Wednesday, January 15 THE WORLD WE LIVE IN (NET, 8-8:30 p.m.).*"Animal War, Animal Peace" studies the ways animals guard their territory, and relates their actions to human aggression.
Thursday, January 16
THE QUEEN AND I (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). A scheming purser (Larry Storch) meets his nemesis in Billy De Wolfe, who plays a first officer on the S.S. Amsterdam Queen, an ancient ocean liner steaming toward the scrap pile. Premiere.
NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9 p.m.). The National Theater of the Deaf features a troupe of professional actors who, although deaf themselves, perform for hearing audiences as well as the silent world.
CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE CHRISTMAS SHOW (NBC, 8:30-10 p.m.). Highlights from Hope's annual trip to entertain the servicemen during the holidays. This year he is assisted by Ann-Margret, Linda Bennett, Rosy Grier and the Golddiggers.
COMEDY IS KING II (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Alan King leads a group of guests in a satirical look at contemporary life. Among the jaundiced eyes: Shirley Jones, Leslie Uggams, Tony Randall, Jack Carter, Nipsey Russell and Linda Lavin.
Saturday, January 18
KELLOGG'S PRESENTS THE BANANA SPLITS ADVENTURE HOUR (NBC, 10:30-11:30 a.m.). Burl Ives narrates a dramatization of Robert Lawson's award-winning book, Rabbit Hill, which is about a group of animals and their feelings toward man. Repeat.
THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). It's country-and-western night, with Hosts Roy Rogers and Dale Evans and their guests Burl Ives, George Gobel, Minnie Pearl, Jeannie C. Riley, Sonny James and a hillbilly singing group, Stoney Mt. Cloggers.
Sunday, January 19
DISCOVERY '69 (ABC, 11:30 a.m. to noon). In "A Corner of France," St. Pierre, a French possession off the coast of Newfoundland, is visited to see how the islanders live today.
AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE ALL-STAR GAME (NBC, 2 p.m. to conclusion). The best of the East meet the best of the West, live from the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida.
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE PRO BOWL (CBS, 4 p.m. to conclusion). The formula as before from the senior circuit, live from the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Monday, January 20
THE PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION OF RICHARD M. NIXON. All three networks cover inaugural activities during the day. NBC starts at 7 a.m. with a special three-hour Today Show, and is joined by the other networks at 10 a.m. for live coverage throughout the day.
INAUGURATION '69 (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Frank McGee reviews the outstanding events and ceremonies of the day.
THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION (NET, 8-10 p.m.). The program 1) profiles the people around the new President, 2) discusses the problems facing the new Administration, 3) presents a film of the transition from one Administration to another, and 4) gives a view of the 91st Congress.
Tuesday, January 21
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 8-9 p.m.). "The Film Generation: Cinema of the Absurd" features an interview with Polish Director Roman Polanski and a showing of his film Mammals, plus excerpts from his first film, Two Men and a Wardrobe.
NBC TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Oskar Werner and Julie Christie star in Fahrenheit 451 (1967), about a futuristic society where owning and reading books is a crime.
THEATER
On Broadway
FORTY CARATS is a light and frothy French farce by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. Julie Harris, as a twice-divorced damsel of 40 who is wooed and won by a lad nearly half her age, proves that love is a game for all seasons. As a tonic for middle-aged matrons, the play is so potent that Producer David Merrick may have to institute extra matinees to handle the crush.
PROMISES, PROMISES is an imitation of past successes, with a plot from the Wilder-Diamond film The Apartment and a structure borrowed from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Jerry Orbach and Marian Mercer turn in the best performances of the evening.
JIMMY SHINE. Playwright Murray Schisgal, attempting a journey through mood, psyche and character, rails to go anywhere. But Dustin Hoffman is so obviously pleased with himself that it is difficult for anyone in the audience not to be just as satisfied.
ZORBA. Producer-Director Harold Prince has turned out a brassy bit of Broadwayana that is as far from the Mediterranean basin as is Shubert Alley. Herschel Bernardi is never really possessed by the role of the grizzled Dionysian pagan, and the bouzouki music sounds as if it were piped in by Muzak.
KING LEAR. Lee J. Cobb gives the best performance of his career in this revival by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. Cobb's portrayal of the blind, incurably foolish Lear has an all-involving humanity from which an audience cannot withhold some of its deepest emotions.
Off Broadway
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a warm, loving tribute to the late Lorraine Hansberry, put together from her own writings. The interracial cast, ably directed by Gene Frankel, works well as an ensemble to thread an elegiac mood through the range of comedy, rage, reminiscence and introspection.
DAMES AT SEA is a delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the 1930s. The engaging cast of six features Bernadette Peters as Ruby, the hoofer who "taps her way to stardom" against all odds.
TEA PARTY and THE BASEMENT. In all Harold Pinter plays the surface is never the substance, and the meaning lies in the eye and mind of the beholder. In Tea Party, a middle-aged manufacturer of bidets is pushed into what may be his death throes by the interactions of his secretary, his wife and his wife's brother. The Basement deals with the relations of two men and a girl who share a basement flat.
BIG TIME BUCK WHITE. Dick Williams is more a bore than a bombshell as he delivers a sermon at a Black Power meeting. But the three years that the cast has worked together pays off in an excellent comic ensemble.
CINEMA
THE FIXER. "I'm the kind of man who finds it perilous just to be alive," says the reluctant hero of this grueling and often moving adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel. Under the meticulous direction of John Frankenheimer, the cast performs with a power that gives the film an almost Dostoevskian force.
THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S was one of the nicest surprises of the old year: a funny, affectionate valentine to the vanished days of burlesque. Songs, dances, and moldy jokes are all delivered with appropriate irreverence. The actors, including Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom as a couple of seedy comics, Britt Ekland as an innocent young thing in the big city, and Joseph Wiseman and Harry Andrews as concerned fathers, all seem perfect for their parts.
CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is a friendly, affectionate musical that drags a bit in the first half, but picks up once Dick Van Dyke, who plays a pixilated inventor, gets his children, his girl friend (Sally Ann Howes) and his car airborne in a glorious romp.
THE FIREMEN'S BALL. Under the direction of Milos Forman (Loves of a Blonde), a group of firemen stage a party in honor of their retiring chief, and act out a neat parody of Communist bureaucracy.
YELLOW SUBMARINE is an elaborate cartoon adventure starring the Beatles in animated form. Although Animator Heinz Edelmann brings off a series of visual puns, the overall result tends to drag at times.
BULLITT is a cops-and-robbers movie that moves the audience's viscera, particularly during a chase scene up and down the hills of San Francisco. Steve McQueen stars as a detective with impeccable cool.
FUNNY GIRL. Barbra Streisand makes her movie debut in a loud musical biography of Fanny Brice. Miss Streisand is onscreen most of the time, which may delight rabid fans, but can give others a sense of uneasy familiarity.
COOGAN'S BLUFF. This story of an Arizona sheriff (Clint Eastwood) who comes to New York on a manhunt, amply justifies Director Don Siegel's reputation as a minor film genius.
WEEKEND. Jean-Luc Godard gives the bourgeoisie a good drubbing in a satire that might have been sharper had its straight-faced Maoist political harangues not been so dull.
PRETTY POISON. Homicide can be fun, as Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld prove in this small but stinging satire on violence in America directed by Noel Black, 31, whose previous experience has been mostly in educational and commercial shorts.
OLIVER! They've removed Dickens' reformist zeal, but substituted some colorful period costumes, some excellent songs by Lionel Bart and some perfectly stunning sets by John Box. The result is the best musical of 1968. Carol Reed directs a large cast (including Ron Moody, Shani Wallis and Mark Lester as Oliver) with wizardly precision.
BOOKS
Best Reading
JOYCE GARY, by Malcolm Foster. The first full-scale biography of the late-blooming author of The Horse's Mouth and Herself Surprised reveals his vision of the world as a struggle between creative man and organized authority.
SILENCE ON MONTE SOLE, by Jack Olsen. The incident itself was only a footnote to the history of World War II's Italian campaign. Yet Author Olsen (The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story) performs a feat of literary journalism in this meticulously researched, excruciatingly detailed account of Nazi SS reprisal raids on Italian villages that resulted in the murder of 1,800 people.
MILLAIS AND THE RUSKINS, by Mary Lutyens. A measured, complex view of the private lives of the Victorian genius John Ruskin and his wife that reads as smoothly as an old-fashioned novel of manners.
THE ARMS OF KRUPP, by William Manchester. An encyclopedic history of the eccentric family whose arsenal on the Ruhr armed Germany in two world wars.
TURPIN, by Stephen Jones. Beginning with the circumcision of a golden retriever and lurching from ludicrous deaths to outrageous depravities, this sweet and savage novel bares the terrors that hide beneath the surface of apparently calm minds.
THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B, by J. P. Donleavy. A rich, dreamy young man wanders rudderless through a series of touchingly humorous misadventures. The author's best novel since The Ginger Man.
O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. In the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer examines the emotional factors in the playwright's family history that drove him to write his great sprawling tragedies.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (2 last week)
2. A Small Town in Germany, Le Carre (1)
3. Airport, Hailey (4)
4. Preserve and Protect, Drury (3)
5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean 15)
6. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (8)
7. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (6)
8. The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, Donleavy
9. Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon, Kellogg
10. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (7)
NONFICTION
1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (3)
2. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (4)
3. Instant Replay, Kramer (1)
4. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (2)
5. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (7)
6. Anti-Memoirs, Malraux (9)
7. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (6)
8. On Reflection, Hayes (5)
9. The Bogey Man, Plimpton
10. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten (8)
* All times E.S.T.
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