Friday, February 28

THE FLIGHT OF APOLLO 9. Starting at 10 a.m.*, the Big Three networks will cover the launching of Apollo 9 as its three astronauts begin a ten-day mission that will include the rendezvous and docking of the command service module and lunar module, a crew transfer and the first U.S. space walk since Gemini 12 in 1966. Reports will be broadcast throughout the flight.

Saturday, March 1

CBS GOLF CLASSIC (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). Julius Boros and Don January compete with Kermit Zarley and Tommy Aaron in this week's match from the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio.

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The World Figure Skating Championships from Colorado Springs, Colo.

THE WORLD CUP SKI CHAMPIONSHIPS (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The world's leading skiers meet in Squaw Valley, Calif., in hopes of winning the honors held by Jean-Claude Killy and Nancy Greene.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Billy Wilder's magnificent farce, Some Like It Hot (1959), stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as innocents of the '20s chased by Chicago Mobster George Raft and Florida Millionaire Joe E. Brown.

Sunday, March 2

CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 1:30-2:30 p.m.). Jennie's Adventures in the Hopfields begin when she breaks her mother's china dog and goes to work picking hops to earn enough money to replace it.

215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Group therapy, directed by a tape recorder, breaks down conventional human barriers to inspire free expression of feelings in a group of San Diego college students.

Monday, March 3

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 8-9 p.m.). Peter Ustinov conjures up a lively portrait gallery of his ancestors in "Ustinov on the Ustinovs." Repeat.

NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "Diary of a Student Revolution" closely follows last December's confrontation between the University of Connecticut's Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.) and the school's president.

Tuesday, March 4

THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Seventeenth century sunken treasure from the Spanish Silver Fleet is sought by the Calypso in the Caribbean.

THE FILM GENERATION (NET, 9-10 p.m.). Polish, French and American film makers examine war from different angles, yet arrive at the same indictment.

THEATER

On Broadway PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen stars in his new play as Allan Felix, an ex posed ganglion of neuroses, guilts and self-recriminations, whose wife has just left him. Coached by his fantasy hero, Humphrey Bogart, Allan does get a girl--he winds up in bed with his best friend's wife. The play does not properly progress along with the evening, but Allen's kooky angle of vision and nimble jokes are amusement enough.

CANTERBURY TALES. There is something innocent and sweet about Geoffrey Chaucer. Unfortunately, the Chaucerian spirit is largely missing from this British musical. The chorus boys' codpieces are ample, but they scarcely camouflage the empty boisterousness of both dance and bawdry.

DEAR WORLD is a musical based on Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot. Giraudoux's work had an elegance of manner and a sense of historical irony. Both are missing from this adaptation. Angela Lansbury as the madwoman cavorts with such raffish gallantry that she manages to save her reputation, if not the show.

CELEBRATION is a musical that dwells in childhood's land of enchantment, with an Orphan and an Angel prevailing over the evil Mr. Rich. The story line could have been as sticky as a candied apple, but Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, co-creators of The Fantasticks, have written a fairy tale that winks at itself.

COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY was Sean O'Casey's favorite play, and the APA Repertory Company makes it a rollicking piece of theater. The Cock, magnificently plumed and wattled, is played with impudent elegance by Barry Bostwick. The most uninhibited performance, though, comes from a thatched cottage that writhes, rattles and sheds its vines in one of the most dramatic cases of demonic possession since the Gadarene swine.

HADRIAN VII. Frederick William Rolfe poured out a minor masterpiece of wish fulfillment in his novel Hadrian the Seventh, an account of how a rejected candidate for the priesthood is elected Pope. In Peter Luke's dramatization of the book, Rolfe becomes the hero of his own story. As the misfit made Pope, Alec McCowen turns in a splendid performance marked by his superb command of technique.

FORTY CARATS. In this frothy French farce, Julie Harris plays a middle-aged lady who is courted by a man just about half her age, while her teen-aged daughter runs off with a wealthy widower of 45.

JIMMY SHINE. Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance as a born loser stumbling through episodes from his past, his present and his fantasies, is the best thing about this fragmented, sketchy work by Playwright Murray Schisgal.

Off Broadway

ADAPTATION--NEXT are two one-acters, directed by Elaine May with a crisp and zany comic flair. Adaptation, written by Miss May, is the game of life staged like a TV contest with the contestants hopping from one huge checkerboard square to another. Gabriel Dell, in a performance that is laugh-and letter-perfect, is the hero who plays the adaptation game from birth to death. Terrence McNally's Next features James Coco, fortyish, fat and balding, as a potential draftee called up for his physical examination. Coco gives an enormously funny and resourceful performance in McNally's best play to date.

TANGO. David Margulies plays a young man who tries to rebel against his totally permissive home in this incisive comedy on the contemporary value vacuum by Polish Playwright Slawomir Mrozek.

CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN is a first play by Lonne Elder III about the disintegration of a black family in Harlem. The script is somewhat spindly, but Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company, as usual, performs with skill, verve and beautifully meshed precision.

LITTLE MURDERS is a revival of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer's first full-length play about a family living in a psychotic New York milieu of impending violence and violated privacy. Though it still seems a series of animated cartoons spliced together rather than an organic drama, Director Alan Arkin and a resourceful cast do achieve some razor-sharp social observation.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a warm tribute to Negro Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, put together from her own writings and presented by an able interracial cast.

DAMES AT SEA, with a thoroughly engaging cast and ingenious staging, is a delightful parody of the Busby Berkeley movie musicals of the '30s.

CINEMA

THE STALKING MOON is a western with classical aspirations but limited accomplishments. Gregory Peck saves the show by allowing his customarily rigid dignity to show an occasional flash of humor.

3 IN THE ATTIC. Campus lady-killer (Christopher Jones) gets his just deserts from vindictive girl friend (Yvette Mimieux) in this sleazy but somehow charming little comedy that is helped immeasurably by the presence of the two young stars.

RED BEARD is an epic drama by the master of Japanese cinema, Akira Kurosawa. Concerning himself with the gradual maturing of a young doctor, he has fashioned a kind of Oriental Pilgrim's Progress.

GRAZIE ZIA. For his first feature, young (25) Italian Film Maker Salvatore Samperi has taken for his theme nothing less than the disintegration of contemporary morality. As often as not, a biting and original satirical eye gleams through the callow symbolism.

THE SHAME. Ingmar Bergman broods once again on the social and spiritual obligations of the artist. In his 29th film, Bergman remains a foremost stylist, and his actors--Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand and Liv Ullman--range effortlessly between fervor and restraint.

THE FIXER is an excellent screen translation of Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer prize-winning novel. Under the creative direction of John Frankenheimer, actors Alan Bates (as the accidental hero), Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm perform their difficult roles with superb dedication.

FACES. A handful of middle-aged people complain about what a mess they've made of their various marriages in this meticulously detailed film written and directed by John Cassavetes. Some of the direction and much of the acting are excellent, but Cassavetes never quite manages to overcome the fact that the basic situation is rather routine.

BOOKS

Best Reading

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth. Laid out on a psychiatrist's couch, a 33-year-old Jewish bachelor delivers a frenzied and savagely funny monologue of lust and guilt reminiscent of the scatological nightclub performances of the late Lenny Bruce.

THE 900 DAYS: THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, by Harrison E. Salisbury. Extravagant in its detail, this is the best account yet of the most murderous siege in modern history. Hitler and Stalin are its villains; its heroes are the people of the city, who clung to hope despite hideous suffering.

AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The writer's job is lonelier than the lighthouse keeper's, but given a chance to talk about their methods and their aims, 14 successful novelists respond here with vigor, perception and occasional ruefulness.

SETTING FREE THE BEARS, by John Irving. Two Austrian university students on a springtime spree plot to free all the animals from Vienna's zoo. In counterpoint to this quixotic escapade are the recalled events of Austria's and Yugoslavia's participation in World War II. The combination makes a startling first novel.

IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON? by Russell H. Greenan. Witless German art experts, villainous Peruvian generals, paranoiac harpies, spying pigeons, nosy janitors and struggling artists are only part of the fantastic story that leads a deranged narrator, park-bench dreamer and master painter into forgery, murder and an attempt to kill God.

THE STRANGLERS, by George Bruce. The original "thugs" were Indian marauders who strangled travelers and robbed them. It wasn't until the 1830s, when their recent victims were numbered in the tens of thousands, that a crusading British officer finally wiped them out. A horrifying, little-known facet of Empire.

ZAPATA AND THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION, by John Womack Jr. A young (31) Harvard historian tells the great revolutionary's story with skill, judgment and a sense of compassion.

OBSOLETE COMMUNISM: THE LEFT-WING ALTERNATIVE, by Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit. Radical leader "Danny the Red" Cohn-Bendit and his brother analyze last year's "days of May" student-worker uprising in France, blaming its failure on lack of support from the French Communist Party and leftist trade unions.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1 last week)

2. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (2)

3. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth

4. Airport, Hailey (3)

5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (5)

6. Preserve and Protect, Drury (4)

7. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (6)

8. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (10)

9. A World of Profit, Auchincloss (7) 10. And Other Stories, O'Hara

NONFICTION

1. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (2)

2. The 900 Days, Salisbury (10)

3. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (5)

4. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)

5. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (8)

6. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (6)

7. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman

8. Instant Replay, Kramer (3)

9. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom 10. The Valachi Papers, Maas (4)

*All limes E.S.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.