TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 5

WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8:30-11:30 p.m.)* Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Dean Martin and Maximilian Schell star in Irwin Shaw's bestselling novel turned movie, The Young Lions (1958).

Saturday, March 8

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The World Two-Man Bobsled Championship, from Lake Placid, N.Y.

Sunday, March 9

CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 1:30-2:30 p.m.). The Little Bearkeepers is a Czechoslovak tale of a little boy who grows up at a zoo and has a pet bear cub that is to be exchanged for a baby elephant belonging to a group of Asian children.

CITRUS OPEN (ABC, 4-6 p.m.). $115,000 sweetens the pot at this meeting of golf's finest at the Rio Pinar Country Club in Orlando, Fla.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). This study of sleep patterns and habits explores the nature of sleep and its relation to memory, learning, pills and age groups.

THE WIZARD OF OZ (NBC, 7-9 p.m.). Time for everyone to step out once more on the yellow brick road to an enchanting evening in Oz with Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley. They may not make movies like they did in 1939, but at least they repeat them.

Tuesday, March 11

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 8-9 p.m.). "Nina Simone: The Sound of Soul" brings the special Simone sound to jazz, blues and folk music in her one-woman show.

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). In "Once Upon a Wall," Luigi Barzini reports on the 1966 flood damage to the Florence frescoes and the restoration work that has been done.

THEATER

On Broadway PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen stars in his new play as an exposed clutter of neu roses, guilts and self-recriminations, mostly centering around his lack of success with women. Coached by his fantasy hero, Humphrey Bogart, Allen 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. This British musical has not thrived on a sea change from London. Four of Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims' tales are told without the unity of faith and flesh of the 14th century. The pop-rock score seems incongruous, and the dialogue is all in rhyming couplets; the sensation is rather like spending the evening listening to a metronome.

DEAR WORLD. Plays converted into musicals have a high disaster ratio, and this one, from Jean Giraudoux's The Mad woman of Chaillot, is no exception to the rule. Angela Lansbury, looking like a ruefully unkempt Colette, is excellent as the madwoman, but the Jerry Herman score is disappointing and Joe Layton's choreography is mediocre.

CELEBRATION, by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the co-creators of The Fantasticks, has a handsome blond Orphan and a crestfallen Angel pitted against the bored and impotent Mr. Rich. It is a charmer for sophisticates who have never quite forsaken the magic realm of childhood.

COCK-A-DOODLE DANDY. Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey was offended by realistic theater, and in this blast at what he felt was wrong with Ireland, he turned his antic imagination loose. The players of the APA Repertory Company make it a rollicking, rumbustious piece of theater.

HADRIAN VII is a deft dramatization by Peter Luke of fantasy and fact in the life of Frederick William Rolfe, the misfit first rejected for the priesthood and then astonishingly elected Pope. Alec McCowen's performance is a paradigm of the elegant best in English acting style.

FORTY CARATS proves that love is a game for all seasons, with Julie Harris as a middle-aged divorcee wooed and won by a lad of 22 while her teen-age daughter is carried off by a widower of 45.

JIMMY SHINE. Playwright Murray Schisgal attempts an inner journey through mood, psyche and character, but merely creates a transparent character in a sketchy play. What makes Jimmy more winning than his fate is Dustin Hoffman's ingratiating stage personality.

Off Broadway

AN EVENING WITH MAX MORATH. Singer-Pianist Max Morath provides ragtime piano playing and patter on the manners of turn-of-the-century America. An amiable show for those who miss the days of cherry phosphates and trolley transfers.

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.

CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN, by Lonne Elder III, is a somewhat spindly and melodramatic play about a Harlem family. What makes it bearable is the superior performances of the players of Manhattan's Negro Ensemble Company.

TANGO, a comedy of debased manners by Polish Playwright Slawomir Mrozek, features David Margulies playing a young man who finds himself with nothing to rebel against except permissiveness.

LITTLE MURDERS. This 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, still seems a series of animated cartoons spliced together rather than an organic drama. Director Alan Arkin and a resourceful cast do, however, achieve some razor-sharp social observation.

DAMES AT SEA. Bernadette Peters plays Ruby, who comes to the Broadway "jungle" to "tap her way to stardom" in this delightful parody of the movie musicals of the '30s. Tamara Long as the slinky heavy and Sally Stark as Ruby's peroxided pal are perfect, as is the rest of the minicast of six.

CINEMA

SWEET CHARITY. This adaptation of the Broadway musical fairly bursts its celluloid seams with misdirected stylistic energy. Some of the tunes are good, and Shirley MacLaine is a commendable Charity, the whore with a heart of gold; but all the frenetic activity is more suggestive of a perpetual-motion machine than a movie.

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

RED BEARD is an epic drama by that great 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. This first film by young (25) director Salvatore Samperi probes such fashionable subjects as moral disintegration with an aggravatingly eclectic but often successfully mordant style.

THE SHAME. The horrors of war and the responsibility of the artist are two themes that Ingmar Bergman fuses into a somber, beautiful parable. Bergman is a stylistic wizard, but he also knows how to get perfect performances from Actors Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max von Sydow and the lovely Liv Ullman.

THE FIXER is an excellent screen translation of Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer prizewinning novel about political responsibility and human dignity. 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.

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. Good humor and excellent performances abound in this affectionate tribute to the raunchy days of oldtime burlesque. As a seedy song-and-dance man, Jason Robards wears a frayed straw boater as naturally as John Wayne wears a Stetson.

OLIVER! Dickens' novel might at first seem as likely a subject for a musical as Death of a Salesman, but Lionel Bart's score, Carol Reed's direction and John Box's breathtaking sets all combine to make what is easily the entertainment of the year.

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 funny monologue on sex and guilt reminiscent of scatological nightclub performances by the late Lenny Bruce.

BRUNO'S DREAM, by Iris Murdoch. Around the bed of a dying man, his kith and kin are stirred to bizarre combinations of love and lust. A metaphysical farce by a master of the form.

THE 900 DAYS: THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD, by Harrison E. Salisbury. A most thorough account of the Nazi siege of Leningrad, in which 1,500,000 Russian civilians died of gunfire and starvation.

AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The anxiety, excitement and loneliness of confronting blank sheets of paper, sharply recalled and brightly written by 14 novelists, including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Louis Auchincloss.

SETTING FREE THE BEARS, by John Irving. Two Austrian university students plot to free the animals from Vienna's zoo. In counterpoint to this escapade are the recollected events of Austria's and Yugoslavia's part in World War II.

IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON? by Russel H. Greenan. Witless German art experts, villainous Peruvian generals, paranoiac harpies, spying pigeons and struggling artists are only part of the fantastic story that leads the deranged narrator into forgery, murder and an attempt to kill God.

THE STRANGLERS, by George Bruce. Before the 1830s, native travelers in India were in constant danger of being choked to death by marauding bands of Thugs who murdered as a religious rite. An account of how a British officer brought the Thugs to heel.

HIS TOY, HIS DREAM, HIS REST, by John Berryman. Using a fictional middle-aged American named Henry as his mouthpiece, Berryman comments on a whole range of human experience, particularly life during the past eleven years, and completes the poem cycle begun in 77 Dream Songs.

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, MacInnes (1 last week)

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

3. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (3)

4. Airport, Hailey (4)

5. Preserve and Protect, Drury (6)

6. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (5)

7. The Lost Queen, Lofts

8. The Hurricane Years, Hawley

9. A World of Profit, Auchincloss (9)

10. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (7)

NONFICTION

1. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (1)

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

3. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (7)

4. The 900 Days, Salisbury (2)

5. Instant Replay, Kramer (8)

6. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (3)

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

8. The Valachi Papers, Maas (10)

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

10. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock

* All times E.S.T.

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