TELEVISION

Thursday, March 13

NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.).* Arthur Schnitzler's romantic comedy, Anatol, is made up of three amorous episodes in the life of a dashing 19th-century Viennese boulevardier.

Saturday, March 15

N.C.A.A. COLLEGE BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP TOURNAMENT (NBC, 2-6 p.m.). Two games, to be announced, in the regional finals, broadcast live.

CBS GOLF CLASSIC (4-5 p.m.). The quarterfinals from Akron, with Kermit Zarley and Tommy Aaron v. Lee Elder and Bruce Crampton.

Sunday, March 16

NATIONAL INVITATIONAL TOURNAMENT (CBS, 1:30-3 p.m.). First-round game of college basketball's oldest post-season event from Madison Square Garden.

EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Kids, mental patients, prisoners, inner-city youths--all take up the use of movie film, still photography and audio tape as means of getting across their thoughts and emotions in "The New Communicators," which will include ten specially commissioned 60-second films on the subject "Faces."

CAROL CHANNING AND PEARL BAILEY ON BROADWAY (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Broadway songs that Carol and Pearl would have loved doing on the stage provide a point of departure for the Hello, Dolly! stars in this two-woman show.

Monday, March 17

THREE YOUNG AMERICANS IN SEARCH OF SURVIVAL (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Sidney Poitier appears in a segment of this Paul Newman-narrated ABC News special about two young men and a woman involved in social projects.

Tuesday, March 18

THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PIZZAZZ (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Fashion, chic and hip, co-hosted by Carl Reiner and Michele Lee, with Pat Paulsen, the Harper's Bizarre and the Cowsills as guests.

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). The life and music of Composer Dmitri Shostakovich are presented in still photographs and recent documentary footage in this Soviet-produced film.

THEATER

On Broadway PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen has written what seems to be a play about Woody Allen, in which he appropriately stars as a young man with so many psychological hang-ups that he makes playgoers feel positively healthy.

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

CANTERBURY TALES. This British musical has not thrived on a sea change from London. Four of Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims' tales are told without capturing the 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 Madwoman of Chaillot, is no exception. 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.

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 gives a performance of ragtime piano playing and patter on the mores and manners of turn-of-the-century America. An amiable show for those who get nostalgic for the days of cherry phosphates and trolley transfers.

ADAPTATION-NEXT. Elaine May, a corrosively perceptive satirist with a mean comic punch, is director of both of these humorous one-acters. Adaptation, which Miss May wrote, has the ironic viewpoint that life is a game played on as well as by the contestant. In Terrence McNally's Next, James Coco gives a fine performance as an overaged potential draftee.

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. Under the direction of Alan Arkin, this revival of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer's play is breathcatchingly funny and hair-trigger fast in pace.

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

3 IN THE ATTIC is by Alfie out of The Graduate, a cautionary tale of a campus la-dykiller (Chris Jones) who is unfaithful to his steady girl friend (Yvette Mimieux) and gets his just deserts. The film has a kind of cheap charm, and Jones and Mimieux are fun to watch.

THE STALKING MOON. Gregory Peck lends strength and dignity to a low-key western about a trapper who combats the remorseless, silent presence of an Indian bent on bloody revenge.

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.

RED BEARD. Japan's Akira Kurosawa directed this morality play about the spiritual growth of a young doctor with all the stylistic wizardry and vision that have made him one of the world's greatest film makers.

GRAZIE ZIA. This first film by young (25) Director Salvatore Samperi probes fashionable subjects such 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 cinematic magician, 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 prize-winning novel about political responsibility and human dignity. Under the creative direction of John Frankenheimer, Actors Alan Bates (as the accidental hero), Dirk Bogarde and Tan Holm perform their difficult roles with superb dedication.

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. Some great players like Jason Robards, Joseph Wiseman, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliot and Norman Wisdom are obviously having the time of their lives in this raunchy, affectionate tribute to the days of oldtime burlesque.

OLIVER! Unlikely as it might seem, Dickens' novel has been transformed into a smashing musical that features a good score (by Lionel Bart), excellent direction (by Carol Reed) and some of the most breathtaking sets (by John Box) that have ever appeared on a movie screen.

FACES is all about a group of resolutely middle-aged people and what an awful mess they have made of their respective marriages. John Cassavetes wrote and directed this exercise in marital tensions that seems, alternately, both vivid and rather pointless.

RECORDINGS

More Mozart

The current Schwann LP catalogue lists 21 columns of Mozart recordings. Judging by the batch of new releases issued every month, the end is nowhere in sight. Among the recent albums:

SONATAS NO. 4, K. 282; NO. 5, K. 283; NO. 10, K. 330; NO. 12, K. 332; RONDO IN A MINOR, K. 511 (London). Germany's Wilhelm Backhaus is 84, but he plays with a strength often missing in younger pianists. Whatever the composer's mood, Backhaus is master of it--from the earthy Gemiitlichkeit of the minuet in the Sonata No. 4 to the urbane wit of Sonata No. 10. The tragic A Minor Rondo breathes with the deep current of unrest that runs through so much of the composer's work.

SYMPHONY NO. 28, K. 200; SYMPHONY NO. 29, K. 201 (Deutsche-Grammophon). Another veteran, 74-year-old Conductor Karl Bohm, is clearly a romanticist in his interpretation of these middle-period symphonies. The Berlin Philharmonic sings as suavely as ever, but Bohm's rather Brahmsian approach to the scores becomes over-weighty. Ultimately, it is less satisfying than the crisper approach of such younger conductors as Britain's Colin Davis.

CONCERTO NO. 14, K. 449; CONCERTO NO. 15, K. 450 (Angel). Daniel Barenboim, the young (26) Israeli virtuoso, is now in the process of recording Mozart's major piano concertos. Billed as both conductor and soloist, Barenboim the conductor is, unfortunately, often at odds with Barenboim the pianist. The superb English Chamber Orchestra, for example, begins the andantino of No. 14 with a refreshing, lilting tempo, only to be dragged slower and slower once the piano enters. Barenboim's low-keyed but emotional playing simply does not mix with his orchestra's brisk classical manner.

DIVERTIMENTI, K. 136, K. 137, K. 138; SERENATA NOTTURNA, K. 239 (Argo). One of the world's best new chamber orchestras is the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which took its name from the old London church where it made its debut a decade ago. With Concertmaster Neville Marriner directing in 18th century style from the first desk, the 16-man ensemble achieves a dramatic precision that would do credit to Toscanini. The three Divertimenti for strings, written when Mozart was 16, are stunning miniatures in Italian rococo symphonic style. The Serenata Notturna, scored for two small orchestras plus timpani, also sparkles with classical elegance.

QUARTET FOR FLUTE AND STRINGS, K. 285; QUARTET FOR OBOE AND STRINGS, K. 370; QUINTET FOR HORN AND STRINGS, K. 407 (Telefunken). This new recording of some seldom heard but thoroughly charming Mozart is ably presented by the Strauss Quartet, a group of young German instrumentalists, and three agile collaborators. Particularly outstanding is Hermann Baumann's dazzling horn playing in the quintet; he seems to be daunted neither by enormous leaps nor precipitous scales and ornaments.

REQUIEM, K. 626 (Telefunken). Mozart's liturgical music is tricky to interpret. But Karl Richter, an organist and harpsichordist as well as conductor, creates a performance that combines operatic grandeur in the Dies Irae with the religious awe attending death that is heralded by the sepulchral drumbeats at the close of the Agnus Dei. The four first-class soloists (Maria Stader, soprano; Hertha Toepper, alto; John van Kesteren, tenor; Karl-Christian Kohn, bass) enter into the spirit of their conductor's classical conception: they never struggle to achieve Wagnerian eminence of tone but modestly blend into the musical architecture. The vocal texture of the Munich Bach Choir is glowingly transparent, despite its 90-odd members, even in the tumultuous contrapuntal sections.

BOOKS

Best Reading

TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. A beautifully written documentary of human adversity in Southern Italy that deserves a place next to Oscar Lewis' The Children of Sanchez.

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.

HEADS, by Edward Stewart. Ivy League sacred cows are milked, and human parts are strewn about in unlikely places by ax murderers in a cheerfully gruesome novel by the author of Orpheus on Top.

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 events recollected from Austria's and Yugoslavia's part in World War II.

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 and master painter 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. A horrifying, little known facet of Empire.

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. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (3)

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

4. Airport, Hailey (4)

5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (6)

6. Preserve and Protect, Drury (5)

7. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (8)

8. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (10)

9. The Voyeur, Sutton

10. A World of Profit, Auchincloss (9)

NONFICTION 1. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (1)

2. The 900 Days, Salisbury (4)

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

4. Instant Replay, Kramer (5)

5. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (6)

6. The Valachi Papers, Maas (8)

7. The Bitter Woods, Eisenhower

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

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

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

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