Wednesday, April 23
PRUDENTIAL'S ON STAGE (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Barry Sullivan and E. G. Marshall star in "This Town Will Never Be the Same," which chronicles the last day in the life of a newspaper and the effect its death will have on its staff and the town.
YOUR DOLLAR'S WORTH (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "Auto Repairs: Points and Plugs" is a comprehensive report on the high cost of auto repairs, with comments from Ralph Nader and Senator Philip Hart.
THE JAPANESE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Former U.S. Ambassador Edwin Reischauer hosts this program on Japan and its people.
Thursday, April 24
THE UNDERSEA WORLD OF JACQUES COUSTEAU (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The Cousteau crew goes to Peru to dive for lost Incan gold in "The Legend of Lake Titicaca."
MEET GEORGE WASHINGTON (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Part of Project 20, this show will try to breathe some life and substance into the dehumanized schoolbook image of our first President.
NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). Dorothy Tutin stars as Catherine of Valois, the tragic widow of Henry V and grandmother of Henry VII in "The Queen and the Welshman."
Saturday, April 26
BYRON NELSON GOLF CLASSIC (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). The final two rounds of the $100,000 tourney from the Preston Trail Golf Club in Dallas will be continued Sunday afternoon 4-6.
CBS GOLF CLASSIC FINALS (CBS, 4-5:30 p.m.). The last 18 holes in the 36-hole finals from Firestone Country Club in Akron, with George Archer and Bob Lunn playing Al Geiberger and Dave Stockton.
Sunday, April 27
NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE (CBS, 2-4:30 p.m.). The Stanley Cup playoff.
FELICIANO-VERY SPECIAL (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A musical 60 minutes, starring Vocalist-Guitarist Jose Feliciano, with Guests Andy Williams, Glen Campbell, Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach.
Monday, April 28
THE SPRING THING (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Love and springtime are the subjects, and Noel Harrison and Bobbie Gentry the objects, with some outside help from Rod McKuen, Goldie Hawn, Shirley Bassey, Irwin C. Watson, Meredith MacRae and the Harpers Bizarre.
Tuesday, April 29
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "The World of Jose Limon" deals with the life and artistry of the American dancer and choreographer.
THEATER
On Broadway
1776 presents a stereotypical version of the key signers of the Declaration of Independence and their sometimes abrasive, sometimes soporific deliberations at the Second Continental Congress. The musical succeeds only in bringing the heroic, tempestuous birth of a people and a polity down to a feeble vaudevillian jape.
HAMLET. Everything about Ellis Rabb's APA production is peculiarly wrong, including Rabb's portrayal of Hamlet as if the Prince of Denmark were in desperate need of geriatric drugs.
CELEBRATION, with a handsome blond Orphan pitted against an evil Mr. Rich, is a beguiling musical fairy tale for sophisticates who have never quite forsaken the magic of childhood.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM features Woody Allen playing Woody Allen, the compleat neurotic, with his nimble jokes and woefully unconfident presence.
FORTY CARATS is a comedy of new marital modes and manners from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, the team that wrote Cactus Flower. It features a lovely Julie Harris as a middle-aged lady wooed and won by a 22-year-old lad.
HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen exhibits an outstanding command of technique as Frederick William Rolfe in this deft dramatization of Rolfe's novel of wish fulfillment, Hadrian the Seventh.
Off Broadway
INVITATION TO A BEHEADING. As a play, Russell McGrath's adaptation of the Vladimir Nabokov novel is less than successful, but Ming Cho Lee's set is elegant, Gerald Freedman's direction is deft, and the acting is full of flair.
STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME is an evening of three slightly savage and humorous one-act plays by Novelist James Leo Herlihy performed ably by the Theater Company of Boston.
ADAPTATION-NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed by Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged as a TV contest. Terrence McNally's Next features James Coco in a splendid performance as an overaged potential draftee.
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a warm, loving tribute to Lorraine Hansberry, put together from her own writings and presented by an able, interracial cast.
DAMES AT SEA. A delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the '30s with an enthusiastic and gifted minicast of six, including Bernadette Peters as Ruby, who taps her way to stardom in one day.
CINEMA
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS is a slick adaptation of Philip Roth's novella about being young, in love and Jewish. Director Larry Peerce is a canny craftsman, and if his film is a little too glossy, most of his actors--especially newcomer Ali MacGraw--perform with warm and endearing conviction.
STOLEN KISSES. In his newest and gentlest film, Franc,ois Truffaut creates a poignant memory of adolescence, beginning with the eagerness and delight of youth and ending with the promise of melancholy maturity.
THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. Marlon Brando is back in top form as a hipster-criminal in this thriller directed by Hubert Cornfield, who uses a story about kidnaping as an excuse to conduct a surreal seminar on the poetics of violence.
THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU. This is the one to take the family to see on the next rainy Saturday afternoon. Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg battle bad guys all across, and sometimes above Europe in an unceasing repertory of derring-do that will keep the kids enthralled and their parents amused.
I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW). If it were not for the sex scenes, this film probably would never have been imported. The rather conventional story of a confused adolescent girl in Sweden is interminable and unenlightened; like the much publicized sex scenes themselves, it is finally and fatally passionless.
THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer has directed this adaptation of Bernard Malamud's somewhat flawed novel with care and dedication. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm are all transcendent in their roles.
THE STALKING MOON pits canny Frontier Scout Gregory Peck against an ingenious Indian bent on a bloody and horrible revenge. The outcome is standard, but Director Robert Mulligan manages a couple of good chills along the way.
SWEET CHARITY. This adaptation of the Broadway musical about a heart-of-gold "hostess" fairly bursts its seams with misdirected stylistic energy. Shirley MacLaine is a commendable Charity, and some of the tunes are catchy, but the result is sadly lacking in vitality.
RED BEARD is an Oriental Pilgrim's Progress in which Japan's Akira Kurosawa explores the psychology of an ambitious young doctor until his frailties and strengths add up to a picture of humanity itself.
THE SHAME. Ingmar Bergman tells a painful parable of the horrors of war and the moral responsibility of the artist. This is his 29th film and one of his best, with resonant performances by Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow and Gunnar Bjoernstrand.
3 IN THE ATTIC has echoes of both Alfie and The Graduate, but viewers may find themselves being won over by its own sleazy charm as it spins the unlikely tale of a campus Lothario (Chris Jones) whose best girl (Yvette Mimieux) develops a novel and strenuous plan to punish him for his infidelities.
BOOKS
Best Reading
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY, by Carlos Baker. The long-awaited official biography offers the first complete and cohesive account of a gifted, troubled, flamboyant literary figure who has too often been recollected in fragmentary and indulgent memoirs.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, this agonizing, outrageous, funny, profoundly rueful fable tries to say something about the timeless nature of human cruelty and self-protective indifference.
URGENT COPY, by Anthony Burgess. In a collection of brilliant short pieces about a long list of literary figures (from Dickens to Dylan Thomas), the author brings many a critical chicken home to roost.
REFLECTIONS UPON A SINKING SHIP, by Gore Vidal. A collection of perceptively sardonic essays about the Kennedys, Tarzan, Susan Sontag, pornography, the 29th Republican Convention, and other aspects of what Vidal sees as the declining West.
EDWARD LEAR, THE LIFE OF A WANDERER, by Vivien Noakes. In this excellent biography, the Victorian painter, poet, fantasist, and author of A Book of Nonsense is seen as a kindly, gifted man who courageously tried to stay cheerful despite an astonishing array of diseases.
THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, expertly convoys Powell's innumerable characters through the intrigue, futility, boredom and courage of World War II.
TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. Full of an orphan's love for her adopted town, the author has turned a documentary of human adversity in southern Italy into the unflinching autobiography of a divided heart.
THE SECRET WAR FOR EUROPE, by Louis Hagen. As he explores the development of espionage agencies and replays many a cold war spy case, the author presents a detailed view of politics and espionage in Germany since 1945.
THE MARX BROTHERS AT THE MOVIES, by Paul D. Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt. Next to a reel of their films, this excellent book offers the best possible way to meet (or revisit) the Marx Brothers in the happy time when they had all their energy and all their laughs.
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, by Thomas Wiseman. Wiseman's novel about the friendship between a half-Jew and a Nazi, before and during World War II in Vienna, is a brilliant psychological study of how two very different men can become so fatally entwined that each determines the course of the other's life.
GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. Completing the trilogy begun by the late historian Lloyd Lewis, Catton employs lucidity and laconic humor as he follows the taciturn general to his final victory at Appomattox.
THE GODFATHER, by Mario Puzo. For the Mafia, as for other upwardly mobile Americans, the name of the game is respectability and status--after the money and power have been secured. An excellent novel.
PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth. This frenzied monologue by a sex-obsessed Jewish bachelor on a psychiatrist's couch becomes a comic novel about the absurdly painful wounds created by guilt and puritanism.
Best Sellers
FICTION 1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (1 last week)
2. The Godfather, Puzo (2)
3. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (3)
4. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman (4)
5. Airport, Hailey (6)
6. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (5)
7. The Vines of Yarrabee, Eden (9)
8. The Lost Queen, Lofts (8)
9. Except for Me and Thee, West 10. Preserve and Protect, Drury
NONFICTION 1. The 900 Days, Salisbury (1)
2. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (3)
3. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (4)
4. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (6)
5. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (10)
6. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (2)
7. Jennie, Martin (5)
8. The Valachi Papers, Maas (9)
9. Instant Replay, Kramer
10. Grant Takes Command, Catton (7)
* All times E.S.T. through April 26; E.D.T. from then on.
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