Often during the summer, TV screens are lit by star-studded movies to break the rerun blues. But rarely are there so many name-dropping films in a row:
Thursday, Aug. 21 (CBS, 9-11 p.m.):* DIAMOND HEAD, with Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, George Chakiris, France Nuyen and James Darren.
Friday, Aug. 22 (CBS, 9-11 p.m.): GOD'S LITTLE ACRE, with Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Buddy Hackett and Tina Louise.
Saturday, Aug. 23 (NBC, 9-11 p.m.): THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING, with Burl Ives and Hal Holbrook.
Sunday, Aug. 24 (ABC, 8-10:45 p.m.): IS PARIS BURNING?, with Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Robert Stack, Orson Welles and half of the acting world.
Monday, Aug. 25 (NBC, 8:30-11 p.m.): A HOLE IN THE HEAD, with Frank Sinatra, Edward G. Robinson, Eleanor Parker, Eddie Hodges and Thelma Ritter.
Tuesday, Aug. 26 (NBC, 9-11 p.m.): GAMES, with Simone Signoret and Katherine Ross. For those who want more:
Wednesday, August 20 KRAFT MUSIC HALL FROM HAWAII (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Host Don Ho hums along with Guests Bobby Goldsboro and the comedy team of Stiller and Meara.
Saturday, August 23
THE $150,000 AVCO CLASSIC (NBC, 5-6 p.m.). The third round of golf from the Pleasant Valley Country Club in Sutton, Mass. The final round will be seen on Sunday from 4:30 to 6 p.m.
WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Little League Baseball World Series from Williamsport, Pa.
Sunday, August 24
SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). "To Be Black," explores the psychological problems of the American Negro based on the work of black Psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, authors of Black Rage.
SOUNDS OF SUMMER (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). Pete Seeger and the Hudson River Sloop Singers give a performance aboard the Clearwater, a replica of the sloops that sailed New York's Hudson River during the 1800s.
Monday, August 25
PUEBLO: A QUESTION OF INTELLIGENCE (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). An examination of the Pueblo incident and its implications.
Tuesday, August 26
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.), deals with a ghost hunter who investigates strange happenings in a haunted house.
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). Erich Leinsdorf, Music Director of the Boston Symphony, rehearses the young players of the New England Conservatory of Music's senior orchestra in Mahler's Symphony No. 1.
THE DICK CAVETT SHOW (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Dick's guests are ex-Senator Wayne Morse, Dr. Lendon Smith and Singer John Lee Hooker.
STRAW HAT
In the last weeks of summer, many productions are being mounted that should tempt theatergoers, be they classics buffs, lovers of drama, or fond of a spontaneous laugh or engaging melody:
FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES is a sometimes shocking drama about homosexuality in a prison. Frank Vohs and Frank Savino play Queenie and Smitty at the Hampton Playhouse, Hampton, N.H., Aug. 18-23.
MIRAGE takes place amid the tensions and sudden revelations of a courtroom and in the dogmatic mind of the judge. This new play by John White, starring Earl Bowen and Ann Hackney, premieres at the Dartmouth Summer Repertory Theater, Hanover, N.H., on dates between Aug. 18 and 29.
THE RATTLE OF A SIMPLE MAN, a comedy about a middle-aged chemist who finds a measure of happiness with an imaginative prostitute, is the feature at the Hutchinson Theater in Raymond, N.H., Aug. 20-30.
TWELFTH NIGHT offers its comical Shakespearean turns at the Monomoy Theater in Chatham, Mass., Aug. 20-23.
CAMINO REAL, Tennessee Williams' allegory of our times as viewed in a timeless dream, boasts such memorable characters as Casanova, Camille, Byron and Kilroy. At the Provincetown Playhouse, Provincetown, Mass., Aug. 18-30.
YOU KNOW I CAN'T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER'S RUNNING, a three-piece suite about sex, will evoke the laughter of recognition from audiences in Williamstown, Mass., Aug. 19-23.
THREE SUMMERSONGS are three one-acters, including Jules Feiffer's The Unexpurgated Memoirs of Bernard Mergen-deiler, The Nine O'Clock Mail, a comic study of obsession with the U.S. Post Office by Howard Sackler (The Great White Hope), and Slawomir Mrozek's Out at Sea, a parody on Polish politics. Craft Experimental Theater, Brookline, Mass. Through Aug. 30.
LUV allows for many complications in the lives of three characters. Murray Schis-gal's comedy opens for a week in Southbury, Conn., on Aug. 19.
SCHWEYK IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR is not altogether unlike the Good Soldier Schweik of W.W.I, but Bertolt Brecht made him a subject of even broader comedy. Woodstock, N.Y., Aug. 19-24.
YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU has been proven over and over again, but this time the Kaufman and Hart comedy about a zany family will delight visitors to the Pennsylvania State Festival Theater, University Park, Pa., Aug. 20-30.
TAKE ME ALONG is Bob Merrill's musical version of the Eugene O'Neill classic, Ah, Wilderness!, which focuses on the problems of a Connecticut family at the turn of the century. It will be staged at Boiling Springs, Pa., Aug. 19-31.
ON TIME, a new musical revue of the generation gap through the ages, has music by Charles Burr and stars Alfred Drake. Gaithersburg, Md., Aug. 26-31.
I DO! I DO! stars Carol Lawrence in the Kenley Players production at Warren, Ohio, Aug. 19-23.
DYLAN, biographical sketches of the language-loving poet by Sidney Michaels, is at the Trotwood Circle Theater near Dayton, Aug. 20-31.
THE FANTASTICKS is the ne'er dying story with ne'er dying songs about a girl and boy in love, their fathers, and a wall. George Chakiris and Meredith MacRae (Gordon MacRae's daughter) will play the leads at the Houston Music Theater, Houston, Aug. 19-31.
THE THREE SISTERS. Chekhov's drama will be revived by San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater at the Ravinia Theater Festival in Chicago, Sept. 3-14.
SONG OF NORWAY, with Edvard Grieg's music, puts Anne Jeffreys and Bill Hayes in top billing at the Melody Top Tent in Milwaukee, Aug. 19-31.
THE ODD COUPLE attempt to set up bachelor housekeeping, with results as disastrous as their marriages. Robert Vaughn and Sherwood Price are the stars at the Sir John Falstaff Theater, St. Louis, through Aug. 31.
UNCLE VANYA, another Chekhov favorite, will be staged by Harold Clurman with a cast that includes Richard Basehart, Joseph Wiseman, Ruth McDevitt and Pamela Tiffin, at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, Aug. 21-Oct. 5.
MARAT/SADE with its half historical, half mad scenes from the insane asylum at Charenton, will be performed by A Contemporary Theater in Seattle, Aug. 19-30.
CINEMA
TRUE GRIT offers ample proof that John Wayne is alive and well at 62. In possibly his finest role, the Duke plays a hard-drinking frontier marshal who hires on with a teen-age girl (Kim Darby) to bring her father's murderer to justice. Wayne has the time of his life, and movie audiences will find the feeling infectious.
THE WILD BUNCH. Director Sam Peckinpah renders a vast canvas of the waning West in this drama of men who insist on living by their own outmoded moral code. The performances are faultless and the film is one of the year's best.
EASY RIDER. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper ride their motorcycles cross-country looking for the true meaning of America. The film (directed by Hopper, produced by Fonda and co-authored by Terry Southern) is by turns sensitive and embarrassing --and at its best when it shows with compassion the places and faces of mid-America.
LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Nicol Williamson plays a heartsick member of the English aristocracy yearning for the love of a brazen movie usherette (Anna Karina) in this skillful adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel.
MARRY ME, MARRY ME. Claude Berri (The Two of Us) wrote and directed this wistful comedy about the trials of courtship in a French Jewish family.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Dustin Hoffman and Newcomer Jon Voight are the real points of interest in John Schlesinger's somewhat slick rendering of James Leo Herlihy's novel of love and loneliness in New York City.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. In the context of recent achievements, Stanley Kubrick's epic film deserves another look. Combining machinery and metaphysics in his tale of a voyage to Jupiter, Kubrick creates a cosmic morality play to which the flight of Apollo 11 adds a tantalizing immediacy.
THE DEVIL BY THE TAIL. Another slight and savage comedy by Philippe de Broca, Devil follows a slick Gallic seducer (Yves Montand) on his rounds. Montand could well become the new Bogart if he weren't already so good as the old Montand.
POPI. The plight of the poor is told with humor and bite in this surprisingly successful comedy. Alan Arkin is magnificent as a Puerto Rican widower with three jobs, struggling to get his children out of a New York ghetto.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE YEAR OF THE WHALE, by Victor B. Scheffer. The most awesome of mammals has been left alone by literary men almost since Moby Dick. Now Dr. Scheffer, a scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes of the whales' life cycle and the mysterious deep with a mixture of fact and feeling that invokes Melville's memory.
ALLEN GINSBERG IN AMERICA, by Jane Kramer. Earnest, articulate and somehow despairingly sanguine, Allen Ginsberg has evolved from a minor poet to major cult figure--a kind of one-man air ferry between bohemian and Brahmin traditions. Wisely perhaps, Author Kramer concentrates on the life rather than the works.
MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Peter Kropotkin. The absorbing autobiography of a 19th century Russian prince turned anarchist, who paid for his ideals in stretches of penury and imprisonment.
THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, by Theodore H. White. White is just as diligent as he was when recounting the victories of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But this time his protagonist lacks the flamboyance to fire up White's romantic mind, and as a result, a slight pall hangs over much of the book.
H. G. WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES, by Lovat Dickson. Wells sold the masses on the future and the Utopia that science would bring, but Dickson's biography shows that inside the complacent optimist a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.
ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, edited by Nathalie Babel. Newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches by the brilliant Russian-Jewish writer purged by Stalin demonstrate the individuality that was both Babel's genius and his death warrant.
THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER, by Gay Talese. A former New York Times staffer journeys far behind the headlines and bylines for a gossipy analysis of the workings and power struggles within the nation's most influential newspaper.
THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing. In the final novel of her Children of Violence series, the author takes Heroine Martha Quest from World War II to the present. Then the meticulous, disturbing book proceeds into the future to demonstrate the author's extrasensory conviction that global disaster is at hand.
THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS, by Stephen Spender. Mingling on the barricades with American and European student radicals, the Old Left poet and veteran of Spanish Civil War politics reports humanely on New Left ideals and spirit.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Love Machine, Susann (1 last week)
2. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (4)
3. The Godfather, Puzo (3)
4. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2)
5. The Pretenders, Davis (6)
6. Ada, Nabokov (5)
7. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (7)
8. A Place in the Country, Gainham
9. Except for Me and Thee, West (9)
10. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (8)
NONFICTION
1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (2)
2. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (1)
3. The Making of the President '68, White (3)
4. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (4)
5. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (5)
6. Jennie, Martin (8)
7. The Money Game,'Adam Smith'(10)
8. The 900 Days, Salisbury (6)
9. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig
10. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (7)
* All times E.D.T.
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