TELEVISION

Wednesday, October 15 WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.)* Everyone's changing partners in Divorce, American Style (1967), which stars Dick Van Dyke, Debbie Reynolds, Van Johnson, Jason Robards Jr. and Jean Simmons.

Thursday, October 16 DANIEL BOONE (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A former slave (Roosevelt Grier), now chief of the Tuscarora Indian tribe, gives ole Dan'l a hand in snatching a British cannon. "Rosy" will be back in other episodes. THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11:20 p.m.). Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, Roddy McDowall, Robert Redford and Ruth Gordon ramble through the Hollywood of the '30s in Inside Daisy Clover (1966). IT TAKES A THIEF (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Fred Astaire also takes on a recurrent guest-star role as the retired master thief and father of Alexander Mundy (Robert Wagner). He gives his son a little assistance in capturing a counterfeiter in "The Great Casino Caper."

Saturday, October 18 WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 2-4 p.m.). Lew Alcindor's regular season N.B.A. debut with the Milwaukee Bucks is covered live from Milwaukee as his team takes to the basketball court against the Detroit Pistons. N.C.A.A. GAME (ABC, 4-7:30 p.m.). California v. U.C.L.A. from Los Angeles.

Sunday, October 19

HEIDI (NBC, 7-9 p.m.). Tune in and see if this repeat does exactly what last year's presentation did when it cut off the exciting finish of the A.F.L. football game that preceded it.

FRANK SINATRA JR. WITH FAMILY AND FRIENDS (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). The family includes Dad and Sister Nancy, and the friends are Jack Benny, Sammy Davis Jr., Arte Johnson and the Doodletown Pipers on this musical-variety special.

THE FORSYTE SAGA (NET, 9-10 p.m.). The third episode in the lives of this complex clan.

Monday, October 20

NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "Matador" is a film portrait of El Cordobes, Spain's magnetic and successful bullfighter.

THEATER

On Broadway

FORTY CARATS. Julie Harris stars in this frothy French farce that pleads for a single standard of judgment on age disparity in marriage.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen plays Woody Allen in his comedy about a neurotic young man who is rejected even by the girls of his fantasies.

Off Broadway

SALVATION. Begotten by Hair, this new musical is an aesthetically retarded child that epitomizes Modcom -- the commercial exploitation of modernity without regard for dramatic art. Like other Modcom productions that peddle the youth cult. Salvation is replete with cynical simulations of innocence, freedom and dissent.

ADAPTATION--NEXT. Elaine May's Adaptation and Terrence McNally's Next are a happy combination of funny one-acters. Both plays are directed by Miss May with her usual wit and comic perception.

NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY. Charles Gordone's story of black-white and black-black relations is flawed by melodrama; yet the play ticks with menace and is unexpectedly and explosively funny.

OH! CALCUTTA! is a revue that looks suspiciously like burlesque, featuring lots of bodies but not much substance.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a series of readings from the works of the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry, in which whites as well as blacks speak for her. Suffused with a glowing concern for all humanity, as well as with anger at injustice, it is something of a milestone in the current white-black confrontation.

CINEMA

THE GYPSY MOTHS. Director John Frankenheimer once more brings courage to the fore in this tale of three stunt parachutists bound together by danger. The story bogs down somewhat in heavy-handed philosophy, but Frankenheimer manages to pull the rip cord in time with a brilliant skydiving sequence that makes the moviegoer's time well spent.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Woody Allen makes his debut as a film director. He also co-authored this zany crime flick, and plays the starring role of a crook. What's more, he makes it all work.

EASY RIDER. A major movie on an old theme--youth searching for where it's at. The props are familiar--drugs and motorcycles--but Director Dennis Hopper (who also co-stars with Peter Fonda) puts starch in what has become worn material. A brilliant performance by Newcomer Jack Nicholson, plus the use of hard-core Americans playing themselves, makes the youths' odyssey Homeric indeed.

TRUE GRIT. It's the Duke at his best. In what could have been just another western, John Wayne shows true grit in this cornball shoot-'em-up.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A slick package about being lonely and loveless in New York is directed by John Schlesinger in fashion-magazine style, but the acting of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight gives the film a sense of poignancy and reality.

MEDIUM COOL is an angry essay on American society in crisis. Writer-Director-Photographer Haskell Wexler uses the framework of a TV cameraman's experiences during last summer's Chicago convention to render the year's most impassioned and impressive film.

THE WILD BUNCH. The place is the Tex-Mex border, around the turn of the century, where a group of freebooting bandits try to scrounge a living out of a life that is fast becoming obsolete. Director Sam Peckinpah explores this violent world with hard-edged poetry and a sense of visual splendor that establishes him as one of the best American film makers.

STAIRCASE. There are two good reasons to see this film version of Charles Dyer's play; they are Richard Burton and Rex Harrison. Portraying a bickering, desperate homosexual couple on the brink of old age, both men turn in their best screen performances in years.

ALICE'S RESTAURANT. Arthur Penn has turned Arlo Guthrie's jaunty talking-blues hit of a couple of years back into a melancholy epitaph for an entire way of life. It is hard to imagine a more beautiful film than this--or a sadder one.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THEM, by Joyce Carol Gates. The battle to escape the economic and spiritual depression of urban American life is the theme of this family-chronicle novel by the author of A Garden of Earthly Delights and Expensive People.

CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS, by Vine Deloria. A savagely funny and perceptive book by a young member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe examines the modern plight of red men beset by white plunderers and progressives alike. Recommended without reservations.

MY LIFE WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., by Coretta Scott King. Intimate touches and a personal context lend new dimensions and drama to the life of her doomed and dedicated husband.

DR. BOWDLER'S LEGACY: A HISTORY OF EXPURGATED BOOKS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA, by Noel Perrin. Examining the literary atrocities of squeamish expurgators, the author has created a brilliant little work of cultural history full of wit and learning.

THE WATERFALL, by Margaret Drabble. The author's finest novel is a superb audit of the profits and losses of love for a woman threatening to destroy herself.

THE EGG OF THE GLAK AND OTHER STORIES, by Harvey Jacobs. Bizarre urban fairy tales delivered with the kick and rhythm of a nightclub comedian.

JESUS REDISCOVERED, by Malcolm Muggeridge. The 66-year-old British cultural curmudgeon writes tellingly of the ways, means and meditations that led to his conversion to Christianity.

FAT CITY, by Leonard Gardner. A brilliant exception to the general rule that boxing fiction seldom graduates beyond the level of caricature.

BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES, by Gerald Durrell. Zoology begins at home, or at least that's the way it seems to Naturalist Durrell, who recalls his boyhood infatuation with animals and his family's strained tolerance of some of the things that followed him into the house.

THE FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE, by Sanche de Gramont. Only the cuisine comes off unscathed in this analysis vinaigrette of the French national character.

THE COST OF LIVING LIKE THIS, by James Kennaway. An intense and coldly realistic novel about a man's coming to terms with two women who love him and the cancer that is pinching off his life.

COLLECTED ESSAYS, by Graham Greene. In notes and criticism, the prolific novelist repeatedly drives home the same obsessive point: "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."

PAIRING OFF, by Julian Moynahan. The book masquerades as a novel but is more like having a nonstop non sequitur Irish storyteller around--which may be more welcome than well-made fiction.

THE BIG LITTLE MAN FROM BROOKLYN, by St. Clair McKelway. The incredible life of Stanley Clifford Weyman, who cracked the upper crust by posing at various times as U.S. consul general to Algiers, a phy sician and a French naval officer.

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, by Jorge Amado. A sensuous tale of a virtuous lady and her conjugal rites -- as vivid and cheerfully bawdy as Boccaccio.

SHAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1856-1898), selected by Stanley Weintraub. Shaw never wrote one. But this paste-and-scissors por trait fashioned from fragments of the great man's work serves its purpose.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Godfather, Puzo (1 last week) 2. The Love Machine, Susann (2) 3. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe (6) 4. The Pretenders, Davis (4) 5. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (5) 6. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (3) 7. Ada, Nabokov (9) 8. The Promise, Potok (8) 9. The House on the Strand, du Maurier 10. A Place in the Country, Gainham (7)

NONFICTION

1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1) 2. My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, Gallagher (4) 3. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (3) 4. The Making of the President 1968, White (2) 5. The Honeycomb, St. Johns (5) 6. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (10) 7. My Life and Prophecies, Dixon and Noorbergen (8) 8. Prime Time, Kendrick 9. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig 10. Captive City, Demaris (9)

*All times E.D.T.

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