TELEVISION

Television's shining moments seem to come when it shoots for the moon. During their ten-day coverage of the Apollo 12 mission, the networks plan to relay live color television of the astronauts' moon walk, which is set for Wednesday, Nov. 19. Lift-off is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 14, at 11:22 a.m., and will be covered live by all networks.

Wednesday, November 12

HEY, HEY, HEY--IT'S FAT ALBERT (NBC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Bill Cosby's famous characters come to animated life for a football game between Bill's team and the Green Street Terrors.

JOHNNY CARSON'S REPERTORY COMPANY IN AN EVENING OF COMEDY (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). George C. Scott, Maureen Stapleton and Marian Mercer are formidable assets for even an NBC Prince of Players.

DIANA ROSS AND THE SUPREMES AND THE TEMPTATIONS ON BROADWAY (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). When the titles get this long, need more be said?

NORMAN ROCKWELL'S AMERICA (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Some of the famous illustrator's works come alive through the efforts of Jonathan Winters, Michele Lee and Dick Smothers.

THE MERV GRIFFIN SHOW (CBS, 11:30-1 a.m.). Special guest is Mrs. Rose Kennedy.

Thursday, November 13

THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-10:45 p.m.). James Garner, Jean Simmons, Angela Lansbury, Katharine Ross and Suzanne Pleshette in Hollywood's version of Evan Hunter's bestselling story about an amnesia victim's search for identity, Mister Buddwing (1966).

Friday, November 14

FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.).

If you can't get your husband's attention, you might follow Natalie Wood's example and try robbing his bank. But then you might also have Penelope's problem and find that you were a successful robber (1966).

Saturday, November 15

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 8:30-11 p.m.). Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau made dough in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966), even though the show was rather crummy.

Sunday, November 16

WILD KINGDOM (NBC, 7-7:30 p.m.). Sockeye salmon head upstream for a fishy version of the mating game.

THE ADVOCATES (NET, 10-11 p.m.). The pros and cons of the Federal Government's right to continue issuing off-shore leases for oil drilling is up for public debate.

Tuesday, November 18

THE WOLF MEN (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). James Coburn narrates this examination of the scientific work being done to learn more about the wolf and the efforts to prevent its extinction.

WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Charles Collingwood examines the situation in "Can South Vietnam Go It Alone?"

THEATER

JIMMY is a $900,000 anachronism, a Hollywood notion (courtesy of Jack L. Warner) of what a Broadway musical is like, drearily familiar from countless Hollywood films of Broadway musicals. It takes consummate ineptitude to make Jimmy Walker dull and to make his mistress, Betty Compton, even duller.

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE. The basic plot of this tepid little comedy is an old chestnut, dropping with a slightly pathetic spin: Blind Boy meets Girl, Blind Boy loses Girl, Blind Boy gets Girl. Playwright Leonard Gershe is only sporadically funny and never uniquely himself but simply a one-man situation-and-gag file.

INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has joined the mea culpa crew with this play that argues that Americans were once beastly to the redskins, hardly a startling bit of information. The format is that of a Buffalo Bill Wild West show alternated with somber accounts of the humiliation and decimation of the Indians, but the segments never seem to gain any harmony of mood or purpose.

THREE MEN ON A HORSE. George Abbott directs a revival of the 1935 comedy about a composer of greeting-card verses (Jack Gilford) who whiles away his commuting hours by hunch-picking horses with uncanny clairvoyance. The cast is superb, and the entire production is polished to a high gloss.

THE FRONT PAGE. Robert Ryan plays Walter Burns, the tough managing editor of the Chicago Examiner, and Bert Convy plays Hildy Johnson, his top reporter, in this revival of the Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur saga of newspapering in the 1920s. The play has a cornball period flavor that adds to the enjoyment.

A PATRIOT FOR ME. Playwright John Osborne tells the story of Alfred Redl, a homosexual officer of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire who was forced to commit suicide when it was found that he had been selling state secrets to the Russians. Osborne's voice is badly muffled, and he cannot seem to work up the passion to breathe inner life into the play.

Off Broadway

CRIMES OF PASSION. The late British playwright Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot) was much possessed by death, which he treats in these two one-acters with a grisly sense of humor. He died before he had mastered his craft, but rarely in recent years has the theater lost such an original imagination.

A SCENT OF FLOWERS takes a girl on a semipoetic, semiprosaic long day's journey into the night of her suicide. Looking uncannily like her aunt Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Houghton gives a tenderly well-wrought performance that has beauty, feeling and intensity.

FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES is a revival of the 1967 prison drama, restaged by Hollywood Actor Sal Mineo in a version calculated to close what he must feel is a sadomasochism gap. Filled with the sight and sound of faces being beaten bloody, genitals being punched, bodies being raped, slugged, tossed and twisted in agony, this latest entry to homosexual theater is a carefully placed kick in the groin.

A WHISTLE IN THE DARK is Thomas Murphy's drama of a brutish Irishman and his four sons who move in on a fifth son attempting to flee their world of tooth and claw by moving to England. The play is full of the rude poetry of the commonplace, stating truths about human nature that one would often rather forget.

ADAPTATION--NEXT. Two one-acters, both directed with a crisp and zany comic flair Elaine May. Miss May's own play, Adptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Terrence McNally's Next has a middle-aged man undergoing a series of humiliating pre-induction examinations.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK. An able interracial cast in a tribute to the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry presents readings from her works--journals, letters and snippets of plays.

CINEMA

THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA. As Italo Bombolini, Anthony Quinn so skillfully cowers and struts in his roles of husband and boozy mayor that he achieves nothing less than comic-operatic stature. Anna Magnani, as his wife, proves every bit the match for the bombastic Bombolini with a performance as strong as the lines indelibly etched on her face.

ALICE'S RESTAURANT. This is a film about young people that is, as they say, very much together. Taking Arlo Guthrie's hit song of a couple of years ago, Director Arthur Penn has fashioned a sad, funny, tragic, beautiful picture of a way of life.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, two of the screen's biggest antiheroes, find compassion and companionship in each other to make this one of the most memorable love stories in American cinema history.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Woody Allen (who shared the authorship of this zany crime flick) makes his star (an inept criminal played by Woody Allen) stumble through such an incredibly long list of bungles and pitfalls that the film loses much of its comic momentum. However, the director (Woody Allen) sustains it all by providing some insanely funny moments.

MEDIUM COOL. Writer-Director Haskell Wexler challenges Hollywood both with stylistic innovations and by dwelling on contemporary politics (the Chicago convention). Add forcefully realistic performances by a cast of unknowns and the result is dynamite.

EASY RIDER. Using townspeople playing themselves and drawing a topnotch performance from Jack Nicholson, Actor-Director Dennis Hopper has added a new dimension to the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer.

ADALEN '31. Director Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) paints a poignant portrait of people caught in the flux of history and conveys the ineffable quality of a single decisive moment in a man's life.

THE BED SITTING ROOM. This is Director Richard Lester's second surrealistic attack on the homicidal excesses of war; it makes his first aggressive stab against the military (How I Won the War) look like a warm-up exercise.

BOOKS

Best Reading

PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS, by Robert Coover. In a collection of clever, surreal--and sometimes repellent--short stories, the author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, plays a literary shell game with his readers.

THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, by John Fowles. A fascinating novel that uses the tricks and turns of Victorian fiction to pound home the thesis that freedom is the natural condition of man.

WHEN THE WAR IS OVER, by Stephen Becker. An excellent period morality tale about a Union Army officer who attempts to save the life of a teen-age Rebel who shot him during a Civil War skirmish.

PRESENT AT THE CREATION, by Dean Acheson. Harry Truman's Secretary of State, in these well-written memoirs, recalls the formative years of the cold war with much wit, knowledge and insight.

BARNETT FRUMMER IS AN UNBLOOMED FLOWER, by Calvin Trillin. Soft implosions of mirthful satire that trouble the social and political pretensions of those who would be with it.

POWER, by Adolf A. Berle. A former F.D.R. brain-truster and State Department official compellingly examines the sources and limitations of power and its relationship to ethics.

A SEA CHANGE, by J. R. Salamanca. Bitterness and tenderness are the alternating currents in this novel of the breakup of a marriage by the author of The Lost Country and Lilith.

AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Kept during the author's two years as Ambassador to India, this diary is rare both for first-rate prose and succinct, irreverent opinion ("The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women").

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, by Antonia Fraser. A rich, billowing biography of a pretty queen who, by casting herself as a religious martyr, has upstaged her mortal enemy, Queen Elizabeth I, in the imagination of posterity.

THEM, by Joyce Carol Gates. One family's battle to escape the economic and spiritual depression of urban American life, by the author of A Garden of Earthly Delights and Expensive People.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Godfather, Puzo (1 last week)

2. The House on the Strand, du Maurier (3)

3. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (4)

4. The Love Machine, Susann (2)

5. The Seven Minutes, Wallace (8)

6. The Promise, Potok (6)

7. In This House of Brede, Godden (7)

8. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (9)

9. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe (5)

10. The Pretenders, Davis (10)

NONFICTION

1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1)

2. The Selling of the President 1968, McGinnis (3)

3. My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, Gallagher (2)

4. Present at the Creation, Acheson (5)

5. The Making of the President 1968, White (9)

6. My Life and Prophecies, Dixon and Noorbergen (6)

7. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (8)

8. Ambassador's Journal, Galbraith

9. Prime Time, Kendrick (4)

10. The Honeycomb, St. Johns (7)

* All times E.S.T.

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