Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, "but not in the midday snow, at least not in my case," protested Director Alfred Hitchcock, 76. Even so, the pudgy film maker and his wife Alma ventured to the snowy slopes of St. Moritz, where he wanted to rest before finishing his latest film, Family Plot. The movie, he said cryptically, is "sort of a comedy-melodrama about a fake woman medium, an out-of-work actor and a chase after a missing heir who is also a kidnaper." Had he bothered even to sample the Swiss snow? "We spend most of our time sitting comfortably in the Palace Hotel, watching it all from behind the window."-

Despite his reputation as a quick-fire lover, Casanova is moving out of the bedsheets and onto the screen in slow motion at best.

Director Federico Fellini's movie about the 18th century Italian seducer first ran into trouble last August when thieves broke into Technicolor's vaults and filched three weeks' worth of shooting. Then a strike by the production crew and a case of flu contracted by Star Donald Sutherland caused further costly delays. Claiming that Fellini had run over both his $6 million budget and a Dec. 20 deadline, Producer Alberto Grimaldi last week announced that he was suspending the cast of 170. Fellini called in his attorneys about the matter and offered a one-line review of his producer's charges: "Slanderous, untruthful and offensive."

-The holiday spirit apparently did not impress Burma's President Ne Win, 64. Disturbed by noise from the Inya Lake Hotel across from his home in Rangoon, the socialist leader rounded up a trio of military aides armed with submachine guns and barged in on 800 revelers. While stunned guests watched, he then bashed in the band's drums, pushed over some amplifiers and slapped an army officer. Diplomats who were there reported that the Burmese partygoers, who obviously knew a Ne Win situation when they saw it, quickly made for the exits.

-Too many of her dire predictions have come true, too little of her advice has been followed, complained Ideologue Ayn Rand, 70. And that, said the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, accounts for her decision to stop publishing the Ayn Rand Letter, her monthly four-page tract on objectivist philosophy and laissez-faire capitalism. "I intend to return, full time, to my primary work: writing books," she wrote to her 15,000 subscribers. "The state of today's culture is so low that I do not care to spend my time watching and discussing it. I am haunted by a quotation from Nietzsche: 'It is not my function to be a flyswatter.' " -British Actor-Director Richard Attenborough was "thrilled beyond measure" when he received from No. 10 Downing Street a letter offering him a trusteeship in London's prestigious Tate Gallery. So thrilled, he later remembered, that he neglected to open a second letter from the same address. It contained a polite inquiry as to whether Attenborough would accept a British knighthood. "It has not fully sunk in yet," said Attenborough happily last week after learning that he was among 32 Britons thus honored.

-Just a "coming home party" was the way Pulp Novelist Harold Robbins, 59, described his 600-guest New Year's Eve bash at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Robbins, who has been in France working on the film version of his most recent novel, The Pirate, played host to a crowd that included Cesar Romero and Glenn Ford, Gossip Rona Barrett and the girls featured on Robbins' party favors, a 1976 calendar. The shindig cost $40,000, which may explain why the author wasted no time returning to work on his new book, another love-and-lust epic titled The Lonely Lady. "One fellow grabbed me around the neck, and the other went directly for the left front pocket where I'd put the money," said former Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, describing his brush with muggers in Washington, D.C.

Clark, 76, was on his way home from a neighborhood grocery when two youths jumped him and stole his wallet. The father of onetime Attorney General Ramsey Clark duly reported, "I chased after them shouting 'Police!' and 'Help!' and stuff like that, but they were too fast."

The robbers got $136, he announced, adding that he might take a different route home in the future. Explained Clark: "I'll have to be more judicious."

-"It was an ordeal," reflected Publisher Hugh Hefner, describing a Government investigation into drug trafficking within his Playboy empire. The 15-month inquiry, which accelerated after Hefner's social secretary was found dead of a drug overdose, finally ended last week when the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago decided there was insufficient evidence to bring charges. "It was not a drug case in the usual sense; they were obviously and clearly out to get me," protested Hef, who has long advocated the liberalization of marijuana laws. Not only had the investigation cost him subscribers and advertising revenue, added the aging playboy, now 49, but one sponsor for a Bunny beauty contest as well.

-Since selling his Kentucky Fried Chicken business for $2 million in 1964, Colonel Harland Sanders has not found the finger lickin' so good. In an interview published in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Sanders sourly described a new extra-crispy recipe being promoted by the company as "a fried doughball stuck on some chicken." The gravy, he added, is "pure wallpaper paste.

There's no nutrition in it at all." Sanders, 85, who is still under contract to the chicken chain as a "good-will ambassador," was promptly sued for libel by one angry franchise owner. But last week Louisville Circuit Court Judge Thomas Ballantine dismissed the suit, ruling that the Colonel's comments had not been aimed at anyone in particular and so could not be considered damaging.

-He was filming a hurricane sequence in a new Walt Disney adventure picture titled Treasure of Matecumbe, recalled Peter Ustinov, 54. Asked to turn away from the camera so his stuntman-double could take over, the well-rounded star stumbled and tore some ligaments in his legs. "The trouble was that my feet were planted in sand," explained Ustinov. "While I turned, my feet didn't. I was hit by a few hundred gallons of water, did an elegant curtsy and sat down." In all, the disabled actor will have spent three weeks sitting down --and a few more hobbling around on crutches--by the time his ligaments have mended. Said Ustinov: "I think I liked it better when the Disney people drew their stunts."

-Though often compared to the 19th century Austrian statesman Klemens Metternich, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger claims to have other idols. "I think Metternich was an extremely skilled diplomat, but not very creative," said Kissinger to the Washington Star. "I hope to have constructed more than he had. He was a skillful manipulator of events that he didn't help shape." And who have been the great men of modern times? "De Gaulle was a great figure," answered the Secretary.

"Franklin Roosevelt, Mao, I am not attaching moral judgments. Churchill, of course. To some extent, Adenauer."

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