CINEMA

The Quare Fellow. Brendan Behan, like most Irishmen, laughs hardest when he hurts worst, and in this movie version of his first successful play he laughs at the way men are made to live, and condemned to die, in an average Irish prison.

To Kill a Mockingbird. The Pulitzer Prize novel by Harper Lee, which was always just a mite too cute for words, has been made into a cinemelodrama of remarkable charm--some of it supplied by the hero (Gregory Peck), most of it by three gumptious young 'uns (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna).

The Trial. Orson Welles is a cinema genius whose flops are more fascinating than the hits of lesser men, and in this eerie piece of esoterica, an adaptation of Franz Kafka's parable of the Anxious Age, he has produced the most fascinating failure of his career, a madhouse matinee that is so far out it's in.

Term of Trial. A good film about a bad marriage. Sir Laurence Olivier and Simone Signoret play Mr. & Mrs. with charm and impressive skill.

Love and Larceny. A naughty, nutty comedy from Italy about a con man who discovers that a liar and his lira are seldom parted.

A Child Is Waiting. What is it like to be a mental defective? What is being done to help such people? This film makes a calm inspection of this major disaster area (there are 5,700,000 defectives in the U.S.) and makes some surprising recommendations. Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland and Bruce Ritchey play the principal parts with distinction.

Days of Wine and Roses. An old-fashioned but effective diatribe against Demon Rum, in which Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick serve impressively as the object lessons.

David and Lisa. Love is a light to the sick as well as the sane, and in this painful and beautiful film it lights the life of two psychotic children and gives them hope that somehow they may be healed.

TELEVISION

Now and then, TIME LISTINGS calls attention to daily programs that are too copious to be listed in the ordinary manner but too interesting to be steadily ignored. Such a program is Discovery '63, a children's show on ABC, 4:30-4:55 p.m. weekdays, which ranges skillfully and educationally through a host of subjects and themes. In the coming week, for example, Discovery '63 covers unusual zoo animals, the U.S.'s Gemini space project, micro-projection of tiny objects and organisms, a trip through Washington, B.C., with Interior Secretary Udall, and a visit to the Smithsonian Institution.

Regular listings:

Wednesday, March 13 CBS Reports (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Continuing the program's analysis of the Supreme Court: the decision to ban prayers in public schools.

The Bob Hope Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Guests include Sinatra and Edie Adams.

Hollywood: The Great Stars (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Henry Fonda narrates another David Wolper documentary about Hollywood.

Thursday, March 14

California . . . the Most (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A swift history of the state.

Friday, March 15

Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The week's top news event.

Saturday, March 16

National Invitation Tournament (NBC, 1:30-3:30 p.m.). Basketball from Manhattan's Madison Square Garden.

Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9 p.m. to end). A Certain Smile, with Joan Fontaine, Rossano Brazzi and Bradford Dillman.

Sunday, March 17

Camera Three (CBS, 11-11:30 a.m.). Agnes Moorehead in a program about Wanda Landowska, the harpsichordist.

Sunday Sports Spectacular (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). World's amateur ice hockey championships: U.S. v. U.S.S.R.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A day in the life of an American Rhodes scholar, Winston Churchill Jr. from North Wales, Pa. at Oxford.

Monday, March 18

Monday Night at the Movies (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Boy on a Dolphin, with Sophia Loren as a Greek sponge diver.

Tuesday, March 19

Judy Garland Special (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Also featured: Phil Silvers and Robert Goulet.

THEATER

On Broadway Photo Finish, by Peter Ustinov. Looking like a cross between a grumpy polar bear and a tipsy Greek philosopher, Ustinov plays an 80-year-old confronting his onstage 60-, 40-and 20-year-old selves. His comic mugging and artful directing help the play to skate, with deceptive ease, over the thin ice of his own script.

Little Me shows the high-polish professionalism that Broadwayites are always claiming for the U.S. musical without much tangible evidence. Sid Caesar's frivolity quotient borders on genius.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, turns a college professor's living room into a lethal conversation pit. Poised at each other's jugulars, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen are comic terrors to behold, and impossible to forget.

Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long. Actor Paul Ford cannot face belated fatherhood, but he does glower at it all evening, and the effect is uproariously beguiling.

Beyond the Fringe is an explosion of literate joy. A demolition crew of four antic, articulate young Englishmen blow up any number of civilization's idols.

Off Broadway

The Tiger and The Typists, by Murray Schisgal, are both clever, two-character one-acters; the first concerns two self-appointed nonconformists who eat their own cliches, the second a pair of drab office workers whose entire lives drain away from 9 to 5. Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson greatly assist the playwright.

The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter, are just past the 100-performance mark, but it is doubtful if any playgoer has fully resolved--or ever will--the enigmatic terrors and ironic absurdities with which the playwright invests his eerily modern one-act parables.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Second Stone, by Leslie Fiedler. In this boisterous first novel of love in Rome, the author-critic puts into fictional form one of his pet literary theories: the eternal antagonism between the artist as true rebel and the artist as public entertainer.

Voltaire and the Calas Case, by Edna Nixon. Voltaire's memory is well served in this account of how the great skeptic roused Europe against France's execution of an innocent Huguenot.

Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, A Private Correspondence. Exchanges full of bombast, flattery and genuine admiration between two writers who arc probably only near geniuses, despite what they tell each other.

The Liberator, by John L. Thomas. The great abolitionist emerges from this objective biography as a fanatic who infuriated his fellow abolitionists as much as the slaveholders.

The Party, by Rudolph von Abele. At a grand and lurid party, a decent German soldier--symbolizing humanitarians everywhere--is thoroughly corrupted by an immensely attractive and utterly unscrupulous Nazi warlord.

Coat Upon a Stick, by Norman Fruchter. A brilliantly illuminated day in the dotage of an old immigrant Jew who rages the more against life as he senses it slipping away from him.

Of Streets and Stars, by Alan Marcus. Plotlessly presenting Hollywood as a series of tangentially connected lives, the author is surprisingly successful in a kind of latter-day Nathanael Western.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (1, last week)

2. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour--An Introduction, Salinger (4)

3. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (3)

4. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (2)

5. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (6)

6. $100 Misunderstanding, Gover (7)

7. A Shade of Difference, Drury (5)

8. Triumph, Wylie

9. The Cape Cod Lighter, O'Hara (8) 10. Ship of Fools, Porter (9)

NONFICTION 1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)

2. Happiness Is a Warm Puppy, Schulz (2)

3. Final Verdict, St. Johns (3)

4. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (5)

5. The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hopper

6. The Points of My Compass, White (8)

7. Silent Spring, Carson (4)

8. The Good New Days, Smith

9. The Fall of the Dynasties, Taylor (9) 10. My Life in Court, Nizer (6)

* All times E.S.T.

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