TELEVISION
Wednesday, January 8
PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE TO CONGRESS (NBC, 12:30-1 p.m.).* Live.
CBS REPORTS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A study of the problems of presidential succession. Former Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry S. Truman give their views.
Friday, January 10
THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Premiere of a new satirical revue of topical comment.
THE JACK PAAR PROGRAM (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Paar shows films of his three-day visit with Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Color.
THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Dramatization of H. G. Wells's The Magic Shop, in which a young boy with supernatural evil powers visits a magic shop and disappears.
Saturday, January 11
THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Guests include Janet Leigh, Patachou and Rosemary Clooney. Bob Cummings is the host.
Sunday, January 12
ONE OF A KIND (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). A bird's-eye view of America by helicopter, showing the changes civilization has brought to the country's landscape.
14TH ANNUAL N.F.L. PRO BOWL GAME (NBC, 4 p.m. to conclusion). The Eastern Conference v. the Western Conference, from Los Angeles. Color.
BIRTH CONTROL: HOW? (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). The religious implications of oral contraceptives are debated by Roman Catholic Dr. John Rock, codeveloper of the first pill, and some of his critics. Color.
Tuesday, January 14
BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). A program devoted to young artists, including Singers Liza Minelli and Jack Jones, Pianist Susan Starr, Folk Singers Ian and Sylvia, and Dancer Violette Verdy, with Jane Wyman as hostess. Color.
THEATER
On Broadway
MARATHON '33, by June Havoc, blends clowns and music and lacerated feet and shrieking nerves to prove that life is a grueling test rather like a 3,000-hour dance marathon. In this strange spectacle that suggests new directions for the U.S. theater, Julie Harris is put to the test, and her inspiring childlike ardor makes this one of her finest performances.
NOBODY LOVES AN ALBATROSS, by Ronald Alexander, is a cynical, funny, abrasive comedy about the frauds who cultivate the TV wasteland for the cash crop. As the biggest phony of them all, Robert Preston is full of roguish charm and as magnetic as sin.
THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE. The mismatched magnets love makes of men and women interested Carson McCullers, but in his adaptation of her novella, Play wright Edward Albee is unable to show as strongly as she did the real powers of attraction, although Colleen Dewhurst and Michael Dunn do their best to help.
BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, by Neil Simon. Audiences may shiver at the sight of a balky radiator and a snow-drifted skylight in the apartment shared by Newlyweds Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford, but they are certain to shake with laughter as the couple copes kookily with a week's wedlock.
THE PRIVATE EAR and THE PUBLIC EYE. Playwright Peter Shaffer shows his comic range in two one-acters--one about the strain of early love, not knowing how to win by being casual, the other about the strain and boredom of later love, not knowing how to win by seeing anew.
CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING. R.A.F. trainees shape up into smart marching units during this play, but they have more trouble forming themselves into rebels and reforming the British class system, as Playwright Wesker would have them do.
LUTHER, more performance than play, is lifted by Albert Finney's acting from the vagueness of its theology to a vital concern with a man whose purpose is more obsessive than sure, but whose impact set the Reformation in motion.
Off Broadway
THE TROJAN WOMEN. This masterly revival of the Euripides classic has been directed by Michael Cacoyannis with brooding eloquence, cyclonic passion and cruel inner hurt. Mildred Dunnock, Carrie Nye and Joyce Ebert deserve the compliment of truth--that they are worthy of the playwright.
IN WHITE AMERICA thoughtfully and evocatively combines a series of dramatic readings to chronicle the Negro's legacy of pain, oppression and denial from the days of slavery to the present hour. A fine group of actors makes the word intolerance become flesh.
CINEMA
LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER. Made in Manhattan, this pulp-fiction romance about a girl "in trouble" wisely plays down its drama, plays up its gritty humor, and becomes an actor's holiday for Natalie Wood, Steve McQueen and company.
HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. Vermont is the setting for the first surrealist camping trip in history--a hilarious conceit by one of the U.S.'s "new cinema" directors, Adolfas Mekas, who keeps his cast racing from pratfall to parody.
NIGHT TIDE. In this promising first film by a young writer-director named Curtis Harrington, a young U.S. sailor is lured toward destruction by a Lorelei who lives under a pier in Venice, Calif.
KNIFE IN THE WATER. A keen Polish thriller with a very sharp point.
BILLY LIAR. In this tragicomic fantasy from Britain, Tom Courtenay gives a matchless performance as an undertaker's assistant whose dreams are bigger than life. And Julie Christie is a dream come true as his way-out girl friend.
THE CARDINAL. Director-turned-Actor John Huston plays a fire-breathing man of the cloth and nearly walks off with this screen version of Henry Morton Robinson's 1950 bestseller, which is directed by Otto Preminger in a style best described as Hollywood baroque.
TOM JONES. Henry Fielding's 18th century classic is one of the funniest novels in the language, and Tony Richardson's screen version of the book is one of the funniest films of recent years. Albert Finney is excellent as the hero, and Hugh Griffith is magnificent as Squire Western.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE QUIET ENEMY, by Cecil Dawkins. These seven longish stories about recessive but exotic people of the inland South have the special power, which usually belongs to poetry, of haunting the mind.
FATHERS TO SONS, edited by Alan Valentine. The real rattlers in this fine and funny collection of letters to famous sons from their fathers are understandably pre-Freudian. Characteristically fatherly is Heinrich Marx's letter to Son Karl: "Instead of writing a lot about Kapital, make a lot of Kapital."
DON'T KNOCK THE CORNERS OFF, by Caroline Glyn. The great-granddaughter of Elinor Glyn made an early (age: 15) start on a literary career, writes about friendships of Byronic intensity and alliances of Renaissance intricacy among the intense little girls at a London primary school.
"WE NEVER MAKE MISTAKES," by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. These two short novels by the author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch concern outsiders in the new, post-Stalin Soviet society: the earnest young man who believes Lenin to the letter, and an ancient, impoverished peasant woman.
MR. DOOLEY REMEMBERS-THE FORMAL MEMOIRS OF FINLEY PETER DUNNE, edited by Philip Dunne. An affectionate recollection, written by his son, of the creator of Mr. Dooley, the Irish bartender who was the "wit and censor" of the nation.
THE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, edited by Andrew Turnbull. "The thing that lies behind all great careers from Shakespeare's to Lincoln's is the sense that life is a cheat and its conditions those of defeat." So wrote the novelist near the end of his life when he was poor, neglected and wasted by hack-writing and alcohol. But these letters, most of them written in the period, contain some of his very best writing.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Group, McCarthy (1 last week)
2. The Shoes of the Fisherman, West (2)
3. The Hat on the Bed, O'Hara (7)
4. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (3)
5. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, Godden (8)
6. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Fleming (9)
7. The Three Sirens, Wallace (6)
8. Caravans, Michener (4)
9. The Living Reed, Buck (5)
10. The King's Orchard, Turnbull (10)
NONFICTION
1. The American Way of Death, Mitford (3)
2. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (1)
3. Mandate for Change, Eisenhower (2)
4. Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy (4)
5. Rascal, North (5)
6. J.F.K.: The Man and the Myth, Lasky (6)
7. Dorothy and Red, Sheean (7)
8. My Darling Clementine, Fishman (9)
9. The Pooh Perplex, Crews (10)
10. I Owe Russia $1,200, Hope (8)
* All times E.S.T.
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