TELEVISION

Wednesday, October 21 CBS REPORTS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* CBS follows the candidates in New York's senatorial fight between Kenneth Keating and Robert Kennedy.

ELECTION SPECIAL (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Palo Alto County in Iowa has always voted for the winning presidential candidate. A study of this county's temper, 1964.

Thursday, October 22 THE MUNSTERS (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Gas-company workers stumble into the Munster dungeon while installing a pipeline.

Friday, October 23

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). The story of a Korean War G.I. who turns traitor and returns to the U.S. to steal missile secrets. George Hamilton attempts the leading role. Margaret O'Brien costars.

THE JACK PAAR PROGRAM (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Excerpts from Broadway's new topical revue, The Committee. Color.

OLYMPICS 1964 (NBC, 11:15-11:30 p.m.). Special gymnastics competition for men and women.

Saturday, October 24 OLYMPICS 1964 (NBC, 5-7 p.m.). Equestrian grand-prix jumping, closing ceremonies and highlights of week's events.

Sunday, October 25

DISCOVERY (ABC, 11:30 a.m.-12 noon). The history of witchcraft, starring Margaret Hamilton, Oz's Wicked old Witch of the West.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A fascinating look at the smear campaigns of past presidential elections--the rumors that George Washington was a woman, Abraham Lincoln a Negro--and the successful use of slander in destroying many a political career.

Monday, October 26

SLATTERY'S PEOPLE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Slattery takes on a freshman legislator who insists on introducing an important bill on his own, refuses all help. Ricardo Montalban guest-stars as the stubborn one.

Tuesday, October 27

WORLD WAR I (CBS, 8-8:30 p.m.). The battle of Verdun, the bloodiest of them all: 1,250,000 French and German casualties.

THE CAMPAIGN AND THE CANDIDATES (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A look at the polls, and state-by-state evaluation of the presidential candidates' areas of strength.

THEATER

CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS. A band of incredibly funny young Cambridge graduates, with a revue that thinks small and carries a big slapstick. Laughter is all but incessant, and the most hilarious sketch of the evening is a bewigged theater-of-the-absurd British courtroom trial involving a dwarf.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Mockingly ironic, tender, frolicsome and tragic, this musical revolves around the unlikely subject of the follies of World War I. Blending English music-hall sentimentality with

Brechtian savagery, Lovely War is an unsettling and not-to-be-forgotten theatrical experience.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF strays far from Broadway to record the gentle joys and occasional sorrows of a Jewish community in a Russian town in 1905. In his finest performance to date, Zero Mostel gives this musical an unfaltering heartbeat.

ABSENCE OF A CELLO erupts with steady laughter as an academic scientist tangles with an org man from corporation land.

RECORDS

Jazz KENNY BALL PLAYS FOR THE JET SET (Kapp). The thought of From Russia with Love pounded out in Dixieland style by a sextet of Britons is enough to make purists quail. But the result is surprisingly lively, with a mean banjo taking the balalaika part. Even more surprising is Londonderry Air in shuffle rhythm, and Isle of Capri with a honky-tonk piano intro. Best of all is Alabama Jubilee, a traditional Dixie item done up brown as a hoecake.

ELLINGTON 65 (Reprise) sounds reassuringly like Ellington '26, but the material in this album of pop and corn is scarcely worth the Duke's attention. Fortunately, his style shines through almost every bar of such half-roasted chestnuts as Never on Sunday and I Left My Heart in San Francisco. Oldtime Ellington Saxpots Jimmy Hamilton (tenor), Johnny Hodges (alto) and Harry Carney (baritone) add to the luster. Standouts are Russell Procope's low-register clarinet solo in More and Cootie Williams' soaring trumpet work on Fly Me to the Moon. And binding it all together is the deft piano scrimshaw of Ellington himself.

CHARLIE MINGUS: TONIGHT AT NOON (Atlantic) is the sort of stuff that Ellington should be doing: original jazz works of concert length and worth. Bassist-Pianist Mingus' debt to Ellington is most apparent in Invisible Lady where both mood and the stylish trombone solo of Jimmie Knepper are evocative of the Duke at his best. Peggy's Blue Skylight features Mingus on piano and a haunting tenor sax solo by Booker Ervin.

HELLO LOUIS! (Epic). Cornetist Bobby Hackett, freed from the treacly bondage of those Jackie Gleason albums of a few years back, pays tribute to Satchmo the composer. Louis Armstrong's compositions have always been overshadowed by his virtuoso performances of other people's work, though he has written several hundred pieces, among the better known being Gate Mouth Blues, Brother Bill and Hear Me Talkin' to Ya. Hackett proves to have a real feeling for the Armstrong style, and his cornet solos, backed by authentic-sounding tuba, saxophone, banjo, trombone, piano and drums, are incisive and bouncy. Pick of the lot: Someday You'll Be Sorry, with Hackett's cornet and Sonny Russo's trombone taking turns playing obbligato to each other.

SAMMY DAVIS JR. SINGS MEL TORME'S CALIFORNIA SUITE (Reprise). As a singer, Mel Torme is known as "the velvet fog"; as a composer he is known scarcely at all. Yet Torme is responsible for at least four songs that have become standards in the repertory. Sammy Davis Jr. gives A Stranger in Town a stronger performance than Torme's original, and his rendition of Born to Be Blue is the best since the late Mildred Bailey made it her own. While the California Suite is billed as Torme's "major composition" on this album, it is memorable chiefly as the sort of thing in which Lyricist Torme rhymes La Jolla with "annoy you." But the songs --wistful, full of tender despair--make Side 2 worth the price.

CINEMA

THE SOFT SKIN. With elegant style and economy, French Director Franc,ois Truffaut diagnoses the love game as played by an aging, suety intellectual (Jean Desailly) who shuttles between his wife and a shapely airline stewardess (Franc,oise Dorleac).

TOPKAPI. A jewel theft in Istanbul is played mostly for laughs by Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell and Peter Ustinov in Director Jules Dassin's niftiest caper since Rififi.

THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY. Robert Shaw and Mary Ure are superb in a sensitive, deeply affecting drama based on Brian Moore's novel about a genial Irish nobody who feels his life and his wife slipping away from him.

THE APE WOMAN. Man's inhumanity is the theme of this squalid but often hilarious Italian comedy about a punk promoter and his wife, a girl covered from head to toe with brown silky hair.

MARY POPPINS. Walt Disney's drollest film in decades has wit, sentiment, lilting tunes, and an irresistible performance by Julie Andrews as the proper London governess with a flair for magic.

I'D RATHER BE RICH. In this surprisingly sprightly comedy, Sandra Dee occupies an acute romantic triangle with Andy Williams and Robert Goulet, while Hermione Gingold and Maurice Chevalier sharpen its points.

SEDUCED AND ABANDONED. A young girl's dishonor sets off a sunny Sicilian nightmare in Director Pietro Germi's savage tragicomedy, which is less warm but no less wicked than his memorable Divorce--Italian Style.

GIRL WITH GREEN EYE,S. As a bubbly colleen who chances a fling with a middle-aged author, Britain's Rita Tushingham makes a trite tale seem fresh, poignant, and deliciously funny.

THAT MAN FROM RIO. A stylish French spoof of Hollywood action epics assigns most of the derring-do to Hero Jean-Paul Belmondo, who does it to a turn.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. The Beatles play the Beatles in "'a comedy deftly calculated to whip up hysteria among pre-teens without spoiling the fun for their elders.

RHINO! African melodrama as it should be done--with scenic splendor and crackling humor--tied to a timely story about a hunt for a pair of rare white rhinos.

BOOKS

Best Reading

FOR THE UNION DEAD, by Robert Lowell. Less obscure than his earliest works and less embarrassingly confessional than his recent Life Studies, these poems pursue Lowell's preoccupation with creativity, madness, marriage and his Puritan heritage in tough, masculine verse.

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by Charles Chaplin. Hollywood's comic genius writes eloquently of his pitifully poor childhood but prefers name-dropping to telling about his later artistic achievements. The reason for this autobiographical lapse is apparent on every page and saves the book: despite his wealth, fame and notoriety, the penniless child in Charlie still marvels at the attention of the great.

THE BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW, by John Cheever. In these chilling short stories, the fall from corporate grace, the merger, the personal scandal that might stop the money are the demons Cheever uses to speculate about the fears of salaried suburbanites.

LITTLE BIG MAN, by Thomas Berger. An exuberant novel of the wild West that lights new fires under old myths yet at the same time satirizes them.

REMINISCENCES, by Douglas MacArthur. In a style that is more restrained than his usual baroque eloquence, MacArthur vividly recounts his trials and his triumphs.

HERZOG, by Saul Bellow. In this long-awaited novel, Bellow's hero is a man in search of a new life amid the rubble of a wrecked marriage. His conclusion is disappointingly flat ("I am what I am"), but in the process of reaching it, Herzog-Bellow ranges wittily, learnedly, and perceptively over nearly all the dilemmas--major, minor, and plain absurd--of 20th century man in a virtuoso display that is a constant delight.

THE WORDS, by Jean-Paul Sartre. After a series of increasingly labored, metaphysically morose works, Sartre has written a clear-eyed, warm, but very sad account of his early years. The despair of modern existentialism, it turns out, is partly rooted in the struggle for sanity of a bookish, lonely child.

THIS GERMANY, by Rudolf Leonhardt. In a series of provocative essays, a West German journalist tries to clear up the many mysteries of the German character.

THE ITALIANS, by Luigi Barzini. Foreigners often love Italy for the wrong reasons, thinks this brilliant Italian journalist, who goes on to consider his countrymen in damaging detail.

VIVE MOI! by Sean O'Faolain. It took this Irish novelist 30 years to come to terms with his provincial Irish upbringing; in an engaging autobiography, he records the dilemma of a man forever "impaled on one green corner of the universe."

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Candy, Southern and Hoffenberg (1 last week)

2. Herzog, Bellow (3)

3. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (2)

4. This Rough Magic, Stewart (8)

5. Armageddon, Uris (6)

6. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (5)

7. Julian, Vidal (4)

8. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (7)

9. A Mother's Kisses, Friedman (10)

10. The Man, Wallace (9)

NONFICTION

1. Reminiscences, MacArthur (3)

2. My Autobiography, Chaplin (7)

3. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (6)

4. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway (2)

5. Harlow, Shulman (5)

6. The Italians, Barzini (4)

7. The Invisible Government, Wise and Ross (1)

8. Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver (9)

9. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (8)

10. Four Days, U.P.I, and American

Heritage (10)

*All times E.D.T. through October 24. E.S.T. thereafter.

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