CINEMA

TELEVISION

Wednesday, November 3

THE JACK BENNY HOUR (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Durable Jack is host to Bob Hope and Hike Sommer in his first show of the season.

Thursday, November 4

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11:30 p.m.). Elmer Gantry, based on the Sinclair Lewis novel about a corrupt revivalist preacher. Burt Lancaster, in the title role, won an Oscar for his performance.

Friday, November 5

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.LE. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). As if Asia didn't have enough trouble, Solo and Illya appear in the neighborhood to foil some dictatorial plotters lurking in the jungle.

Saturday, November 6

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The two events are the National Air Races in Reno, Nev., and from Mexico City the Grand Prix of Mexico.

TRIALS OF O'BRIEN (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Guest star is Theodore Bikel. Lawyer O'Brien investigates the death of a Seventh Avenue dress manufacturer.

GET SMART! (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). "The Day Smart Turned Chicken" implausibly involves a dying cowboy and a plot to assassinate an ambassador.

Sunday, November 7

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Duke Ellington Swings Through Japan" shows the Duke on his memorable three-week tour of Japan in 1964. Repeat.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Singers Barbara Cook, Anita Gillette, John Raitt and Ron Husmann are guests, along with the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club. Host is Henry Fonda.

Monday, November 8

DAYS OF OUR LIVES (NBC, 2-2:30 p.m.). The premiere of another soap-and-scalpel opera, this time starring Macdonald Carey as the melodramatic medico.

THEATER

On Broadway

GENERATION. William Goodhart converts a Greenwich Village loft into a sparring ground for the Establishment and the hip pie, the parent and the child. Henry Fon da, as a visiting father-in-law, fights the battle of the ages with his usual bemused charm.

HALF A SIXPENCE glints with bright song and dance, and Tommy Steele glows with the grin of an English leprechaun in an exuberant musical.

THE ODD COUPLE. The comic insight of Playwright Neil Simon gives hilarious credibility to a household of two husbands who find out -- by living together -- why their wives couldn't stand to live with them.

LUV. Murray Schisgal's satire of psychic snobs and pseudo-Freudian fools is sharp ened by the inventive direction of Mike Nichols.

THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT are more kitten (Diana Sands) and mouse (Alan Alda) in Bill Manhoffs amusing yarn about the eternal circular pursuit of male and female.

Off Broadway

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE. The limited agonies and ecstasies of a Brooklyn longshoreman and his family are the fabric for Arthur Miller's tapestry of domestic tragedy.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER makes a not-so-gay era seem not-so-grim. The Porter wit is the guide on a tuneful journey through the past 40 years.

RECORDS

Virtuosos

JULIAN BREAM IN CONCERT (RCA Victor).

At actual performances, the 32-year-old English virtuoso usually plays first the lute and then the classical guitar. These galliards and pavans composed by John Dowland and William Byrd are for the lute alone; or, in the case of six of Dow-land's songs, for lute and voice. Bream and Tenor Peter Pears are in tune with the Elizabethans and make their music sound both fresh and intimate.

MOZART: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 21 AND 24 (Columbia). In the C Major Concerto, Robert Casadesus keeps his touch crisp to balance and blend with the clear, light Cleveland Orchestra ensemble conducted by the ideal Mozartean, George Szell. In the great C Minor Concerto, both Casadesus' tone and the orchestration darken for the rich chromatic flights that dramatically presage the romantic era.

MENDELSSOHN: VIOLIN CONCERTO IN E MINOR (Mercury). Schumann called Mendelssohn "the Mozart of the 19th century." Violinist Henryk Szeryng proves the point, gives the famed concerto an attractive, refined profile by playing it poetically but not passionately, with as much taste as temperament. Szeryng also plays the rarely heard Schumann Concerto in D Minor. Both with Antal Dorati and the London Symphony Orchestra.

MUSICAL SOIREE AT THE COURT OF SANS SOUCI (Mercury). Musicologists and the proliferating LP are bringing back souvenir programs from every musical era. This is the kind of concert Frederick the Great used to hear every evening at 6: flute concertos by Johann Quantz, Johann Hasse, Johann Graun and himself. Flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal can play to the King's taste, but generally the program could be adduced as an argument against state subsidy of the arts.

TCHAIKOVSKY: PIANO CONCERTOS NOS. 2 AND 3 (Columbia). The unfamiliar and devilishly difficult second concerto, written five years after the overwhelmingly successful first, is given a technically brilliant and melodious performance by Pianist Gary Graffman, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. The Third Concerto lasts only 15 minutes and can barely contain Graffman's lightning and the Philadelphians' thunder.

HEIFETZ PLAYS GERSHWIN AND MUSIC OF FRANCE (RCA Victor). At least Heifetz cannot be accused of recording the same old violinist's repertoire. Instead, he has made violin transcriptions of Gershwin songs (Summertime, Bess, You Is My Woman, It Ain't Necessarily So), and of

French piano music by Ibert, Ravel, Poulenc. The cantabile melodies transfer prettily enough, but Debussy's Golliwog just doesn't Cake-Walk.

KHACHATURIAN: PIANO CONCERTO (RCA Victor). The flame-breathing war colt has met its master in Lorin Hollander, the 21-year-old ex-wunderkind. Andre Previn takes a holiday from Hollywood to conduct the spectacular with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

THE HILL. Looking less like Bond and more like Gable, Sean Connery leads a handful of World War II unfortunates up and down a sandy pyramid in Director (The Pawnbroker) Sidney Lumet's forceful if conventional drama of men v. masters in a British army stockade.

REPULSION. With monstrous art, Writer-Director Roman Polanski wrings a classic chiller from the pulse-quickening misdeeds of a lovely French manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) whose problems seem reminiscent of that other classic, Psycho.

THE RAILROAD MAN. The commonplace woes of everyman catch up with a devil-may-care railroad engineer in this family drama made in 1956 by Director Pietro Germi (Divorce--Italian Style), who also plays the title role.

TO DIE IN MADRID. With John Gielgud and Irene Worth among the narrators, French Producer-Director Frederic Rossif splices vintage newsreels into a masterful elegy for victims of Spain's scarring civil war of 1936-39.

DARLING. A dazzling playgirl (Julie Christie) learns how to succeed at jet-set fun-and-games, only to discover too late that to win can be to lose.

KING AND COUNTRY. Director Joseph Losey (The Servant) takes an excruciating look at a World War I deserter (Tom Courtenay) who is doomed to die, and at the anguished officer (Dirk Bogarde) who is doomed to defend him.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH. Blood, sand and social protest mix in Director Francesco Rosi's angry drama about the rise and fall of a great bullfighter--played with impressive sting by Spanish Matador Miguel Mateo.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE LIFE OF DYLAN THOMAS, by Constantine Fitz Gibbon. Welsh Poet Dylan Thomas brought glories to lyric poetry not found there since Elizabethan times. But besides being a genius, he was also a perennial problem child who mooched off his friends, slept with any available woman, ignored his children and drank ceaselessly. FitzGibbon, a friend of Dylan, eloquently brings the two images into focus, following the poet from a spoiled childhood through a tempestuous marriage to a premature death in America from an overdose of Scotch.

THE GREAT MUTINY, by James Dugan.

The British fleet in 1797 may have seemed invincible to the French, but 50,000 of His Majesty's seamen, fed up with being underfed, rarely paid and too often flogged, took control of some 100 vessels and blockaded their own country in the greatest mass mutiny of maritime history. Historian Dugan recreates the furious but futile Channel insurrection.

CONVERSATIONS WITH BERENSON, recalled by Count Umberto Morra, translated by Florence Hammond. The late Bernard Berenson, the American critic who trained lis eye on Renaissance art and his tongue n the art of conversation, was both wise and wise guy. Count Morra, an Italian intellectual and one of Berenson's frequent guests, fortunately took notes.

PROUST: THE LATER YEARS, by George D. Painter. British Museum Curator George D. Painter concludes his rich biography of Marcel Proust in a second volume. Remembrance of Things Past is virtually required prior reading, but once that hurdle is out of the way, the reader is treated to a detailed and near-reverent account of Proust's agonizing labors over Remembrance, his homosexuality, and his pathetic transformation from social climber to neurotic recluse.

AN END TO CHIVALRY, by Tom Cole.

This book of stories by a lecturer at M.I.T. is witty, charming, and dominated by a superb novella that casts a young American couple against the primordial background of Sicily, hurls them into the frenzy of a carnival, and delicately records their individual reactions.

KENNEDY, by Theodore C. Sorensen.

These reminiscences by Kennedy's chief speechwriter are too long (350,000 words) and too ponderous, but they offer occasional fascinating closeups of the late President as seen by an ardent admirer.

THE VINLAND MAP AND THE TARTAR RELATION, by Thomas E. Marston, R. A. Skelton, George D. Painter. Anyone intrigued by the controversy over whether or not Christopher Columbus was the true discoverer of the New World would be wise to dip into this pedantic tome. Prepared by British Museum and Yale scholars who recently unearthed and authenticated a 1440 map showing Greenland and a distorted North America, the book has provoked an outcry by crediting Leif Ericsson with a pre-Columbian look at the American shore.

ALICE'S ADVENTURES UNDER GROUND, by the Rev. C. L. Dodgson. Alice makes her first trip down the rabbit hole in this delightful original version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with the handwriting and original lacy sketches of Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (2)

3. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3)

4. The Honey Badger, Ruark (4)

5. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (6)

6. Hotel, Hailey (5)

7. Thomas, Mydans (10)

8. The Green Berets, Moore (7)

9. The Looking Glass War, le Carre (9)

10. Those Who Love, Stone

NONFICTION

1. Kennedy, Sorensen (1)

2. Intern, Doctor X (2)

3. The Making of the President, 1964, White (3)

4. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (5)

5. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (4)

6. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (7)

7. Games People Play, Berne (6)

8. My Twelve Years with John F. Kennedy, Lincoln (10)

9. Mrs. Jack, Tharp

10. Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown (8)

* All times E.S.T.

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