Wednesday, December 29

I SPY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.).*In "Affair in Tsien Cha," Agents Scott and Robinson solve the mystery of a train that disappears en route from Hong Kong. Color.

Thursday, December 30

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Rossano Brazzi, Suzanne Pleshette and Troy Donahue star in Rome Adventure, a naive drama of an American girl determined to learn about love in Italy. Color.

Friday, December 31

THE GATOR BOWL GAME (ABC, 2-5 p.m.). Georgia Tech v. Texas Tech, from Jacksonville. Color.

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Napoleon and Illya resort to their own brand of witchcraft to outwit a voodoo dictator in "The Very Important Zombie Affair." Color.

Saturday, January 1

SUGAR BOWL (NBC, 1:45 p.m.). Missouri v. Florida, from New Orleans. Color.

COTTON BOWL (CBS, 1:45 p.m.). Arkansas v. Louisiana State University, from Dallas. Color.

ROSE BOWL (NBC, 4:45 p.m.). Michigan State v. U.C.L.A., from Pasadena.

ORANGE BOWL (NBC, 7:45 p.m.). Nebraska v. Alabama, from Miami. Color.

Sunday,January 2

N.F.L. CHAMPIONSHIP GAME (CBS, 2 p.m.). The top of the Eastern Conference v. the best in the West. Color.

N.B.A. GAME OF THE WEEK (ABC, 4-6 p.m.). New York Knickerbockers v. Philadelphia 76ers, from Philadelphia.

Tuesday, January 4

CBS REPORTS: THE VOLGA (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A view of Russian industry, farming, education, and the life of the ordinary citizen in the Soviet Union today. Color.

THEATER

On Broadway

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. John Osborne's threnody on the middle years electrifies with bolts of bitterness and sparks of caustic humor. Bill Maitland, the effigy that Osborne burns in his anathema on the modern world, is played with stunning force by Nicol Williamson, a 28-year-old Scotsman, who spares neither himself nor his audience with a gripping performance. .

CACTUS FLOWER is a French farce seasoned to U.S. tastes by Adapter-Director Abe Burrows and served with unerring timing by a well-chosen cast. Lauren Bacall is drolly dry as a spinsterish nurse with a voice that would intimidate gangrene, and Barry Nelson is convincingly mock-innocent as a dentist with a master's degree in bachelorhood.

YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. The screwball humor of George Kaufman and Moss Hart today seems brushed with tender nostalgia in a superb revival of the 29-year-old comedy about the slightly zany and entirely winning Sycamore family.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. Tired philosophy and an undocumented personal interpretation of the relationship between Conquistador Pizarro and Inca Ruler Atahuallpa are injected into a historical spectacle that pleases visually but fails to satisfy dramatically.

GENERATION. The battle between age groups is second only to the battle of the sexes as the stuff of which life and plays are made. William Goodhart makes it laughing matter in a lighthearted comedy about a doting father (Henry Fonda) who finds his daughter and her nonconformist husband living in a Greenwich Village loft and--much to Fonda's distress--liking it.

Off Broadway

THE WHITE DEVIL. The decisive motion of John Webster's bloody tragedy is a plunging dagger, but the determining mood is an obsessive sense of evil. In this revival, an authoritative cast headed by Frank Langella and Carrie Nye propels the play with a controlled drive and fury.

RECORDS

Opera

PRESENTING MONTSERRAT CABALLE (RCA Victor). The 32-year-old Spanish soprano (TIME Dec. 24), who has been winning superlative reviews since her first U.S. appearance last April, shows that they are richly deserved. In superb performances of Casta diva and other arias from Bellini and Donizetti, Caballe's voice is full, pure and effortless. Dark torrents of sound shade evenly into silver pianissimos, all in the service of the poetry she sings.

BERG: WOZZECK (2 LPs; Deutsche Grammophon). A chilling interpretation of Berg's musical masterpiece on man's inhumanity to man. Karl Bohm conducts the orchestra of the German Opera of Berlin, and an excellent cast including Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the befuddled, victimized soldier Wozzeck and Soprano Evelyn Lear as his unfaithful mistress. Berg's eerie music is impregnated with drama, yet more than most the opera demands to be seen, if only for the finale, in which Wozzeck's illegitimate son, taunted by other children about the death of his mother, hops off alone on his hobbyhorse.

OFFENBACH: THE TALES OF HOFFMAN ' (3 LPs; Angel). Nicolai Gedda is a lucky tenor. As Hoffmann, his three loves in three acts are two golden sopranos and one gilded fledgling: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf is Giulietta, the courtesan; Victoria de los Angeles is Antonia, the lovely invalid; and Gianna D'Angelo is Olympia, the dancing doll. Gedda and the evil bassos have difficulty in keeping up with the ladies, and the performance, in spite of some spirited conducting by Andre Cluytens, is a series of uneven set pieces.

NICOLAI GHIAUROV: FRENCH AND RUSSIAN ARIAS (London). The Don Basilio of the new Barber is a 36-year-old Bulgarian whose rich and rolling basso has resounded through Europe's great opera houses and is now being heard at the Metropolitan (TIME, Nov. 19). On this recording, his voice (singing Bizet, Borodin, Glinka, Tchaikovsky) is a pleasure to the ear, but some of his interpretations are too broad: as Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, for example, his laughter sounds like a parody of villainy.

ROSSINI: THE BARBER OF SEVILLE (3 LPs; London). Teresa Berganza takes her place as one of the rosiest Rosinas on records. The Spanish coloratura executes the florid passages with ease and accuracy but never allows them to detract from her sweet but peppery portrayal. The Italian tenor Ugo Benelli makes a lightweight but appealing Almaviva, while Bass Nicolai Ghiaurov is a richly venal Don Basilio, fairly licking his chops over the wondrous power of calumny and his chance to exploit it. The other singers are not outstanding, but the performance is generally effective and well-styled by Silvio Varviso, who conducts the Rossini Orchestra and Chorus of Naples.

CINEMA

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. In this taut, tasteful version of John le Carre's bestseller about a burnt-out British secret agent. Richard Burton gives his best screen performance. This is all one needs to know.

THUNDERBALL. Sean Connery returns as 007, equipped with a backpack jet and aqualung for all sorts of spectacular conquests by land, sea and air.

LAUREL AND HARDY'S LAUGHING 20'S. Wit less innocence runs amuck in excerpts from the silent classics of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, assembled with hilarious results by Cinema Anthologist Robert Youngson.

KING RAT. A shrewd G.I. con man George Segal) exploits his buddies for fun and profit in Writer-Director Bryan Forbes's harsh, searching drama about survival of the fittest in a Japanese prison compound during World War II.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2) ostensibly xplores the subconscious of a mild little matron (Giulietta Masina) whose husband has strayed, makes her problems materialize as a Freudian three-ring circus in full color.

REPULSION. A deranged French manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) gives her London suitors a bloody bad time of it in Writer-Director Roman Polanski's heartthumping shocker.

THE LEATHER BOYS. Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton lend exuberance to this sharply observed British drama about a pair of motorcycling newlyweds, whose marriage is threatened by the boy-husband's homosexual pal.

TO DIE IN MADRID. Rare vintage newsreels recall the tragedy of Spain's disastrous civil war (1936-39) in Producer-Director Frederic Rossifs masterly compilation, narrated most movingly by John Gielgud and Irene Worth.

DARLING. Director John Schlesinger's brittle jet-set satire, with Julie Christie as the playgirl who makes a name for herself by doing the wrong things with the right people.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Harvard Historian-New Frontiersman Schlesinger's admiration for the late President is often obvious; nevertheless this is by far the most perceptive, the most vivid, and the best-balanced assessment of the Kennedy years that has yet appeared.

THE LOCKWOOD CONCERN, by John O'Hara. The "concern" is that of the tough, grasping Lockwoods of eastern Pennsylvania, who want to turn themselves into gentlemen but don't want to give up the morals of the coal patch. The period detail is meticulous, but the book as a whole, like most of the author's long novels, will be useful principally to the reader who wants to commit O'Hara-kiri.

THE WILD SWAN, by Monica Stirling. A tender and touching biography of Master Storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, who lived to be 70, and was still seeing life as a fairy story more magical than any he wrote.

MY LIFE IN THE MOUNTAINS AND ON THE PLAINS, by David Meriwether. Dictated to a granddaughter and now published for the first time 72 years after his death, this gruffily matter-of-fact autobiography overflows with anecdotes which show that life on the early American frontier was a grim and dangerous business.

IN MY TIME, by Robert Strausz-Hupe. The distinguished director of the University of Pennsylvania's Foreign Policy Research Institute looks back without anger at his youth amid the ruins of a Middle-Europe shattered by World War I, weighs his own nostalgia for a lost bourgeois civilization against the dynamics of the atomic age.

QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL, by Elizabeth Bishop. In the first book of poems that she has published since 1954, a fine but unprolific poet presents a slender sampling of superb descriptive verse.

THE BEGGAR, by F. M. Esfandiary. The injustice of justice and the crime of punishment are shrewdly displayed in this fiercely ironical parable, composed by an Iranian-in-exile, that demonstrates how the devil takes the hindmost when men play God.

THE PEACEMAKERS, by Richard B. Morris. In an impressive account of the political maneuvering that led to the Peace of Paris (1783), Historian Morris holds that royalist France, far from being a loyal friend, would have scuttled the newly founded U.S. except for the canniness of Jay, Franklin and Adams.

THE MAIAS, by Ec,a de Quenroz. In this major novel written in a minor language, Portugal's most important 19th century novelist delineates the degeneration of the aristocracy that ruled and undermined his country as the century was drawing to a close.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

3. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3)

4. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (4)

5. Hotel, Hailey (5)

6. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (7)

7. The Honey Badger, Ruark (9)

8. Thomas, Mydans (8)

9. The Rabbi, Gordon

10. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (10)

NONFICTION

1. Kennedy, Sorensen (1)

2. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (2)

3. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (3)

4. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (6)

5. Games People Play, Berne (4)

6. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (8)

7. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (10)

8. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (7)

9. The Sense of Wonder, Carson

10. The Making of the President, 1964, White (5)

*All times E.S.T.

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