Wednesday, Sept. 17

DIONNE WARWICK SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Burt Bacharach will be there; so will George Kirby, Glen Campbell and The Creedence Clearwater Revival. The occasion is Dionne's very first special.

THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE'S FATHER (ABC, 8-8:30 p.m.). Bill Bixby, as a widowed magazine editor, teams up this season with a seven-year-old charmer named Brandon Cruz, who plays his son. Miyoshi Umeki plays their housekeeper. Premiere.

ROOM 222 (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). The scene is a school, where Lloyd Hanes as Pete Dixon teaches American history and deals with his own problems as well as those of his 35 home-room students. Premiere.

THEN CAME BRONSON (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). His motorcycle takes Jim Bronson (Michael Parks) across the U.S. His temporary job at a camp for disturbed children is the opening sequence, with Mark Lester, Jack Klugman and Karen Huston. Premiere.

Thursday, Sept. 18

NATURAL HISTORY OF OUR WORLD: THE TIME OF MAN (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Man's biological and social evolution is the focus of this special, produced in conjunction with the American Museum of Natural History.

NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). The Father, August Strindberg's bitter drama depicting a man's destruction by his wife, stars Robert Shaw, Daphne Slater.

Friday, Sept. 19

BRACKEN'S WORLD (NBC, 10-11 p.m.).

The palmy life around a movie studio with Eleanor Parker, Peter Haskell and Elizabeth Allen. "Fade-In" features Cameo Performers Raquel Welch, Tony Curtis, Omar Sharif. Premiere.

Saturday, Sept. 20

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 2:30-4 p.m.). The Canadian Grand Prix from Mosport, Ont., with Formula One cars, is the first auto race for world-championship points to be televised live in the U.S.

THE ANDY WILLIAMS SHOW (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Back on the tube after a two-year hiatus, Andy welcomes Petula Clark, Don Ho, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Premiere.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Sophia Loren is The Countess from Hong Kong (1967) who takes advantage of rich American Ambassador Marlon Brando by stowing away in his stateroom. Charles Chaplin wrote and directed the film.

Sunday, Sept. 21

ROYAL FAMILY (CBS, 7:30-9 p.m.). The royal couple themselves suggested that the BBC and commercial British television might like to film an intimate picture of them en famille. This result was edited from almost a year's shooting, and shows Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and the young royals behaving with cinema verite candor.

SOUNDS OF SUMMER (NET, 8-10 p.m.). The Du Quoin State Fair in southern Illinois presents Grand Ole Opry Night on "Country Music at a County Fair," amid horse racing, the midway and prizewinning heifers.

THE WOODY ALLEN SPECIAL (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Woody, Candy and Billy (Allen, Bergen and Graham), plus the Fifth Dimension, having fun.

Monday, Sept. 22

MUSIC SCENE (ABC, 7:30-8:15 p.m.). A latter-day version of "Your Hit Parade," with James Brown, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos and the Beatles performing the top songs. Premiere.

THE NEW PEOPLE (ABC, 8:15-9 p.m.). Half a dozen young Americans get a crack at making a better world when they survive a plane crash on a deserted island in the Pacific. Premiere.

CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Top bananas by the bunch on the first show of Hope's 20th video season: Sid Caesar, Wally Cox, Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett are but a few of the two dozen promised.

THE FLIP WILSON SHOW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Jonathan Winters, Andy Williams and Arte Johnson get together for giggles with Flip on his own special.

Tuesday, Sept. 23

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). A tribute to "The Eternal Tramp"--Charlie Chaplin. Harry Hurwitz's documentary footage is narrated by Gloria Swanson.

MOVIE OF THE WEEK (ABC, 8:30-10 p.m.). "Seven in Darkness" include Milton Berle, Dina Merrill, Tippy Walker and Barry Nelson as blind survivors of a plane wreck, in remote mountains. Premiere of a series of movies produced for TV.

THE GOVERNOR AND J.J. (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). Dan Dailey is the former, Julie Sommars the latter, a zoo curator and proxy First Lady to Daddy. Middle-of-the-road politics and the ever popular generation gap promise predictable results. Premiere.

MARCUS WELBY, M.D. (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). The lovable old general practitioner is Robert Young; his young assistant is James Brolin; they grapple with problems of present-day medical practice. Premiere.

RECORDINGS

Jazz

MILES DAVIS, IN A SILENT WAY (Columbia). With his customary ingenuity, Miles has turned up some rock samples that should do America proud. By sitting Pianists Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul down at electric keyboards and adding John McLaughlin's guitar, he has found a new sound formula. Using the impressionistic surge of piano, throb of bass and clockwork clack of drumstick, Miles conducts melodic tracking expeditions into a curiously peaceful space.

CHICK COREA, NOW HE SINGS, NOW HE SOBS (Solid State). The new pianist in Miles' regular group, Corea creates airy, crystal lines that have an almost fugal precision. Working here with Bassist Miroslav Vitous and Drummer Roy Haynes, the self-possessed young player neither sings nor sobs but delivers fleet atonal improvisations, buoyed by light chords that almost never come to a resolution.

CRAIG HUNDLEY TRIO & ORCHESTRA (World Pacific). Here is an album that will make listeners want to throw themselves into the generation gap. At fifteen, Hundley cannot get a driver's license, but he can play the piano in stunning style. With Bassist Stuffy McKinney, 16, Drummer Gary Chase, 15, and a big band arranged by Don Sebesky and Allyn Ferguson, Hundley shows a flair for rock rhythms, displays an affection for Sonny Rollins tunes and contributes two appealing compositions of his own.

BILL EVANS AND JEREMY STEIG, WHAT'S NEW (Verve). Pianist Evans and Flutist Steig make an effective team. Evans' controlled, persuasively lyrical solos tend to loosen up when goaded by Steig's frenetic flute, and his perceptive accompanying helps tone down Steig's demonic soarings. Particularly on What's New, Lover Man and the Spartacus Love Theme, the interaction results in near-perfection.

JEAN-LUC PONTY, ELECTRIC CONNECTION (World Pacific). Ponty not only plays violin, an unusual instrument in jazz, but he produces streaking arpeggios and comet trails of bent tones with a Coltranian intensity. This album, recorded with Gerald Wilson's orchestra when Ponty visited California last spring, should be enough to convince anyone that the violin can be a stirringly soulful jazz-solo voice. Classically trained, Ponty wails, shrills and sails through Hypomode de Sol, The Name of the Game and Scarborough Fair-Canticle.

THAD JONES-MEL LEWIS JAZZ ORCHESTRA, MONDAY NIGHTS (Solid State). When they are not touring the world, the artists can be found at home in the Village Vanguard on Monday nights. All the joy, humor and vigor of these home-stand evenings are preserved on this second live recording. Fluegelist Jones does most of the arrangements and conducts the crew, which includes Baritonist Pepper Adams, Soprano Saxophonist Jerome Richardson, Pianist Roland Hanna and Bassist Richard Davis. They give Mornin' Reverend a tongue-in-cheek but toe-to-floor gospel treatment and swagger to glory on St. Louis Blues.

McCOY TYNER, TIME FOR TYNER (Blue Note). The former Coltrane pianist here plays in a quartet that includes Vibist Bobby Hutcherson. Tyner's composition African Village is a free fall into the heart of rhythms that pound and shift as McCoy and Bobby superimpose eddying patterns. May Street moves along with jaunty strut, shadowed, however, by a tension of eerie chords. As for standard tunes, Tyner does a pensive I Didn't Know What Time It Was and then zooms off in The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.

ELVIN JONES, THE ULTIMATE (Blue Note).

Drummer Jones, Bassist Jimmy Garrison and Saxophonist/Flutist Joe Farrell continue their successful alliance. Leaping or striding in harmonic freedom is their thing, though they pause to explore free-time byways as well. On Sometimes Joie, Garrison coaxes quivering screeches or low-bowed hums from the bass, and on What Is This? Farrell skitters on soprano while Jones brushes out a rapid patter.

CINEMA

THE GYPSY MOTHS. Three sky divers (Burt Lancaster, Gene Hackman and Scott Wilson) barnstorm through Kansas challenging an irrevocable fate in John Frankenheimer's tense and sober investigation of existential courage.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. In a movie year not noted for levity, Woody Allen's first film as a director comes on like gangbusters. Although it tends to lose its comic momentum toward the end, there are more than enough insanely funny moments to sustain the picture.

ALICE'S RESTAURANT. Director Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde) has transformed Arlo Guthrie's rambling, hilarious talking-blues record of a couple of seasons back into a melancholy epitaph for an entire era. With its combination of wild humor and lingering sadness, Restaurant is one of the most perceptive films about young people ever made in this country.

MEDIUM COOL is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year. Writer-Director-Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention fuses documentary and narrative techniques into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict.

STAIRCASE. Rex Harrison and Richard Burton portray two bickering homosexuals struggling with middle age and loneliness. This unobtrusive film never yields to the temptation to play its two deviate characters for laughs.

THE WILD BUNCH. There are equally generous doses of blood and poetry in this raucous, magnificent western directed by Sam Peckinpah. Telling a violent yarn about a group of freebooting bandits operating around the Tex-Mex border at the turn of the century, Peckinpah uses both an uncommonly fine sense of irony and an eye for visual splendor to establish himself as one of the very best Hollywood directors.

MARRY ME, MARRY ME. Courtship, love and marriage in a community of French Jews are the subjects of this wistful film directed by Claude Berri (The Two of Us).

TRUE GRIT. John Wayne has his finest hour in this cornball western comedy. His genial, self-satirizing performance as an aging lawman proves that his nickname, "the Duke," has seldom been more apt.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE, by Sanche de Gramont. Only the cuisine comes off unscathed in this entertaining analysis vinaigrette of the French national character.

BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES, by Gerald Durrell. Zoology begins at home, or at least that's the way it seems to Naturalist Durrell, who recalls his boyhood infatuation with animals and his family's strained tolerance of some of the things that followed him into the house.

THE COST OF LIVING LIKE THIS, by James Kennaway. An intense and coldly accurate novel about a man's coming to gloomy terms with the cancer that is pinching off his life.

DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, by Jorge Amado. A leisurely, sensuous tale of a virtuous lady and her conjugal rites --as vivid and bawdy as Boccaccio.

THE BIG LITTLE MAN FROM BROOKLYN, by St. Clair McKelway. The incredible life of Stanley Clifford Weyman, who cracked the upper crust by posing at various times as U.S. Consul General to Algiers, a physician and a French naval officer.

FLASHMAN: FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS 1839-1842, edited and arranged by George MacDonald Fraser. But don't believe it for a minute. Though it has fooled several scholars, Flashman is actually an agreeable fictional takeoff on assorted British tales of derring-do in the days of the Empah.

MILE HIGH, by Richard Condon. The author's mania for mania is still evident. But this flawed novel about a man who invented, and then profited from Prohibition eventually settles into unpalatable allegory.

SHAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1856-1898), selected by Stanley Weintraub. Shaw never wrote one. But this paste-and-scissors portrait fashioned from fragments of the great man's work serves its purpose well enough.

COLLECTED ESSAYS, by Graham Greene. In notes and criticism, the prolific novelist provocatively drives home the same obsessive point: "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."

PAIRING OFF, by Julian Moynahan. The book masquerades as a novel but is more like having a nonstop non sequilur Irish storyteller around--which may, on occasion, be more welcome than well-made fiction.

SIAM MIAMI, by Morris Renek. The trials of a pretty pop singer who tries to sell herself and save herself at the same time. Astoundingly, she manages both.

THE YEAR OF THE WHALE, by Victor B. Scheffer. The most awesome of mammals has been left alone by literary men almost since Moby Dick. Now Dr. Scheffer, a scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes of the whale's life cycle with a mixture of fact and feeling that evokes Melville's memory.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Godfather, Puzo (1 last week)

2. The Love Machine, Susann (2)

3. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (4)

4. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (3)

5. The Pretenders, Davis (5)

6. Ada, Nabokov (6)

7. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe (7)

8. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (9)

9. Except for Me and Thee, West (8)

10. A Place in the Country, Gainham

NONFICTION

1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1)

2. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (2)

3. The Making of the President 1968, White (3)

4. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (6)

5. Jennie, Martin (4)

6. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginolt (5)

7. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (7)

8. Captive City, Demaris

9. The Prison of My Mind, Benziger

10. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (8)

* All times E.D.T.

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