Gypsy. In this stripsnorter of a show adapted from the Broadway musical abstracted from Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography, Rosalind Russell is marvelous as a stage mother whose daughter can't act, but is pretty good at takeoffs.

Period of Adjustment. Jim Hutton and Jane Fonda are fun in this sappy screen version of Tennessee Williams' "serious comedy" of postmarital relations.

II Grido. A mournful little movie, made in 1957, in which Italy's Michelangelo Antonioni first fumbles with the material he later handled so powerfully in L'Avventura.

Billy Budd. Herman Melville's didactic tale has been transformed into a vivid, frightening, deeply affecting film, and for this the credit belongs principally to Britain's Peter Ustinov, who directed the picture, helped write the script, and plays one of the leading roles.

The Manchurian Candidate. In this self-consciously "different" movie about a posthypnotic political assassination, Laurence Harvey's brains are washed, tumble-dried and dyed Red in a Chinese P.W. camp, and he ends up stalking a U.S. presidential candidate with murderous intent.

Phaedra. Melina Mercouri purrs, snarls and shrieks in this modern-day version of an old Greek myth. Raf Vallone, as her ship-tycoon husband, is healthily Hellenic in a role with obvious overtones of Onas sisism. Only Tony Perkins seems somewhat less than believable as Vallone's stepson.

Long Day's Journey into Night. Director Sidney Lumet and a generally effective cast (Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr., Dean Stockwell) have translated the truest and the greatest of Eugene O'Neill's plays into one of the year's finest films.

Divorce--Italian Style. This wickedly hilarious lesson in how to break up a marriage in divorceless Italy stars Marcello Mastroianni as a Sicilian smoothie who sheds his unwanted wife in the only way the law seems to allow: he provides her with a lover, catches them together, shoots her dead. But then . . .

TELEVISION

Wed., Nov. 21

N.Y. Philharmonic Young People's Concert (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* "The Sound of a Hall," conducted and narrated by Leonard Bernstein, explores the general relationship of acoustics to music and the particular sound of Lincoln Center's new Philharmonic Hall.

Thurs., Nov. 22

Thanksgiving Parade (CBS and NBC, 10 a.m.-noon). A cornucopia of coast-to-coast celebrations with bands, baton twirlers, floats and all.

Bell Telephone Hour (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Poet Carl Sandburg reads from his "Remembrance Rock." John Raitt, Martha Wright, Mahalia Jackson and the West Point Glee Club sing. Color.

Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Carol

Lynley and Anthony George co-star in "Whatever Happened to Miss Illinois?", the story of a beauty-contest runner-up who likes the up part but not the running.

Fri., Nov. 23

Jack Paar (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Also starring: the newly elected Senator and Mrs. Ted Kennedy, Singer Genevieve. Color.

Sat., Nov. 24

Exploring (NBC, 12:30-1:30 p.m.). The new educational children's program looks at an underwater ballet, a puppet film produced by Designer Charles Eames, and a Czechoslovakian movie in which all objects are glass. Color.

Sun., Nov. 25

Issues and Answers (ABC, 3-3:30 p.m.). Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz analyzes the state and future of the U.S. economy.

Art Carney Meets Peter and the Wolf (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The third re-run of the award-winning original, well worth still another look.

Walt Disney (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The second of a two-part dramatization of Ludwig van Beethoven's life and music. Color.

As Caesar Sees It (ABC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Sid spoofs lawyer shows, police shows, quiz shows, westerns and panel shows, but not his own.

Mon., Nov. 26

David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Documentary on upper-class life in Peru. Color.

Tues., Nov. 27

Close-up (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Howard K. Smith narrates "India: The Troubled Giant," a documentary examination of the current border war and its effects on the country's politics and people.

THEATER On Broadway

Beyond the Fringe. Four high-IQ British imps skewer cliches and milk sacred cows for irreverent merriment. The chief scholar-clown, Dr. Jonathan Miller, is a droll, gravity-defying pixy for whom a new vocabulary of humor will have to be invented.

Tchin-Tchin is a strange and oddly affecting play in which an Italo-American contractor and a proper Englishwoman are thrown into each other's company because their respective spouses are having an affair. Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn touch the playgoer's nerve ends, crazybones, and heart strings with deceptive ease and authority.

Mr. President, with Robert Ryan in the title role and Nanette Fabray as First Lady, is a taste-exempt musical that is bulging with more than $2,600,000 in advance-ticket-sale swag. The patrons of its 385 theater parties (largely benefit affairs) may redefine playgoing for charity as "painful giving."

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, is an annihilating war of love-hatred fought between a middle-aged history professor and his wife, in which a younger guest couple are also savaged.

Arthur Hill, as the professor, raises acting to the level of genius, and Uta Hagen, as his wife, is a virtuoso Medusa.

The Affair makes a sleepy British university common room crackle with the charges and countercharges of a courtroom trial. Adapted from the novel by C. P. Snow, this drama is concerned with justice for a man whose personality is revolting, and whose politics are scarcely less so.

BOOKS

Best Reading

Tale for the Mirror, by Hortense Cal-isher. Masterful anecdotes of human hope, and foibles for our time, set in exurbia-on-Hudson, written by a subtle and stylish mistress of the short story.

Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir.

The quirky character of the great impres sionist painter, fondly reported by his gifted son, makes this one of the best biographies of the year.

A Dancer in Darkness, by David Stac-ton. Seventeenth century Playwright John Webster's ill-fated heroine, the duchess of Malfi, is chillfully done in, this time in silky, horrifying prose.

Black Cargoes, by Daniel Mannix. The breathtakingly brutal history of how some 15 million Africans were transported to the New World -- the more telling because quietly told.

The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. This first complete, un-bowdlerized collection of letters reveals Wilde as someone far more profound than the talented fop of his own caricature.

Chekhov, by Ernest J. Simmons. A classic scholarly biography.

The Vizier's Elephant and Devil's Yard, by Ivo Andric. In four short novels a Yugoslav Nobel prizewinner treats with some new and old varieties of human tyranny.

Say Nothing, by James Hanley. An ac complished English novelist's brittle, sav age account of the guilt-edged insecurity of three lives.

The Kindly Ones, by Anthony Powell.

Further fascinating pages from the au thor's already fat but never fatuous note book of English upper-class doings be tween the wars.

Best Sellers FICTION 1. A Shade of Difference, Drury (1, last week) 2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2) 3. Ship of Fools, Porter (3) 4. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (7) 5. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (6) 6. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (4) 7. The Prize, Wallace (5) 8. The Thin Red Line, Jones (8) 9. Youngblood Hawke, Wouk (9) 10. The Reivers, Faulkner (10) NONFICTION 1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2) 2. Silent Spring, Carson (1) 3. The Rothschilds, Morton (3) 4 My Life in Court, Nizer (4) 5! O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (5) 6 The Blue Nile, Moorehead (7) 7. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown (6) 8. Final Verdict, St. Johns 9. Letters From the Earth, Twain (9) 10. Who's in Charge Here?, Gardner (8)

* All times E.S.T.

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