Thursday, December 19

DR. KILDARE (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.) *Lauren Bacall guest-stars as a journalist stricken with a crippling disease.

Friday, December 20

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A story about a bartender who decides to sell the tavern and marry the hat-check girl; with Lee J. Cobb and Gena Rowlands.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). "Ninety Years Without Slumbering," a script by Rod Serling about an old clockmaker (Ed Wynn) convinced that he will die if anything happens to his grandfather clock.

Saturday, December 21

NORTH-SOUTH COLLEGE ALL-STAR GAME (ABC, 4-7 p.m.).

Sunday, December 22

DISCOVERY (ABC, 12:30-1 p.m.). A typical Christmas 200 years ago in colonial Williamsburg.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Part 2 of a documentary on the Strategic Air Command.

THE STORY OF CHRISTMAS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A special with Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Roger Wagner Chorale.

Monday, December 23

THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC YOUNG PEOPLE'S CONCERT (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Leonard Bernstein will preside.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE STARS (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Bing Crosby's movie career.

Tuesday, December 24

SERVICES FROM THE CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE (ABC, 11:15 p.m. to midnight). Episcopal services.

CHRISTMAS EVE MIDNIGHT MASS (NBC, midnight to conclusion). From St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan.

CHRISTMAS EVE SERVICES (CBS, midnight to 1 a.m.). From the First Congregational Church in Washington, D.C.

THEATER

On Broadway THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE, as adapted by Edward Albee from Carson McCullers' novella, reproduces the story's mood of Southern grotesquerie. Unfortunately, the play itself is wispy and intangible, despite the strenuous acting efforts of Colleen Dewhurst and Michael Dunn.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, by Neil Simon. Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford break from a wedding march into a scrappy farrago of newlywed problems. Director Mike Nichols paces the contest to leave the audience a few breaths be tween laughs.

THE PRIVATE EAR and THE PUBLIC EYE are two sharply observed but compassionate one-act comedies about a bashful boy who finds that his chosen Venus is just an other dumb blonde, and a brash detective who chews macaroons and Brazil nuts and sweetly seasons a marriage that is stewing in acrid juices.

CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING resounds to marching boots at a peacetime R.A.F. training base, but what Playwright Wesker sets out to trample -- with bright, biting argument and laughter--is the British class system.

THE REHEARSAL. Playwright Jean Anouilh achieves a stylish symbiosis of good and evil in which the pure love of a young girl is subverted by a drawing-room coterie, which in turn finds that it can no longer treat love as a game.

LUTHER. Playwright John Osborne looks back in anger at the people and practices which outraged Martin Luther. In the power of Albert Finney's portrayal, the playgoer senses the force which shaped the Reformation.

Off Broadway

THE ESTABLISHMENT. Some antic Britons wield the rapiers of satire with precision and glee as they commit merry mayhem on pompous personages and reverential attitudes.

CINEMA

HIGH AND LOW. Without a samurai in sight, Japanese Director Akira Kurosawa sets the screen crackling with excitement as his camera trails a vicious kidnaper through the Yokohama underworld.

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS. Up in Vermont, three madcap characters are put through their paces by Director Adolfas Mekas, an East Village cinemaniac who pokes fiendish fun at every moviemaker from D. W. Griffith to Antonioni.

BILLY LIAR. Another visit to a bleak industrial city somewhere in England. But Tom Courtenay is hilarious as a working-class Walter Mitty full of fascistic drama, and Julie Christie as his beatnik girl friend is a bit of all right too.

THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY. To brighten the season, Walt Disney presents Tao the cat, Bodger the, bull terrier and Luath the Labrador retriever making their way home across 250 miles of rough Canadian terrain and straight into the affections of the young at heart.

NIGHT TIDE. The age-old legend of the mariner and the mermaid brought up to date by Writer-Director Curtis Harrington, whose offbeat first feature turns a Venice, Calif., amusement park into a mystical land of Edgar Allan Poetry.

KNIFE IN THE WATER. In this deft Polish thriller, two lusty men and one bikini-clad woman go out in a sloop to sail--and Director Roman Polanski sets them tacking on a zigzag course between the ego and the id.

TOM JONES. The funniest movie in many a year. Fielding's bawdy classic about vice in 18th century England has been pinched and patted into shape by Director Tony Richardson, with able assistance from stars Albert Finney and Hugh Griffith.

THE CARDINAL. In Director Otto Preminger's hands, the 1950 bestseller about a poor priest from Boston who becomes a papal prince often seems fairly preposterous despite a smooth performance by Tom Tryon, a racy one by Romy Schneider, and a sensational one by Director-Turned-Actor John Huston.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE ELEPHANT, by Slawomir Mrozek. A lion refuses to eat Christians, a Polish matron keeps a live revolutionary caged in her living room, civil servants begin to fly like eagles over Warsaw in the fantasy world of a brilliant young Polish satirist who pokes fun most often at the howling gap between reality and Communist Party renderings of it.

THE WOLVES OF WILLOUGHBY CHASE, by Joan Aiken. Children may have to wait until their parents finish reading this sly and delightful melodrama in which ravening wolves are the least of the Victorian villains that beset our two young heroines.

APOLLINAIRE, by Francis Steegmuller. Self-appointed promoter of cubist painting and experimental poetry, this violent, rebellious poet-critic of pre-World War I Paris lived his own wild legend, which Steegmuller largely confirms with carefully researched fact.

GEORGE C. MARSHALL: EDUCATION OF A GENERAL, 1880-1939, by Forrest C. Pogue, Ending with the general's appointment in 1939 as Roosevelt's chief of staff, this first volume of a three-volume biography seeks the hidden warmth in the man who baffled most by his icy reticence.

THE COLD WAR AND THE INCOME TAX, by Edmund Wilson. An ordeal by bureaucracy, which can be read with sympathy until the author confuses his own small experience in income-tax delinquency with the cold war and the space race.

DOROTHY AND RED, by Vincent Sheean. Dorothy Thompson dreamed of an ideal "creative marriage" and tried to find it with Novelist Sinclair Lewis. For 14 years their close friend, Vincent Sheean, watched the dream turn to nightmare; his comments on Dorothy's letters and diaries help explain how it happened.

THE FABULOUS LIFE OF DIEGO RIVERA, by Bertram Wolfe. Rivera confounded capitalists and Communists alike with his preposterous stories and visionary murals, but Biographer Wolfe wisely takes the artist's exuberant imagination as the surest cue to the man and his work.

A SINGULAR MAN, by J. P. Donleavy. Graves, ghosts and cryptic portents of the Gothic novel, transposed in Joycean prose to contemporary Manhattan, funny even when deadly serious.

THE HAT ON THE BED, by John O'Hara. As a novelist, O'Hara has lately faltered, but the more short stories he writes, the better he gets, and this newest collection refracts with flawless skill the sights, sounds and thoughts of four decades of American life.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Group, McCarthy (1 last week)

2. The Shoes of the Fisherman, West (2)

3. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (3)

4. Caravans, Michener (4)

5. The Living Reed, Buck (5)

6. The Three Sirens, Wallace (6)

7. The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, Godden (7)

8. On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Fleming (8)

9. The Hat on the Bed, O'Hara (9)

10. City of Night, Rechy (10)

NONFICTION

1. The American Way of Death, Mitford (1)

2. Mandate for Change, Eisenhower (2)

3. Rascal, North (3) 4. Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy (4)

5. Dorothy and Red, Sheean (6)

6. My Darling Clementine, Fishman (5)

7. The Craft of Intelligence, Dulles

8. I Owe Russia $1,200, Hope (7)

9. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (8)

10. My Life and Loves, Harris (9)

-- All times E.S.T.

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