TELEVISION

Wednesday, December 2 CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).-- Japan's top cameramen explore the lives of five Japanese from different strata of society, all beset by the problems of adjusting to the nation's increasingly Westernized way of life.

Thursday, December 3 THE DEFENDERS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.).

Guest Star Robert Redford is an escaped convict intent on killing his court-appointed lawyer (E. G. Marshall), whom he blames for his life sentence.

Friday, December 4 BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Roddy Mc-Dowall plays a dizzy young scientist in a slapstick comedy of errors. Color.

12 O'CLOCK HIGH (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). While a stowaway on a bomber, a young clerk (Brandon de Wilde) is forced to operate the turret gun.

THE JACK PAAR PROGRAM (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests are the brilliant Elaine May-Mike Nichols team, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Saturday, December 5 EXPLORING (NBC, 12:30-1 p.m.). The sun as a source of energy is explained to children. Color.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-10:43 p.m.). Spencer Tracy and Robert

Ryan in MGM's Bad Day at Black Rock,

1955. Color.

Sunday, December 6

LOOK UP AND LIVE (CBS, 10:30-11 a.m.). Freedom inside and outside the Roman Catholic Church is discussed by a leading layman and two Jesuit theologians, Father John Courtney Murray and Austria's Father Karl Rahner.

DISCOVERY (ABC, 11:30 a.m.-12 noon). A study of the human brain.

DIRECTIONS (ABC, 1-1:30 p.m.). The crassly commercial side of Christmas is sniped at in a play that finds Santa Claus bedeviled by consumer researchers and pitchmen.

WILD KINGDOM (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). The life of the golden eagle, America's largest preying bird. Color.

G.E. FANTASY HOUR (NBC, 5:30-6:30 p.m.). An animated musical comedy based on the saga of Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Color.

PROFILES IN COURAGE (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The story of Richard T. Ely, the University of Wisconsin professor who was charged in 1894 with teaching subversive ideas.

Monday, December 7 SLATTERY'S PEOPLE (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). A reporter's right to keep secret his sources is examined when state legislators threaten criminal libel proceedings.

Tuesday, December 8 THE BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 10-11

p.m.). Maurice Chevalier plays host to

Stanley Holloway and the puppet cast of

Les Poupees de Paris. Color.

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). As usual, utterly preposterous, but fun for that reason. In this installment. Agent Solo (Robert Vaughn) is ordered to destroy some germ-loaded missiles that are being used to goad the U.S. and the Soviet Union into atomic war.

THEATER

On Broadway

POOR BITOS hinges on the visceral French political sport of right-baits-left. With more intellectual acuity than passion Jean Anouilh goes back to Robespierre to perform a masterly autopsy on the revolutionary mentality. As Bitos-Robespierre, Donald Pleasence is phenomenally good THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, by Bill Manhoff, is as timeless as a Punch-and-Judy show and as timely as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Diana Sands as a sexy pussycat who claws and Alan Alda as a bookish owl who screeches, fill the evening with good, vulgar, neurotic laughter.

LUV, by Murray Schisgal, sends three very modern and morose souls through a slapstick, tongue-wagging, satirical inferno of cocktail-party griefs. Under Mike Nichols' brilliantly inventive direction, Actors Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson and Alan Arkin produce constant and rib-aching hilarity.

COMEDY IN MUSIC. That matchless mirthmaster of the keyboard, Victor Borge, riffles through gags and slides off the piano bench without altering his usual mask of disdainful dismay. Added notes, comic and musical, are provided by a straight man, noted Pianist Leonid Hambro.

OH WHAT A LOVELY WAR. Blending song and satire, commedia dell' arte garb and Brechtian notions, Joan Littlewood and her "thinking clowns" effectively depict the foolishness and ironies of the 1914-18 war. FIDDLER ON THE ROOF is a nostalgic folk-musical version of Sholom Aleichem's tales of life in czarist Russia and Aleichem's gentle dairyman, Tevye, brought to life by Zero Mostel's larger-than-life interpretation.

Off Broadway

THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY. This engaging musical is lightly based on the days and dreams of the James Thurber character. Scenes from his several worlds are played with bounce.

CAMBRIDGE CIRCUS. With a chuckle rather than a sneer, a band of young Englishmen keep their eyes on the oddball and carry a big slapstick in this hilarious revue.

RECORDS

Jazz

PHILLY JOE JONES & ELVIN JONES TOGETHER (Atlantic), Two top drummers (no kin) trade solos in triumphant tattoos and combine in layered rhythms to launch some short flights by Trumpeter Blue Mitchell, Pianist Wynton Kelly and other swingers. Philly Joe rattles the right stereo, Elvin the left.

COLLABORATION: THE MODERN JAZZ QUARTET WITH LAURINDO ALMEIDA (Atlantic). The M.J.Q. and the Brazilian guitarist seem meant for each other, like gin and vermouth. Not that they are intoxicating; their colors are muted, their moods refined, their rhythms subtle. They can swing, but seldom do. In Bach's A Minor Fugue they demonstrate delicate counterpoint, and in the Adagio from the Concierto de Aranjuez they conjure up a lavender twilight as the guitar gently punctures the lingering ring of the vibraharp.

OSCAR PETERSON TRIO PLUS ONE (Mercu-ry). The guest plus is Trumpeter Clark Terry, who makes himself right at home, tearing along breakneck above Ray Brown's bouncing bass in Squeaky's Blues, weeping into his flugelhorn in They Didn't Believe Me, choking out a funny song of his own called Incoherent Blues.

THE INDIVIDUALISM OF GIL EVANS (Verve). Evans, revered arranger for Claude Thornhill and Miles Davis, gathered a platoon of excellent musicians to stir musical colors with him (in The Barbara Song, El Toreador). The orchestration is sensuously full of woodwinds and French horns, and the arrangements so complex that they invite close listening.

IT'S MONK'S TIME (Thelonious Monk Quartet; Columbia). Monk stubbornly hammered out his style when nobody much cared, still has plenty to say now that he is in a continuous spotlight. Using his own dies to cut the rhythms and shape the harmonies, he remakes each song (Nice Work if You Can Get It, Memories of You). Lulu's Back in Town is one of his better top-to-toe transformations.

CINEMA

THE PUMPKIN EATER. A marriage is sliced open by Director Jack Clayton, and the raw wounds throb in Anne Bancroft's performance as an oft-wed British matron who is bored, betrayed and thoroughly befuddled.

THE FINEST HOURS. This skillfully edited documentary sums up the career of Sir Winston Churchill, often in his own words, and warms history with intimate views of Churchill's country retreats.

SEND ME NO FLOWERS. Married at last, Doris Day and Rock Hudson fluff up their pillow talk in a spoof about an exurban hypochondriac who thinks his wife's widowhood is at hand. As chief mourner, Tony Randall gets most of the laughs.

SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON. Kim Stanley seems simultaneously sweet, bitchy, poignant and menacing in this taut British thriller about a psychotic psychic whose contact on the other side persuades her to carry out a kidnaping.

MY FAIR LADY. As the irascible phonetics expert who transforms a grimy flower girl into an English rose, Rex Harrison suavely repeats for the camera his Broadway triumph in the Lerner-Loewe classic based on Shaw. Audrey Hepburn, in her full-blooming rose period, is a delight.

A WOMAN IS A WOMAN. A lissome Parisian stripteaser (Anna Karina) takes off in this giddy, free-form improvisation by French Director Jean-Luc Godard, who seems to have liberated his mind from all but youth, love, and a fondness for old Hollywood musicals.

THE SOFT SKIN. The emotional trigonometry of a love triangle formed by an aging intellectual, his wife and a pretty airline stewardess is worked out with Gallic elegance by Director Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows), whose talent conquers triteness.

WOMAN IN THE DUNES. Japanese Director Hiroshi Teshigahara studies the human condition in a stunningly achieved metaphor--a man and woman trying to survive in a desolate sandhole.

TOPKAPI. For Director Jules Dassin's jewel thieves, getting theirs is only half the fun in this merry account of an Istanbul caper pulled off by Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov and other droll disreputables.

THE LUCK OF GINGER COFFEY. Played superbly by Robert Shaw, Ginger is a broguish, affable Irishman whose luck is just so much blarney.

BOOKS

Best Reading THE HORSE KNOWS THE WAY, by John O'Hara. This is O'Hara's fourth large col lection of short stories in as many years; he has now sworn off to concentrate on novels. Maybe he shouldn't. The latest volume shows O'Hara's brevity and wit as a social observer.

HENRY ADAMS: THE MAJOR PHASE, by Ernest Samuels. This scholarly biography describes Adams' life of rather luxurious despair, traveling often and behaving, as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it, like "an old cardinal." LIFE WITH PICASSO, by Francoise Gilot.

An odd mixture of acid and adulation comes from a discarded mistress who of fers illuminating accounts of the artistic views of Picasso and his friends. Best of all are inside glimpses of the master's monumental ego.

ARISTOS, by John Fowles. The author of The Collector, a brilliant demonic nov el, turns to philosophy. His mentor is Greek Philosopher Heraclitus, who also wrote of aristos (the excellent in life).

Fowles shares Heraclitus' love of paradox, his clear-eyed contemplation and, particu larly, his eloquence.

MARKINGS, by Dag Hammarskjold. As if it were some kind of Security Council document, the late U.N. Secretary-Gener al described this strange and moving jour nal as "a white paper concerning my nego tiations with God." The book portrays in aphorisms, essays, and even haikus Hammarskjold's mystical efforts to resolve agonizing religious doubts.

OF POETRY AND POWER, edited by Erwin Glikes and Paul Schwaber. An anthology of poems -- some elegiac, some angry --lamenting the death of John F. Kennedy.

THE BRIGADIER AND THE GOLF WIDOW, by John Cheever. In these short stories, the author writes again of exurbia: the proletariat of vice presidents, the charming, irresponsible remnants of old fami lies, and the winning eccentrics.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Herzog, Bellow (1 last week) 2. The Rector of Justin, Auchincloss (2) 4. 3. Julian, Candy, Vidal (4) Southern and Hoffenberg (3) 5. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Le Carre (5) 6. This Rough Magic, Stewart (6) 7. The Man, Wallace (7) 8. You Only Live Twice, Fleming (8) 9. Armageddon, Uris (9) 10. Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby NONFICTION 1. Reminiscences, MacArthur (1) 2. Markings, Hammarskjold (3) 3. My Autobiography, Chaplin (2) 4. The Italians, Barzini (4) 5. The Kennedy Wit, Adler (7) 6. The Warren Commission Report (6) 7. A Tribute to John F. Kennedy, Salinger and Vanocur (5) 8. Future of Man, De Chardin 9. The Words, Sartre 10. Harlow, Shulman

-- All times E.S.T.

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