On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, January 26 BATMAN (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* To get Batman off on the right talon, ABC is pitting him against some fine-feathered birds of prey. This week Oscar Winner (for Razor's Edge) Anne Baxter is a visiting villainess.

THIS PROUD LAND (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Robert Preston narrates "The Sun Country," a special on Texas. Oklahoma, Arizona and New Mexico, with New Mexican (by adoption) Greer Garson and Oklahoman (by birth) Pamela Tiffin pointing out some of the sights.

Friday, January 28

THE SAMMY DAVIS JR. SHOW (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). A previous commitment to ABC (see below) keeps Davis off his new show this week, so Actor Sean Connery, who has been crying loudly for a chance to be better than his Bond, gets a break.

Saturday, January 29

THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). TV tries hard to forget its former favorites, but here's a cup of kindness for Auld Prime Timers Arthur Godfrey and Sid Caesar.

Sunday, January 30

LAMP UNTO MY FEET (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). You have to get up early in the morning to catch a show with a name like "Te Deum for J. Alfred Prufrock"--a dramatic reading commemorating T. S. Eliot's death a year ago.

ISSUES AND ANSWERS (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Richard Nixon will answer questions on Viet Nam, the Republican Party and his own political plans.

AGES OF MAN (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Part 2 of Sir John Gielgud's Shakespeare readings.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Man of the Month," a profile of North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh.

BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Polly Bergen, Diahann Carroll, John Raitt and others devote themselves to the music of George Gershwin.

Monday, January 31

CBS EVENING NEWS WITH WALTER CRONKITE (CBS, 6:30-7 p.m.). In color for the first time.

THE ANDY WILLIAMS SHOW PRESENTS THE GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). The Hollywood Foreign Press Association's awards for excellence in motion pictures and television, live from the Cocoanut Grove.

Tuesday, February 1

SAMMY AND HIS FRIENDS (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Sammy Davis' one-shot special, with Friends Edie Adams, Joey Heatherton, Count Basie and Top Friend and Platoon Leader Frank Sinatra.

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Robert Morse plays a guy who is jilted at the altar and therefore decides to take his pal (Robert Goulet) on the leftover wedding trip. Honeymoon Hotel is the name of the comedy, and MGM perpetrated it in 1964.

THEATER

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE, by Peter Weiss. Each theater seat becomes an electric chair as Director Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company sear the senses with a high-voltage production.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. Bill Maitland is a modern antihero, muddled by progress, maddened by the machine and mangled by his all-too-painful awareness that he is irredeemably mediocre. With astounding authority, 28-year-old Nicol Williamson nets all the screeching humor and curdling vituperation from John Osborne's whirlpool of words.

CACTUS FLOWER. France's humor, like its wine, travels well, since it is usually about a universal subject, sex. With Abe Burrows at the helm, this farce about a roueish dentist whose idea of honesty is to tell his mistress he's married when he's not has made a successful crossing. Lauren Bacall and Barry Nelson are on board.

YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. As captured by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart in 1936, the inspired madness of an everlastingly free-spirited Manhattan family seems exquisitely refreshing to today's theatergoers--who may have forgotten that to be effective, humor need not be black.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. A pantomimic interpretation of the Spanish conquistadors ascending the Andes and the gorgeously costumed array of conquered Peruvians make a dazzling wrapping, but cannot hide the dramatic hollowness of Peter Shaffer's historical drama.

RECORDS

Chamber Music

BRAHMS: QUINTET IN B MINOR FOR CLARINET AND STRINGS (Angel). The elegiac mood of Brahms's late work is sustained in a quietly flowing performance by members of the Melos Ensemble with English Clarinetist Gervase de Peyer, whose clarinet sensuously blends with the strings, then suddenly flashes into the foreground, as in his solo treatment of the theme in the Adagio.

SCHUBERT: OCTET IN F MAJOR (Deutsche Grammophon). Here, once again, the clarinet contrasts poignantly with the strings, but now the horn, bassoon and double bass add depth to the ensemble--and the harmonies are almost symphonic. Schubert's melodic genius was at full flood, and singable, danceable, even frankly comical tunes tumble out joyfully into the six expansive movements. Performed by a lustrous octet from the Berlin Philharmonic.

DAVID DIAMOND: STRING QUARTET NO. 4 (Epic). Diamond is one of the brave band of well-reviewed but little-played U.S. composers. His quartet, written after he deliberately gave up "easy expressivity," is thorny, dissonant and technically complex. It has a sober power as performed by the Beaux Arts String Quartet, which also plays Samuel Barber's String Quartet Opus II, with its familiar second movement. Rearranged for orchestra and called Adagio for Strings, it is the American composition most often performed by U.S. symphony orchestras in recent years.

MUSIC AT THE COURT OF MANNHEIM (Telefunken). Because of its rich artistic life, the German court of Mannheim was known as the Athens of the 18th century. It was there that the rigid counterpoint of the baroque period gave way to music with more romantic melodies and sudden dynamic contrasts. The recording includes chamber works by the pioneers of the new style, Johann Stamitz, Franz Richter and Ignaz Holzbauer, along with a more polished, Mozartian quintet by Johann Christian Bach. All are performed on 17th and 18th century instruments by the Concentus Musicus of Vienna, currently making its first tour of the U.S.

BEETHOVEN: QUARTETS 7, 8, 9, 10 (3 LPs; Epic). These are the masterly works of Beethoven's middle years--the three "Rasumovsky quartets," commissioned by the Russian ambassador to Vienna, plus "The Harp," so called because of its pizzicato passages. The Juilliard String Quartet, thoroughly schooled in 20th century music, plays Beethoven with precision, brooding excitement, and plenty of bite. Traditionalists may prefer the warmer performances of the Budapest String Quartet, which makes the melodies sing. The Juilliard makes them spring.

CINEMA

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Romance and revolution flourish against eye-filling vistas of Mother Russia in Director David Lean's literate, old-fashioned love story based on Pasternak's novel, with Omar Sharif as Zhivago, Julie Christie as his Lara.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Richard Burton, at his very best, gets sturdy opposition from Oskar Werner in Director Martin Ritt's somber, skillful version of the John le Carre thriller about a British intelligence agent who poses as a defector to East Germany.

THUNDERBALL. The slightly faded James Bond formula is brightened by spectacular underwater effects, a few splashy conquests and Sean Connery, who by now delivers his Jimcracks martini-dry.

VIVA MARIA! An alluring pair of strip queens (Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau) carry on a Central American revolution rather haphazardly devised by Director Louis Malle (The Lovers), but France's master cinematographer Henri Decae catches their act and turns a frail farce into a thing of beauty.

DARLING. How-to-succeed in the jet set is the theme of Director John Schlesinger's trim satire, tailor-made for Julie Christie's stylish performance as the amoral jade who sleeps her way from pad to palazzo.

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 camp during World War II.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. A betrayed woman (Giulietta Masina) reviews her life in full-color fantasies staged by Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2), the Barnum of the avantgarde.

THE LEATHER BOYS. In this lively but poignant British drama, Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton flesh out an unholy triangle about a teen-aged slattern who nearly loses her young husband to a homosexual in hood's clothing.

TO DIE IN MADRID. A passionate elegy for the victims of Spain's tragic civil war of 1936-39, pictured in vintage newsreels and charged with poetry by such distinguished narrators as John Gielgud and Irene Worth.

BOOKS

Best Reading

IN COLD BLOOD, by Truman Capote. In an effort to expand the dimensions of journalism by exploring the subsurface of a real-life murder, Novelist Capote has permanently enriched and amplified the form. The principal beneficiary is the reader, who cannot escape Capote's narrative unscathed.

A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. In this perceptive and vivid history-memoir, Historian Schlesinger has done himself and his craft full justice in capturing the moods and assessing the deeds of the Kennedy Administration.

THE PROUD TOWER, by Barbara W. Tuchman. As a sequel to her admirable The Guns of August, Historian Tuchman has again used impressive scholarship and a beguiling wit to examine the quality of the uneasy society that produced World War I.

TWENTY DAYS, by Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt and Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. With 300 photographs from the famed Meserve collection and a lively text, a mother-and-son team gives new perspectives to the 20-day period in April and May 1865, from the time Abraham Lincoln fell mortally wounded to the time his body was laid to rest at Springfield.

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY, by Shirley Hazzard. A young novelist has chosen her words with such delicacy and precision that even the trite theme of a holiday affair between an inhibited, not-so-young Englishwoman and a smooth, not-so-young Italian architect has become a haunting and poetic tale.

BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS (1874-1897), edited by Dan H. Laurence. Nearly 700 letters--anecdotal, flirtatious, argumentative--are more than just the brilliant babble of a compulsive correspondent; they comprise an autobiography of G.B.S.'s prodigious early years as music and drama critic, socialist propagandist and philanderer. A first volume, which ends as fame dawns for the playwright.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week) 2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

3. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (4)

4. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3)

5. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton

6. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (5)

7. Thomas, Mydans (7) 8. Hotel, Hailey (6) 9. The Rabbi, Gordon (9)

10. The Honey Badger, Ruark (8)

NONFICTION

1. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (1) 2. Kennedy, Sorensen (2) 3. Games People Play, Berne (3) 4. In Cold Blood, Capote (8) 5. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (4) 6. The Proud Tower, Tuchman 7. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (6) 8. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (5)

9. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (10) 10. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre

*All times E.S.T.

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