Wednesday, April 13

CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE COMEDY SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.)* Hamming it up with Bob are Guests Lee Marvin, Jonathan Winters and Phyllis Diller. Originally scheduled for March 16, but postponed for Gemini 8.

Thursday, April 14

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Elmer Gantry. Burt Lancaster in his Academy Award-winning performance as a Baptist minister in the screen version of Sinclair Lewis' novel about tent-show Bible-belt religion.

Friday, April 15

THE SAMMY DAVIS JR. SHOW (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Sammy swings with Kaye Stevens, Art Carney, and the cast of Golden Boy.

Sunday, April 17

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). A review of the eight-year-old American Grand Prix from Watkins Glen, N.Y., the only U.S. auto race that counts toward the world driving championship, plus a preview of the May 7 Kentucky Derby, featuring films of the contenders.

VIET NAM WEEKLY REVIEW (NBC, 5-5:30 p.m.). The week's events in Viet Nam and the world's reactions to them. Premiere.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). The cameras follow "The American Draftee" through his induction, training and service to his eventual readjustment back to civilian life. Walter Cronkite interviews General Lewis Hershey.

NBC WHITE PAPER (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Chet Huntley examines the spread of nuclear weapons in interviews with U.S. and foreign government leaders.

Monday, April 18

38TH ANNUAL PRESENTATION OF THE ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS AND SCIENCES (ABC, 10 p.m. on). Hollywood's annual rites of spring are hosted again this year by Honest Bob Hope. Oscars will be presented by almost every movie personality anyone has ever heard of.

THEATER

On Broadway

MARK TWAIN TONIGHT! Hal Holbrook takes three hours putting on his Mark Twain makeup, and he has spent more than 13 years getting into Mark Twain's psyche. The result is a one-man show that is wise and witty.

WAIT A MINIM! Light of hand, light of heart and light of foot, this musical revue from South Africa is keenly aware of and distinctly amused by more magnetic centers of civilization.

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! The immigrant is an archetypal role in American experience; and now from Dublin, Playwright Brian Friel sends a reminder of the wrench at leaving the other side. As a double exposure of the young Irish hero, Donal Donnelly and Patrick Bedford do not miss a trick or a tear.

SWEET CHARITY. The electric presence of Musical Comedy Star Gwen Verdon and the kinetic choreography of Director Bob Fosse spark Neil Simon's blown-out fuse of a book about a dance-hall hostess' futile search for a lifetime partner.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE, by John Osborne, is one man's violent outburst at how he has marred his life and how life has mauled him. Poisoned arrows of wit and vituperation fill the air, and Nicol Williamson is an actor-archer with deadly aim.

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE. While the lines of Peter Weiss's philosophical argument of the social revolutionary v. the anarchic egoist are a trifle jaded, the theatricality of his drama, as performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of Peter Brook, is totally jarring.

CACTUS FLOWER. Sex farces are to the French what fairy tales are to children. In this version, the dour duckling (Lauren Bacall) becomes a swan just in time to tame a big bad wolf (Barry Nelson). With all the laughs, no one seems to care if they live happily ever after.

RECORDS

Orchestral

OLIVIER MESSIAEN: CHRONOCHROMIE FOR ORCHESTRA (Angel). One of France's leading composers, declaring that "nature is the supreme resource," has based a weird, episodic, 22-minute piece on the sounds of wind and water and the songs of birds (the xylophone plays the nuthatch, the glockenspiel the wren). At one point the instrumental stand-ins for 18 birds, from nightingale to chiffchaff, perform a complex medley. Yet Chronochromie is no mere imitation of nature, and in fact stands at the opposite pole--being a highly cerebral exercise concerned, as its title indicates, with the "color of time." Played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra along with shorter pieces by Pierre Boulez and the late Charles Koechlin.

MUSSORGSKY: PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION (London). The usual orchestral transcription of Mussorgsky's piano pieces contains subtle coloring by Ravel, but Leopold Stokowski has orchestrated his own version and recorded it with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in brassy sweeps of sound that have a bold and often wild impact. Quite unlike the bizarre, ornate drawings that inspired Mussorgsky in the first place.

SIBELIUS: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Columbia). Leonard Bernstein, conducting the New York Philharmonic, is at his best in the expansive, triumphal affirmation of the last movement but, in spite of mighty swells of sound, seems a little somnolent in the andante (where Von Karajan, on Deutsche Grammophon, creates a brooding tension). Bernstein has more overall success in the rich tone poem Pohjola's Daughter, about a maiden who sits high on a rainbow preferring, for some reason, to weave rather than be wooed.

PROKOFIEV: SYMPHONY NO. 6 (RCA Victor). The fourth album in the Boston Symphony's Prokofiev series is devoted to his next to last symphony, which commemorated the end of World War II. Written when Prokofiev was a semi-invalid, the sixth is largely elegiac, for "wounds that can't be healed." Erich Leinsdorf distinguishes subtly between each muted mood, first sorrowing, then celebrating with sober splendor, and kicking off the traces for a jaunty, jazzy finale.

THE RENAISSANCE BAND (Decca) contains pictures and demonstrations of archaic instruments such as the sackbut, the shawm and the krummhorn, which are used to play dances by Michael Praetorious, madrigals by Orlando di Lasso, and a solemn "battle symphony" by Heinrich Isaac probably performed during a play by Lorenzo the Magnificent (Leonardo da Vinci is supposed to have composed a similar work). Recorded by the New York Pro Musica under the direction of its founder, the late Noah Greenberg.

BOCCHERINI: SYMPHONY IN C MINOR (London). The great composers of the classical age, Mozart and Haydn, have overshadowed their contemporary, Luigi Boccherini, who also wrote prolificacy--more than 400 instrumental works. "Boccherini is Haydn's wife," jested a violinist of the day, referring to the Italian's gentle, melting melodies, including gilded minuets that are whispering echoes of an elegant past. There is just such a dance in this bland but pretty symphony played by the Orchestra Rossini di Napoli, conducted by Franco Caracciolo.

CINEMA

BORN FREE. Fine photography displaces some of the African lore in Joy Adamson's delightful book about the taming and untaming of Elsa the lioness, and this filmed biography glows with dusty golden beauty, the lion's share of it supplied by the big cats themselves.

MORGAN! Two gifted young British actors, David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, enliven a way-out comedy about an eccentric London painter who is destroyed by his love for his divorced wife, his mother, Karl Marx and King Kong.

HARPER. As a private eye on a kidnaping case, Paul Newman bites off a chunk of the Bogart tradition and spits it out in slick '60s style. Lauren Bacall, Arthur Hill and Julie Harris complicate the plot.

SHAKESPEARE WALLAH. An Indian playboy (Shashi Kapoor) wavers between his movie-star mistress (Madhur Jaffrey) and an English actress (Felicity Kendal) who is touring the provinces with a troupe of tatty Shakespeareans. But the real show is U.S. Director James Ivory's delicate study of fading British influence in India.

DEAR JOHN. A sex-starved seagoing man (Jarl Kulle) spends a weekend with a waitress (Christina Schollin) whose attractions turn out to be more than sin-deep in Swedish Director Lars Magnus Lindgren's tender, funny and lusty study of a love match in the making.

LOVING COUPLES. Another Swedish showpiece, this one contrived by Film Star turned Director Mai Zetterling. Antimarriage, antisex, anti-men, Couples is a lively closeup of three women and the ne'er-do-wells they cannot say no to.

THE GROUP. Mary McCarthy's bitchy bestseller about Vassar's class of '33 retains its period flavor in this movie version by Director Sidney Lumet, with eight captivating young actresses as the grads going forth to seek fulfillment of one kind or another during the Roosevelt era.

THE LAST CHAPTER. The long bitter history of Jewish life in Poland is ruefully recounted in rare stills and film clips, with a moving narration by Theodore Bikel.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. An insignificant Aryan carpenter (Josef Kroner) is assigned by Nazi puppets to share the wealth of a harmless old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kaminska) and finds himself sharing her woes as well in this small-scale masterpiece from Czechoslovakia.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE FATAL IMPACT, by Alan Moorehead. Writing in the wake of Captain Cook, Bougainville and other great Pacific navigators and explorers, the superbly skilled journalist-historian Alan Moorehead takes soundings of philosophic depth--savage and civilized man in confrontations unresolved to this day.

THE LAST BATTLE, by Cornelius Ryan. With meticulous detail, Historian Ryan (The Longest Day) paints an exciting, often terrifying account of the final agonies of Berlin and Hitler's Third Reich during World War II.

A GENEROUS MAN, by Reynolds Price. The pursuit of an escaped python through a North Carolina pinewoods provides the setting for this perceptive novel of an adolescent boy's march into manhood.

TOO FAR TO WALK, by John Hersey. Author Hersey's Faustian tale of a sophomore who temporarily becomes the Devil's man rates only a B --, but his pitiless portrait of today's collegiate scene earns him an easy A.

THE DOUBLE IMAGE, by Helen Maclnnes. Another well-mannered and innocent hero, another band of dastardly international spies, and--presto!--Master Spy writer Maclnnes produces another of her first-rate suspense tales.

GARIBALDI AND HIS ENEMIES, by Christopher Hibbert. The supreme romantic of the 19th century is appraised in terms of the central passion of a wild life--Italy was Garibaldi's religion before he made it a nation.

THE SADDEST SUMMER OF SAMUEL S, by J. P. Donleavy. A writer who can see the humor in human despair, Novelist Donleavy here disburses another handsome, lean portion of his inexhaustible wit, this time about a man who embarks on a successful search for hopelessness.

BRET HARTE, by Richard O'Connor. Historian O'Connor does well with figures who never quite hit it big, and Bret Harte never did: despite all he wrote, his literary crown rests on two stories and a bit of very bad verse.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. The Double Image, Maclnnes (2)

3. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (4)

4. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (3)

5. Those Who Love, Stone (5)

6. The Adventurers, Robbins (10)

7. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (6)

8. Tell No Man, St. Johns (7)

9. The Comedians, Greene (8)

10. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman

NONFICTION

1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)

2. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (3)

3. The Last Battle, Ryan (5)

4. The Last 100 Days, Toland (2)

5. Games People Play, Berne (4)

6. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (6)

7. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (7)

8. Kennedy, Sorensen (8)

9. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (10)

10. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (9)

*All times E.S.T.

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