TELEVISION

Wednesday, July 13

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THE ATER (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* "The Highest Fall of All" has Stuart Whitman as a Hollywood stuntman trying to stay alive through a leap from the Golden Gate Bridge while his wife, played by Joan Hackett, tries to kill herself in the bathtub. Repeat.

Thursday, July 14

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). A bee taller than a man and a bird the size of a B-17 are Jules Verne's way of upscreening Michael Craig, Michael Callan and Gary Merrill in Mysterious Island.

Friday, July 15

WAYNE AND SHUSTER TAKE AN AFFECTIONATE LOOK AT GEORGE BURNS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Not to mention Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Bea Benadaret, Harry von Zell, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Bobby Darin, Carol Channing and Sergio Franchi.

Saturday, July 16

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Danny Kaye plays Jazzman Ernest Loring ("Red") Nichols in The Five Pennies, a Hollywood biography that also manages to find "real life" roles for Barbara Bel Geddes, Harry Guardino, Louis Armstrong, Bob Crosby and Tuesday Weld.

THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Kate Smith is the hostess, and among her guests is Charles Aznavour. Repeat.

MISS UNIVERSE BEAUTY PAGEANT (CBS, 10-11:30 p.m.). Some day this annual event will be broadcast from Venus with a bunch of Martians presiding, but in the meantime viewers will have to be content with Miami Beach, Pat Boone, June Lockhart and Jack Linkletter. In color for the first time, though.

Sunday, July 17

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). A repeat of professional tennis, with Pancho Gonzales and Ken Rosewall showing the amateurs how to play the game, National Football League highlights from last year, plus a live broadcast of the Hollywood Gold Cup horse race from Hollywood Park, Calif.

SPORTSMAN'S HOLIDAY (NBC, 5:30-6 p.m.). "Black Marlin of Peru," "Arctic Fishing" and "Game Birds of Ireland" are on the agenda.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:15 p.m.). The Best of Everything was rated just about the worst of anything when it first attempted to cram Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, Martha Hyer and Joan Crawford into Rona Jaffe's bestselling novel about girls who get their jobs through the New York Times and their kicks from Modern Romances. Now that it's dated, it's too funny to miss.

Tuesday, July 19 TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). MGM, which in its golden years brought forth Boys Town and Andy Hardy and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, saw a new vision in 1960, called it Where the Boys Are. The town was Fort Landerdale, and one of the boys was George Hamilton.

THEATER

On Broadway

MAME was hilarious in a book, ebullient in a play, a delight on the screen, and in this musical she can sing and dance too. Angela Lansbury plays the most famous aunt since Jemima, with a winning mixture of the maternal and mad-hat.

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! Irish Playwright Brian Friel, knowing that every man is his own toughest critic and most devoted fan, uses two actors to play the inner and outer selves of a youth torn between nostalgia and expectation on the eve of his departure for America. The device is stunning and absorbing.

SWEET CHARITY is Fortune's fool and no one's darling. Her unsuccessful attempts to remedy the situation provide the rather sad story for a very slick musical. As the doxy who requites the unrequited, Gwen Verdon is a dancing dynamo.

CACTUS FLOWER. In a sex farce from France, a seasoned playboy dentist (Barry Nelson) loves nothing more than to cut the mustard. His seemingly bland nurse (Lauren Bacall) puts an end to all that with relish.

RECORDS

Choral & Song

MENDELSSOHN: ELIJAH (Angel). In a superb recording, Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts the Royal Society Orchestra in highlights only, but the cuts are not really missed: Sir Malcolm wisely opts for the graceful Mendelssohnian airs; Soprano Elizabeth Harwood gives a limpid account of "Hear ye. Israel"; John Shirley-Quick delivers "Is not his word like a fire" in an opulent basso style. The only low points, in fact, are the hammer-heavy choruses, which remind the listener that this florid form was not really suited to the urbane Mendelssohn, and that when he essayed heroism he often made only noise.

ELGAR: THE DREAM OF GERONTIUS (Angel). Sir Edward Elgar pondered Cardinal Newman's noble poem for fully a decade before finally setting it to music, and the result is an unusual confluence of religious and musical feeling. In his last agony an old man is guided past the demons of hell by a protecting angel, who then sadly reveals that he must "dip in the lake of Purgatory" before he can see God. Janet Baker gives a warm performance as the angel, and Richard Lewis' exceptional gifts for phrasing carry him through a very wordy role as the old man.

FALLA: LOVE, THE MAGICIAN AND THE THREE-CORNERED HAT (Deutsche Grammophon). Loren Maazel, conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, streaks through two famous ballet suites with much of Falla's own theatrical genius, and Grace Bumbry, as a girl chased by the ghost of her dead gypsy lover, gives an exuberant, shoes-off performance in her brief role. All hands seem to have caught the spell of old Andalusia.

SCHUMANN: DICHTERLIEBE AND LIEDERKREIS (Deutsche Grammophon). One of the very finest lieder recordings since the war. The artist's vocal beauty, technique, phrasing, intelligence and imagination combine to magnify Schumann's songs and Heine's words. The singer, of course, is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

GUSTAV HOLST: A CHORAL FANTASIA/ PSALM 86 AND GERALD FINZI: DIES NATALIS (Everest). An opportunity to compare two widely diverging paths in modern vocal music. Hoist is sophisticated and eclectic: his bold Fantasia has a concerto-like role for the organ along with choral and solo sections; in the Psalm, he spins a gossamer a cappella prayer. By contrast, Finzi's quiet music comments on the lyrics, in this case Metaphysical Poet Thomas Traherne's musings on the innocence and beauty of children. Tenor Wilfred Brown's impeccable diction helps to make this a delightfully accessible, intimate performance. The English Chamber Orchestra and soloists, conducted by Imogen Hoist (the composer's daughter), handle their vastly differing assignments well.

BEETHOVEN: CHRIST ON THE MOUNT OF OLIVES (Columbia). Beethoven was working on the early drafts of Fidelia when he wrote his only oratorio, and so alike are the musical moods that the listener expects the soprano to break into Abscheulicher! any second. Both works insistently celebrate high moral courage, Christ on the Mount of Olives to the degree of priggishness relieved by passages of very human despair. Eugene Ormandy, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Soloists Richard Lewis and Herbert Beattie are all in fine form --but Judith Raskin's small voice is physically not capable of the demands that Beethoven makes on sopranos.

CINEMA

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Edward Albee's drama about a venomous all-night orgy on faculty row has reached the screen with every four-letter word intact. And Elizabeth Taylor, playing bitch-wife to Richard Burton's hagridden husband, proves that there is talent on both sides of the family.

THE ENDLESS SUMMER. On a round-theworld tour, two skillful surfers search for the perfect wave in a documentary that captures the appeal of a dazzling sport.

A BIG HAND FOR THE LITTLE LADY. Some hanky-panky around a card table features Henry Fonda, Joanne Woodward, Jason Robards and other poker faces playing this indoor western for a pot of laughs.

THE NAKED PREY. Manhunting in Africa a long dark century ago, with resourceful Director-Star Cornel Wilde, as the sole survivor of an ill-fated safari, who becomes fair game for savage warriors.

"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING." The best thing about this cold war comedy is Broadway's Alan Arkin, hilarious as a Red-roving Soviet sailor whose sub is beached on a tight little island off the New England coast.

AND NOW MIGUEL. Sheep ranching in New Mexico generates excitement for the boy hero of a juvenile film by the makers of Island of the Blue Dolphins and Misty.

LE BONHEUR. The Prince Charming of Director Agnes Varda's wry fairy tale about infidelity is a rather impulsive young carpenter (Jean-Claude Drouot) who drives his wife to suicide and happily settles down with his mistress.

BORN FREE. A lioness named Elsa is as winning on the screen as she was in Joy Adamson's celebrated animal biography.

MANDRAGOLA. In Director Alberto Lattuada's romp through a Renaissance classic, some bold types carry out Machiavellian plots against the virtue of a Florentine beauty (Rosanna Schiaffino).

DEAR JOHN. The subjects of this perceptive essay on sex in Sweden are a sailor and a girl who spend a weekend learning that there is more to their relationship than lust at first sight.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. Well deserving of its Oscar, the best foreign film of the year owes much of its impact to Josef Kroner and Ida Kamiriska as a couple of harmless villagers who have to work out their own answers to the Jewish question in Nazi-dominated Czechoslovakia.

BOOKS

Best Reading

JUSTICE IN JERUSALEM, by Gideon Hausner. Having prosecuted Adolf Eichmann in Israel, Hausner here successfully prosecutes him again in print.

JAMES BOSWELL: THE EARLIER YEARS, by Frederick A. Pottle. The man who wrote the first great biography in English becomes himself the subject of one that is rich and delightful.

THE BIG KNOCKOVER, by Dashiell Hammett. These collected early detective stories are every bit as fresh as they were 40 years ago, and demonstrate why the many imitators of Hammett's realistic tough-guy technique are just that--imitators.

MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN, by Justin Kaplan. The best humor has a cutting edge, and Kaplan's able biography explains the bitterness and cynicism that underlay everything Mark Twain wrote.

THE LAST GENTLEMAN, by Walker Percy. A meditative novel by a talented Southern writer (The Movie-Goer) about a young Southerner whose daydreams provide the meaning he cannot find in life.

SELECTED POEMS, by Eugenic Montale. The light, the colors and the fruits of Italy are brightly evoked by a great modern Italian poet, but his musings on his fellow men are somber. The translations faith fully reflect the poet's spare, luminous language.

ARIEL, by Sylvia Plath. Author Plath, who committed suicide at 30, wrote a mass of morbid but powerful poetry in the last few months of her unhappy life, and in the three years since her death has become the most celebrated woman poet of her generation.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (1 last week)

2. The Adventurers, Robbins (2)

3. Tai-Pon, Clavell (5)

4. The Source, Michener (3)

5. Tell No Man, St. Johns (6)

6. The Double Image, Maclnnes (4)

7. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (7)

8. Those Who Love, Stone (8)

9. I, the King, Keyes(10)

10. The Mission, Habe (9)

NONFICTION

1. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (3)

2. Papa Hemingway, Hotchner (2)

3. The Last Battle, Ryan (1)

4. Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson (4)

5. In Cold Blood, Capote (5)

6. Churchill, Moran (9)

7. Games People Play, Berne (6)

8. Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader (7)

9. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (8) 10. The Crusades, Oldenbourg

* All times E.D.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.