Wednesday, December 28
YEAR END REVIEW: A DINNER AT HOWARD K. SMITH'S (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).* ABC correspondents gather at the Maryland home of their colleague to discuss and analyze the major news events of 1966. Among them: Edward P. Morgan, William Lawrence, John Scali, Sam Jaffe, Charles Arnot and George Watson.
Thursday, December 29
THE CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Five Finger Exercise (1962), the film version of Peter Shaffer's play, starring Rosalind Russell, Jack Hawkins and Maximilian Schell.
Saturday, December 31
FOOTBALL (from noon on). Because New Year's Day falls on a Sunday--and also because the pros will pre-empt the tube for their championship game on Jan. 1--the colleges and networks have decided to split the bowl games, with some Dec. 31 and the rest on Jan. 2. Today's lineups:
GATOR BOWL (ABC, noon). Syracuse v. Tennessee, from Jacksonville, Fla.
COTTON BOWL (CBS, 2:15 p.m.). S.M.U. v. Georgia, from Dallas.
EAST-WEST SHRINE GAME (NBC, 4:30 p.m.), for the senior all-stars not playing in one bowl or another, from San Francisco.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Cole Porter's classic Anything Goes (1956) is crooned to life again by Bing Crosby, Donald O'Connor, Jean-maire, Mitzi Gaynor and Phil Harris.
Sunday,January 1
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP GAME (CBS, 4 p.m.).
BELL TELEPHONE HOUR (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). "The First Ladies of Opera," with Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland and Renata Tebaldi in separate sequences highlighting their unique styles.
Monday, January 2
THE 1967 MUMMERS PARADE (CBS, 10:30-11:30 a.m.). Allen Ludden acts as host for the 66th annual Mummers parade from Philadelphia.
FOOTBALL (from 11:30 a.m. on). All three networks will cover the Tournament of Roses parade, but only NBC will have the game itself--sandwiched in between two other bowls.
SUGAR BOWL (NBC, 1:45 p.m.). Alabama v. Nebraska, from New Orleans.
ROSE BOWL (NBC, 4:45 p.m.). U.S.C. r. Purdue, from Pasadena.
ORANGE BOWL (NBC, 7:45 p.m.). Florida v. Georgia Tech, from Miami.
Tuesday, January 3
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9 p.m. to conclusion). A poverty-stricken British naval commander (James Mason) concocts an ingenious plot to have the newspapers call him a traitor so he can sue for libel in A Touch of Larceny (1960), co-starring George Sanders and Vera Miles.
THE NATIONAL CURRENT EVENTS TEST (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Now where can a man win $947,400 on a 52-c- bet? Don't know? Too bad. That's really worth remembering.
In coming weeks check your educational TV stations for:
N.E.T. PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). La Marmite, which means "Pot of Gold," follows the fortunes of a disagreeable old miser who lives in fear of losing his gold.
N.E.T. JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "The Opium Trail" shows how the narcotic is grown in the interior of Southeast Asia and then moved to Hong Kong for distribution throughout the world.
THEATER
On Broadway
I DO! I DO!, based on the 1951 play, The Fourposter, is a two-character, two-gun salute to the enduring joys and passing frustrations of 50 years of married life. While the musical is blessed in its stars, Mary Martin and Robert Preston, and in its director, Gower Champion, the book and score are dull pudding.
WALKING HAPPY--singing brightly, dancing spritely, clapping loudly. A sort of My Fair Laddie, with British Beguiler Norman Wisdom as a Lancashire boatmaker who starts out so far below the stairs that he arrives onstage via a trapdoor.
THE SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL. Rosemary Harris and Ellis Rabb lead the suavely professional APA repertory company through Richard Sheridan's high-humored dissection of a gossipy group in 18th century London whose slashing tongues cut a wider path than their wits.
RIGHT YOU ARE. Is reality an illusion? Aren't a man's illusions most real to him? And doesn't each one appear a different being in the eyes of others? Right you are, Luigi Pirandello answered. If you think you are, he added. The APA again.
THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE. A radio heroine, beloved by millions for her sweetness and generosity, makes life a maelstrom for her intimates with her tyrannical temper and oppressive ways. Comedienne Beryl Reid makes British Playwright Frank Marcus' lesbian protagonist a most believable bully.
Off Broadway
AMERICA HURRAH, and bravo for Playwright Jean-Claude van Itallie for the inventive dramatic form and sharp philosophical content of his three-playlet investigation of life in mid-20th century U.S.A.
EH? is Henry Livings' running assault on logic, the glorification of a British "nit," a living non sequitur whose code of life is "Bim bom ban on the brain pan."
CINEMA
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS. Playwright Robert Bolt and Director Fred Zinnemann have transformed this 1960 drama into one of the most intelligent religious movies ever made. Paul Scofield is even more mesmeric as Sir Thomas More than he was in the play, pulling all eyes toward the brilliant Christian who chooses to save his soul and lose his head in the greatest scandal of the 16th century.
THE PROFESSIONALS. Director Richard Brooks pumps this fast-moving western full of high-gauge performances, guts, ingenuity, flaming arrows, dynamite and hot lead. The action starts when, for $10,000 apiece, Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Woody Strode and Robert Ryan set out to return a kidnaped wife (Claudia Cardinale) to her husband.
CULDESAC. A comedy of terrors with Donald Pleasence playing a flabby old fool of a husband to Franc,oise Dorleac's snippy little chippy who lusts for excitement--and finds it when a mobster-on-the-lam (Lionel Slander) staggers into their home.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE. Offering the season's lushest crop of crass, Walter Matthau leers, sneers and swaggers as an ambulance-chasing lawyer who cons his brother-in-law (Jack Lemmon) into faking an insurance claim in Director Billy Wilder's latest jab at American mores.
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM. Unhappily, Director Richard Lester sells his mirthright for a mess of footage in his version of this comedy of erotic errors. But Zero Mostel still manages to be funny skipping around in his fingertip-length tunic.
BOOKS
Best Reading
SATORI IN PARIS, by Jack Kerouac. An account of a beat writer's ribald search for some noble French ancestors, told with gusto and amusing dropout grammar.
WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, by Randolph Churchill. An only son's compassionate biography of his famous father's painful Victorian upbringing. First of five volumes.
THE BEST TIMES, by John Dos Passes. An informal canter through a "narrative panorama" of the U.S. of the recent past. Historian-Journalist Dos Passes, having suffered ideological tumbles on both the left and right, now has come to rest on a distrust of all systems that claim to improve mankind at the cost of freedom.
VESSEL OF WRATH, by Robert Lewis Taylor. A new and nimble biography of Carry Nation, whose hatchet made a shambles of saloons from Medicine Lodge to Coney Island.
LA CHAMADE, by Franc,oise Sagan. Another dissection of the anatomy of a love affair written crisply and economically by the heiress to Colette's throne.
LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE, edited by Richard Ellmann. The furies and compulsions that prefigured his work are set down in the literary electrocardiogram of a genius.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (1 last week)
2. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (2)
3. Capable of Honor, Drury (3)
4. The Mask of Apollo, Renault (4)
5. The Birds Fall Down, West (5)
6. All in the Family, O'Connor (8)
7. Tai-Pan, Clavell (6)
8. The Fixer, Malamud (7)
9. The Adventurers, Robbins (10)
10. A Dream of Kings, Petrakis (9)
NONFICTION
1. Rush to Judgment, Lane (1)
2. The Boston Strangler, Frank (3)
3. Everything But Money, Levenson (2)
4. The Jury Returns, Nizer (8)
5. With Kennedy, Salinger (4)
6. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (6)
7. Paper Lion, Plimpton
8. Random House Dictionary of the English Language (9)
9. The Search for Amelia Earhart, Goerner (5)
10. Games People Play, Berne (7)
* All times E.S.T.
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