TELEVISION

Wednesday, March 19

CHRYSLER PRESENTS THE BOB HOPE SPECIAL (NBC. 9-10 p.m.).-Bob's guests are Jimmy Durante, Nancy Sinatra. Ray Charles and Cyd Charisse.

ANDY'S LOVE CONCERT (NBC. 10-11 p.m.). Andy Williams offers his tribute to affection, with help from Jose Feliciano, Donovan and the brothers Smothers.

Thursday, March 20

1969 N.C.A.A. COLLEGE BASKETBALL CHAMPIONSHIP TOURNAMENT (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Semifinal game from Freedom Hall, Louisville. The consolation and finals will be telecast on Saturday starting at 2 p.m.

NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). Dame Sybil Thorndike and Virginia McKenna in A Passage to India, a dramatization of E. M. Forster's novel about the failure of East to meet West in 1920s India.

Friday, March 21

THE FIRST AMERICANS (NBC. 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Hugh Downs reports on man's migration from Siberia to the Americas.

HOLLYWOOD: THE SELZNICK YEARS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Henry Fonda narrates this special on the career of Movie Producer David O. Selznick with some rarely seen film clips and comments from Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Rock Hudson, Joseph Cotten, Alfred Hitchcock, Janet Gaynor and Dorothy McGuire.

Saturday, March 22

NATIONAL INVITATIONAL TOURNAMENT (CBS, 2-4 p.m.). Championship collegiate basketball, live from Madison Square Garden in New York.

THE WORLD CUP SKI CHAMPIONSHIPS (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The second of two ski meets in the U.S. leading to the 1969 World Cup Awards.

Sunday, March 23

DISCOVERY '69 (ABC, 11:30 a.m. to noon). To study the problems of the only coffee-producing area in the U.S., the Kona Coast, "Discovery Returns to Hawaii."

THE CBS CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 1-2:30 p.m.). A prizewinning film, Testadirapa, about a father who tries to keep his son away from school when education becomes obligatory in Italy.

CHINA TODAY AND TOMORROW (NBC, 2:30-4:30 p.m.). Edwin Newman is the anchorman for this news special which features television films from Communist China and discussion of China by a panel of experts including Edwin O. Reischauer, A. Doak Barnett, Allen S. Whiting. Lucian Pye, Richard L. Walker and Roderick MacFarquhar.

NBC EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). "Bye-Bye, Butterfly" explores the preparation and production of a Japanese film that takes a modern approach to the Madame Butterfly story.

Tuesday, March 25

THE MOD SQUAD (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Sammy Davis Jr. guest-stars as a militant young priest in "Keep the Faith, Baby."

SIBELIUS: A SYMPHONY FOR FINLAND (NET, 9-10:30 p.m.). The great Finnish composer as man and artist. Repeat.

THEATER

On Broadway HAMLET. Everything about this production of the APA Repertory Company I peculiarly wrong. The costumes are a strange mixture of period and modern; the sense and tempo of the play have been mangled by both Director Ellis Rabb's cuts and his use of the corrupt First Quarto; and Hamlet, played by Mr. Rabb with monotony and weariness, seems in desperate need of geriatric drugs.

IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, by Heinar Kipphardt, offers audiences a chance to weep over the renowned physicist who, in 1954, was deprived of his security clearance. Dissertation, however, is not drama; the play is as inert as a stone, and Joseph Wiseman as Oppenheimer is mannered, overly European and brittle.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen has written what seems to be a play about Woody Allen, in which he appropriately stars as a young man with so many psychological hang-ups that he makes playgoers feel positively healthy.

CANTERBURY TALES. Four of Geoffrey Chaucer's tales are told in this musical import from London. Unfortunately, the Chaucerian spirit is largely missing. Sex is treated as a commodity and faith as an epilogue, in the manner of a Cecil B. De-Mille devotional epic.

DEAR WORLD. The only saving grace about this musical adaptation of Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot is a gallant performance by Angela Lansbury.

CELEBRATION features Potemkin, a master of ceremonies and revelers, presiding over a world peopled by an Orphan, an Angel and an evil Mr. Rich. Spareness and clarity are the order of the evening, and that alone makes the show a treat by contrast to most other Broadway musicals.

HADRIAN VII. Playwright Peter Luke makes Frederick William Rolfe, one of the most freakishly talented eccentrics of English letters, the hero of Rolfe's own novel of wish fulfillment. Hadrian the Seventh. Alec McCowen gives a polished performance as Rolfe.

FORTY CARATS is a frothy farce by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy. With Julie Harris as a middle-aged divorcee wooed by a lad of 22, the play enters a sane plea for a single standard of judgment on age disparity in marriage.

Off Broadway

SPITTING IMAGE. Some plays sound distinctly unappetizing in conception but prove surprisingly palatable in realization. For anyone who can abide the idea, this work about two homosexuals who have a baby provides a consistently amusing evening, nursing its basic joke with taste and felicity. Sam Waterston and Walter McGinn turn in accomplished performances as Daddy One and Daddy Two in what is probably the first homosexual play with a happy ending.

ADAPTATION-NEXT. Elaine May, a corrosively perceptive satirist with a mean comic punch, is director of both of these humorous one-acters. Adaptation, which Miss May wrote as well, has the ironic viewpoint that life is a game played on the contestant. In Terrence McNally's Next, James Coco gives a fine performance as a potbellied, middle-aged businessman summoned for the draft through an obvious computer error.

LITTLE MURDERS. Under the direction of Alan Arkin, this revival of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer's play is breath-catchingly funny and hair-trigger fast in pace.

DAMES AT SEA, with a thoroughly engaging cast and some of the most ingenious staging currently on or off Broadway, is a delightful and loving spoof of the movie musicals of the '30s.

CINEMA

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY is one of the tensest, toughest thrillers anyone could ask for. But Director Hubert Cornfield isn't content to stop there; he creates a surreal seminar in the poetics of violence. The small cast is uniformly good, and Marlon Brando is back in great form playing a hipster-hood.

SALESMAN. A moving and troubling cinema verite documentary focusing on a group of New England Bible salesmen. The Maysles brothers spent six weeks filming the drummers at work, and the result is a frightening picture of one part of American society.

3 IN THE ATTIC is a cautionary tale of a campus ladykiller (Chris Jones) who is unfaithful to his steady girl friend (Yvette Mimieux) and gets his just deserts. The film has a kind of cheap charm, and Jones and Mimieux are fun to watch.

THE STALKING MOON. Gregory Peck lends strength and dignity to a low-key western about a trapper who combats the remorseless, silent presence of an Indian bent on bloody revenge.

SWEET CHARITY. A lot of energy obviously went into this adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, but the result is sadly lacking in vitality. Shirley MacLaine is in fine form, though, and a couple of the tunes are catchy.

RED BEARD. Japan's Akira Kurosawa directed this morality play about the spiritual growth of a young doctor with all the stylistic wizardry and vision that have made him one of the world's greatest film makers.

THE SHAME. Artistic integrity and political responsibility are the themes of Ingmar Bergman's 29th film, a somber and often beautiful contemporary parable containing outstanding performances by Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow and Gunnar Bjoernstrand.

THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer has directed this adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel with care and dedication, and Alan Bates (as the accidental hero), Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm all seem perfect in their difficult roles.

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. Some great players (Jason Robards, Joseph Wiseman, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliot, Norman Wisdom) are obviously having the time of their lives in this raunchy, affectionate tribute to oldtime burlesque.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE GODFATHER, by Mario Puzo, is a robust, crisply narrated novel about the Mafia with a clear-cut moral: the family that preys together stays together.

GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. In the final volume of a trilogy begun by the late historian Lloyd Lewis, Catton carries Grant's career to his day of final victory at Appomattox. The author's quiet lucidity and laconic humor are well suited to a portrayal of the elusive, taciturn little general.

THE TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Eric F. Goldman. Instant history, like instant coffee, can sometimes be remarkably palatable. At least, it is in this memoir by a former White House aide who sees L.B.J. as "an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances."

PUSHKIN, by David Magarshack. In a solid, if sometimes pedestrian biography, the poet who was a founding father of Russian literature often seems more like a rakehell uncle.

THE WOMAN DESTROYED, by Simone de Beauvoir. In three new novellas, the author of The Second Sex examines with skill a familiar theme: how unfair it is that a sufferer from the degenerative disease, life, should be tormented as well by the affliction of being female.

CASTLE TO CASTLE, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, is the final novel in a crazed autobiographical trilogy by the demented French physician-genius who apparently viewed the body of modern society with complete revulsion.

JBS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF J.B.S. HALDANE, by Ronald W. Clark. One of the last great Victorian eccentrics, Haldane sought to embrace the "two cultures." Author Clark demonstrates, however, that he was vastly more successful in his scientific ventures than in his often wild misadventures in social causes.

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth, is a comic sex novel of the absurd, told in the form of a frenzied monologue by a 33-year-old Jewish bachelor on his psychiatrist's couch.

TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. A beautifully written documentary of human adversity in Southern Italy that deserves a place next to Oscar Lewis' The Children of Sanchez.

HEADS, by Edward Stewart. Ivy League sacred cows are milked, and human parts are strewn about in unlikely places by ax murderers in a cheerfully gruesome novel by the author of Orpheus on Top.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2 last week)

2. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1)

3. Airport, Hailey (4)

4. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (3)

5. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (5)

6. The Voyeur, Sutton (9)

7. Preserve and Protect, Drury (6)

8. A World of Profit, Auchincloss (10)

9. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (8) 10. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell

NONFICTION

1. The 900 Days, Salisbury (2)

2. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (3)

3. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (8)

4. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (9)

5. Instant Replay, Kramer (4)

6. The Age of Discontinuity, Drucker

7. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (10)

8. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (5)

9. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (1)

10. The Bitter Woods, Eisenhower (7)

-All times E.S.T.

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