TELEVISION

Wednesday, October 29 THE BRASS ARE COMIN' (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).*

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass star in this musical special, which also features Petula Clark. Johnny Carson, Gene Kelly, Lome Greene, James Stewart and Henry Fonda make cameo appearances.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Georgy Girl (1966) stars Lynn Redgrave, James Mason and Alan Bates in a comedy about a gawky, soft-hearted girl.

The performances by Redgrave and Mason earned them Oscar nominations.

Thursday, October 30 NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8:30-10:30 p.m.).

"Glory! Hallelujah!", described by its author, A. M. Barlow, as a Civil War "parable play," explores the nature of war and its effects on the human spirit.

THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.).

Dear Heart (1965), with Glenn Ford, Geraldine Page and Angela Lansbury, is the story of misbegotten love between a post mistress and a greeting-card salesman.

Saturday, November 1 WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). National "500" Auto Race from Charlotte, N.C., and an international ski-jumping championship from Planica, Yugoslavia.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Hamming it up as only this pack can do are Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop in Sergeants 3 (1962).

THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Sammy Davis Jr. plays host to Mama Cass Elliott, Roosevelt Grier, Lionel Hampton and Peter Lawford.

Sunday, November 2 WALT DISNEY'S WONDERFUL WORLD OF COLOR (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar." Part 1 of a two-part story showing how being tamed as a pet dulls a cougar's instinct for survival.

Monday, November 3 NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "The Conservative Mr. Buckley." What William F. Buckley Jr. is all about, as seen through a series of his film statements on crime, the ghetto, capital punishment, patriotism, Communism and the arts.

Tuesday, November 4 NET SCIENCE SPECIAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.).

"The Heartmakers" explains the world's only artificial-heart implantation in a human being through separate interviews with Dr. Denton Cooley, who performed the operation, and Dr. Michael DeBakey, who headed the research team.

FIRST TUESDAY (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). The so-called TV magazine features a portrait of former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a look at the contemplative life at Poor Clare Monastery in Omaha, Neb., and American rule in Okinawa.

CBS NEWS HOUR (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). In cities with elections, results will be reported. Other cities will see "A Conversation with Dean Acheson -- Part 2," with CBS News Correspondent Eric Sevareid.

THEATER

On Broadway

INDIANS. Playwright Arthur Kopit has taken up the cause of the American Indian and has tried to mesh together segments of a vaudeville-styled Buffalo Bill Wild West show with segments of Hochhuth-Brechtian didactic polemicism. The idea is to spank the audience while making it laugh, but the whole thing refuses to cohere. Stacy Keach plays Buffalo Bill with relish, flamboyance and charm.

THREE MEN ON A HORSE is a revival of the 1935 comedy, with a cast of superb character actors playing together like an ensemble company. Jack Gilford deftly fits his long, lugubrious countenance around the part of Erwin, ace composer of Mother's Day verses for a greeting-card company. Patsy, the horse player, is played by Sam Levene, and Dorothy Loudon as Patsy's moll does a solo in her underwear that would give any choreographer something to think about.

A PATRIOT FOR ME. When John Osborne steps into the spotlight and throws a nightlong temper tantrum, the dramatic results are explosively and corrosively alive. But when he goes rummaging through history for his theme, he is far less successful. This play is about Alfred Redl, a homosexual officer in the army of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire who was blackmailed by the Russians into turning traitor. Unfortunately, Osborne's characters are not immersed in history; they merely wear it like a costume.

Off Broadway

A WHISTLE IN THE DARK has the raw, roiling energy of life observed with an exactitude that defies disbelief. The Carneys are a pride of Irish gutter lions, bred to the tooth and claw, who move into the home of the only brother who has tried to flee their world of lacerating animal instinct. The performances are all labors of skill and love, and Arvin Brown's deft direction is full of silent music.

ADAPTATION-NEXT. Elaine May directs both her own play, Adaptation, and Terrence McNally's Next in an evening of perceptive and richly comic one-acters.

NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY. Playwright Charles Gordone, aided by a skillful cast, examines the fabric of black-white and black-black relationships with uninhibited fury--and unexpected humor.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a moving tribute to the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry made up of selected readings and dramatizations from her writings.

DAMES AT SEA is a delightful parody of the movie musicals of the 1930s, complete with all the frenetic dance routines and the naive young girl who taps her way to stardom.

CINEMA

THE BED SITTING ROOM. This is Director Richard Lester's second surrealistic attack on the homicidal excesses of the military; it makes his first aggressive stab against war (How I Won the War) look like a warm-up exercise.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Jon Voight is a strutting phallus, good for nothin' but lovin'; Dustin Hoffman is a septic, crippled thief. Together, they create one of the most moving and poignant performances in the history of American film. Though Director John Schlesinger has decorated the story with stylistic tics, the film stands as a moving study of the lonely and the loveless.

MEDIUM COOL. Writer-Director Haskell Wexler takes a fictitious plot, places it against an authentic backdrop (the Chicago convention), and explodes a film that is both social and cinematic dynamite.

THE WILD BUNCH. "Killing is no fun. I was trying to show what the hell it's like to get shot," says Director Sam Peckinpah about this film, which follows a ragtag bunch of bandits as they scrounge through the Southwest. While traveling with the bunch, Peckinpah provides long looks at scenes of uncontrolled frenzy in which the sense of chaotic violence is overwhelming.

STAIRCASE. Among other things, Richard Burton and Rex Harrison are known for their heterosexuality. Here they show their acting talent by portraying a pair of middle-aged homosexuals, and they do it most convincingly.

ALICE'S RESTAURANT. This is a film about young people that is, as they say, very much together. Taking Arlo Guthrie's hit song of a couple of years ago, Director Arthur Penn has fashioned a sad, funny, tragic, beautiful picture of a way of life.

THE GYPSY MOTHS. Director John Frankenheimer once more brings courage to the fore in this tale of three stunt parachutists bound together by danger. The story bogs down somewhat in heavyhanded philosophy, but Frankenheimer manages to pull the rip cord in time with a brilliant skydiving sequence.

TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Woody Allen makes his debut as a film director. He also co-authored this zany crime flick, and plays the starring role of a crook. What's more, he makes it all work.

EASY RIDER. A major movie on an old theme--youth searching for where it's at. The props are familiar--drugs and motorcycles--but Director Dennis Hopper (who also co-stars with Peter Fonda) puts starch in what has become worn material. Though self-pity gets more footage than it deserves, a brilliant performance by Newcomer Jack Nicholson, plus the use of hard-core Americans playing themselves, makes the youths' odyssey Homeric indeed.

TRUE GRIT. It's the Duke at his best. In what could have been just another western, John Wayne shows true grit in this cornball shoot-'em-up.

BOOKS

Best Reading

AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Kept during the author's two years as Ambassador to India, this diary is rare both for first-rate prose and succinct, irreverent opinion ("The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women").

MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, by Antonia Fraser. A rich, billowing biography of a pretty queen who, by casting herself as a religious martyr, has upstaged her mortal enemy, Queen Elizabeth I, in the imagination of posterity.

MY LIFE WITH MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., by Coretta Scott King. Intimate touches and a personal context lend new dimension and drama to the life of her doomed and dedicated husband.

THEM, by Joyce Carol Oates. A family's battle to escape the economic and spiritual depression of urban American life is the theme of this novel by the author of A Garden of Earthly Delights and Expensive People.

CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS, by Vine Deloria. A savagely funny and perceptive book by a young member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe examines the modern plight of red men beset by white plunderers and progressives alike.

DR. BOWDLER'S LEGACY: A HISTORY OF EXPURGATED BOOKS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA, by Noel Perrin. Examining the literary atrocities of squeamish expurgators, the author has created a brilliant little work of cultural history full of wit and learning.

THE WATERFALL, by Margaret Drabble. The author's finest novel is a superb audit of the profits and losses of love for a woman threatening to destroy herself.

THE EGG OF THE GLAK AND OTHER STORIES, by Harvey Jacobs. Bizarre urban fairy tales delivered with the kick and rhythm of a nightclub comedian.

JESUS REDISCOVERED, by Malcolm Muggeridge. The 66-year-old British cultural curmudgeon writes tellingly of the ways, means and meditations that led to his conversion to Christianity.

FAT CITY, by Leonard Gardner. A brilliant exception to the general rule that boxing fiction seldom graduates beyond the level of caricature.

THE COST OF LIVING LIKE THIS, by James Kennaway. An intense and coldly realistic novel about a man's coming to terms with two women who love him and the cancer that is pinching off his life.

THE FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE, by Sanche de Gramont. Only the cuisine comes off unscathed in this analysis vinaigrette of the French national character.

COLLECTED ESSAYS, by Graham Greene. The novelist repeatedly drives home the same obsessive point: "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Godfather, Puzo (1 last week)

2. The Love Machine, Susann (2)

3. The House on the Strand, du Maurier

4. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe (6)

5. The Promise, Potok (5)

6. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (4)

7. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (3)

8. The Seven Minutes, Wallace

9. The Pretenders, Davis (7)

10. In This House of Brede, Godden (8)

NONFICTION

1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (2)

2. My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, Gallagher (1)

3. Prime Time, Kendrick (7)

4. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (3)

5. The Selling of the President 1968, McGinnis

6. The Making of the President 1968, White (5)

7. My Life and Prophecies, Dixon and Noorbergen (4)

8. The Honeycomb, St. Johns (6)

9. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (8)

10. The American Heritage Dictionary (10)

*All times E.S.T.

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