TELEVISION
Thursday, November 27
Thanksgiving traditions in the television age extend far beyond mere turkey anc trimmings. There are the Thanksgiving Day parades, which will be covered live by NBC and CBS from 9 a.m. to noon, and then there is football, football and more football.
N.F.L. GAME (CBS, noon to conclusion).* Minnesota Vikings v. Detroit Lions.
A.F.L. GAME (NBC, 1:30 p.m. to conclusion). Denver Broncos v. Kansas City Chiefs.
N.C.A.A. GAME (ABC, 2:30-6 p.m.). Texas Tech v. University of Arkansas.
A.F.L. GAME (NBC, 4 p.m. to conclusion). San Diego Chargers v. Houston Oilers.
N.F.L. GAME (CBS, 6 p.m. to conclusion). San Francisco 49ers v. Dallas Cowboys.
NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8:30-10 p.m.). The Yale Repertory Theater Company presents five of Grimm's fairy tales in "Theater America: Story Theater." Mildred Dunnock and Alvin Epstein star in "The Golden Goose," "The Blue Light" and others.
Friday, November 28
HOW LIFE BEGINS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Jules Power's outstanding documentary on the beginnings of human and animal life. Repeat.
FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Doris Day and David Niven in Jean Kerr's Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1960).
Saturday, November 29
N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC, 1-4:15 p.m.). Army v. Navy from Philadelphia.
N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC, 4:15-7 p.m.). Penn State v. North Carolina State from Raleigh.
Sunday, November 30
A.F.L. DOUBLEHEADER (NBC, 1:30 p.m. to conclusion). Oakland Raiders v. New York Jets, followed by Miami Dolphins v. Boston Patriots.
LASSIE (CBS, 7-7:30 p.m.). With help from their canine friend, six blind children learn to use the Braille Nature Trail in the San Bernardino National Forest.
SIMON AND GARFUNKEL (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). The talented duo present an hour of their generation's music.
PEGGY FLEMING AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN WITH THE ICE FOLLIES (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).
THE ADVOCATES (NET, 10-11 p.m.). Senator George Murphy presides over a debate on "Should criminal penalties for the use of marijuana be abolished?"
Monday, December 1
OLYMPIC BOY (NET, 7-8 p.m.). The 1968 Olympics as seen through the eyes of a Mexican boy who finds that the games are a way for him to earn money.
CBS PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Jack Albertson and Robert Foxworth star in George Bellak's comedy-drama "Sadbird," about a hip young man in "the square world."
Tuesday, December 2
I DREAM OF JEANNIE (NBC, 7:30-8 p.m.). At long last, a questionable relationship has been legalized, and Jeannie (Barbara Eden) marries her astronaut, played by Larry Hagman.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). "Siberia: The Endless Horizon" is a study of the land that occupies more than one-tenth of the earth's solid surface.
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10:30 p.m.) The American premiere of Czech Composer Leos Janacek's opera based on the Dostoevsky novel From the House of the Dead features John Reardon, Robert Rounseville, David Lloyd and Frederick Jagel.
THE ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK SHOW (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). This special serves as a preview for the Humperdinck series that will start on Jan. 21. Guests include Tom Jones, Barbara Eden, Dionne Warwick and Jose Feliciano.
THEATER
On Broadway
THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE. William Saroyan's play was first performed 30 years ago and is now revived with care, affection and excellence by the Lincoln Center Repertory Company. To the audience of today, the colorful characters in Nick's Saloon seem like a commune of dropouts, and Saroyan may qualify as the first articulate hippie.
BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE. No one expects a new comic writer to be another Neil Simon or Jean Kerr. But one does expect him to be funny and to be himself. Leonard Gershe is only sporadically funny and never uniquely himself. But Eileen Heckart, playing the mother of a blind young man who seeks independence by moving into his own apartment, delivers her lines almost as if Gershe had delivered the goods.
THREE MEN ON A HORSE. Jack Gilford plays Erwin, a composer of verses for greeting cards, and Sam Levene plays Patsy, the horse player, in this revival of the 1935 comedy. The cast is superb, and while the plot may contain no surprises, the entire production is polished to a high gloss.
THE FRONT PAGE. Robert Ryan and Bert Convy, backed by an adroit cast, star in a revival of the Ben Hecht-Charles Mac-Arthur saga of newspapering in the Chicago of the 1920s. When the time comes to put the paper to bed and bring down the final curtain on this breezy merriment, the audience may well feel sorry that it has to go home.
Off Broadway
A SCENT OF FLOWERS takes a girl on a semipoetic, semiprosaic long day's journey into the night of her suicide. Looking uncannily like her aunt Katharine Hepburn, Katharine Houghton gives a tender, well-wrought performance that has beauty, feeling and intensity.
FORTUNE AND MEN'S EYES, by Canadian Playwright John Herbert, was, when originally presented in 1967, a scorching indictment of the prison system, with its brutal guards and tyrannizing homosexual inmates. As restaged by Sal Mineo, complete with the added attractions of blood, gore, a nude rape scene and an almost totally inept cast, it turns out to be nothng more than a carefully placed kick in the groin.
A WHISTLE IN THE DARK. Irish Playwright Thomas Murphy has written a drama full of the raw, roiling energy of life. The story of the Carney clan, moving in on a brother who has tried to flee their world of animal instinct, is full of the rude poetry of the commonplace. The performances are labors of love and skill, and Arvin Brown's direction is flawless.
CINEMA
THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA. Anthony Quinn reaches comic-opera stature as the roistering, boozy Bombolini, who becomes the town's hero as he cons the invading Germans out of nearly 1,000,000 bottles of vermouth. Anna Magnani as Rosa, his strong-willed wife, proves every bit the match for Bombolini--not to mention the Nazis.
ADALEN '31. Director Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) paints a poignant portrait of people caught in the flux of history and conveys the ineffable quality of a single decisive moment in a man's life.
ALICE'S RESTAURANT. Starting with Arlo Guthrie's hit song of a couple of years ago, Director Arthur Penn develops an amusing yet tragic view of today's youth.
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. With tour de force performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, an improbable love story movingly comes to life.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Though he bogs down in endless bungles, Coauthor, Director and Star Woody Allen nonetheless manages to come through with a funny crime flick.
EASY RIDER is a major movie that follows two youths on their search for where it's at. Director-Actor Dennis Hopper has created a classic by letting townspeople "rap" at will and drawing a top performance from Newcomer Jack Nicholson.
MEDIUM COOL. Using contemporary politics for a backdrop, and making the most of a cast of unknowns, Writer-Director Haskell Wexler explodes with a film that is dynamite.
THE BED SITTING ROOM. This relentlessly surrealistic attack on war makes Director Richard Lester's first film against the military (How I Won the War) look like child's play.
DOWNHILL RACER. Skiing has never before been filmed with quite the electricity that illumines this otherwise routine tale of an amateur athlete (Robert Redford) on the make.
GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS. Despite the talent and voice of Petula Clark, this adaptation of James Hilton's classic falls flat as a musical. But Peter O'Toole, as the beloved Mr. Chipping, gives one of the most subtle performances of his career.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE, by Loren Eiseley. A paean to the possibilities of man in an age of the machine by the anthropolater and author of The Immense Journey and The Mind as Nature.
FAKE!, by Clifford Irving. An exuberant account of the activities of one of the most successful and flamboyant art-forging rings in modern history.
COUNTING MY STEPS, by Jakov Lind. The author of Soul of Wood recalls his schizophrenic years in Nazi and postwar Europe, when his survival depended on how convincingly he could change his nationality, language and religion.
PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS, by Robert Coover. In a collection of clever, surreal--and sometimes repellent--short stories, the author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, plays a literary shell game with his readers.
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, by John Fowles. A fascinating novel that uses the tricks and turns of Victorian fiction to pound home the thesis that freedom is the natural condition of man.
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER, by Stephen Becker. An excellent period morality tale about a Union Army officer who attempts to save the life of a teen-age Rebel who shot him during a Civil War skirmish.
PRESENT AT THE CREATION, by Dean Acheson. In these well-written memoirs, Harry Truman's Secretary of State recalls the formative years of the cold war with much wit, knowledge and insight.
BARNETT FRUMMER IS AN UNBLOOMED FLOWER, by Calvin Trillin. Soft implosions of mirthful satire that should trouble the social and political pretensions of those who would be with it.
POWER, by Adolf A. Berle. A former F.D.R. brain-truster and State Department official compellingly examines the sources and limitations of power and its relationship to ethics.
A SEA CHANGE, by J. R. Salamanca. Bitterness and tenderness are the alternating currents in this novel of the breakup of a marriage, by the author of The Lost Country and Lilith.
AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Kept during the authors two years as Ambassador to India, this diary is rare for both its 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.
THEM, by Joyce Carol Gates. One family's battle to escape the economic and spiritual depression of urban American life.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Godfather, Puzo (1 last week)
2. The Inheritors, Robbins
3. The House on the Strand, du Maurier (2)
4. The Seven Minutes, Wallace (3)
5. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (4)
6. In This House of Brede, Godden (5)
7. The Love Machine, Susann (6)
8. The Promise, Potok (7)
9. The Pretenders, Davis (10)
10. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe (8)
NONFICTION
1. The Selling of the President 1968, McGinnis (1)
2. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (2)
3. Present at the Creation, Acheson (3)
4. My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy, Gallagher (4)
5. My Life and Prophecies, Dixon and Noorbergen (5)
6. The Making of the President 1968, White
7. The Human Zoo, Morris (10)
8. Ambassador's Journal, Galbraith (6)
9. The American Heritage Dictionary (9)
10. Prime Time, Kendrick (8)
* All times E.S.T.
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