CINEMA

The Entertainer. A fascinating if messy movie, based on the stage work by Angry John Osborne. The author's vision of contemporary England as a crumbling music hall is an unconvincing yet somehow magnificent metaphor, and Sir Laurence Olivier's portrayal of a third-rate vaudeville performer is a masterpiece of mannerism.

The World of Apu. The third part of Indian Director-Producer Satyajit Ray's vital and abundant trilogy that began with Father Panchali and continued with Aparajito, now brings its hero to marriage and eventual confrontation with tragedy.

Let's Make Love. The silly plot, about a billionaire who wants to be loved for himself and not for his money, urgently requires old-age insurance, but Marilyn Monroe triumphantly sings My Heart Belongs to Daddy as if she had never heard of Mary Martin, and Partner Yves Montand is possibly France's most charming male export since Chevalier.

The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Playwright William Inge takes a fairly shrewd but not really profound cinematic look at an Oklahoma harness salesman (rowdily played by Robert Preston) and his family, all of whom find themselves suddenly faced with doubt and darkness.

TELEVISION

Tues., Oct. 4

Stagecoach West (ABC, 9-10 p.m.).* More oat-couture.

Rivak, the Barbarian (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Jack Palance in the Punic Wars. Color.

Wed., Oct. 5

My Sister Eileen (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). Premiere of a new series based on the Manhattan adventures of those two sisters from Ohio. With Elaine Stritch.

Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Guests: Shelley Berman, Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Ethel Merman. Color.

NBC News U.N. Special (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). The General Assembly.

The Bing Crosby Show (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Bing's first 1960-61 special, with Rosemary Clooney, Johnny Mercer, Dennis, Philip and Lindsay Crosby.

Thurs., Oct. 6

The Witness (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Simulated trial-by-history of Louisiana's Kingfish, Huey P. Long.

Angel (CBS, 9-9:30 p.m.). First in a new series about a French girl who marries an American architect.

Victor Borge Special (ABC-9:30-10:30 p.m.). Guests: Japanese Singer Izumi Yukimura, Kabuki Dancers Shiko Yagi and Chushiro Sato, Concert Pianist Leonid Hambro.

Person to Person (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Visiting Richard M. Nixon.

Fri., Oct. 7

Nixon and Kennedy (ABC, CBS, NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The second of the candidates' TV encounters, halfway between a press conference and a debate.

Route 66 (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). First of a Chevrolet-sponsored series about two young on-the-roadsters who roam Route 66 in a Chevrolet Corvair.

Eleanor Roosevelt's Diamond Jubilee Plus One (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A tribute--by Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, George Burns, Carol Channing, Jimmy Durante, Mahalia Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Mary Martin, Richard M. Nixon, Richard Rodgers and Simone Signoret--o Eleanor Roosevelt and the Eleanor Roosevelt Cancer Research Foundation.

Mr. Garlund (CBS, 9:30-10 p.m.). Premiere of a dramatic series about a 30-year-old financier, a sort of baby Baruch.

Eyewitness to History (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The week's outstanding news story.

The Law and Mr. Jones (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). First of a new series about a Manhattan mouthpiece.

Sat., Oct. 8 N.C.A.A. Football Game (ABC, 4:45 p.m. to final gun). Washington at Stanford.

Campaign Roundup (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.). Updating the race.

The Campaign and the Candidates (NBC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Survey of campaign developments.

Fight of the Week (ABC, 10 p.m. to end). Incumbent Gene Fullmer v. Challenger Sugar Ray Robinson for the middleweight championship.

Sun., Oct. 9

Face the Nation (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Guest: Henry Cabot Lodge.

Jackie Gleason Special (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Bandleader-Comedian Phil Harris is Gleason's guest in a variety show about American salesmen.

The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Guests: Red Skelton, Shirley Temple, Nat King Cole. Color.

Mon., Oct. 10

Road to Reality (ABC, 2:30-3 p.m.). First in a professionally acted series on group psychotherapy.

THEATER

The Broadway season's first new offering, Brendan Behan's The Hostage, though less a play than a dramatization of its wild Irish playwright, tells the humane, hilarious, howlingly off-key story of a young English soldier held hostage in a Dublin brothel, is an irreverent stage piece that is thoroughly good fun. The World of Carl Sandburg, an evening of the poet's work more or less acted out by Bette Davis and Leif Erickson, comes off as an agreeable recital, evoking a poet's world that i dramatically mild and a little ostentatiously benign. And at the Phoenix, Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore sails briskly along in the capable hands of its right good captain, Tyrone Guthrie.

Still going strong are last year's hits notably The Miracle Worker, Toys in the Attic, Bye Bye Birdie and A Thurber Carnival, whose cast now include the author.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Trial Begins, by Abram Tertz. Pseudonymously signed and smuggled from Russia, this remarkable work of socialis surrealism bitterly mocks the monolithic state with its Soviet Organization Men, its Bolshy bitches and addled Utopian dreamers, suggesting among other things that under the Communist icecap, the Russian spirit still lives.

Victory in the Pacific, by Samuel Eliot Morison. The 14th and last book of narrative (a technical volume is to follow) in the author's masterly history of World War II naval operations.

The Man Next To Me, by Anthony Barker. The journal of an Anglican medical missionary to the Zulus, written with modesty and skill, is an inspiring account of brotherly love in the troubled land of apartheid.

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant, by Anthony Powell. Installment No. 5 of The Music of Time, a seriocomedy of Britain between the two World Wars, which combines the antic savagery of Waugh with the social savvy of Proust.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, with photographs by Walker Evans. A new edition of a classic account of sharecropper life in the mid-'30s, written with luminous love, raging anger, Christian anguish, and cascading torrents of poetry.

The Politics of Upheaval, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. In the third volume (1935-36) of his massive history, the author follows skillfully--and sometimes too admiringly--as the New Deal loses its first momentum and, after reassessment, sets out in a different direction.

The Black Book, by Lawrence Durrell. A school piece by the author of the Alexandria novels, written when he was 24, and full of murk, gloom, glittering words and the beans of youth.

The Human Season, by Edward Lewis Wallant. The author has chosen a dark theme for his uncommonly well-written first novel--an aging plumber's bout with melancholy after the death of his wife.

The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis. The late great Greek writer saw God as the search for God.

Temptation is his soaring, shocking, final vision of that search.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Advise and Consent, Drury (1)*

2. Hawaii, Michener (2)

3. The Leopard, Di Lampedusa (3)

4. The Lovely Ambition, Chase (7)

5. The Chapman Report, Wallace (4)

6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee (6)

7. The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis (9)

8. Water of Life, Robinson (5)

9. Watcher in the Shadows, Household 10. The Black Book, Durrell

NONFICTION 1 . Born Free, Adamson ( 1 )

2. How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market, Darvas (2)

3. Felix Frankfurter Reminisces, Frankfurter with Phillips (10)

4. The Good Years, Lord (6)

5. The Waste Makers, Packard

6. Enjoy, Enjoy! Golden (3)

7. The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater (4)

8. Folk Medicine, Jarvis (5)

9. May This House Be Safe from Tigers, King (7)

10. Taken at the Flood, Gunther

* All times E.D.T. * Position on last week's list.

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