The Legend of Lobo. Walt Disney, who thinks that wolves are really nicer than people, tries to prove it by telling the story of a 150-lb. monster who terrorized New Mexico in the 1890s. Disney is sort of crying sheep, but the kids won't care.
The Reluctant Saint. Maximilian Schell attains new histrionic heights in the amusing, amazing story of San Giuseppe of Cupertino (1603-63), a saint who could literally fly.
Two for the Seesaw. Shirley MacLaine is pretty funny in a pretty funny film version of William Gibson's Broadway comedy. Robert Mitchum is not.
The Long Absence. A man who doesn't know who he is and a woman who thinks he is her husband suffer their strange dilemma in a strange but affecting French film, thoughtfully directed by Henri Colpi.
Mutiny on the Bounty. Trevor Howard, as Captain Bligh, is all man and a yardarm wide in MGM's $18.5 million reconstruction of The Bounty, but Marlon Brando has inexplicably chosen to play Fletcher Christian as a sort of hard-alee Hamlet.
Billy Budd. An exciting and disturbing study of good and evil, based on Herman Melville's moralistic novel; Peter Ustinov directed the picture with style, and plays one of the principal roles with skill.
Long Day's Journey into Night. Eugene O'Neill's play, one of the greatest of the century, is brought to the screen without significant changes and with a better than competent cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell.
TELEVISION
Wed., Dec. 19 Polaris Submarine: Journal of an Undersea Voyage (NBC, 10-11 p.m.).* Six NBC newsmen went along on the U.S.S.
George Washington as she fissioned along in silence, then surfaced and fired a spray of missiles.
Thurs., Dec. 20 Alcoa Premiere (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).
Theodore Bikel and David Opatoshu star in the story of a Communist from a satellite nation who visits the U.S., goes home, and begins to get the needle from his comrades.
Fri., Dec. 21 What Is a Melody? -- Second Philharmonic Young People's Concert (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Leonard Bernstein and the N.Y. Philharmonic explore melodies through Wagner, Mozart, Hindemith and Brahms.
The Jack Paar Program (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Sally Ann Howes, Buddy Hackett, Vaughn Meader.
Sat., Dec. 22 Wide World of Sports (ABC, 3:30-6:30 p.m.). College football. The North-South game from Miami.
The Jackie Gleason Show: American Scene Magazine (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).
Among the chicks and chuckles, Reggie Van Gleason presents a magic show, and rings in Prestidigitator Milbourne Christopher to give a helping sleight of hand.
Sun., Dec. 23
Directions '63 (ABC, 1:30-2 p.m.). In a TV play based on Henri Gheon's Christmas in the Market Place, Folk Singer Josh White stars as one of a group of migrant workers in Florida who set up a tent to act out the Nativity scene.
Amahl and the Night Visitors (NBC, 3:30-4:30 p.m.). A repeat of the NBC Opera Company's much-praised production of Gian Carlo Menotti's opera.
The Ed Sullivan Show (CBS, 8-9 p.m.).
Christmas song and dance taped Dec. 21 at Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba.
Voice of Firestone (ABC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Christmas music. Guests include Rise Stevens and the Columbus Boychoir.
Mon., Dec. 24
The Bing Crosby Show (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). With Mary Martin.
Christmas Eve Services (ABC, 11:15 p.m. to 1 a.m.). First, services from Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine, then Solemn Pontifical Midnight Mass from the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.
Christmas Eve Midnight Mass (NBC, midnight to 1:45 a.m.). From St. Patrick's Cathedral, N.Y.
Tues., Dec. 25
Christmas Day Service (NBC, 11 a.m. to noon). Communion from Washington Cathedral.
THEATER
On Broadway
Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long, is a one-gag, all-night laugh show about a chagrined man of 60 who finds himself facing the unexpected onslaught of second fatherhood. As the father-to-be, Paul Ford is an excruciatingly funny anatomy of melancholy.
Little Me. Sid Caesar is the laugh-combustion engine of this musical comedy. Neil Simon's tart script, Bob Fosse's inventive dances and Virginia Martin's ding-dong Belle Poitrine help to keep the evening chugging merrily along.
Beyond the Fringe offers the lucid and lunatic drolleries of four young English antiEstablishmentarians. God, Shakespeare, nuclear defense--name it, they slam it, right in the funny bone.
Tchin-Tchin is a cheery drink-up expression, but all the hero and heroine of this play have to swallow are the lees of abandonment by their mutually unfaithful spouses. As the pair of wistful rejects, Margaret Leighton and Anthony Quinn perform with sorcery.
Mr. President impeaches taste and demeans the considerable talents of Robert Ryan and Nanette Fabray, but the public has given this musical an unparalleled vote of confidence with an advance ticket sale of over $2,600,000.
Stop the World--I Want to Get Off is a tedious musicomedy apotheosis of Every-littleman, mimed with confident ineptitude by Anthony Newley. Comedienne Anna Quayle glitters like a diamond in this puddle of paste.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee, pits a husband who is a monster of sadistic intelligence against a wife who is a monster of sensual appetite.
Off Broadway
The Dumbwaiter and The Collection, by Harold Pinter. These two one-acters combine the comedy and menace of England's most powerfully provocative playwright. Alan Schneider's direction of a splendid cast seismographically records volcanic shifts of meaning.
BOOKS
Best Reading
The Conquest of London and The Middle Years, Vols. II and III of Henry James, by Leon Edel. Author Edel's vast work, which will run to four volumes and which promises to be the definitive biography of James, is written with a scholar's exhaustive combing of detail and a novelist's flair for mood and motive.
Two Stories and a Memory, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. Excellent minor pieces by the Sicilian prince whose elegiac novel of nobility's erosion, The Leopard, was a bestseller two years ago. The author's memoir of the great houses he lived in as a child is particularly good.
The Cape Cod Lighter, by John O'Hara. The author writes better than ever of heels and down-at-the-heels in Gibbsville. Pa., and small-town New Jersey in this collection of short stories.
Tale for the Mirror, by Hortense Calisher. Human vagaries in exurbia and out of it. To be any good at all, short stories must be nearly perfect. These are.
The Community of Scholars and Drawing the Line, by Paul Goodman. The U.S. college scene and the U.S. scenario for the cold war, peppered with scorn and assaulted with wit by an uneven but provocative critic.
Renoir, My Father, by Jean Renoir. The author, who as a boy sat for his father, the great impressionist painter, now turns portraitist, and his biography is one of the most likable in years.
The Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. This first complete collection reveals the witty playwright not as the foppish caricature he seemed, but as the sad and profound fellow he was.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. A Shade of Difference, Drury (3, last week)
2. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (2)
3. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (1)
4. Ship of Fools, Porter (5)
5. Where Love Has Gone, Robbins (7)
6. Genius, Dennis (9)
7. The Thin Red Line, Jones (4)
8. Dearly Beloved, Lindbergh (6)
9. The Prize, Wallace (10)
10. The Passion Flower Hotel, Erskine (8)
NONFICTION
1. Silent Spring, Carson (2)
2. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (1)
3. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (3)
4. My Life in Court, Nizer (4)
5. The Rothschilds, Morton (5)
6. Final Verdict, St. Johns (7)
7. Letters from the Earth, Twain (6)
8. The Points of My Compass, White (10)
9. The Blue Nile, Moorehead (8)
10. Sex and the Single Girl, Brown
* All times E.S.T.
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