CINEMA

The L-Shaped Room. The plot may be soap-operatic, but sensitive direction, an understated screenplay, and good performances by luminous Leslie Caron, hawk-faced Tom Bell and oldtime Vaudevillian Cicely Courtneidge help to make this story about love, loneliness and unwed motherhood more than worthwhile.

55 Days at Peking. The Boxer Rebellion gets the wide-screen treatment, and the result is a full-scale war. Among the foreign devils who make the Chinese so mad are David Niven, Ava Gardner, Charlton Heston and Paul Lukas; there are fireworks and plenty of blood mixed with the mob scenes, and the sets are Bronstonian in magnificence.

Doctor No. Ian Fleming fans will get more than their money's worth in this somewhat overdone dollop of derring-do about British Agent 007, a mad scientist and an atomic furnace. Sean Connery is properly urbane and unbelievably brave as James Bond.

Winter Light. Ingmar Bergman probes deeper into religious philosophy in this somber and icily beautiful film about an afternoon in the life of a Swedish pastor who finds himself unable to help or love others because he fears that he himself is beyond the help or love of God.

Two Daughters. In this gentle and witty two-part film, the camera of India's Satyajit Ray speaks a universal language. The Postmaster tells of the touching relationship between a backwoods postmaster and a ten-year-old girl who is his servant; The Conclusion is a comedy about a reluctant bride, ardent groom and spoiled mother.

The Third Lover. Claude Chabrol has made a chilling psychological thriller about the sin of envy. Jacques Charrier is the baby-faced rat who wrecks a marriage and causes a murder because others' happiness makes him angry.

TELEVISION

Wednesday, June 5

Naked City (ABC, 10-11 p.m.).* Burgess Meredith is an alcoholic poet trying to get back manuscripts he exchanged for drink. Repeat.

Thursday, June 6

The Nurses (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Kim Hunter guest-stars as a nurse who drives herself at an unreasonable pace for mysterious reasons.

Friday, June 7

The Jack Paar Program (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Anne Bancroft, Buddy Hackett, Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Color.

Eyewitness (CBS, 10:30-11 p.m.). The top news story of the week.

Saturday, June 8

Wide World of Sports (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Grand Prix of Europe auto race from Monaco.

Saturday Night at the Movies (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Richard Burton, James Mason in The Desert Rats.

Fight of the Week (ABC, 10 p.m. to conclusion). Welterweights Emile Griffith v. Luis Rodriguez.

Sunday, June 9

Issues and Answers (ABC, 2:30-3 p.m.). President Radhakrishnan of India, on a state visit to the U.S.

Sixth Annual Buick Open Golf Tournament (NBC, 4:30-6 p.m.). From Warwick Hills Club in Grand Blanc, Mich.

The Twentieth Century (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). A profile of the late Frank Lloyd Wright. Repeat.

Du Pont Show of the Week (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Art Carney stars in a play about the last-surviving comedian in a society where comedy has become a capital offense. Color.

Monday, June 10

Monday Night at the Movies (NBC, 7:30-9:30 p.m.). Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr. Color.

David Brinkley's Journal (NBC, 10-10:30 p.m.). Report on Nevada's marriage mills. Color. Repeat.

Tuesday, June 11

Chet Huntley Reporting (NBC, 10:30-11 p.m.). New York City's project for aiding slum children.

THEATER

On Broadway

She Loves Me is an old-fashioned musical that believes in love and has an up-to-date way of showing it, even if it is set in a perfume shop in Old Budapest. He (Daniel Massey) and She (Barbara Cook) make wistful music together.

Photo Finish reduces the Seven Ages of Man to four--20, 40, 60 and 80--and puts them all onstage at the same time. Author-Director-Star Peter Ustinov, as the 80-year-old, plays philosophical host to his earlier selves, and he treats them, and life, as balefully amusing.

Enter Laughing, by Joseph Stein, has been stained with the familiar finish of Jewish family comedy, but the splintery grain of life still shows through it.

Strange Interlude, by Eugene O'Neill, commits the vibrant resources of the Actors Studio Theater to a 4 1/2 -hour play that would be more than a little stale and distinctly interminable without them. What salvages the drama is the emotional integrity of Geraldine Page and her acting confreres.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. A history professor (Arthur Hill) and his bitter half (Uta Hagen) mercilessly tell all the news that's not fit to print about each other.

Never Too Late, by Sumner Arthur Long. Unintentional fatherhood at 60 makes Paul Ford a lumber merchant of most hilariously sorrowful countenance, and turns a one-joke comedy into a nightlong cavalcade of laughs.

Beyond the Fringe is a civilized, devil-may-care revue in which four monstrously clever young Englishmen raise merry hob with the Establishment.

Little Me wears its high-polish frivolities with a sophisticated air. The musical's funmaster-in-chief is Sid Caesar, who has never been droller.

Off Broadway

The Boys from Syracuse. Breeding tells, and this musical is a thoroughbred, originally sired by Shakespeare (Comedy of

Errors) out of Plautus. The Rodgers tunes are a lilting delight, the Hart lyrics are a tonic to the ear, and a Most Adorable Cutie award should be bestowed on the bewitchingly gifted Julienne Marie.

Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello, offers a model revival of a modern classic.

BOOKS

Best Reading

The Shoes of the Fisherman, by Morris West. Catholic Novelist West imagines a Russian who becomes Pope just as his onetime interrogator becomes head of the Soviets. The resulting moral dialogue between God's man and Communism's master is skillfully woven into a texture of high drama.

The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George, by Lord Beaverbrook. An intimate account of the events that in 1922 ended the career of one of the greatest of England's Prime Ministers, by a man who had a large part in his downfall.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by C. G. Jung. In this posthumous autobiography, the late great Swiss psychologist traces his life in dreams, offering some startling insights into a mind that at the end was in flight from its century, from science and particularly from Freud.

Our Mother's House, by Julian Gloag. A little masterpiece of the macabre in which seven London youngsters bury their mother in the garden, clout Dad with a poker, and evolve the forms of a religion based on the dead.

The Tin Drum, by Guenter Grass. A grotesque dwarfs-eye view of the Third Reich and its aftermath told by the most powerfully imaginative novelist to emerge in postwar Germany.

Speculations About Jakob, by Uwe Johnson. Writing in a fragmented style, another gifted young German uses a whodunit plot to explore the small tensions and concerns of his divided world.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Glass-Blowers, Du Maurier (2, last week)

2. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour An Introduction, Salinger (1)

3. Seven Days in May, Knebel and Bailey (3)

4. When the Legends Die, Borland (8)

5. Fail-Safe, Burdick and Wheeler (10)

6. The Sand Pebbles, McKenna (5)

7. The Tin Drum, Grass (7)

8. Grandmother and the Priests, Caldwell (4)

9. The Moonflower Vine, Carleton (6) 10. The Moon-Spinners, Stewart (9)

NONFICTION 1. Travels with Charley, Steinbeck (2)

2. The Whole Truth and Nothing But, Hopper (1)

3. The Fire Next Time, Baldwin (8)

4. I Owe Russia $1,200, Hope (7)

5. The Great Hunger, Woodham-Smith (5)

6. O Ye Jigs & Juleps!, Hudson (6)

7. The Day They Shook the Plum Tree, Lewis (9)

8. The Feminine Mystique, Friedan (10)

9. The Ordeal of Power, Hughes (3) 10. Forever Free, Adamson (4)

* All times E.D.T.

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