Wednesday, April 29

CBS REPORTS (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.)* First of a two-part series on French President Charles de Gaulle, his motives, philosophy and aims.

BEN CASEY (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). George C. Scott guest-stars as a brilliant surgeon who forges another doctor's name to obtain morphine for himself. Repeat.

Friday, May 1

THE BOB HOPE THEATER (NBC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). George Peppard is an actor bitter at his inability to find work.

THE JACK PAAR SHOW (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Guests: Jonathan Winters, Art Carney, Jayne Mansfield.

Saturday, May 2

THE TRIPLE CROWN (CBS, 5-6 p.m.). The 90th running of the Kentucky Derby.

THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Louis Jourdan is host to Anna Maria Alberghetti and Henny Youngman.

Sunday, May 3

DIRECTIONS '64 (ABC, 2-2:30 p.m.). The excavation of the ancient city of Tel Ashdod, Israel, now in the second year of a three-year excavation program. Repeat.

12TH ANNUAL GOLF TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS (NBC, 4-5:30 p.m.). The finals of the four-day competition at Desert Inn Country Club, Las Vegas. Color.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Biography of Lenin and Trotsky.

DU PONT SHOW OF THE WEEK (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). One of NBC News's Creative Projects, this is the real story of two fifth-grade teachers at a "culturally deprived" public school in Brooklyn.

THEATER

On Broadway

HAMLET is played by Richard Burton as Hamlet would have liked to have been --masterly, heroic, and never self-doubting. The tragedy is missing, but the production is lucid, fresh and vivid, and Burton makes the lines ring with present meaning rather than bygone eloquence.

HIGH SPIRITS. Such wildly improbable sprites as Bea Lillie and Tammy Grimes spook the musical version of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit into comic afterlife. Danny Daniels' dancers are wide-eyed and their steps nimbly inventive.

FUNNY GIRL. Singing, loving, wheedling, Barbra Streisand is a shower of bright lights as she re-creates Comedienne Fanny Brice's starshoot over Broadway.

ANY WEDNESDAY. As sunny and as teary as a fickle April day, Sandy Dennis makes the mistressing game just slightly more complicated than doll housekeeping.

DYLAN. Alec Guinness plays Dylan Thomas on his last U.S. reading tour, his humor biting but not bitter, his heart in neither his life nor his poetry.

HELLO, DOLLY! is a twinkle-toed musical, thanks to Director-Choreographer Gower Champion's dancers and to a raffish, resourceful matchmaker, Carol Channing.

NOBODY LOVES AN ALBATROSS. As a knavish TV writer-producer -- not without times E.D.T. charm -- Robert Preston uses the backfire from his faulty schemes to set bonfires under the next person he wants to roast.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Barely married and blissful but bickering, Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford cope with each other and with some engagingly kooky visitors.

Off Broadway

THE LOWER DEPTHS. In a crude beam-and-burlap basement, a group of humanity's dregs inhabit a no-exit hell of thoughtlessness, meanness and cruelty for each other, until a stranger for a while tries to set their lives in motion again and soothes them with the balm of understanding.

AFTER THE FALL. Making his actors enter and exit like vagrant thoughts of memory, Playwright Arthur Miller tangles them in the web of man's hurt and guilt.

IN WHITE AMERICA testifies evocatively to the patience, humor and bitterness of the U.S. Negro as he has suffered the negation of his constitutional rights and human dignity.

RECORDS

Virtuosos

PROKOFIEV: PIANO CONCERTO NO. 3. (Kyril Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic; Mercury). Byron Janis blasts off like a rocket with the orchestra ablaze behind him, and even when they get back to earth, they are still incandescent. The First Rachmaninoff Concerto on the other side is equally brilliant. A harmonious international collaboration, the record was made with U.S. equipment in Bolshoi Hall and won the French Oscar, a Grand Prix du Disque.

BEETHOVEN: SONATAS NO. 12 AND 18 (London). Wilhelm Backhaus, 80, has spent a lifetime studying and restudying Beethoven. He is now rerecording some of the sonatas, with a technique that is still formidable, an interpretation that is firm, majestic and less personal than that of Artur Schnabel, his late great contemporary. Only in the Funeral March of the 12th is Backhaus disappointing; he seems to be impatient, even bored.

GLAZOUNOV: VIOLIN CONCERTO (Walter Hendl conducting; RCA Victor). Heifetz in a sparkling new performance of the 59-year-old work by the late cosmopolitan Russian, who studied with Rimsky-Korsakov but was more influenced by Brahms. Filled with musing melodies, effortless ornamental passages and infectious rhythms, the three movements are played in one romantic sweep.

THE VIRTUOSO FLUTE (Antonio Janigro conducting I Solisti di Zagreb; Vanguard). Cleveland-born Julius Baker plays the Telemann Suite in A Minor for Flute and Strings in sensitive partnership with the chamber ensemble of soloists from Zagreb. Telemann gives the flute seven chances to preen and prance beside the violins, in an Italian air, some minuets, a polonaise.

SCHUMANN AND LALO CELLO CONCERTOS (Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting the London Symphony Orchestra; Mercury). Janos Starker, 39, perhaps the finest of the new generation of cellists, shows how to succeed without sounding like Casals: every note is clearly articulated and virtually free of vibrato. The Schumann, written during a period of joy and serenity, is allowed to speak eloquently for itself. Starker, who can also play like a mad gypsy, shows his Hungarian heritage in the Lalo.

THE GLORY OF CREMONA (Decca). For an elaborate and instructive violin lesson, Ruggiero Ricci collected $750,000 worth of great instruments, including six Stradivarii and five Guarnerii. To show their differences, Ricci plays on each the same short phrase from Bruch. To bring out their beauty, he plays on each a different short piece (Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, Paganini, Handel, Brahms). "The more output and resource an instrument has," Ricci says, "the more difficult it is to handle." He proves that he can handle them all, but like Heifetz and Stern, he favors the Guarnerii, capable of more bite and passion than the more fluid and poetic Strads, which are the first choice of Milstein, Oistrakh, Francescatti and Menuhin.

CINEMA

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. The incredible adventures and immoderate amours of Agent 007, James Bond (Sean Connery), lead to Istanbul in this uproarious parody of Ian Fleming's fiction.

BECKET. Richard Burton as England's 12th century martyr opposes Peter O'Toole as King Henry II in this superbly played, eye-and ear-filling film spectacle based on Jean Anouilh's pungent historical drama.

THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT introduces Tippy Walker and Merrie Spaeth as a pair of antic New York juveniles scotching the adult delinquency of a lecherous concert pianist (Peter Sellers).

THE SERVANT is Director Joseph Losey's slick, frequently spellbinding study of class distinction in Britain. Dirk Bogarde contributes a perfect blend of good manners and menace as the "gentleman's gentleman" who destroys his master.

YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW. The knowing eye of Director Vittorio De Sica scans Italy's greatest natural wonder, Sophia Loren, whose Vesuvian warmth bubbles through the three-part comedy co-starring Marcello Mastroianni.

THE SILENCE is celestial, the passion terrestrial in Ingmar Bergman's bold, beautifully acted drama of life among the damned. Pleading humanity's case are a lesbian, a nymphomaniac and an innocent child.

DR. STRANGELOVE, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB.

Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott and Peter Sellers detonate the bitter laughs in Stanley Kubrick's nightmare comedy about inadvertent nuclear war.

THE GUEST. In this film version of Harold Pinter's offbeat drama The Caretaker, Donald Pleasence stunningly re-creates his stage role as a grubby, conniving, bigoted old derelict.

TOM JONES. "Best" Director Tony Richardson's wonderfully wicked assault on Fielding's 18th century classic proves that the wages of sin add up to a boodle of 1963 Oscars--four in all.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE SPIRE, by William Golding. Overriding church, chapter and parish, a saintly dean drives his architect to build a huge, prayer-envisioned stone spire on the shaky foundations of his cathedral, and then realizes on his deathbed that his spiritual inspiration was probably only worldly ambition. A metaphysical summation of his four previous novels (Lord of the Flies, Free Fall, etc.), William Golding's medieval fable is a provocative and often brilliant statement of the helpless and iniquitous nature of man.

DREAMTIGERS, by Jorge Luis Borges.

Going blind, Argentina's greatest writer has turned inward to the mirrors of his mind, and in this slight volume of poems and parables has dreamed himself into a bewildering multiplicity of recollections and roles.

FLOOD, by Robert Penn Warren. With his considerable talent for narrative and sense of place, the author of All the King's Men observes Fiddlersburg, Tenn., in the strange, revealing twilight that precedes the town's disappearance beneath the flooding waters of a federal dam project.

FIVE PLAYS, by Federico Garcia Lorca.

These dramas, less well known than Lorca's tragedies, have the same soaring poetry, which makes them better to read than to act.

THE WAPSHOT SCANDAL, by John Cheever. A companion novel to The Wapshot Chronicle, in which the family ghosts of the Wapshots' past prove more enduring than the sterile realities of today's computer communities and suburbia.

KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE, by Shirley Ann Grau. Miscegenation, political vengeance and racial hatred unto the third generation are the Faulknerian themes, but Author Grau writes with such quiet directness that the violence serves to define, by contrast, a deeper sense of order and love.

ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN, by Kingsley Amis.

Deprived of the social status which protects him at home, a gross, snobbish English publisher makes the mistake of taking on Americans--male and female--on their own suburban ground.

JUBB, by Keith Waterhouse. Compassion and the author's ear for common and illiterate syntax translate this raw case history of a drab little fetishist into a telling portrait of a desperate human being--one of the unscrupulous meek who not only inherit the earth but know what to do with it.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carre (1 last week)

2. The Group, McCarthy (2)

3. Convention, Knebel and Bailey (3)

4. The Wapshot Scandal, Cheever (4)

5. The Venetian Affair, Maclnnes (7)

6. The Deputy, Hochhuth (5)

7. The Martyred, Kim (6)

8. Von Ryan's Express, Westheimer (9)

9. The Night in Lisbon, Remarque (8)

10. The Night of the Generals, Kirst

NONFICTION

1. Four Days, U.P.I, and American Heritage (1)

2. A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, Bishop (2)

3. Diplomat Among Warriors, Murphy (3)

4. Profiles in Courage, Kennedy (4)

5. The Naked Society, Packard (6)

6. The Green Felt Jungle, Reid and Demaris (7)

7. My Years with General Motors, ' Sloan (5)

8. When the Cheering Stopped, Smith (8)

9 Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy (9)

10. Elegance, Dariaux

* All times E. D. T.

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