On Broadway

TELEVISION

Wednesday, December 1 BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Gary Merrill, Joan Hackett and Stuart Whitman star in a drama, "The Highest Fall of All." Color. I SPY (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). In "Weight of the World," Agents Scott and Robinson try to block the plans of Red Chinese scientists who want to pollute Japanese water supplies with bubonic plague. Color.

Thursday, December 2

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). Richard Burton and Barbara Rush in The Bramble Bush, the story of a doctor who returns to his home town to care for an incurably ill friend. Color.

Friday, December 3

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). "The Virtue Affair." Illya and Napoleon deal with a fanatic in France who is trying to perfect an insecticide bomb that would ruin wine. Color.

TRIALS OF O'BRIEN (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Dead End on Flugel Street." Attorney O'Brien defends Burlesque Comedian Boozey Bailey (Milton Berle), accused of murdering his wife.

Saturday, December 4 GET SMART! (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). "My Nephew the Spy." Secret Agent Smart attempts to conceal his occupation from visiting relatives who arrive just as KAOS agents are trying to kill him. Color.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). The Big Carnival. Kirk Douglas is a small-town reporter bent on making the big time.

Sunday, December 5

MEET THE PRESS (NBC, 1-1:30 p.m.). Senator Robert F. Kennedy is guest. Color.

G.E. FANTASY HOUR (NBC, 5:30-6:30 p.m.). Burl Ives is the off-camera voice of a snowman who sings and narrates Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, an animated Christmas story.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:30 p.m.). William Holden and Clifton Webb in Satan Never Sleeps, the story of a priest caught behind the Bamboo Curtain. Color.

Tuesday, December 7

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). Kirk Douglas again, this time with Nick Adams in The Hook, about a North Korean pilot imprisoned aboard an American freighter.

THEATER

MARCEL MARCEAU is a stylish musician of motion, an exciting architect of space, an eloquent poet of silence. He is the pantomimic accountant of the laughably saddening costs of being human, with the knowledge that no matter how funny the pratfall, the heart is where the hurt is.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. Peter Shaffer's historical drama tosses a pebble of thought into a sea of spectacle. Although the resulting ripples are small, they are enough to give Christopher Plummer an opportunity to show consummate skill in playing a tortured Pizarro searching for Peruvian treasure and a rebirth of faith.

GENERATION. Old Trooper Henry Fonda finds himself bucking the winds of youth and anticonformity when he visits his newly wed daughter and son-in-law. Their Greenwich Village loft is already a fortress of individualism, and, if they get their way, will soon be a delivery room for their at-any-moment baby. They get their way. The audience gets the laughs.

HALF A SIXPENCE, a freshly minted musical, is Cockney Performer Tommy Steele's contribution to the British balance of payments and the Broadway entertainment quotient.

THE ODD COUPLE. Scarred from the battlefield of marriage, two husbands try to find peace and comfort in an all-male stronghold. After some sidesplitting domestic misadventures, they decide to go back into the marital fray.

LUV. Suburban Sartre and soap-opera sensibilities are the springs from which three moderns drink in Murray Schisgal's hilarious satire of the chatter of Freudian analysis and the jargon of the theater of the absurd.

Off Broadway

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE looks into the home and mind of a Brooklyn longshoreman who destroys self and family rather than lose a beloved niece to another man.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ENTIRE WORLD AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF COLE PORTER REVISITED. The witty and urbane talent of the tunemaster is shown to full advantage in this sprightly revue of his lesser-known songs.

RECORDS

Ballads & Broadway

FRANK SINATRA: SEPTEMBER OF MY YEARS (Reprise) is music to brood by as Frankie at 50 reflects on yesterday's loves and warms himself on old memories (Hello, Young Lovers; September Song; Last Night When We Were Young). Tabloid readers do not have to believe a word of it, but he does sound romantically resigned to it all.

PETULA CLARK: THE WORLD'S GREATEST INTERNATIONAL HITS (Warner). The Downtown darling of the younger generation smoothly shifts gears and heads uptown, where the ballad lovers live, picking her wistful way through ethnic pop favorites like Volare, Girl From Ipanerna and Never on Sunday. The beat is still tricky enough to please the youngsters, although they might balk at her slow version of Britain's second national anthem-- I Want to Hold Your Hand.

JOHN GARY SINGS YOUR ALL-TIME FAVORITE SONGS (RCA Victor). He sounds like Muzak with words--a bland, clean-cut voice that has made him a favorite with the over-35 ladies who sent his album sales soaring. All the old standards (Autumn Leaves, Night and Day, Star Dust, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes) seem to get the same beat and treatment, making them interchangeable.

BARBRA STREISAND: MY NAME IS BARBRA, TWO (Columbia). Whether clowning her way through a medley of down-and-out songs (Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?; I Got Plenty of Nothin') or recalling the wondrous first moment of love (He Touched Me), the Streisand zing for living is still the most zestful around. She polishes off a couple of lesser-known Rodgers and Hart tunes and, best of all, a ricky-tick rendition of the Fanny Brice favorite, Second Hand Rose.

TONY'S GREAT HITS, VOLUME III (Columbia). Tony Bennett seems to sing nothing but hits: In San Francisco, I Wanna Be Around, Who Can I Turn To, This Is All I Ask. The ingredients of his success: a voice that makes a virtue out of sounding like incipient laryngitis, a delivery distinguished for being relaxed even in a field of relaxed singers, and top arrangements.

DEAN MARTIN: I'M THE ONE WHO LOVES YOU (Reprise). Dean trades his Neapolitan approach to a song for a country-and-Western beat that fits in fine with his own easy style. Guitars twang and fiddles saw the hillbilly sound in King of the Road, My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You, Walk On By--all sung without a trace of tomato paste.

ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER (RCA Victor). Sometimes listening to the album made from a musical is better than sitting through the show--but not this time. Alan Jay Lerner (who wrote the lyrics for the unforgettable My Fair Lady) and Burton Lane (who composed Finian's Rainbow's fine music) miss the Viennese schmaltz of a Hammerstein or a Loewe that would give these songs warmth. Even the soft-sharp voice of Barbara Harris cannot make up for the lack of feeling.

CINEMA

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. A betrayed wife (Giulietta Masina) lets her mind wander off to a far-out Freudian three-ring circus conjured up by Italy's Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2 whose effects are breathtaking to behold.

THE LEATHER BOYS. Rita Tushingham, as a seriocomic British strumpet, nearly loses her teen-aged husband (Colin Campbell) to his motorcycling mate (Dudley Sutton) in Director Sidney J. Furie's slice-of-life drama about an unsavory triangle.

NEVER TOO LATE. Unplanned parenthood creates problems for an older couple. Maureen O'Sullivan and Paul Ford repeat their Broadway roles as if the jokes about middle-aged love-in-bloom were new.

KING RAT. The struggle for survival in a Japanese prison camp spells prosperity for an unscrupulous G.I. con man (George Segal) in Writer-Director Bryan Forbes's brutal drama, based on the novel by James Clavell.

REPULSION. This classic chiller by Writer-Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water) gathers images of horror from the shattered psyche of a lissome French manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) whose sexual fantasies drive her to murder.

THE HILL. Sean Connery matches wits with a sadistic sergeant major (Harry Andrews) and forcefully illustrates man's inhumanity to man at a British army stockade during World War II.

THE RAILROAD MAN. Director Pietro Germi (Divorce--Italian Style) plays the title role in his sentimental 1956 drama about a 50-year-old train engineer whose life goes off the track.

TO DIE IN MADRID. Old newsreels recall the tragedy of Spain's disastrous civil war (1936-39) in Producer-Director Frederic Rossif's masterly compilation, narrated most movingly by John Gielgud and Irene Worth.

DARLING. This stabbing satire of a play-girl's progress from obscurity to celebrity owes much to Julie Christie's stunning presence in the leading role.

THE MOMENT OF TRUTH. A rigorous but eloquent ritual drama about the short tragic life of a great bullfighter, perceptively played by Spanish Matador Miguel Mateo.

BOOKS

Jest Reading

THE MAIAS, by Eca de Queiroz. A minor language is a cloak of invisibility for the man who writes in it. The greatness of Eca de Queiroz (1845-1900), for example, has been almost completely concealed from the English-reading world by the mere fact that he wrote in Portuguese. Happily, the cloak is now removed by this handsome translation of a massive satire that anatomized Portugal's pathetic aristocracy and stands today, against any standards, as a major 19th century novel.

THE SEA YEARS, by Jerry Allen. Everybody knows that Joseph Conrad spent his youth before the mast and his middle years composing some of the finest sea stories in the language. What nobody knew, until Author Allen documented it in this sober but fascinating monograph, is that Conrad's stories are fact-for-fact, act-for-act transcriptions of the hairy adventures of his youth.

THE MAN WHO ROBBED THE ROBBER BARONS, by Andy Logan. The shoddy story of Colonel William d'Alton Mann, a courtly Manhattan publisher who looked like Santa Claus but carried a sackful of hush money, is told with skill and glee in this brisk biography.

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, by Peter Matthiessen. A splendid novel that is a compelling parable of religious rebirth as well as a superior adventure story about a primitive South American tribe and an American soldier of fortune.

THE NEZ PERCE INDIANS AND THE OPENING OF THE NORTHWEST, by Alvin M. Josephy Jr. From 1805 to 1877, Oregon's Nez Perce Indians were engaged in an epic struggle to preserve their identity; 750 of them retreated across four states until they were surrounded by U.S. troops and forced onto reservations. Author Josephy has written a big, thoroughly researched account of the trek.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. The Source, Michener (1 last week) 2. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (4)

3. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

4. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3) 5. Hotel, Hailey (7) 6. The Honey Badger, Ruark (8)

7. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (6)

8. The Rabbi, Gordon

9. Thomas, Mydans (10)

10. The Looking Glass War, le Carre (9)

NONFICTION 1. Kennedy, Sorensen (1) 2. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (2) 3. Intern, Doctor X (5) 4. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (6) 5. Games People Play, Berne (3) 6. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (7) 7. The Making of the President, 1964, White (4) 8. My Twelve Years with John F.

Kennedy, Lincoln (10) 9. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (8) 10. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger

* All times E.S.T.

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