TELEVISION

Wednesday, December 15 CHRYSLER PRESENTS A BOB HOPE COMEDY SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Guests include Jack Benny and Bing Crosby.

Thursday, December 16 CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). John Ford's Two Rode Together (1961), in which Texas Marshal James Stewart and Army Lieutenant Richard Widmark try to rescue some white women (long held captive by the Comanches) who don't want to be disquawified.

Friday, December 17

MR. MAGOO'S CHRISTMAS CAROL (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). A repeat of a special (of Christmas past), with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill and Scrooge by Magoo.

Saturday, December 18 THIS PROUD LAND (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). A special celebrating the Great Plains and the Rockies, narrated by Robert Preston, Laraine Day and Mildred Dunnock; music by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the Rosebud Sioux Indians, who will sing their new tribal song, Seventy-Six Trombones.

Sunday, December 19

RELIGIOUS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). A report, filmed in Rome, on the four-year Ecumenical Council.

I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY (NBC, 12:30-1 p.m.). Hanukkah drama based on a collection of drawings and poems created by children in a World War II Nazi extermination camp.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Operation Gwamba," the rescue of more than 10,000 South American animals from 870 square miles about to be flooded by a dam on the Suriname River. This show begins a new season for Twentieth Century; in color for the first time.

Monday, December 20

SUPERMARKET SWEEP (ABC, 11-11:30 a.m.). To replace its high-class and low-rated discussion show Young Set, ABC has come up with two no-class game shows (see also below). Supermarket Sweep will originate from different stores each week, feature local contestants racing around the market scooping up as many groceries as possible. Premiere.

THE DATING GAME (ABC, 11:30 a.m.-noon). "An attractive woman" contestant selects from behind a screen one of three "very eligible bachelors" by asking pertinent questions. Then the show pays for the date. Premiere.

ART LINKLETTER'S HOLLYWOOD TALENT SCOUTS (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). CBS replaces the canceled Steve Lawrence Show with a revival (in color) of last summer's high-rated Hollywood Talent Scouts. Premiere.

VIET NAM: DECEMBER 1965 (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). A news special in color.

Tuesday, December 21 CHRISTMAS BALLET SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). The Nutcracker, a new ren dering in color, with dancers from the New York City Ballet, singers from the Stuttgart Opera and music from the Budapest Philharmonic. Eddie Albert narrates.

COMBAT (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Two-time Oscar Winner Luise Rainer and one time Matinee Idol Ramon Novarro are the oldtime guest stars.

THEATER

On Broadway

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE is a compulsively fascinating 2 1/2-hour dramatic typhoon in which John Osborne's voice--splenetic, grieving, raging--is heard with more furious personal intensity than at any time since Look Back in Anger. As a defeated solicitor for whom life in the modern world has become a playing field of pain, Nicol Williamson, 28, gives a performance of epic dimensions and phenomenal resourcefulness.

YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU has been restored to Broadway with loving care and craft by the APA repertory company. The comic zaniness of the Sycamore family is a delight, and an unforeseen bonus is the tender re-creation of the '30s as a golden age of moneyless innocence.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN is an eye-pleasing spectacle, although it fails to provide dramatic stimulation. Christopher Plummer gives theatrical dimension to Conquistador Pizarro, who cannot achieve peace of mind though he conquers the Inca emperor and gains his gold.

GENERATION. A Chicago advertising man (Henry Fonda) sends his daughter to finishing school, and she ends up in a Greenwich Village loft with the kind of husband who wears blue beads because he likes the way they catch the light. Fonda's confused consternation provides the entertainment.

HALF A SIXPENCE. Tommy Steele spreads a grin across the stage and injects a British musical import with sparkle and bounce.

THE ODD COUPLE. One man's wife left him because he is a slob, the other man's because he's a nitpicking neatnik. The jilted men are surefire flops as roommates but roaring successes on Broadway.

LUV. Playwright Murray Schisgal writes loudly and Director Mike Nichols carries a slapstick in a spoof of a society that out-Freuds Sigmund and out-Friedans Betty.

RECORDS

Jazz THE NEW WAVE IN JAZZ (Impulse!). Five combos, led by avant-garde Jazzmen John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Charles Tolliver, Grachan Moncur and Albert Ayler. "Trane" sets the stage by skywriting his personal hieroglyphics with his tenor sax. Even farther out is Saxophonist Ayler. His Holy Ghost consists of hysterical, sizzling squiggles of sound played fast and high, while a drummer beats insistently, as though knocking on a locked door. "It's about feelings," Ayler explains.

E.S.P. (Columbia). Miles Davis and his fine quintet in abstract musings of their own invention (Agitation by Davis, Iris by Tenor Saxman Wayne Shorter, Mood by Bassist Ronald Carter). Sometimes the drum, bass and piano drive the soloists, but mostly they provide only phantom rhythms under the fluid runs and fragmentary phrases of the trumpet and tenor sax. No one will be tempted to tap a foot or sing along, but few with any E.S.P. at all will stop listening.

ANGEL EYES (Columbia). Dave Brubeck's quartet plays Matt Dennis' songs without words, although Alto Saxophonist Paul Desmond seems to speak sweet somethings in Violets for Your Furs, and Brubeck makes some conventional but well-turned pianistic comments on The Night We Called It a Day.

PLAIN OLD BLUES (Emarcy). Art Hodes at the piano and Truck Parham on bass swing their way through a lexicon of the blues reminiscent of Chicago in the '30s (Washboard Bines, How Long, How Long Blues, The Chimes Blues, Snowy Morning Blues). All very backward-looking, comfortable and exceptionally cheery.

PASTEL BLUES (Philips). Whoever called these blues pastel is colorblind. This is raw, strong and often ugly singing by Nina Simone, who makes one chilling visit to the South (Strange Fruit--"black bodies swinging from the trees") but mostly moans and shouts with gospel fervor about love and loneliness (End of the Line, Ain't No Use). Be My Husband is sung to the accompaniment of a loudly cracking whip.

SING A SONG OF BASIE (Impulse!) A reissue of the 1957 recording that first spotlighted Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross. By singing over their own voices on tape (a process that took 60 hours of recording time), the three remarkably flexible jazz singers create an exciting vocal equivalent of Basic's big band (accompanied by a real Basie rhythm section). Together, the trio sounds the brasses or the reeds, then Annie Ross sings a bright trumpet solo (in Blues Backstage) or with Hendricks a mellow saxophone duet (Two for the Blues).

CINEMA

LAUREL AND HARDY'S LAUGHING 20'S. From one- and two-reel silent comedies made before 1930, Cinema Anthologist Robert Youngson distills the best drollery of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and provides a welcome cure-all for atrophied funnybones.

SANDS OF THE KALAHARI. The makers of Zulu find lively if conventional excitement in the plight of five marooned men, led by Stuart Whitman, and one venturesome woman (Susannah York) who endure heat, hunger and sexual desire after a plane crash in the African desert.

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. Eye-filling fantasies created by Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2) wholly dominate the tale of a placid bourgeoise matron (Giulietta Masina) with a faithless husband, among other things, on her mind.

THE LEATHER BOYS. Director Sidney J. Furie (The Ipcress File) revs up Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton for this exuberant British drama about a teen-age harridan whose husband prefers his homosexual motorcycling mate to home and hearth.

KING RAT. James Clavell's novel about the morality of survival in a Japanese prison camp is an unforgettable screen drama, strongly played by James Fox, Tom Courtenay and George Segal--the latter as a G.I. wheeler-dealer who cashes in on the misery of his fellow inmates.

REPULSION. In London, gentlemen callers seldom survive their yen for a deadly blonde psychopath (Catherine Deneuve), whose inch-by-inch descent into madness is unreeled with monstrous art by Director Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water).

THE HILL. A sandy pyramid separates the men from the boys at a British army stockade in North Africa where Sean

Connery, as a bedeviled prisoner, proves his mettle without benefit of Bond.

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 by John Gielgud and Irene Worth.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A THOUSAND DAYS: JOHN F. KENNEDY IN THE WHITE HOUSE, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Some of Kennedy's advisers stood nearer the President, but none was better equipped than Harvard Historian Schlesinger to pay public respect to his memory. Perceptive as history and vivid as memoir, this--despite its touches of partisanship--is the most balanced assessment yet of the Kennedy years.

THE LITTLE SAINT, by Georges Simenon. In his 500th novel, give or take a dozen or two, the great French whodunist has made a serious and nonviolent attempt to describe the life of an artist, "a perfectly serene character, in immediate contact with nature and life." The extraordinary thing about the book is that it succeeds.

WITHOUT FEAR OR FAVOR, by Walker Lewis. A beguiling, if somewhat biased biography of U.S. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, an uncompromising old constitutionalist, whose decision in the Dred Scott case and steadfast opposition to wartime measures of the Lincoln Administration made him one of the most unpopular men of his time.

THE LOCKWOOD CONCERN, by John O'Hara. Another report from the O'Hara country, this one the story of George Lockwood, whose "concern" is to become a gentleman--a concern which has turned into an O'Hara obsession and, consequently, is a bit boring.

THE PEACEMAKERS, by Richard B. Morris. Historians have traditionally assumed that France was the loyal friend of American independence. Not so, says Historian Morris in this study of the political maneuvers that led to the Peace of Paris (1783). France tried to scuttle the upstart republic, but the attempt was averted by three Yankees (Jay, Franklin and Adams) who played a bad hand so skillfully that they won the better part of the pot.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1 last week)

2. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

3. Airs Above the Ground, Stewart (4)

4. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (3)

5. Hotel, Hailey (5)

6. The Honey Badger, Ruark (6)

7. Thomas, Mydans (10)

8. The Green Berets, Moore (9)

9. The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming (8)

10. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara

NONFICTION

1. Kennedy, Sorensen (1)

2. Games People Play, Berne (4) 3. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (9)

4. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (2)

5. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (3)

6. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (8)

7. A Gift of Joy, Hayes (5)

8. The Making of the President, 1964 White (7)

9. Intern, Doctor X (6) 10. World Aflame, Graham

* All times E.S.T.

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