TELEVISION

THE GEMINI 8 MISSION. Splashdown for the three-day Gemini 8 flight is scheduled for Friday, March 18, if all goes well, followed by color films of the space walk.

Wednesday, March 16 BATMAN (ABC, 7:30-8 p.m.).* Julie Newmar, who played a robot last season on "My Living Doll," unbends for a supple guest appearance as the Catwoman in "The Purr-fect Crime."

CHRYSLER PRESENTS A BOB HOPE COMEDY SPECIAL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A daring mixture of unlike comic elixirs--Lee Marvin, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters--which may blend into a palatable draught.

Thursday, March 17

CBS THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIE (CBS, 9-11:15 p.m.). The Notorious Landlady, with Kim Novak and Jack Lemmon. Gilbert and Sullivan fans will enjoy the Pirates of Penzance band concert at the end of this film--about 10:50, to be safe.

Saturday, March 19

THE NATIONAL INVITATIONAL BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT (CBS, 2-4 p.m.). The finals from Manhattan's Madison Square Garden.

Sunday, March 20

CBS SPORTS SPECTACULAR (CBS, 2:30-4 p.m.). The U.S. Alpine and International Ski championships from Stowe, Vt. Saturday events will be taped, but the Sunday ones will be live.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). "Woman Doctor in Viet Nam," a documentary about Dr. Pat Smith, who runs the 40-bed Catholic Mission Hospital in Kontum, 255 miles northeast of Saigon.

THE REFORMATION (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola are anchormen for this special on Europe in the 16th century.

THE SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:45 p.m.). In this cinema version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, lovesick Psychiatrist Jason Robards cannot save himself (or the film) from being destroyed by his psychotic wife and patient, Jennifer Jones. Intriguing for those who think Jung.

Tuesday, March 22

CAROL + 2 (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). "Carol" = Burnett and "2" = Lucille Ball + Zero Mostel. With that O in there, the sum should be impressive.

THEATER

On Broadway

PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! When a man buries his past, he rarely faces the grave dry-eyed. But Brian Friel applies the saving sponge of humor to the Irish sentiment pouring from his play, and Dubliners Donal Donnelly and Patrick Bedford, as twin images of the hero, stir up a fine farrago of laughter and tears.

SWEET CHARITY. As a dancing doxy with a heart of gold, Gwen Verdon is one of nature's eternally winning losers. Choreographer Bob Fosse adds redeeming grace to Neil Simon's feeble script.

INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE. Sunk in mediocrity, trapped in middle life, self-accusing and self-condemned, John Osborne's anti-hero spews out a caustically funny anathema on his world and his fate. In the lead, Nicol Williamson is scaldingly good.

THE PERSECUTION AND ASSASSINATION OF MARAT AS PERFORMED BY THE INMATES OF THE ASYLUM OF CHARENTON UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE is a shot of dramatic adrenaline. People who demand theatrical tranquilizers had better stay away.

CACTUS FLOWER is a French farce successfully transplanted to the U.S. by Director Abe Burrows. Handling dialogue like a bone-dry martini, Nurse Lauren Bacall is all efficiency in the office, but predictably cuts loose on the dance floor with some torso twisting that causes Dentist Barry Nelson to drop his dentures.

Off Broadway

THE MAD SHOW. Styled after the sappy smile of Mad magazine's trademark moron, Alfred E. Neuman, this revue tickles where it might have stung. But its cast still reaches the funny bone, satirizing everything from soap-flake operas to hi-fi nuts.

HOGAN'S GOAT. The dialogue is blather and brogue, but the important thing is Playwright William Alfred's unvarnished view of priest and politician campaigning for authority over the Irish electorate in the Brooklyn of 1890.

RECORDS

Pop Hits

RUBBER SOUL (Capitol). Ringo playing an organ? George plunking a sitar? Paul crooning in French? George Martin rattling off baroque piano riffs? The Beatles are becoming more sophisticated as they concentrate on soul music, and their eleventh album is selling even better than the other ten.

SOUNDS OF SILENCE (Columbia) is Simon and Garfunkel's biggest single, and the title of their second current hit album. Low-keyed and harmonious folk singers who teamed up for the first time in sixth grade, the newly successful duo offers ten of Paul Simon's songs with their occasionally enigmatic and slightly ominous lyrics ("The people bowed and prayed,/ To the neon god they made").

JUST LIKE US! (Columbia) might well be called Just Like Them!, because Paul Revere and the Raiders put one in mind of so many other rock-'n'-roll groups, along with a dash of Dylan and a roll of Stones. But Paul, who comes from Portland, Ore., plays a rocking, rollicking organ, and the colonially clad quintet (seen on Where the Action Is) may make whole regiments of fans waver from their British alignments.

DECEMBER'S CHILDREN (London), which includes the hit single Get Off of My Cloud, is another Rolling Stones foray into rhythm and blues. There are signs no bigger than an LP's band that the Stones are softening. As Tears Go By is a weeper that Bobby Vinton might sing, though not so well as Mick Jagger, who is actually accompanied by violins.

GOING TO A GO-GO (Tamla). "Smokey" Robinson and the Miracles are consistent top runners in rhythm and blues. The fascination of their music lies in the way their voices chase each other and intertwine in fleeting harmonies to a comparatively muffled but hypnotic beat.

THE SUPREMES AT THE COPA (Motown). In songs like Baby Love and Stop! In the Name of Love, Florence, Diana and Mary show why they are perhaps the best-known evangels of the Detroit Sound (TIME, March 4). But the Sound is frequently abandoned as the girls adopt some Broadway airs (I Am Woman, Make Someone Happy).

FLOWERS ON THE WALL (Columbia), a catchy and ironic song about a left-behind lover ("Countin' flowers on the wall,/ That don't bother me at all") was taken immediately into the repertory of the rock-'n'-roll set, but most of the other songs in this album (This Ole House, The Whiffenpoof Song) will appeal to other audiences. The four Statler Brothers, who began by singing Gospel at tent meetings in the South, specialize in country music.

THE 4 SEASONS' GOLD VAULT OF HITS (Philips). It's not only the sound but the sentiments of the Seasons that are so durable. Never mind if the quartet seems to whine. Its members are chroniclers of love affairs nixed, by parents ("My folks won't let me") and hexed by small allowances ("Think what your family would say to a poor boy like me!").

CINEMA

THE GROUP. Under the expert tutelage of Director Sidney Lumet, eight captivating young actresses rediscover the Roosevelt era in an irresistible drama based on Mary McCarthy's bitchy, college-bred bestseller about what happened to Vassar's class of '33 after commencement day. Joan Hackett, Jessica Walter, Shirley Knight and Joanna Pettet are the most active alumnae.

THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET. This poignant Czech drama hurls the question of universal guilt into a tranquil but non-occupied Slovakian village in 1942. The case concerns a Chaplinesque little nobody (Josef Kroner) who, because he is an Aryan, is put in charge of the business, and the fate, of a shiningly innocent old Jewish shopkeeper (Ida Kaminska).

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW. A rare Biblical film, made with nonprofessional actors and a script based wholly on Scripture, this modest, unassuming drama on the life of Christ is the work of Director Pier Paolo Pasolini, an Italian Communist.

KING AND COUNTRY. Injustice triumphs in Director Joseph Losey's story about a doomed World War I deserter (Tom Courtenay) and the officer (Dirk Bogarde) who fights to save him.

THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX. Survival seems more urgent and exciting than usual when James Stewart, Richard Attenborough and a cynical crew crawl out of a plane crash in the Sahara and try to patch up their differences long enough to jerry-build a one-engined getaway plane from the wreckage.

OTHELLO. This filmed stage production stars Sir Laurence Olivier playing Shakespeare's Moor in blackface with inexhaustible virtuosity, though his characterization shifts at times from classic to calypso.

DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Omar Sharif and Julie Christie lead an exceptional cast through romance and revolution in Director David Lean's eye-filling facsimile of Pasternak's Russia.

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. The grey nether world of espionage, in a masterly re-creation by Director Martin Ritt (Hud), with Richard Burton as the disillusioned British agent on a cruelly subtle mission behind the Wall. Oskar Werner is his East German quarry.

BOOKS

Best Reading

GARIBALDI & HIS ENEMIES, by Christopher Hibbert. The vastly confused and equally grand career of Giuseppe Garibaldi, most romantic and most effective of those who waged the 19th century fight for Italian nationhood, is made crisply clear by British Historian Hibbert.

GREENSTONE, by Sylvia Ashton-Warner. Maori and British-descended New Zealanders come together in a graceful parable of age and childhood, mysticism and reality, told with talent enough to create a subtle celebration of life.

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL, by Kenneth Rexroth. With a cast of 1,000 people least likely to get into Who's Who, Kenneth Rexroth, last of the old bohemians, crams the stage of a crowded biography. Fortunately, the old political evangelist ceases to wave the flags of social revolt in favor of chronicling the reign of a minor king of the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

AUSTERLITZ, by Claude Manceron. The campaign that Napoleon always regarded as his tactical masterpiece is meticulously reconstructed hour by hour, from inception to final triumph over the combined armies of Austria and Russia.

THE NOWHERE CITY, by Alison Lurie. Because Novelist Lurie can make preposterous characters come alive, her tour of Los Angeles' gaudier unrealities is just--but just--worth the rubberneck fare.

MARQUIS DE SADE, SELECTED LETTERS, edited by Gilbert Lely. From prison and the lunatic asylum, the Marquis wrote to his mother-in-law, his wife and his valet, hoping that someone would understand. These letters make a human figure of the ogre whose actions and fantasies turned his name into an eponym for the pain that, to some, gives pleasure.

THE COMPLETE LETTERS OF LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGUE, VOLUME I (1708-1720), collected and edited by Robert Halsband. A beauty, a wit, an essayist admired by Addison, a satirist who rivaled Pope, Lady Mary was also acclaimed the greatest of the great letter writers of the 18th century.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Source, Michener (1)

2. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (4)

3. The Double Image, MacInnes (3)

4. Those Who Love, Stone (2)

5. The Comedians, Greene (5)

6. The Lockwood Concern, O'Hara (7)

7. The Billion Dollar Brain, Deighton (8)

8. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (9)

9. Up the Down Staircase, Kaufman (6)

10. The Rabbi, Gordon (10)

NONFICTION

1. In Cold Blood, Capote (1)

2. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger (4)

3. The Proud Tower, Tuchman (3)

4. Games People Play, Berne (5)

5. A Gift of Prophecy, Montgomery (7)

6. Kennedy, Sorensen (2)

7. The Last 100 Days, Toland (8)

8. The Penkovskiy Papers, Penkovskiy (9)

9. Yes I Can, Davis and Boyar (6)

10. Is Paris Burning? Collins and Lapierre (10)

*All times E.S.T.

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