TELEVISION
Wednesday, September 14
THE VIRGINIAN (NBC, 7:30-9 p.m.).* Charles Bickford, as John Grainger, buys Shiloh ranch and joins the series in the season's opener, with Jo Van Fleet as a bitter widow who tries to drive Grainger off his new property.
BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Julie Harris and Farley Granger combine talents to poison Granger's wife so they can use her money to support their future life in "Nightmare."
ABC STAGE 67 (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Alan (The Russians Are Coming . . .) Arkin stars as a New Yorker facing the hazards of marriage complicated by his love affair with the Big City. Co-starring in "The Love Song of Barney Kempinski" by Murray Schisgal are Sir John Gielgud, Alan King and Lee Grant. Premiere.
Thursday, September 15
JERICHO (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). When a radar expert has to be smuggled behind Nazi lines to study a new antiaircraft gun, an espionage team code-named Jericho is tapped for the job. With John Leyton, Marino Mase and Don Francks in the leads. Premiere.
BEWITCHED (ABC, 9-9:30 p.m.). Robert Q. Lewis guest-stars as a commercial photographer assigned to snap Baby Tabatha for an advertising campaign. Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) refuses, and with one magic twitch of her nose has everything going her way.
Friday, September 16
THE MILTON BERLE SHOW (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Pushing the network's own products, Berle includes among his guests Phyllis (The Pruitts of Southampton) Diller; Adam (Batman) West and Van (The Green Hornet) Williams.
T.H.E. CAT (NBC, 9:30-10 p.m.). Robert Loggia plays a character named Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat in the tale of a cat burglar turned crime fighter. In the premiere, he acts as a bodyguard for a fearless priest threatened by the underworld.
Saturday, September 17
N.C.A.A. FOOTBALL (ABC,. 4:30 p.m. to conclusion). The University of Southern California meets the University of Texas at Austin.
THE UNITED NATIONS HANDICAP (CBS, 5-5:30 p.m.). The $100,000 race for three-year-olds broadcast live from Atlantic City. Among the entries will be minion-dollar winner Buckpasser.
PISTOLS 'N' PETTICOATS (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Ann Sheridan stars as Hank Hawks in a new comedy western series about a modern Annie Oakley who can outfight, outshoot and outwit any man west of the Mississippi. Premiere.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Dan Briggs (Steven Hill) heads the four-man Impossible Mission Force. This week, with the help of a safe cracker (Wally Cox), they smuggle two nuclear warheads out of a Latin American dictator's heavily guarded vault. Premiere.
THE HOLLYWOOD PALACE (ABC, 9:30-10:30 p.m.). Bing Crosby hosts George Burns, Sid Caesar, the Mamas and the Papas, and Soprano Jane Marsh, winner of the recent Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
Sunday, September 18
NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE (CBS, 3:15 to conclusion). The Dallas Cowboys, one of the leading contenders for the Eastern division title, meet the New York Giants in Dallas.
CBS NEWS SPECIAL REPORT (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Peter Kalischer reports on the results of the South Viet Nam elections.
NBC NEWS SPECIAL: AIR OF DISASTER (NBC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). The growing problem of air pollution across the U.S.; the major causes and possible solutions explored by Sander Vanocur of NBC News. CBS will study the same problem on Tuesday (10-11 p.m.) with Daniel Schorr doing the research.
THEATER
On Broadway
MAME. The tone is brassy, the mood is brash, and the genre is pure Broadway. As the latest reincarnation of Patrick Dennis' effervescent Auntie, Angela Lansbury lacks none of the glitter of a star.
PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! The American immigrant experience is a tale oft told; but in this engaging drama, Irish Playwright Brian Friel offers a dramatic visit to the Ould Sod for a glimpse of the wrenching departure that precedes each expectant arrival.
SWEET CHARITY. As Toulouse-Lautrec memorialized the cancan girls of Paris, Director Bob Fosse celebrates the taxi dancers of New York with stylish staging and sophisticated choreography. Gwen Verdon is a terpsichorean tornado as a gal who has a lot of love to give--if she could only find a taker.
CACTUS FLOWER. It's tricky business when a man tells his wife he has a mistress. It's trickier when a man tells his mistress he has a wife--and doesn't. How to turn the trick when mistress insists on meeting nonexistent wife is the pivot this labyrinthian sex farce twists around.
CINEMA
FANTASTIC VOYAGE. Reduced to the size of bacteria, four men and a girl are injected into the bloodstream of a prominent scientist. Despite opposition from white cells, antibodies and other microscopic villains, they manage to complete their assignment: the removal of an inoperable blood clot in his brain.
LA VISITA. An ad in a lonely-hearts column brings together a small-town spinster (Sandra Milo) and a middle-aged clerk (Francois Perier), who within a single day meet, quarrel, make love, and go their separate lonely ways again.
THE WRONG BOX. Doddering old John Mills attempts bodily mayhem on his doddering old brother, Ralph Richardson, in a hilarious race to see which branch of the family will inherit a large fortune.
HOW TO STEAL A MILLION. Audrey Hepburn sets out to save the reputation of her father, a charming forger played by Hugh Griffith, and learns that crime can be beautiful with Peter O'Toole as an accomplice.
THE ENDLESS SUMMER. Riding the crest of surfing's popularity, this beautifully photographed documentary follows two young Californians as they sample the world's beaches in quest of the perfect wave. To everyone's surprise, they find it, too, and in the most unlikely place.
"THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING." Broadway's Alan Arkin steals the show from such tough competitors as Paul Ford and Jonathan Winters in his portrayal of Rozanov, the frenzied head of a Soviet shore party whose sub has run aground off the New England coast.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE FIXER, by Bernard Malamud. A great tragic novel is probably in Malamud, and this stark, metaphorical tale of a Jew in Czarist Russia condemned to die for a murder he didn't commit, comes powerfully close to that achievement.
GILES GOAT-BOY, by John Barth. In this novel, which might be called metaphysical science fiction, Barth takes a boy who might be a goat--or a goat who might be the protagonist--into a nightmare collegiate world, which, by flashes of phosphorescent light, might seem to resemble our own. A distinguished puzzle.
THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE, by Kingsley Amis. The precarious balance of the cold war provides the ambiance for this spy story by a writer who happily feels neither limited nor depressed by the form.
Generally speaking, first novels don't have to be read, and, generally speaking, nobody reads them; their average sale falls under 1,500 copies. In this season's bountiful batch, however, are a dozen or more first novels that are not only worth reading but worth remembering. Among them: Robert Crichton's The Secret of Santa Vittoria, a wry, humorous war parable in which Crichton, who is mostly a black humorist, nevertheless keeps his cool; Monique Wittig's The Opoponax, in which the simple story of a little girl growing up is told without either false gravity or sentimentality; Mario Vargas Llosa's The Time of the Hero, in which a Peruvian military academy suggests allegorically the tribulations of life in Peru; and James Mossman's Beggars on Horseback, a brilliant satire on the British colonial spirit.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Valley of the Dolls, Susann (1 last week)
2. The Adventurers, Robbins (2)
3. Tai-Pan, Clavell (3)
4. The Detective, Thorp (4)
5. Giles Goat-Boy, Barth (6)
6. The Source, Michener (5)
7. The Ninety and Nine, Brinkley
8. The Kremlin Letter, Behn
9. Tell No Man, St. Johns (7)
10. The Embezzler, Auchincloss (8)
NONFICTION
1. How to Avoid Probate, Dacey (1)
2. Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson (2)
3. Games People Play, Berne (5)
4. Papa Hemingway, Hotchner (3)
5. The Last Battle, Ryan (4)
6. Flying Saucers--Serious Business, Edwards (6)
7. In Cold Blood, Capote (8)
8. Two Under the Indian Sun, Godden and Godden (7)
9. Rush to Judgment, Lane
10. Tinkerbelle, Manry
* All times E.D.T.
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