TELEVISION

Wednesday, June 28

BOB HOPE PRESENTS THE CHRYSLER THEATER (NBC, 9-10 p.m.).* Roddy McDowall plays a blackmailer in "The Fatal Mistake." His victim, Arthur Hill, raises reptiles; desperation drives him and his pets to strike. Repeat.

Thursday, June 29

SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Fredric March, as George Washington, narrates "1776" in a re-creation of the birth of the nation, with films shot at such historic sites as Lexington, Concord, Boston, Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. Repeat.

Friday, June 30

CBS FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11:15 p.m.). Fred Astaire, Lilli Palmer, Debbie Reynolds and Tab Hunter star in The Pleasure of His Company (1961).

THE AVENGERS (ABC. 10-11 p.m.). Those British unbeatables, Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg, take on the supernatural. Repeat.

Saturday, July 1

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Jim McKay and Phil Hill comment on the 24-hour Le Mans Grand Prix.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Kirk Douglas is the modern cowboy in Lonely Are the Brave (1962).

Sunday, July 2

SOCCER GAME OF THE WEEK (CBS, 2-4 p.m.). Los Angeles Toros v. the Atlanta Chiefs, in Atlanta.

15TH U.S. WOMEN'S OPEN GOLF TOURNAMENT (ABC, 5-6 p.m.). The final round from the Hot Springs Cascades course.

THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.). Modern architecture, technology and city planning in "At Home, 2001." Repeat.

OUR PLACE (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). The Doodletown Pipers, Burns and Schreiber, and the dog puppet Rowlf host this new musical-comedy variety hour. Guest star on the premiere show: Carol Burnett.

THE ABC SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Grace Kelly is forced to pick a partner from the likes of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in High Society (1957).

THE SAINT (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Simon Templar (Roger Moore) encounters a cult that worships Rome's glories in "The Man Who Liked Lions."

Monday, July 3

PERSONALITY (NBC, 11-11:30 a.m.). Larry Blyden hosts a new daily series: three celebrities try to guess how another would answer a question. Premiere.

VACATION PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Old pilots never die; they become a summer series. The first in this group of comedy pilot films--which did not make it as full-fledged shows--stars Ed Wynn and Ethel Waters in You're Only Young Twice.

Tuesday, July 4

SPOTLIGHT (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Abbe Lane and Noel Harrison are the guest hosts in the first of this summer variety series from London. Premiere.

TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC. 9-11 p.m.). Charlton Heston comes down from the mountain to become Buffalo Bill in Pony Express (1953).

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "The Anderson Platoon." A harsh but compassionate study of young Americans at war produced by Pierre Schoendoerffer for French TV (TIME, Feb. 17). This is a closeup of Captain Joseph B. Anderson, 24, a West Pointer and a Negro, as he leads his soldiers through the Viet Nam war in the fall of 1966.

NET PLAYHOUSE (shown on Fridays). "The Victorians: London Assurance" is a lively comedy by Dion Boucicault about an elderly nobleman who takes a fancy to an 18-year-old heiress.

NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "Losing Just the Same" studies the problems of a Negro family in Oakland, Calif.

THEATER

On Broadway

YOU KNOW I CAN'T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER'S RUNNING. Four playlets poke fun at man's desires and taboos in the pursuit of sex. Martin Balsam, Eileen Heckart and George Grizzard project all the poignancy and lunacy of Robert Anderson's characters.

BLACK COMEDY is not a play about civil rights or a comedy of black humor. Its tale of what happened when the lights went out is as unsubtle and vaudevillian as a slip on a banana peel or a pie in the face--and just as much fun.

THE HOMECOMING springs traps and surprises on its audience, making the play's validity, intent and meaning the controversy of the season. The Royal Shakespeare Company gives Harold Pinter's drama a spellbinding presentation.

Off Broadway

AMERICA HURRAH is as refreshing and shocking as a dive into cold water. The playlets by Jean-Claude van Itallie are the season's most original American drama.

RECORDS

Opera

WAGNER: DIE WALKUeRE, (Deutsche Grammophon; 5 LPs). Despite all of its flames, blood, magic swords and flying goddesses, this crystal-and-velvet score is the most human of Wagner's Ring operas. Conductor Herbert von Karajan's slow, deliberate pace illuminates each stroke of genius in the score, but some listeners will find that he has sacrificed passion for clarity and restrained the anguish that Wagner's wild climaxes can evoke. No matter: Jon Vickers' Siegmund is powerful and Regine Crespin's hotoyohos are properly rousing.

VERDI: UN BALLO IN MASCHERA (RCA Victor: 3 LPs). Masked Ball's libretto is strictly crackplot, but Verdi's tunes justify the onstage bewilderment. The opera has an ominous history: the day Verdi brought his score to Naples, assassins tried to murder Napoleon III. Frightened Bourbon censors forced the composer to switch the locale of his rather gloomy tale (about the assassination of Sweden's 18th century King Gustav III) to exotic Massachusetts and to dramatize instead the assassination of the "Governor of Boston." Conducted appropriately by Boston's Erich Leinsdorf, this version stars the lush vocal beauty of Leontyne Price, supported by a mostly American cast, including Robert Merrill, Shirley Verrett and Reri Grist. Carlo Bergonzi provides appropriate Italianate grace as the doomed governor.

MONTEVERDI: L'INCORONAZIONE Dl POPPEA (Cambridge; 4 LPs). Monteverdi, the true father of opera, composed Popped in 1642, when the art was still in its infancy. This is the first complete recording of his lusty, utterly amoral libretto and gentle music. Yet the results probably fall short of Monteverdi's intentions. In his day, singers, not composers or conductors, were kings; and no modern revival can ever recapture their singular contributions to a performance. For instance, two major roles in Poppea, scored for castrato voices, are sung in this recording by a countertenor and tenor, who provide earnest but ghostly approximations of the old score. The album, however, gives fine hints of how early Italian baroque opera sounded: intimate, civilized, and a trifle boring to modern ears.

PURCELL: DIDO & AENEAS (Angel). If the English had not loved spoken drama so well, Henry Purcell might have started a glorious operatic tradition in his country. As it was, Dido and Aeneas is Purcell's only opera, which he composed for a 1689 performance by the "Young Gentlewomen" at Josias Priest's School in Chelsea. This album boasts a more distinguished roster of singers, including Victoria de los Angeles, but Purcell's baroque is as airy and clear as a birdsong in an English meadow--and sounds just as repetitious. Sir John Barbirolli conducts with vivacity.

IRINA ARKHIPOVA: RUSSIAN OPERA & CANTATA ARIAS (Melodiya/Angel). The dark passion of good Russian music is welcome to even the most jaded ears, and this collection of arias is particularly affecting. While most of the composers (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev) are familiar, the excerpts are less so. Among the most intriguing is from Not Love Alone, an opera about the love life on a collective farm by Rodion Shchedrin. The youngest composer represented on the album (and husband of Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya), Shchedrin finds room for originality within conventional Soviet Realism--which means late, late, late Romanticism. However superficial, his melodies are refreshingly singable. Mezzo-Soprano Arkhipova renders all with intelligence and virtuosity.

CINEMA

THE DRIFTER. Inventive, impressionistic camera work and a memorable score tell a story as thin and fragile as a sea shell about a vagabond hitchhiker.

THE WAR WAGON. A standard western that has style and gusto, thanks to Old Pros John Wayne and Kirk Douglas and the taut direction of Burt Kennedy.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK. Author Neil Simon has taken a plot as bland as a potato, sliced it into thin bits--and made it as hard to resist as potato chips. Jane Fonda, Robert Redford and Mildred Natwick are also crisp.

A GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN. Walter Matthau is the man and Bobby Morse is his guide through the intricacies of adultery. A fine collection of comics (among them: Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, Art Carney, Joey Bishop) contribute cameo illustrations to the lecture.

THE HONEY POT. Rex Harrison plays a voluptuary who lives a vita that is incredibly dolce until Director Joseph Mankiewicz's sourly satirical plot takes over.

MADE IN ITALY. Anna Magnani, Virna Lisi and Catherine Spaak are among the stars of this mosaic of modern Italy that blends humor, irony and pathos.

BOOKS

Best Reading

A PRELUDE: LANDSCAPES, CHARACTERS AND CONVERSATIONS FROM THE EARLIER YEARS OF MY LIFE, by Edmund Wilson. A distinguished and versatile critic gathers shards of youthful experience into a memoir that says farewell to the innocence--his own and the country's--that was shattered by World War I. The same experiences help his rather stilted early stories, GALAHAD and I THOUGHT OF DAISY, now reissued, to hold up as searching documentaries of an era.

HAROLD NICOLSON: THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945, VOL. II OF DIARIES AND LETTERS, edited by Nigel Nicolson. This second installment of Author-Politician Nicolson's sprightly and irreverent reminiscences might well clinch his position as the brightest British diarist of his age.

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING, by Jean Cocteau. Autobiographical jottings of the Frenchman who poured his enormous talents into playing the artist in both his strange novels and otherworldly movies.

RICHARD STRAUSS: THE LIFE OF A NON-HERO, by George R. Marek. The author orchestrates vivid evocations of German cultural life around his theme, that decay and upheaval after World War I cut Strauss off from his romantic roots and kept him from fulfilling his greatness.

ALL MEN ARE LONELY NOW, by Francis Clifford. Still another double agent ravels the skein of British cold-war diplomacy with a classically simple plan that Author Clifford fashions into a classically complicated thriller.

SNOW WHITE, by Donald Barthelme. A weird and wicked contemporary version of the old fairy tale. Children would like the story without understanding it--but, then, the same is true for adults.

THE HORRORS OF LOVE, by Jean Dutourd. In his exploration of a tragic love affair between a middle-aged Frenchman and his young mistress, Dutourd also performs an unconstrained and meticulous dissection of French character.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Arrangement, Kazan (1 last week)

2. The Eighth Day, Wilder (3)

3. Washington, D.C., Vidal (2)

4. The Chosen, Potok (9)

5. The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Crichton (7)

6. The Plot, Wallace (4)

7. Rosemary's Baby, Levin (6)

8. Capable of Honor, Drury (8)

9. Tales of Manhattan, Auchincloss (5)

10. Go to the Widow-Maker, Jones

NONFICTION

1. Everything but Money, Levenson (3)

2. The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (2)

3. The Death of a President, Manchester (1)

4. Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet, Steam (5)

5. Madame Sarah, Skinner (4)

6. Games People Play, Berne (6)

7. Disraeli, Blake (10)

8. Treblinka, Steiner (7)

9. Paper Lion, Plimpton (9)

10. A Man Called Lucy, Accoce and Quet

*All times E.D.T.

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