TELEVISION
Wednesday, February 7 CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* Charles Kuralt and cameramen track the abortive attempt last spring of an eleven-man team, headed by Minnesota Insurance Agent Ralph Plaisted, to become the first surface motorized expedition (riding snowmobiles) to reach the North Pole.
THE FRED ASTAIRE SHOW (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Back on TV for his first musical special in eight years, Astaire and Co-Star Barrie Chase sing and dance to today's sounds, provided by Simon and Garfunkel, Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66, the Gordian Knot, the Young-Holt Trio and Neal Hefti and his orchestra.
SAGA OF WESTERN MAN (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). "Venice: City in Danger" traces Venice's history as mirrored in Renaissance paintings and discusses how its future is threatened by the waters that are undermining its foundations. John Secondari narrates the initial production in this season's series.
Thursday, February 8
1968 WINTER OLYMPICS (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Men's Downhill Skiing. Via satellite from Grenoble, France.
Friday, February 9
1968 WINTER OLYMPICS (ABC, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Women's 500-Meter Speed Skating.
AMERICAN PROFILE: MUSIC FROM THE LAND (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Eddy Arnold narrates the saga of country and western music from its humble hillbilly origins to its current popularity across the U.S. Among the performers: Flatt and Scruggs, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, Minnie Pearl and John Lowdermilk, plus film clips of Jimmy Rodgers, Tex Ritter and the late Hank Williams.
Saturday, February 10
1968 WINTER OLYMPICS (ABC, 3-5 p.m.). Women's Figure Skating.
1968 WINTER OLYMPICS (ABC, 6:30-7:30 p.m.). Women's Downhill Skiing.
SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9 p.m. to midnight). Montgomery Clift as Freud (1962).
Sunday. February 1 1
FRONTIERS OF FAITH (NBC, 1:30-2 p.m.). Dr. Philip A. Johnson of the World Council of Churches interviews U.S. Delegate to the U.N. Patricia Roberts Harris on human rights in the second of four discussions revolving around the question "Is Peace Possible?"
THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN (ABC, 4-5 p.m.). Texas Governor John Connally hunts elephants in Africa; Golfer Jack Nicklaus fishes for tarpon in Nicaragua.
THE CHILDREN'S FILM FESTIVAL (CBS, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Part 2 of the award-winning Italian film Testadirapa, a 19th century tale of a father who is jailed for believing that his son will get more from roaming free than from going to school.
THE FABULOUS FUNNIES (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). A gallery of comic-strip characters--including Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Prince Valiant and Dick Tracy--leaps onto the TV screen in song-and-dance routines, animated episodes and interviews with such cartoonists as Al Capp, Milton Caniff, Charles Schulz and Rube Goldberg. Carl Reiner is the host.
A CASE OF LIBEL (ABC, 9-11 p.m.). Van Heflin, Lloyd Bridges, Jose Ferrer, and E. G. Marshall provide the courtroom drama in this TV adaptation of the Broadway play based on Attorney Louis Nizer's 1962 bestseller, My Life in Court.
Monday, February 12
THE GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Andy Williams is M.C. of the 25th annual presentation of awards for TV and movie excellence, live from Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove. Jerry Lewis, Carol Channing, Peter Lawford and Jim Brown hand out the statuettes.
Tuesday, February 13
CBS PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). Ralph Bellamy, Jane Wyatt, Inga Swenson and Gene Hackman people Robert Crean's drama My Father and My Mother, third original TV play on this season's Playhouse roster.
Check your local listings for date and time of these NET specials:
NET JOURNAL (shown on Mondays). "Huelga!," the rallying cry of Mexican strikers against California grape growers, resounds throughout this documentary.
NET FESTIVAL. "Leinsdorf Recreates" presents the Boston Symphony Orchestra maestro rehearsing the third movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1 with members of the senior orchestra at the New England Conservatory of Music.
THEATER
On Broadway
I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER, by Robert Anderson, wears its heart on its sleeve but has small muscle in its script. It sentimentally examines the plight of a son who wants to heal the wound of lovelessness festering between himself and his aging tyrant of a father, magnificently played by Alan Webb. A sense of mortality, filial duty and remorse, family ties that chafe as well as bind, all give the play scenes of poignance but, despite the impeccable direction of Alan Schneider, never a coherent dramatic vision.
THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE is more a one-character study than a fully fleshed play. Australian Actress Zoe Caldwell acts up a typhoon as an Edinburgh teacher with sweeping fervors and fantasies, but Mrs. Jay Allen's adaptation of a novel by Muriel Spark is unfortunately becalmed.
EXIT THE KING is a stark play about death, rich in poetry and insight. Unfortunately, as interpreted by members of the APA, King has too much of a whine and too little command to involve the audience in lonesco's tragic vision or in his character's emotional tumult.
PANTAGLEIZE is Michel de Ghelderode's celebration of the individual, "unfit for anything except love, friendship, and ardor," and his condemnation of our "autodisintegrated age." The APA production retains much of the excitement and magic typical of the Belgian playwright.
THE SHOWOFF. The marrying process is always a mystery, but Playwright George Kelly's tightly corseted family cannot begin to understand how the youngest daughter could possibly pick a man whose every guffaw grates on the nerves and whose every word offends the sensibilities. Helen Hayes leads the APA in a gentle revival of the 1924 comedy.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD. Shakespeare's duo may have been swinging students on the Wittenberg campus, but when Tom Stoppard tosses them into the midst of the intrigants of Elsinore, they seem two poor sophomores being hazed by a malevolent fraternity. The skillful dramatic interplay between Brian Murray and John Wood provokes laughter even as it evokes compassion.
Off Broadway
THE INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX and IT'S CALLED THE SUGAR PLUM are one-acters marking the propitious off-Broadway debut of 28-year-old Israel Horovitz. Plum is an absurd love waltz between a boy and girl. Bronx boils up a cauldron of terror with the litter of abused humanity, as two street punks ridicule, badger, and finally knife to death a bewildered East Indian on his first day in New York City.
YOUR OWN THING. The old plot of Twelfth Night slides surprisingly well into the world of the kids of the '60s and their talk of sexual hang-ups and his-and-her looks. Shakespeare's talented collaborator in this thoroughly delightful rock-musical is Writer-Director Donald Driver.
THE SONG OF THE LUSITANIAN BOGEY. Writing well below his Marat/Sade form in this tract against the evils of Portuguese colonialists in Africa, Peter Weiss follows the first rule of the polemicist: do not play fair. But the cast, members of the newly formed Negro Ensemble Company, infuses the evening with its own talent and humanity.
RECORDS
Pop Hits
THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES REQUEST (London). Now it is The Rolling Stones' turn to take off on a fantastic musical trip--at least a million miles from the rhythm 'n' blues in which they are rooted. After an instrumental interlude that is something of a moaning, squawking nightmare, they ask: "Why don't we sing this song all together?" With weird blips and whooshes they describe the loneliness of being 2000 Light Years from Home and lament the computerization of 2000 Man ("'My name is a number, a piece of plastic film"). The prettiest number is She's a Rainbow, a shimmering love song with a Mozartean piano introduction.
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR (Capitol). As a TV extravaganza, the Beatles' Tour was a flop in Britain, but the album's songs from the show are agreeably Beatley. They include a softly' sudsy ditty called The Fool on the Hill; a toe-tapping piece that may serve as a generational link, Your Mother Should Know ("though she was born a long, long time ago"); and a wild lark called I Am the Walrus, with fast, fractured Lennonesque lyrics: "Man, you been a naughty boy. You let your face grow long." Side 2 contains such classics as Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever, and the youthfully poignant Hello Goodbye ("I don't know why you say goodbye. I say hello").
A GIFT FROM A FLOWER TO A GARDEN (Epic). Time was when British Folk Singer Donovan, with his dreamy surrealistic ballads, was known as a psychedelic Pied Piper. His new album suggests that he is still a 24-carat hippie; he is photographed decked out in a robe with beads, posies and peacock feathers, and his gentle singsongs ooze various kinds of blissfulness ("His kisses on your brow/You may rest assured peace is coming"). Yet the self-styled minstrel has a stern message to his followers: "Stop the use of all Drugs and banish them into the dark and dismal places."
JOHN WESLEY HARDING (Columbia) is Bob Dylan's long-awaited new album, the first public peep from him since his motorcycle accident in 1966. His new songs are simple and quietly sung, some about drifters and hoboes, with morals attached, some with religious overtones, including I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine and a parable about Judas Priest. The catchiest number is the last, a swinging proposal called I'll Be Your Baby Tonight.
ALICE'S RESTAURANT (Reprise) features Arlo Guthrie, the son of the late folk singer Woody, and a long "talking blues" about his misadventures, his eventual arrest for littering, and his subsequent problems with his draft board. It's protest, but it's funny.
CINEMA
THE JUNGLE BOOK. This animated version of the children's classic may be a perverse introduction to Rudyard Kipling, but it is a nice way to remember the late Walt Disney; it is the last film he personally supervised.
THE PRODUCERS has many things going for it--notably a wild ad-lib energy that explodes in sight gags and punch lines. Mel Brooks, creator of TV's Get Smart, wrote and directed this piece of lunacy about a pair of sleazy producers (Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder) who try to make a killing on a Broadway flop.
THE GRADUATE. Mike Nichols' second screen effort begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama, although Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross do an excellent job as victims of a sophomoric love triangle.
IN COLD BLOOD. Capote's non-fiction novel has, in the hands of Director Richard Brooks, become a first-rate movie.
BOOKS
Best Reading
SINS OF THE FATHERS: A STUDY OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADERS, 1441-1807, by James Pope-Hennessy. From its origins on the 15th century African Gold Coast to the Abolition Act of 1807, the author documents the vast complex of international crime that sold people for profit.
THE NAKED APE, A ZOOLOGIST'S STUDY OF THE HUMAN ANIMAL, by Desmond Morris. Wit and graceful prose make these speculations on the evolution of man engaging and at times provocative reading.
THE THIRD POLICEMAN, by Flann O'Brien. A brilliant Joycean romp through the nether world, written by the late Irish novelist in 1940 and now published in the U.S. for the first time.
RIGHT & WRONG, by Paul Weiss and Jonathan Weiss. A dialogue between a father and son attempting to resolve problems of ethics and moral philosophy.
THE BLAST OF WAR 1939-1945, by Harold Macmillan. Wartime England's darkest and finest hours are remembered with wisdom and clarity in the second volume of the former Prime Minister's autobiography.
TOLSTOY, by Henri Troyat. Making masterful use of mountains of documents and diaries, the Russian-born biographer forges an unforgettable portrait of one of literature's greatest figures.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron (1 last week)
2. Topaz, Uris (2)
3. Christy, Marshall (3)
4. The Gabriel Hounds, Stewart (4)
5. The Instrument, O'Hara (5)
6. The Chosen, Potok (9)
7. The President's Plane Is Missing, Serling (8)
8. The Exhibitionist, Sutton (6)
9. Vanished, Knebel
10. Where Eagles Dare, MacLean (7)
NONFICTION
1. Nicholas and Alexandra, Massie (1)
2. Our Crowd, Birmingham (2)
3. Tolstoy, Troyat (6)
4. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (4)
5. Memoirs: 1925-1950, Kennan (5)
6. Rickenbacker, Rickenbacker (3)
7. Report From Iron Mountain, Lewin, ed. (9)
8. The New Industrial State, Galbraith (7)
9. At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, Eisenhower (8)
10. Incredible Victory, Lord (10)
*All times E.S.T.
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