Wednesday, July 3

ABC WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* It Started in Naples. The tiny Mediterranean island of Capri is background for this 1960 romantic comedy, with Sophia Loren at her most briosa, Vittorio De Sica at his most simpatico, and Clark Gable at his usual most.

Friday, July 5

AMERICAN PROFILE: HOME COUNTRY, U.S.A. (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Are America's grass roots withering? This documentary, ranging from Maine to Texas, examines the philosophy, traditions, individuality and skills of some people who have always lived close to the rural community where they were born and raised. With Chet Huntley. Repeat.

Saturday, July 6

THE $125,000 BUICK OPEN (CBS, 5-6 p.m., concluding on Sunday, 4-6 p.m.). The four finishing holes on the par-72 Warwick Hills Golf & Country Club, Grand Blanc, Mich., with Defending Champ Julius Boros and 143 other contestants. Live.

ABC'S WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Sonny Liston, beaten by Muhammad Ali in '64 and '65, more recently staging a comeback under Sammy Davis Jr.'s management, takes on up-and-cutting Henry Clark in a ten-round bout, live from San Francisco.

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11 p.m.). The Liverpudlian quartet's first (and best) movie, A Hard Day's Night, with Wilfred Brambell as Paul's clean old granddad. Repeat.

Sunday, July 7

U.S. WOMEN'S OPEN GOLF CHAMPIONSHIP (ABC, 4:30-6 p.m.). Final round of the 16th annual tourney from Moselem Springs, Pa. Four-time Winners Betsy Rawls and Mickey Wright are among those competing against France's Catherine Lacoste, last year's winner.

Monday, July 8

NBC COMEDY PLAYHOUSE (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). "The Blue-Eyed Horse." Is that any way to describe your wife? You bet it is, when she's a compulsive gambler who has somehow been transformed into a four-legged filly. But wishes aren't always horses. Ernest Borgnine and Joan Blondell star.

Tuesday, July 9

39TH MAJOR LEAGUE ALL-STAR BASEBALL GAME (NBC, 8-11 p.m.). Sandy Koufax and Pee Wee Reese analyze the action at the Houston Astrodome.

SHOWTIME (CBS, 8:30-9:30 p.m.). Rudolf Nureyev and Vienna State Opera Ballerina Ulli Wehrer dance that old balletic warhorse, the pas de deux from Don Quixote. Also on the bill: Tanya, an elephant who dances and plays the harmonica with equal grace.

OF BLACK AMERICA (CBS, 10-10:30 p.m.). Second in a seven-part series, "The Black Soldier" follows the history of the Negro in our wars from the Revolutionary days up to the black G.I. in Viet Nam. George Foster narrates.

THEATER

Off Broadway

A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, one of Eugene O'Neill's last plays, laments a loveless trio. W. B. Brydon, Salome Jens and Mitchell Ryan give poignant portrayals of three emotional cripples hiding their afflictions beneath blather and rant. Theodore Mann directs a finely composed production at the Circle in the Square.

THE BOYS IN THE BAND. Playwright Mart Crowley's characters are first of all wonderfully human and secondarily, homosexual. Kenneth Nelson, Leonard Frey and Cliff Gorman lead a sharply honed cast through dialogue of lacerating wit and excruciating humor.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS and meanwhile, in Manhattan, four performers render his songs with both passion and compassion.

MUZEEKA, a wry parable about a man who is an Etruscan in his fantasies and a sellout in life, serves as a showcase for Playwright John Guare's eclectic imagination and disarming dialogue. Red Cross, by Sam Shepard, shares the bill.

THE INDIAN WANTS THE BRONX works on the fear that violence might lurk around any city corner, thus stretching a taut tale of sadism and senseless victimizing. After an appearance at the Spoleto Festival, Israel Horovitz's drama resumes its off-Broadway run July 11.

THE NEGRO ENSEMBLE COMPANY alternates Peter Weiss's Song of the Lusitanian Bogey and Daddy Goodness, by Richard Wright and Louis Sapin, from July 25 to Sept. 1.

YOUR OWN THING slides Shakespeare's Twelfth Night into the 20th century with multimedia effects, rock music and the unisex look of the with-it generation. Leland Palmer lends rag-doll insouciance to a perpetual-motion Viola.

SCUBA DUBA. Bruce Jay Friedman's tense comedy makes a mockery of the sacred cows and shibboleths of an illiberal liberal. Jerry Orbach is the manic hero run amuck on a Riviera holiday.

ATELJE 212, the experimental studio company of Belgrade, is the second troupe in the Lincoln Center Festival. Under the direction of Mira Trailovic, the Yugoslavs will present four plays in Serbo-Croatian, with earphones providing instant English translation. Aleksandar Popovic's Bora, the Tailor, Alfred Jarry's King Vbu, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Roger Vitrac's Victor or the Children Take Over will run in repertory in the Forum Theater through July 14.

CINEMA 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. As a spaceship plows the galactic void, Director Stanley Kubrick searches for the meaning of life 33 years from now and turns the quest into a dazzling--and demanding--cinematic experience.

PETULIA. Julie Christie and George C. Scott get top billing in this ribald, ricocheting Richard Lester film of a love affair between a crusty, cutup doctor and a flouncy, flipped-out wife; the film's biggest star, however, remains the compelling city of San Francisco.

LES CARABINIERS. When he is not behaving like a brat, Director Jean-Luc Godard can be quite grown up, as he once demonstrated with Breathless and now shows again with this dry, abrasive antiwar film that is at once a satire of postwar Europe and a subtle dissection of aggression.

ROSEMARY'S BABY. Satan is alive and living at the Bramford, a haunted apartment house in Manhattan where an ancient witch (Ruth Gordon) troubles a pregnant wife (Mia Farrow); both ladies are superb, thanks to the devilishly deft direction by Roman Polanski (Knife in the Water; Repulsion), who has a nifty horror hangup.

THE FIFTH HORSEMAN IS FEAR. The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia is starkly rendered in this symbolic film written and directed by Zbynek Brynych.

BELLE DE JOUR. Aging but still arch, Spanish Director Luis Bunuel has filled this piece of baroque pornography about the obsessive fantasies of a young housewife (Catherine Deneuve) with some of his most mordant jokes and anticlerical broadsides.

RECORDS

Instrumental

MODERN MUSIC FOR CRASS (Composers Recordings Inc.). A panoply of sonorities--astringent, shivering, blasting, bumbling, raw and muted. The boldest brass works are the three pieces by the succinct and powerful American composer Wallingford Riegger, who died in 1961. More filigreed and less extraordinary are the Concerto and Sonic Sequence, both for a brass quintet, written in 1967 by Iowa-born Alvin Etler.

BEETHOVEN: TRIO IN C MINOR and MENDELSSOHN: TRIO IN D MINOR (Columbia). With Beethoven, even small-scale works like piano trios began to take on a turbulence and profundity foreign to earlier masters. The C Minor (which Haydn found too revolutionary), is such a work, and Pianist Eugene Istomin, Violinist Isaac Stern and Cellist Leonard Rose let just the right degree of emotional intensity burst from the beautiful classical mold. As for the Mendelssohn, those who once considered it a gauzy nothing would now view it as a silken something.

ROGER SESSIONS: VIOLIN CONCERTO (Composers Recordings Inc.). Composer Sessions at 71 has a large reputation but a small catalogue of LPs. Considered "the apotheosis of complexity," this four-movement concerto, dating from 1935, was never before recorded and seldom even performed until a few years ago. Played with wizardly ease by the expert young violinist Paul Zukovsky and a French orchestra conducted by Gunther Schuller, the piece is cracklingly exciting music. In the forefront of an orchestra missing all rival violins, the soloist is given extra long singing lines to twine and tangle with the various voices of the woodwinds and brasses. Indeed so many rich and inviting melodies are stirring at one time that the listener may despair of keeping track of them. Yet the music is often powerful and sometimes very lyrical.

BRAHMS: PIANO QUARTET IN C MINOR (RCA Victor). A work of large scope, this quartet matured along with Brahms, as he developed it off and on during his 20s and 30s. The "early" Scherzo is youthfully headstrong, while the long melodic cello reverie in the Andante and the sober, richly varied dialogue of the Finale seem to be later conceptions. Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and Violinist Jascha Heifetz make the work come to life--even for those under 30 today.

MOZART: THE TWO-AND-THREE-PIANO CONCERTOS (Seraphim). Any good students with three pianos can toss off Mozart's early work, but not with the warm, intimate and assured exchanges provided by Hephzibah and Yaltah Menuhin (Yehudi's sisters) and Jeremy (his son). This family album marks Jeremy's English concert debut, at 14, with his father conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The richer, two-piano work is played by Hephzibah and Yehudi's son-in-law Fou Ts'ong. Some family.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL ASSOCIATION, INC., J. HENRY WAUGH, PROP., by Robert Coover. The cosmos is an intricate baseball game--or is it vice versa?--in this entertaining allegory about an accountant who destroys himself when he relinquishes reality for illusion.

DARK AS THE GRAVE WHEREIN MY FRIEND IS LAID, by Malcolm Lowry. A boozy-brilliant journal of Lowry's 1945-46 visit to Mexico furnished the basis for this fragmented half-novel by a man to whom writing was an unending journey and life the landscape under the volcano.

SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM, by Joan Didion. Twenty essays by a gifted writer who transforms even the most joyous of people and places (hippies, Haight-Ashbury) into her own melancholy image.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE, by Stephen Birmingham. A gossipy, often malicious examination of haut monde that brings the wellborn and well-climbed down to earth with a clatter.

THE MONEY GAME, by 'Adam Smith,' ne George Goodman. The stock market and all its auric mysteries are explained with antic hilarity by a seasoned observer.

ENDERBY, by Anthony Burgess. A jaunty account of the taming of a poet, demonstrating with scurrilous charm that an artist is a man who expresses for all men their honest, unbuttoned selves.

TRUE GRIT, by Charles Portis. An uproarious period piece about a 14-year-old who turns the wild frontier topsy-turvy while avenging the murder of her pa.

Best Sellers

FICTION 1. Airport, Hailey (2 last week)

2. Couples, Updike (1)

3. Myra Breckinridge, Vidal (5)

4. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (4)

5. Topaz, Uris (3)

6. Vanished, Knebel (6)

7. Heaven Help Us, Tarr

8. The Confessions of Nat Turner,

Styron (8) 9. Red Sky at Morning, Bradford 10. Christy, Marshall (9)

NON FICTION 1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (5)

2. The Right People, Birmingham (4)

3. Iberia, Michener (3)

4. The Naked Ape, Morris (2)

5. Or I'll Dress You in Mourning,

Collins and Lapierre (7) 6. Between Parent and Child, Ginott (1)

7. The French Chef Cookbook, Child (10)

8. Our Own Worst Enemy, Lederer

9. The Center, Alsop

10. Our Crowd, Birmingham (9)

-All times E.D.T.

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