TELEVISION

Wednesday, April 2

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (ABC, 9-11 p.m.).* Helen Hayes and Lillian Gish dish out the poison in this TV version of Joseph Kesselring's hit play. Fred Gwynne takes over Boris Karloff's role.

Saturday, April 5

SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9 p.m. to midnight). Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole in Becket (1964).

Sunday, April 6

THE LIGHT IN THE WILDERNESS (CBS, 10-11 a.m.). Dave Brubeck is featured in this performance of his original oratorio, accompanied by his combo, an organ and a 300-voice choir at Washington Cathedral.

DIRECTIONS (ABC, 1-2 p.m.). The Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ as told by the four Evangelists is the basis for "I Shall See You Again," a dramatic presentation with music.

EXPERIMENT IN TELEVISION (NBC, 4:30-5:30 p.m.). Animated versions of five short plays are the focal point of a program on the work of English Playwright Harold Pinter. Voices for "The Pinter People" are done by Donald Pleasence, Pinter, his wife Vivien Merchant, Richard Briers, Kathleen Harrison and Dandy Nichols.

THE SECRET OF MICHELANGELO: EVERY MAN'S DREAM (ABC, 7-8 p.m.). Christopher Plummer and Zoe Caldwell narrate this highly acclaimed special about Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes. Repeat.

THE SHIP THAT WOULDN'T DIE (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). "The U.S.S. Franklin" is an NBC Special Projects report on the World War II carrier that was reduced to a flaming hulk by repeated kamikaze attacks but still survived to return home.

Monday, April 7

PORTRAIT OF PETULA (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). In a musical special, Petula Clark gets an assist from Andy Williams, Sacha Distel and Ron Moody.

THEATER

On Broadway

1776. There is a degradation of intellect, taste and dignity about this musical, which presents history as if painted by a sidewalk sketch artist, relying on calcified profiles of the principal signers of the Declaration of Independence rather than searching character penetration. The score might have led Van Gogh to dispose of his remaining ear, and a brigade of crippled pigeons could have performed better dance numbers.

HAMLET. The question has often been asked: "What is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark?" One answer is given in Ellis Rabb's APA revival. Rabb is the definitive zombie Hamlet, a puppet rather than a mettlesome prince. The production, like the prince, is passionless, prideless and bloodless.

IN THE MATTER OF J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER is a dramatization of the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearings on the security clearance of the renowned physicist. The testimony unfolds like an interminable dream; the play, rather than tingling with the anguish of a man torn between his country and his conscience, is merely misted over with sadness.

CELEBRATION is a musical fairy tale by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, co-creators of The Fantasticks. With a straight melodic line and unpretentiously apt lyrics, the show is intimate and beguiling.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM. Woody Allen wrote and stars in this story of a neurotic young man whose wife has just left him. The play does not progress along with the evening, but Allen's kooky angle of vision and nimble jokes are amusement enough.

HADRIAN VII. Alec McCowen gives an elegant performance as Frederick William Rolfe, the English eccentric who imagined himself named Pope.

FORTY CARATS is precisely the sort of show that people say helps them to forget the trials and tribulations of the day. The story of Julie Harris as a middle-aged lady wooed and won by a lad just about half her age is never less than civilized fun.

CANTERBURY TALES. Four of Geoffrey Chaucer's tales are told in this musical import from London. Unfortunately, the Chaucerian spirit is largely missing. Sex is treated as a commodity and faith as an epilogue, in the manner of a Cecil B. De-Mille devotional epic.

Off Broadway

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING, as adapted by Russell McGrath from the Vladimir Nabokov novel, is not much of a play--the characters are unreal, the tension is nonexistent, and the humor is heavy. But Joseph Papp's Public Theater production is an elegant example of inventive staging, costuming and ensemble playing that all but makes up for the script.

STOP, YOU'RE KILLING ME is an apt title for a slightly bloodstained package of three one-act plays by James Leo Herlihy presented by the Theater Company of Boston. The title's aptness lies not only in its suggestion of homicide but in its humor as well--each of the three is laughing on the outside while dying on the inside. And the company seems to know exactly what the dark and savage satirist is laughing about.

SPITTING IMAGE. Sam Waterston and Walter McGinn play a homosexual couple who, to the dismay of the Establishment, have a baby. Though the play is basically a one-joke affair, and has the somewhat inflated air of a short story masquerading as a novel, it is often amusing.

ADAPTATION--NEXT is an evening of two humorous one-acters directed by Satirist Elaine May with a crisp and zany comic flair. Miss May's own play, Adaptation, is the game of life staged like a TV contest. Next, by Terrence McNally, features an enormously resourceful performance by James Coco as an overaged potential draftee called before a female sergeant for a humiliating physical and psychological examination.

DAMES AT SEA, with a thoroughly engaging cast and some of the most ingenious staging currently on or off Broadway, is a delightful and loving spoof of the movie musicals of the '30s.

LITTLE MURDERS. This revival of Cartoonist Jules Feiffer's play about a family living in a psychotic New York milieu of impending violence fares very well indeed under the masterly hand of Director Alan Arkin.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a tribute to the late Lorraine Hansberry put together from her own writings. An able interracial cast presents sketches that trace an elegiac mood ranging through comedy, rage and introspection.

CINEMA

STOLEN KISSES. Francois Truffaut's new film is another chapter in his cinematic autobiography, a souvenir of the frantic romances and comic careers of an adolescent (Jean-Pierre Leaud) reaching for manhood.

THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. The nominal subject of this chilling film is kidnaping, but Director Hubert Cornfield uses it only as an excuse for conducting a surreal seminar in the poetics of violence. The small cast is uniformly excellent, but Marlon Brando steals the show with some of his best acting since One-Eyed Jacks.

SALESMAN. The Maysles Brothers spent six weeks filming an actual group of New England Bible salesmen at work; the result is an arresting and occasionally appalling cinema verite record of one desperate part of American society.

3 IN THE ATTIC is a kind of bastard offspring of Alfie and The Graduate, but it has a cheap sort of charm of its own as it tells the story of a campus lady-killer (Chris Jones) who gets his comeuppance from his steady girl (Yvette Mimieux).

THE STALKING MOON. A bloodthirsty and ingenious Indian is out to take revenge on Gregory Peck. Such presumption can lead to only one conclusion, but there are good thrills along the way.

SWEET CHARITY. Everyone involved in this project has obviously put a lot of effort into it, most of which goes to waste. Shirley MacLaine plays a pixilated dance-hall hostess--which may relieve the tedium for some viewers.

RED BEARD is a prime example of why Japan's Akira Kurosawa is counted as one of the world's greatest film makers. He transforms a rather ordinary story about the spiritual growth of a young doctor into a vast epic executed with thematic brilliance and stylistic perfection.

THE SHAME. Ingmar Bergman lingers once again on the problems of an artist's moral responsibilities. This is his 29th film and one of his best, with resonant performances by Liv Ullman, Max von Sydow and Gunnar Bjoernstrand.

THE FIXER. John Frankenheimer has directed this adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel with care and dedication. Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm all seem perfect in their roles.

THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S. Some great players (Jason Robards, Joseph Wiseman, Harry Andrews, Denholm Elliot, Norman Wisdom) are obviously having the time of their lives in this raunchy, affectionate tribute to oldtime burlesque.

BOOKS

Best Reading

REFLECTIONS UPON A SINKING SHIP, by Gore Vidal. A collection of perceptively sardonic essays about the Kennedys, Tarzan, Susan Sontag, pornography, the 29th Republican Convention, and other aspects of what Vidal sees as the declining West.

THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, expertly convoys his innumerable characters through the intrigue, futility, boredom and courage of World War II.

THE MARX BROTHERS AT THE MOVIES, by Paul D. Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt. Next to a reel of their films, this excellent book offers the best possible way to meet (or revisit) the Marx Brothers in the happy time when they had all their energy and all their laughs.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, by Thomas Wiseman. In this skilled, unsettling novel, a European half-Jew, haunted by decidedly unorthodox memories of a youthful acquaintance who turned Nazi, probes the past to learn why, even in death, this adversary-friend still manages to dominate his life.

GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. Completing the trilogy begun by the late historian Lloyd Lewis, Catton employs lucidity and laconic humor as he follows the taciturn general to his final victory at Appomattox.

THE GODFATHER, by Mario Puzo. For the Mafia, as for other upwardly mobile Americans, the name of the game is respectability and status after the money and power have been secured. An excellent novel.

TORREGRECA, by Ann Cornelisen. Full of an orphan's love for her adopted town, the author has turned a documentary of human adversity in Southern Italy into the unflinching autobiography of a divided heart.

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, by Philip Roth. This frenzied monologue by a sex-obsessed Jewish bachelor on a psychiatrist's couch becomes a comic novel about the absurdly painful wounds created by guilt and puritanism.

AFTERWORDS: NOVELISTS ON THEIR NOVELS, edited by Thomas McCormack. The anxiety, excitement and loneliness of confronting blank sheets of paper, sharply recalled and brightly written by 14 novelists, including Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Louis Auchincloss.

PUSHKIN, by David Magarshack. In a solid, if sometimes pedestrian biography, the poet who was a founding father of Russian literature often seems more like a rakehell uncle.

THE WOMAN DESTROYED, by Simone de Beauvoir. In three new novellas, the author of The Second Sex examines with skill a familiar theme: how unfair it is that a sufferer from the degenerative disease, life, should be tormented as well by the affliction of being female.

CASTLE TO CASTLE, by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, is the final novel in a crazed autobiographical trilogy by the demented French physician-genius who apparently viewed the body of modern society with complete revulsion.

JBS: THE LIFE AND WORK OF J.B.S. HALDANE, by Ronald W. Clark. One of the last great Victorian eccentrics, Haldane sought to embrace the "two cultures"--science and the humanities. Author Clark demonstrates, however, that he was vastly more successful in his scientific ventures than in his often wild misadventures in social causes.

THE TRAGEDY OF LYNDON JOHNSON, by Eric F. Goldman. Instant history, like instant coffee, can sometimes be remarkably palatable. At least it is in this memoir by a former White House aide who sees L.B.J. as "an extraordinarily gifted President who was the wrong man from the wrong place at the wrong time under the wrong circumstances."

HEADS, by Edward Stewart. Ivy League sacred cows are milked, and human parts are strewn about in unlikely places by ax murderers in a cheerfully gruesome novel by the author of Orpheus on Top.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2 last week)

2. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1)

3. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (4)

4. The Godfather, Puzo

5. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman

6. Airport, Hailey (3)

7. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (5)

8. Preserve and Protect, Drury (6)

9. The Voyeur, Sutton (10)

10. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (9)

NONFICTION

1. The 900 Days, Salisbury (1)

2. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (6)

3. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (2)

4. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten

5. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (8)

6. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (3)

7. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (5)

8. Jennie, Martin

9. Thirteen Days, Kennedy (4)

10. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (9)

*All times E.S.T.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.