Wednesday, May 7 CBS PLAYHOUSE (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.).* Daniel Massey, William Shatner and William Windom star in Loring Mandel's Shadow Game, about a group of people who are trapped in a business office during a power blackout, and learn more about each other than they ever knew when the lights were on.
Thursday, May 8 ANIMAL WORLD (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Bill Burrud hosts the premiere show of a wildlife series that starts off on a cold note by visiting Antarctica.
NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-10 p.m.). Ronald Ribman's prizewinning drama The Journey of the Fifth Horse stars Dustin Hoffman in his Obie-winning role as a publisher's reader whose life begins to parallel that of a character in a novel he is reading. Repeat.
KITTY HAWK TO PARIS: THE HEROIC YEARS (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). A documentary on the daring young men who manned those revolutionary new flying machines during the 24 years between the Wright brothers and Lindbergh's historic journey.
Friday, May 9
BIG CATS, LITTLE CATS (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Aelurophiles will lap it up. Repeat.
RIDDLE OF THE MAYAN CAVE (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Explorers Club scientists travel to the Guatemalan highlands to visit an ancient cave used for Mayan ceremonial rites between 300 A.D. and 900 A.D.
Saturday, May 10 ROD McKUEN: THE LONER (NBC, 8:30-9 p.m.). McKuen, poet, songwriter and recording star, puts on a one-man show.
Sunday, May 11 TEXAS OPEN GOLF TOURNAMENT (ABC, 3-5 p.m.). Final round from the Pecan Valley Country Club in San Antonio.
THE 215T CENTURY (CBS, 6-6:30 p.m.).
Walter Cronkite's question of the day is, "Can We Control the Weather?"
PUBLIC BROADCASTING LABORATORY (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.). "Is a Job the Answer?" investigates industry's attempts to solve the problems of the hard-core unemployment in Detroit. Repeat.
SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:45 p.m.). Anthony Quinn, Alan Bates and Lila Kedrova in Zorba the Greek (1965).
MIRROR OF AMERICA (NBC, 10-11 p.m.).
Burgess Meredith narrates this Project 20 production that goes back into American history to look at the themes, ideals and values represented by national monuments such as the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials and the Washington Monument.
Monday, May 12 ANDERSON & CO. (NBC, 8-8:30 p.m.).
Fred Gwynne and Abby Dalton star as Marshall and Augusta Anderson, parents of eight children, in turn-of-the-century New York City. This is a sneak preview of a comedy series that NBC may include in its 1970-71 season.
MAN AND HIS UNIVERSE (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). John Secondari's excellent program on the growing urban crisis and various plans to make life livable in the "Cosmopolis: Big City 2000 A.D." Repeat.
NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "Human Cargo" observes the operation of smugglers and others who deal with getting Mexican laborers illegally into the country.
Tuesday, May 13
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10:30 p.m.). "The World of Hart Crane" is reconstructed through the memories of friends and associates, his memorabilia and a presentation of some of his poems.
TUESDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES (NBC, 9-11:15 p.m.). Peter Sellers, David Niven, Capucine and Robert Wagner pussyfoot along with The Pink Panther (1964).
THEATER
On Broadway 1776. There is a degradation of intellect, taste and dignity about this musical, which presents history as painted by a sidewalk sketch artist. The Peter Stone book depends on the audience to expect the expectable and to bring along its own worn coloring crayons to fill out the roles.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM is Woody Allen's play in which he also stars as a young man with so many psychological hang-ups that he makes his audience feel positively healthy.
FORTY CARATS. Julie Harris portrays a middle-aged divorcee who is bedded by a lad of 22, while her teen-age daughter runs off with a wealthy widower of 45. Directed with crisp agility by Abe Burrows, the show is never less than civilized fun.
HADRIAN VII is a deft dramatization by Peter Luke of fantasy and fact in the life of Frederick William Rolfe, an unsuccessful candidate for the priesthood who dreamed of becoming Pope. Alec McCowen gives a commanding performance as Rolfe.
Off Broadway
THE MAN WITH THE FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH. An evening of three one-acters by Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello. The title play deals with death, The License with the evil eye, and The Jar with innate human idiocy. The actor who animates each is Jay Novello, a wily performer with a tasty slice of prosciutto in him.
ADAPTATION--NEXT are two one-acters directed by satirist Elaine May. Adaptation, Miss May's own play, is cleverly staged like a TV contest, with Gabriel Dell playing the adaptation game from birth to death. James Coco gives an enormously resourceful performance as a middle-aged man undergoing a humiliating induction examination in Terrence McNally's Next.
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK. An able interracial cast in a tribute to the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry presents readings from her works--journals, letters and snippets of plays.
DAMES AT SEA, with a talented cast of only six, is a delightful spoof of the movie musicals of the 1930s, with all their intricate dance routines and big, glittering production numbers.
CINEMA
THE LOVES OF ISADORA. Vanessa Redgrave performs magnificently as Isadora Duncan, that quintessential free spirit of the early 20th century. Director Karel Reisz starts at the end of Isadora's life and works backward and sideways to achieve dramatic contrast, but the script lacks a unifying point of view.
GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Philip Roth's stinging, perceptive 1959 novella has been turned into a slick little film about the glories, detours and tribulations of young love. Director Larry Peerce is often self-indulgent, but he has extracted two attractive performances from Richard Benjamin and a stunning newcomer named Ali MacGraw.
STOLEN KISSES. Franc,ois Truffaut's newest film is a lyrical souvenir of adolescence that fairly bursts with its director's exuberance, his warm sense of humor and his subtle, never condescending portrait of the excesses and errors of youth.
THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY. This might have been just another kidnaping movie, but Director Hubert Cornfield has a sure and shrewd eye that transforms an ordinary story into a surreal seminar in the poetics of psychological terror. The small cast is uniformly excellent, and Marlon Brando does his best work in years as a slangy hipster criminal.
THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU. Looking for something to take the family to on a rainy Saturday afternoon? This is it. The kids will love all the improbable derring-do, and parents may find themselves getting an occasional laugh out of all the frantic proceedings.
I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW). Yes, yes, this is the movie everyone is talking about, but, as in all gossip, things tend to get exaggerated in the retelling. To set the record straight: the drama is nonexistent, the style derivative, the sociology boring and the sex a passionless fake.
THE FIXER. An adaptation of Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer prizewinning novel that is faithful to the original in its impassioned portrait of the dignity of individual man. John Frankenheimer directs it with taste, and the actors--notably Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm --are all transcendent in their roles.
THE STALKING MOON. Stalwart Gregory Peck battles a crazed redskin bent on bloody revenge in this rather self-conscious western thriller that nevertheless manages a few surprises on its way to a predictable denouement.
SWEET CHARITY. Shirley MacLaine is sometimes cute, sometimes arch in this overblown musical about a dance-hall hostess searching for love. A lot of money and a lot of energy have been expended on this superproduction, and most of both has gone to waste.
RED BEARD is an Oriental Pilgrim's Progress in which Japan's Akira Kurosawa explores the psychology of an ambitious young doctor so deftly that one man's frailties and strengths add up to a picture of humanity itself.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE UNPERFECT SOCIETY, by Milovan Djilas. The author, who has spent years in Yugoslav prisons for deriding the regime, now argues that Communism is disintegrating there and elsewhere, as a new class of specialists--technicians, managers, teachers, artists--presses for a more flexible society.
BULLET PARK, by John Cheever. In his usual setting of uncomfortably comfortable suburbia, Cheever stages the struggle of two men--one mild and monogamous, the other rootless and haunted--over the fate of a boy.
LETTERS FROM ICELAND, by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. A minor masterpiece, written in 1936 when two talented, irreverent young poets knocked about above the tree line and put time on ice.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: A LIFE STORY, by Carlos Baker. The long-awaited official biography offers the first complete and cohesive account of a gifted, troubled, flamboyant figure who has too often been recollected in fragmentary and partisan memoirs.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Through flashbacks to the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, this agonizing, outrageous, funny and profoundly rueful fable tries to say something about the nature of human cruelty and self-protective indifference.
URGENT COPY, by Anthony Burgess. In a collection of brilliant short pieces about a long list of literary figures (from Dickens to Dylan Thomas), the author brings many a critical chicken home to roost.
REFLECTIONS UPON A SINKING SHIP, by Gore Vidal. A collection of perceptively sardonic essays about the Kennedys, Tarzan, Susan Sontag, pornography, the most recent Republican presidential convention, and other aspects of what Vidal sees as the declining West.
EDWARD LEAR, THE LIFE OF A WANDERER, by Vivien Noakes. In this excellent biography, the Victorian painter, poet, fantasist and author of A Book of Nonsense is seen as a kindly, gifted man who courageously tried to stay cheerful despite an astonishing array of diseases.
THE MILITARY PHILOSOPHERS, by Anthony Powell. The ninth volume in his serial novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, expertly convoys Powell's innumerable characters through the intrigue, futility, boredom and courage of World War II.
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.
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.
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.
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.
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, by Thomas Wiseman. Wiseman's novel about the friendship between a half-Jew and a Nazi, before and during World War II in Vienna, is a brilliant psychological study of how two very different men can become so fatally entwined that each determines the course of the other's life.
THE SECRET WAR FOR EUROPE, by Louis Hagen. As he explores the development of espionage agencies and replays many a cold war spy case, the author presents a detailed view of politics and espionage in Germany since 1945.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (1 last week)
2. The Godfather, Puzo (2)
3. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (3)
4. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (5)
5. Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home, Kemelman (4)
6. Airport, Hailey (7)
7. A Small Town in Germany, le Carre (6)
8. The Vines of Yarrabee, Eden
9. Except for Me and Thee, West (10)
10. The Lost Queen, Lofts (8)
NONFICTION
1. The 900 Days, Salisbury (1)
2. Jennie, Martin (3)
3. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (4)
4. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (2)
5. Ernest Hemingway, Baker
6. The Trouble with Lawyers, Bloom (6)
7. The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, Goldman (5)
8. Grant Takes Command, Catton
9. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull
10. Instant Replay, Kramer (8)
*All times E.D.T.
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