Thursday, August 7

NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.).* David Hemmings stars in Auto-Stop as a young man who goes on a hitchhiking trip across Europe to impress an older woman. Repeat.

MASTERS OF POP: INNOCENCE, ANARCHY AND SOUL (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). This rock special features the talents of Lulu, Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger and The Trinity, Lance LeGault, Chris Farlowe, Don Lang and Lonnie Donegan.

SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). "Black Fiddler: Prejudice and the Negro" is a report on community control of public schools highlighted by a Brooklyn junior high school production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Saturday, August 9

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Japanese All-Star Baseball Game from Tokyo.

Sunday, August 10

A.A.U. TRACK AND FIELD (CBS, 3:30-4:30 p.m.). U.S. r. West Germany in Augsburg, Germany.

N.F.L. PRE-SEASON GAME (CBS, 6 p.m. to conclusion). The Cleveland Browns, Eastern Conference champions, meet the San Francisco 49ers in Seattle.

HEE HAW (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Clever country corn with contributions from Guests Conway Twitty and Jerry Lee Lewis.

SUNDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 9-11:30 p.m.). Rex Harrison and Charlton Heston spar as pope and painter in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965).

Monday, August 11

NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "Fasten Your Seat Belts" is a report on our snarled airports and hazard-ridden skies as air traffic outdistances the construction of new ground facilities. Repeat.

Tuesday, August 12

THE MOD SQUAD (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).

Ida Lupino is featured as an adoption racket queen in "Child of Sorrow, Child of Light." Repeat.

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). "Fathers and Sons" is a report by Charles Kuralt and John Laurence on the generation gap in four families and the attempts to bridge it.

STRAW HAT

During summer months, Broadway favorites flood the countryside where they are performed by members of the original cast, summer stock troupes or local players. Among this season's most frequent productions:

MAME cavorts in her inimitable style, with Janis Paige playing Auntie in North Tonawanda, N.Y., Aug. 4-9; Wallingford, Conn., Aug. 11-23. Elaine Stritch stars in Hyannis, Mass., Aug. 11-16; Edie Adams in Devon, Pa., Aug. 11-23. The musical is also on view in Brunswick, Me., Aue. 18-30: Woodstock, N.Y., Aug. 5-17; and Charlotte, N.C., Aug. 5-10.

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE visits its laughter on East Hampton, L.I., Aug. 4-9; Nyack, N.Y., Aug. 11-16, with Tammy

Grimes; Paramus, N.J., Aug. 12-24; Jennerstown, Pa., Aug. 11-16; New Fairfield, Conn., Aug. 18-23; Philadelphia's Playhouse in the Park, Aug. 25-30; and Falmouth, Mass., Aug. 25-29.

YOU KNOW I CAN'T HEAR YOU WHEN THE WATER'S RUNNING brings its three droll and touching playlets to Dennis, Mass., Aug. 4-9; Nashville, Tenn., through Aug. 10; Los Angeles Gallery Theater through Aug. 15; Fish Creek, Wis., Aug. 12-17; Reading, Pa., Aug. 13-24; Woodstock, Vt., Aug. 19-23; Ogunquit, Me., Aug. 18-23; ancf Skowhegan, Me., Aug. 25-30.

CACTUS FLOWER'S bachelor dentist gets an assistant for his love intrigues at Falmouth, Mass., Aug. 4-9 with Barry Nelson; Plymouth, Mass., Aug. 18-23; Charlotte, N.C., Aug. 12-16; Nyack, N.Y., Aug. 18-23; Hendersonville, Tenn., through Aug. 24; East Hampton, L.I., Aug. 25-30; and Cooperstown, N.Y., Sept. 2-14.

BAREFOOT IN THE PARK cuts up about the period of marital adjustment in Warwick, N.Y., through Aug. 10; Salem, Va., Aug. 19-23; Cleveland Musicarnival, Aug. 18-23, with Virginia Graham; New London, N.H., Aug. 18-24; North Tonawanda, N.Y., Aug. 25-30; and Wallingford, Conn., Sept. 1-6.

GEORGE M! brings George M. Cohan's familiar music to audiences in Brunswick, Me., Aug. 4-16; Westbury, L.T., through Aug. 10; Haddonfield, N.J., Aug. 11-23, with Mickey Rooney; Corning, N.Y., Aug. 26-31; and Los Angeles' Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through Aug. 23, with Joel Grey, who starred on Broadway.

DON'T DRINK THE WATER takes a Newark caterer and his family into difficulties behind the Iron Curtain in Plymouth, Mass., Aug. 4-9; Denver, Aug. 4-9; Winooski, Vt., Aug. 12-23; Weston, Vt., Aug. 14-17; Fishkill, N.Y., Aug. 19-24; and Flat Rock, N.C., Aug. 19-23.

THE LION IN WINTER re-creates the frosty family politics of Henry H's 12th century England in Hampton, N.H., Aug. 11-16; Cooperstown, N.Y., Aug. 19-31; Plymouth, Mass., Aug. 25-30; and Orleans, Mass., Aug. 26-30.

THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP spoons out its comedy in Ivoryton, Conn., Aug. 11-17; Laconia, N.H., Aug. 18-23; Beverly, Mass., Aug. 25-30, wiih William Shatner. Also plays Charlotte, N.C., Aug. 19-24.

WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? spits vitriol for those who enjoy someone else's marital problems in Middletown, Va., Aug. 5-17; Olney, Md., Aug. 5-24 and Garden City, L.I., Aug. 14-16.

LUV makes the world of three kooky characters go round in Gilbertsville, Ky., Aug. 6-23; Southbury, Conn., Aug. 19-23; Dorset, Vt., Aug. 20-24 and Kingston, R.I., on dates between Aug. 20 and 31.

CINEMA

MARRY ME, MARRY ME. This wistful French comedy is the story of the trials of a courtship. Although Claude Berri (The Two of Us) wrote, directed and stars in the film, it is not a one-man show but a commanding display of ensemble acting.

TRUE GRIT. What would otherwise be just another formularized western comedy is saved by John Wayne's best performance in a decade.

EASY RIDER. From the unpromising material of drugs and motorcycles, debuting Director Dennis Hopper has made a strong odyssey starring himself, Peter Fonda and a brilliant newcomer named Jack Nicholson. The film occasionally slips into selfpity; yet the places and the faces of mid-America are true and tragic.

THE WILD BUNCH. Under Sam Peckinpah's direction, this film emerges as a huge and beautifully composed canvas of violence in the waning West. The script may be a campfire yarn, but the final shoot-out is one of the most raucous, violent and magnificent gun battles ever put on film.

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Love is literally blind in this film version of Nabokov's novel. Nicol Williamson is a sightless and insightless Englishman deceived by Anna Karina, a tarty movie usherette.

THE DEVIL BY THE TAIL. Yves Montand comes on strong as a sardonic, Gallic Bogart in this lively little French farce directed with wry mockery by Philippe de Broca.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Jon Voight exchanges his Texas desolation for an even more loveless scene--Manhattan, where he meets Dustin Hoffman, another loner. Their vaulting performances bring to life one of the most unlikely and melancholy love stories in the history of the American cinema.

THE FOOL KILLER and THE BOYS OF PAUL STREET. In The Fool Killer, a runaway twelve-year-old orphan comes to the beginning of maturity through a series of picaresque adventures. The call to action in The Boys of Paul Street is a dispute over the last vacant lot in town. Both films are tragicomedies that are focused on --and for--youth.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Director Larry Peerce has produced some rare moments of social criticism in this film, but he frequently slips into burlesque. Nevertheless, Richard Benjamin and AH MacGraw save the show with skillful performances.

POPI. The plight of the poor is told with humor and bite in this surprisingly successful comedy. Alan Arkin is magnificent as a Puerto Rican widower with three jobs, struggling to get his children out of a New York ghetto.

THE LOVES OF ISADORA is distinguished only by Vanessa Redgrave's graceful and majestic performance. The truncated scenario is essentially true to events but essentially false to Isadora, who made them happen.

BOOKS

Best Reading

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, by Theodore H. White. Whether following the poetic figure of Eugene McCarthy into the night or documenting Richard Nixon's electronic conquest of the nation, White is just as persistent as he was in his account of the two previous presidential races. However, his protagonist lacks the kind of flamboyance that fires up White's romantic mind, and as a result a gray pall hangs over much of the book.

H. G. WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES, by Lovat Dickson. Wells sold the masses on the future and the Utopia that science would bring, but Dickson's biography shows that inside the complacent optimist a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.

ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, edited by Nathalie Babel. This collection of newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches by the brilliant Russian-Jewish writer purged by Stalin demonstrates the individuality that was both Isaac Babel's genius and his death warrant.

THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing. In the final novel in her Children of Violence series, the author takes her heroine, Martha Quest, from World War II to the present. Then the meticulous, disturbing book proceeds into the future to demonstrate the author's extrasensory conviction that global disaster is at hand.

SONS OF DARKNESS, SONS OF LIGHT, by John A. Williams. In this novel, set in 1973, a normally reasonable Negro civil rights leader hires a gunman to avenge the death of an unarmed black boy shot by a white New York City policeman. The result evokes the tragedy of a sleepwalking society that can be awakened only by violence.

WHO TOOK THE GOLD AWAY, by John Leggett. Told with marvelous class and considerable spit and polish, this old-school novel recounts the tale of two Yale class mates who alternately befriend and betray each other well into middle age.

THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER, by Gay Talese. A former New York Times staffer takes his readers far behind the bylines for a gossipy analysis of the workings and power struggles within the nation's most influential newspaper.

THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS, by Stephen Spender. Mingling on the barricades with American and European student radicals, the Old Left poet and veteran of Spanish Civil War politics reports humanely on New Left ideals and spirit.

THE RUINED MAP, by Kobo Abe. In this psychological whodunit by one of Japan's best novelists (The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another), a detective turns a search for a missing husband into a metaphysical quest for his own identity.

ADA, by Vladimir Nabokov. A long, lyric fairy tale about time, memory and the 83-year-long love affair of a half sister and half brother by the finest living writer of English fiction.

WHAT I'M GOING TO DO, I THINK, by L. Woiwode. A young couple expecting a baby embark on a honeymoon in the Michigan woods and discover terror in paradise. A remarkable first novel.

THE ECONOMY OF CITIES, by Jane Jacobs.

With a love of cities that overshadows mere statistics, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities explores the financial aspects of growth and decay in urban centers.

TIME OUT OF HAND: REVOLUTION AND REACTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, by Robert Shaplen. Using flashbacks into history and probes into the future, The New Yorker's veteran correspondent in Asia views present dangers there with well-measured judgment.

CRAZY OVER HORSES, by Sam Toperoff. "Horses, horses, horses, crazy over horses," the old song goes. Not quite as repetitive but equally obsessed, the zealous author has transformed a lifelong weakness for the ponies into an oddly winning novel-memoir.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Love Machine, Susann (1 last week)

2. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2)

3. The Godfather, Puzo (3)

4. Ada, Nabokov (4)

5. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (5)

6. The Pretenders, Davis (6)

7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (7)

8. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (8)

9. What I'm Going to Do, I Think, Woiwode (10)

10. Except for Me and Thee, West (9)

NONFICTION

1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1)

2. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (2)

3. The Making of the President'68, White (6)

4. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (5)

5. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (7)

6. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (3)

7. Jennie, Martin (4)

8. The 900 Days, Salisbury (10)

9. Norma Jean, Guiles (8)

10. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig

* All times E.D.T.

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