Thursday, September 4 THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR PRESENT THE ABC SUPER SATURDAY CLUB SPECIAL (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.).* This preview of the new kiddie fare slated to be dished out on Saturday mornings is hosted by Edward Mulhare and Hope Lange. The five new shows:

Smokey the Bear (8:309 a.m.)

The Cattanooga Cats (9-10 a.m.)

Hot Wheels (10-10:30 a.m.)

The Hardy Boys (10:30-11 a.m.)

Sky Hawks (11-11:30 a.m.)

Friday, September 5

ARTUR RUBINSTEIN (NBC, 8:30-10 p.m.). An exploration of the life and music of the famous pianist, narrated by Rubinstein himself.

Saturday, September 6

U.S. OPEN TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS (CBS, 4-6 p.m.). Men's semifinals from Forest Hills, N.Y. Sunday 2:30-4:30 p.m., men's finals and taped features of women's finals.

WORLD SERIES OF GOLF (NBC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Winners of golf's "big four" tournaments (Tony Jacklin, British Open; George Archer, Masters; Orville Moody, U.S. Open; and Ray Floyd, P.G.A.) compete at Firestone Country Club, Akron. Final round Sunday 5-6:30 p.m.

THE ALL-STAR CIRCUS (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Tony Curtis introduces circus acts from all over the world.

THE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT (NBC, 10 p.m. to midnight). There she'll stand--if you can sit there long enough.

Sunday, September 7

CAMERA THREE (CBS, 11-11:30 a.m.). In the first of a two-part program, Pierre Boulez, who is slated to be music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1971, is shown rehearsing and conducting Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

THE BATTLE FOR BRITAIN (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Michael Caine serves as narrator of the re-creation of England's fight against Nazi Germany's aerial attacks during World War II. It will star Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir Michael Redgrave, Robert Shaw, Christopher Plummer, Trevor Howard and Curt Jurgens.

Monday, September 8

A COUNTRY HAPPENING (NBC, 7:30-8 p.m.). Roy Rogers and his wife Dale Evans play host to Michael Landon and Bobby Goldsboro.

JACK PAAR AND HIS LIONS (NBC, 8-9 p.m.). Jack tells of his experiences with several lions he adopted, which were supposed to be offspring of the Born Free lions.

A CONVERSATION WITH EARL WARREN (NET, 9-10 p.m.). An interview with the former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court held just before he announced his retirement last June.

Tuesday, September 9

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT: 1968 (CBS, 9:30-11 p.m.). From the New Hampshire primary to the November election, the tale of how President Richard Nixon made it to the White House.

THEATER

As the straw-hat season draws to a close, Broadway and off-Broadway shows once again become the main focus of the theater world. Among the hits still running, for those who may have missed them earlier:

On Broadway

HADRIAN VII is Peter Luke's deft dramatization of Frederick Rolfe's book about a rejected candidate for the priesthood who in his fantasies becomes the second English Pope. Alec McCowen's performance has been called one of the major theatrical events of the decade.

FORTY CARATS, a French comedy of new marital modes and manners, is just the evening to drive away the day's tribulations. Julie Harris is a matron who falls for a 22-year-old lad while a wealthy widower woos her 18-year-old daughter, proving that love is a game for all seasons.

PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM centers on Woody Allen's latest kooky hero (played by himself), a woefully unconfident guy with so many hang-ups that he makes theatergoers feel positively healthy.

Off Broadway

OH! CALCUTTA! not only offers the most nudity but the handsomest nudes on the New York stage. However, the revels devised by Kenneth Tynan arouse more laughter than eroticism.

NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY fills the stage as if it were an urban jungle, ticking with the menace of black-white confrontation, exploding with unexpected laughter. Charles Gordone's play stars Nathan George and Ron O'Neal.

ADAPTATION--NEXT are two one-acters, the first, a corrosively perceptive satire by Elaine May, cleverly staged like a TV-contest game of life; the second, by Terrence McNally, about an overage draftee commandingly played by James Coco.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK, put together from the sensitive writings of Lorraine Hansberry, is suffused not only with hot anger at the indignity and injustice in black-white relations but also with a glowing concern for men and women as people.

CEREMONIES IN DARK OLD MEN is Lonne Elder's play about the disintegration of a black family amidst today's social protest, performed with verve and precision by the Negro Ensemble Company.

LITTLE MURDERS takes place in an almost psychotic New York milieu of impending violence. The plot is to get the passive fiance to marry the all-American daughter of a middle-class family, but the point is social satire that brings treacherously light-hearted laughter, despite Jules Feiffer's attempt at the blackest of comedies.

DAMES AT SEA sets out to spoof the musicals of the '30s so familiar on the late shows. The naive little girl comes to Broadway to tap her way to stardom, picks her way past all the pitfalls, and finds glory as she goes into the usual diversions of intricate dance routines and glittering production numbers.

CINEMA

MEDIUM COOL is dynamite. A loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention, Cool is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler makes a dazzling directorial debut by fusing dramatic and documentary footage into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict with itself.

RUN WILD, RUN FREE. The trouble with most matinee movies is that they often seem made by children rather than for them. Run Wild is a happy exception, a fondly and meticulously rendered parable about an autistic English boy (Mark Lester) and an almost magical white colt.

THE WILD BUNCH. The blood runs thick and often in Sam Peckinpah's raucous western about a band of freebooting bandits operating on both sides of the Tex-Mex border around the turn of the century. The action is plentiful, the performances faultless, and the film itself one of the best of the year.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. The journey of Apollo II has lent a new immediacy to Stanley Kubrick's visionary film of an expedition to Jupiter that assumes staggering metaphysical consequences. Kubrick is among the greatest of American film makers, and 2001 may well stand as his best film.

EASY RIDER. Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda cruise around the country on their choppers looking for the meaning of it all. If the self-pity becomes rather too heavy at times, Hopper (who also directed) has captured some telling bits of Americana on film and extracted a performance from Jack Nicholson that is a model of intuition and sensitivity.

TRUE GRIT. John Wayne, at 62, has the time of his long screen life in this cornball western comedy about a stubborn old marshal who joins forces with a headstrong teen-age girl (Kim Darby) to bring some murderers to justice. The Duke's performance as the marshal proves that his nickname has never been more apt.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A slick package about being lonely and loveless in New York is directed by John Schlesinger in fashion-magazine style, but the acting of Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight gives the film a sense of poignancy and reality.

MARRY ME, MARRY ME. Courtship, love and marriage among a community of French Jews are the subjects of this wistful film directed by Claude Berri (The Two of Us).

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Tony Richardson does his best film making since The Entertainer in this smooth and savage adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel about the hopeless love of a blind English aristocrat (Nicol Williamson) for a brazen movie usherette (Anna Karina).

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 DEVIL BY THE TAIL. Another drop essay by Philippe de Broca on the intricacies of love, starring Yves Montand at his sardonic best.

BOOKS

Best Reading

COLLECTED ESSAYS, by Graham Greene.

In retrospective notes and criticism, the prolific novelist provocatively drives home the same obsessive point: "Human nature is not black and white but black and grey."

PAIRING OFF, by Julian Moynahan. The book masquerades as a novel but is more like having a nonstop non sequitur Irish storyteller around, which may on occasion be more welcome than well-made fiction.

SI AM MIAMI, by Morris Renek. The trials of a pretty pop singer who tries to sell herself and save herself at the same time. Astoundingly, she manages both.

THE END OF LIBERALISM, by Theodore J. Lowi. Much liberal policy but little liberalizing practice has characterized the U.S. Government for more than 30 years, says this University of Chicago professor, who argues for a dumping of pragmatism and political pluralism in favor of tough, well-planned and enforced Government standards.

THE YEAR OF THE WHALE, by Victor B. Scheffer. The most awesome of mammals has been left alone by literary men almost since Moby Dick. Now Dr. Scheffer, a scientist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes of the whale's life cycle with a mixture of fact and feeling that invokes Melville's memory.

ALLEN GINSBERG IN AMERICA, by Jane Kramer. Earnest, articulate and somehow despairingly sanguine, Allen Ginsberg has evolved from a minor poet to a major cult figure--a kind of one-man air ferry between bohemian and Brahmin traditions. Wisely, perhaps, Author Kramer concentrates on the life rather than the works.

MEMOIRS OF A REVOLUTIONIST, by Peter Kropotkin. The absorbing autobiography of a 19th century Russian prince turned anarchist, who paid for his ideals in stretches of penury and imprisonment.

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 shows that inside the complacent optimist a pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.

ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, edited by Nathalie Babel. Newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches show the individuality that was both Babel's genius and his death warrant.

THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing.

In the final novel of her Children of Violence series, the author takes 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.

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, by Theodore H. White. White is just as diligent as he was when recounting the victories of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. But this time his protagonist lacks the flamboyance to fire up White's romantic mind, and as a result a slight pall hangs over much of the book.

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

Best Sellers

FICTION

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

2. The Godfather, Puzo (2)

3. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (3)

4. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (4)

5. The Pretenders, Davis (5)

6. Ada, Nabokov (6)

7. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe

8. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (7)

9. A Place in the Country, Gainham

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

NONFICTION

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

2. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (3)

3. The Making of the President 1968, White (2)

4. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (4)

5. Jennie, Martin (5)

6. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (6)

7. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (8)

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

9. Captive City, Demaris

10. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (10)

*All times E.D.T.

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