Wednesday, September 24
MEDICAL CENTER (CBS, 9-10 p.m.).* O. J. Simpson guest-stars as a college football player suffering from a strange illness. Doctors James Daly and Chad Everett try to get him into the hospital. Premiere.
KRAFT MUSIC HALL (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Bobby Gentry, Phil Harris and Browning Bryant are guests of Eddy Arnold.
YOUR DOLLAR'S WORTH (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "Wall Street: Place Your Bets" looks into just what your broker is up to down on the Street.
Thursday, September 25
THE JIM NABORS HOUR (CBS, 8-9 p.m.). Nabors has brought along Frank Sutton from his Gomer Pyle days to be a variety-show regular with Ronnie Schell and Karen Morrow. Andy Griffith and Julie Budd are guests. Premiere.
NET PLAYHOUSE (NET. 8-9:30 p.m.). James Joyce's Dubliners, retitled "Dublin One."
THURSDAY NIGHT MOVIES (CBS, 9-11 p.m.). The Guns of Navarone (1961) stars Gregory Peck, David Niven. Anthony Quinn and Anthony Quayle. Part 1 to night; Part 2 Friday, 9-11 p.m.
Friday, September 26
GET SMART (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Agents 86 and 99 (Don Adams and Barbara Feldon), having moved to a new network, find out they are incipient parents.
THE BRADY BUNCH (ABC, 8-8:30 p.m.). Robert Reed, a widower with three sons, marries Florence Henderson, a widow with three daughters, and all eight live happily for the length of the series. Premiere.
MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN (ABC, 8:30-9 p.m.). Inherited ill-gotten gains in the hands of an idealistic newspaper editor and publisher (Monte Markham) bring him romance, adventure, and a public relations man (Pat Harrington) for a sidekick. Premiere.
JIMMY DURANTE PRESENTS THE LENNON SIS TERS (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). Jack Benny, Noel Harrison and Jimmy Dean are along for the premiere.
Saturday, September 27
IT WAS A SHORT SUMMER, CHARLIE BROWN (CBS, 8:30-9 p.m.). Remembrances of sum mer camp flood Charlie's mind on the first day back at school in the newest Pea nuts special.
Sunday, September 28
AMERICAN FOOTBALL LEAGUE DOUBLEHEADER (NBC, 1:30 p.m. to conclusion). Regional games begin the play, and at 4 p.m. the New York Jets meet the San Diego Chargers.
TO ROME WITH LOVE (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Three daughters, aged 19, nine and six, accompany their widower father, John Forsythe, to a new life in Italy. Premiere.
THE LESLIE UGGAMS SHOW (CBS, 9-10 p.m.). Dick Van Dyke, David Frye, Sly and the Family Stons turn out to wel come the Smothers Brothers' replacement. Premiere.
THE BOLD ONES (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Leslie Nielsen is deputy police chief and Hari Rhodes is D.A. Together they look into a mysterious death and other foul play in "A Case of Good Whiskey at Christmas Time."
Monday, September 29
HAROLD ROBBINS' "THE SURVIVORS" (ABC, 9-10 p.m.). Jet-set soap starring Lana Turner. Ralph Bellamy, George Hamilton and Kevin McCarthy. Premiere.
LOVE, AMERICAN STYLE (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). A compendium on the subject, with stories of various lengths and guest stars in each. Flip Wilson in "Love and the Hustler," Robert Cummings and Jane Wyatt in "Love and the Pill," Michael Callan, Penny Fuller and Yvonne Craig in "Love and a Couple of Couples." Premiere.
Tuesday, September 30
NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). To commemorate the 300th anniversary of the master's death, "In Search of Rembrandt" visits Leyden, where the painter was born, Amsterdam, where he lived, and museums throughout the world.
THEATER
With Broadway and Off Broadway about to plunge into a new and busy season, now might be the time to catch up with last season's more successful shows.
Broadway
FORTY CARATS. Julie Harris manages to look both pretty and plausible as a 40-year-old divorcee who is wooed and finally wed by a young man just about half her age.
PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM is Woody Allen's new comedy, in which he plays a woefully unconfident young man trying desperately to be as successful with girls as his idol, Bogey.
Off Broadway
ADAPTATION--NEXT. Elaine May directs two of last season's funniest one-acters. Adaptation, which Miss May also wrote, is the game of life staged like a television game. Next, by Terrence McNally, has James Coco in a fine performance as a middle-aged man undergoing a series of humiliating pre-induction examinations.
DAMES AT SEA. The cast is still tapping its way to stardom in this affectionate parody of the movie musicals of the '30s.
NO PLACE TO BE SOMEBODY is a sometimes rambling, but always absorbing study of the contemporary fabric of black-white and black-black relations.
OH! CALCUTTA! The contents of this "nudie revue" may be disappointing when one considers the list of contributors--and the authors have not come through with the promised "elegant erotica"--but the bodies are indeed handsome.
TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK is a moving and often amusing evening of readings and dramatizations from the works of the late Lorraine Hansberry.
CINEMA
THE GYPSY MOTHS. Three sky divers (Burt Lancaster, Gene Hackman and Scott Wilson) barnstorm through Kansas challenging an irrevocable fate in John Frankenheimer's tense and sober investigation of existential courage.
MARRY ME, MARRY ME. Claude Berri (The Two of Us) has directed another wistful, undemonstrative film, this one about courtship, love and marriage in a French Jewish family.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. In a movie year not noted for levity, Woody Allen's first film as a director comes on like gangbusters. Although it tends to lose its comic momentum toward the end, there are more than enough insanely funny moments to sustain the picture.
ALICE'S RESTAURANT. Arthur Penn has deepened and widened the scope of Arlo Guthrie's hilarious talking blues record and transformed it into a melancholy epitaph for a whole way of life. Alternately funny and poignant, Alice's Restaurant may be the best film about young people ever made in this country.
MEDIUM COOL is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year. Writer-Director-Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention fuses documentary and narrative techniques into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict.
THE WILD BUNCH. There are equally generous doses of blood and poetry in this raucous western directed by Sam Peckinpah. Telling a violent yarn about a group of freebooting bandits operating around the Tex-Mex border at the turn of the century, Peckinpah uses both an uncommonly fine sense of irony and an eye for visual splendor to establish himself as one of the very best Hollywood directors.
STAIRCASE. There are two good reasons to see this film version of Charles Dyer's play, and they are Richard Burton and Rex Harrison. Portraying a bickering, desperate homosexual couple on the brink of old age, both men turn in their best screen performances in years.
TRUE GRIT. At 62, John Wayne is still riding tall in the saddle. Playing a hard-drinking but softhearted lawman in this cornball western comedy, Wayne proves that his nickname, "The Duke," has never been more apt.
BOOKS
Best Reading
FAT CITY, by Leonard Gardner. A brilliant exception to the general rule that boxing fiction seldom graduates beyond caricature, this first novel convincingly explores the limbo lives of three men in a shoddy California town, who cling to the ring and get nowhere.
THE FRENCH: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE, by Sanche de Gramont. Only the cuisine comes off unscathed in this entertaining analysis vinaigrette of the French national character.
BIRDS, BEASTS AND RELATIVES, by Gerald Durrell. Zoology begins at home, or at least that's the way it seems to Naturalist Durrell, who recalls his boyhood infatuation with animals and his family's strained tolerance of some of the things that followed him into the house.
THE COST OF LIVING LIKE THIS, by James Kennaway. An intense and coldly accurate novel about a man's coming to gloomy terms with the cancer that is pinching off his life.
DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS, by Jorge Amado. A leisurely, sensuous tale of a virtuous lady and her conjugal rites --as vivid and bawdy as Boccaccio.
SIAM 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 BIG LITTLE MAN FROM BROOKLYN, by St. Clair McKelway. The incredible life of Stanley Clifford Weyman, who cracked the upper crust by posing at various times as U.S. Consul General to Algiers, a physician and a French naval officer.
FLASHMAN: FROM THE FLASHMAN PAPERS 1839-1842, edited and arranged by George MacDonald Fraser. But don't believe it for a minute. Though it has fooled several scholars, Flashman is actually an agreeable fictional takeoff on assorted British tales of derring-do in the days of the Empah.
SHAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1856-1898), selected by Stanley Weintraub. Shaw never wrote one. But this paste-and-scissors portrait fashioned from fragments of the great man's work serves its purpose well enough.
COLLECTED ESSAYS, by Graham Greene. In 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.
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 evokes Melville's memory.
Best Sellers
FICTION
1. The Godfather, Puzo (1 last week)
2. The Love Machine, Susann (2) 3. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (3)
4. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (4)
5. Naked Came the Stranger, Ashe (7) 6. The Pretenders, Davis (5)
7. Harpoon in Eden, Van Wyck Mason
8. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (8)
9. Ada, Nabokov (6)
10. A Place in the Country, Gainham (10)
NONFICTION
1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1)
2. The Making of the President 1968, White (3)
3. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (2)
4. Jennie, Martin (5)
5. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (4)
6. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (6)
7. Captive City, Demaris (8)
8. Ernest Hemingway, Baker
9. Miss Craig's 21-Day Shape-Up Program for Men and Women, Craig (7)
10. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (10)
*All times E.D.T.
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