Television: Aug. 1, 1969

Wednesday, July 30

SPECTRUM (NET, 8-8:30 p.m.).* “The Alcoholic American” looks at why people drink heavily, how it affects their lives, and what types of treatment are available.

Thursday, July 31 DEAN MARTIN PRESENTS THE GOLDDIGGERS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Cheerful stuff.

Friday, August 1

SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital and almost a member of the Nixon team, Dr. John Knowles is featured on “The Right to Live,” an examination of Medicare and Medicaid.

COLLEGE ALL-STAR FOOTBALL GAME (ABC, 9:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m.). The New York Jets meet the best of last season’s collegiate seniors at Soldier Field in Chicago.

CBS SPECIAL NEWS REPORT (CBS, 11:30 p.m. to midnight). “The President Abroad,” tonight’s report from New Delhi and Lahore via satellite. Saturday from Bucharest, 7:30-8:30 p.m., and a summary of the world trip on Sunday, 6-6:30 p.m.

Saturday, August 2

WESTCHESTER GOLF CLASSIC (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). Top pros vie for $250,000 at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, N.Y. (Finals Sunday from 5 to 7 p.m.)

Sunday, August 3

A.A.U. INTERNATIONAL TRACK AND FIELD (CBS, 3:30-4:30 p.m.). Western Hemisphere athletes v. Europe, from Stuttgart, West Germany.

Monday, August 4

SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). “Ferment and the Catholic Church.”

Tuesday, August 5

DON’T COUNT THE CANDLES (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Lord Snowdon’s Emmy-winning essay on aging is perhaps the most outstanding documentary from last season.

STRAW HAT

The charm of a familiar tune or the lure of a new melody will draw summer the atergoers to barns, tents and playhouses this week:

SKOWHEGAN, ME. Lakewood Theater. Essentially a family album of George M. Co han’s music, George M! gives its regrets to Broadway for an era that has passed; it’s the sort of show to which the audience comes already humming the songs, most of which hold up remarkably well.

Hal Holden stars.

HYANNIS, MASS. Cape Cod Melody Tent.

Petite Molly Picon, who played the role on Broadway, leads a band of widows searching for second love in Israel, the land of Milk and Honey.

NEW FAIRFIELD, CONN. Candlewood Play house. Rodgers and Hart’s caddish antihero, Pal Joey, picks up a girl as easily as he orders a drink. Arlene Francis plays the rich lady who picks up the tab.

LATHAM, N.Y. Colonie Summer Theater.

In the new musical Hello, Sucker, Mar tha Raye plays Texas Guinan, famed speak-times E.D.T. easy hostess of the ’20s, whose forthright greeting gives the show its name. Wilson Stone created the score for this pre-Broadway show, with story line by Larry Marks and Robert Ennis Touroff.

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. Playhouse. Maine is fast becoming everybody’s favorite aunt —at least since Charley’s—attacking every adventure from fox hunting to mountain climbing with uncompromising verve.

GREENPORT, L.I. Summer Playhouse. Adam and Eve face newlywed adjustments, a warrior must choose between his love and a tiger, and a chimney sweep is transformed into a movie star in The Apple Tree, three episodes with music by Jerry Bock and lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, the team who did Fiddler on the Roof.

ATLANTA, GA. Civic Center. How Now, Dow Jones with Tony Randall and Arlene Fontana. Set in the golden canyons of Wall Street, the musical manages occasional humor about stocks and bonds.

BARDSTOWN, KY. My Old Kentucky Home State Park is, appropriately, the setting for the Stephen Foster Story, a song-filled tribute to the composer.

CLEVELAND, OHIO. Musicarnival. On Time, a new revue, takes some of the unlikeliest sources—King Lear, The Seagull, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and the Bible —to illustrate its theme, the generation gap through the ages. It was compiled by Howard da Silva, Felix Leon and Alfred Drake, who also stars; music and lyrics by Charles Burr.

MILWAUKEE, WIS. Melody Top Tent. I Get a Kick out of You, You’re the Top, Blow, Gabriel, Blow, and of course the title song Anything Goes are just four of the numbers that made Cole Porter’s 1934 musical the tops for so long. It is still going strong, with Gretchen Wyler playing the original Ethel Merman role.

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. Ahmanson Theater, the Music Center. José Ferrer plays the dual Don Quixote-Cervantes role in Man of La Mancha, a romantic operetta that resembles Don Quixote as it might have been written by Sancho Panza. But the settings and costumes are handsome.

CINEMA

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 self-pity, but the places and the faces of mid-America are true and tragic.

THE WILD BUNCH. Under Sam Peckinpah’s direction, this film becomes 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 film.

TRUE GRIT would be nothing but another creaky western comedy except for a superb, self-mocking performance by John Wayne, who at 62 has never seemed more like The Duke.

BOOKS

Best Reading

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 American 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 classmates 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 Abé. 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.

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 (8)

8. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (9)

9. Except for Me and Thee, West (7)

10. What I’m Going to Do, I Think, Woiwode

NONFICTION

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

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

3. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (3)

4. Jennie, Martin (4)

5. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (6)

6. The Making of the President ’68, White

7. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (5)

8. Norma Jean, Guiles

9. Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, Newfield (9)

10. The 900 Days, Salisbury (7)

* All time E.D.T.