And the Jerebohms are more than willing to buy it. They plan to become county people who know the proper way to terminate a fox's life on earth.

If, in Larkin's eyes, they are nothing but Piccadilly farmers, he has as much to learn about them as they have to learn about the ways of truly rural living.

Mr. Bates shows us how this mutual education spreads its inevitable havoc. Oneupmanship is practiced by both sides in a total war.

First the Larkins are ahead, then the Jerebohms. After Larkin has been persuaded to restock his tangled acres with pheasants, he poaches only what he needs for the nourishment of his family and local callers. One of the local callers, a retired brigadier apparently left over from Kipling's tales of India, does not approve of the way Larkin gets his birds.

He doesn't think that potting them from a deck chair on the south side of the house with a quart glass of beer for sustenance is entirely sporting. But the brigadier dines on the birds with relish.

It is truly odd and ironic that the most handsome and impressive film yet made from Miguel de Cervantes' ``Don Quixote'' is the brilliant Russian spectacle, done in wide screen and color, which opened yesterday at the Fifty-fifth Street and Sixty-eighth Street Playhouses.

More than a beautiful visualization of the illustrious adventures and escapades of the tragi-comic knight-errant and his squire, Sancho Panza, in seventeenth century Spain, this inevitably abbreviated rendering of the classic satire on chivalry is an affectingly warm and human exposition of character.