The Week in Review

The nation's secret files may be successfully barred to Communists, and sometimes to just plain newsmen, but they are wide open to television writers. TVmen boast that they have their grubby fingers in the file cabinets of the Treasury Department (Treasury Men in Action), the Bureau of the Chief Inspector, Post Office Department (The Mail Story), the Los Angeles Police Department (Dragnet), the FBI (I Led Three Lives), the National Legal Aid Association (Justice). the Los Angeles County Medical Association (Medic), and the San Francisco Police (The Lineup'). Public Defender ranges from coast to coast in grabbing "actual cases on file in courts across the country," and U.S. newspaper morgues are looted to get plots for The Big Story. Last week Du Mont presented a new show. Secret File, U.S.A., that was so classified that no one connected with it was quite sure just what supersecret file they were into. An executive of the producer, Official Films, Inc., said mysteriously: "There's a tie in there between the chief writer and somebody in the OSS during the war."

Secret File stars Robert Alda, and its first script had a touchingly old-fashioned air. Alda, dressed in Nazi uniform, crept into wartime Germany to locate the factory where Hitler was manufacturing a bacteria bomb. There were squads of brutal and booted Gestapo, a beautiful barmaid (Was she enemy or friend?), a German professor who recoiled from making weapons for mass destruction. Alda had plenty of opportunity to make a stiff upper lip and to say things like "I'm only doing a job that has to be done."

Other new shows of the week:

Spectacular No. 3 (Sun. 7:30 p.m., NBC) starring Judy Holliday, Steve Allen and a new comic named Dick Shawn, was a disappointment. Intended as a salute to Manhattan's City Center of Music and Drama, the show never got airborne. Funnyman Shawn opened with a long and painfully unfunny monologue about the Confederacy, while Allen and Holliday were given little material with which to overcome that initial handicap. The best number featured Judy as a short-order waitress who gets involved in a ballet rehearsal; the most tedious--except for confirmed balletomanes -- was a 20-minute dance revolving about a filling station.

Honestly, Celeste! (Sun. 9:30 p.m., CBS) lets Comedienne Celeste Holm play hob with a newspaper office and appears to have been created by the second-string writers of NBC's Dear Phoebe, which is also a situation comedy laid in a newspaper office.

Father Knows Best (Sun. 10:00 p.m., CBS) is another one of CBS' patented family comedies that bear far more relation to each other than they do to life. Everyone from father Robert Young to Junior (Billy Gray) handles his untaxing chore with competence. All the situations and every response to them should be completely familiar to experienced televiewers.

The Search (Sun. 4:30 p.m., CBS) is a worthy addition to Sunday afternoon's "cultural" programs. Worked out over the past two years in cooperation with U.S. colleges and universities, the opening show traveled to the speech clinic of the University of Iowa for an engrossing examination of stutterers. It began with the reassurance to parents that the mere repetition of words by a six-year-old may bear no relation at all to stuttering: an examination of "normal" children in a nursery school proved that word repetition at that age is the rule rather than the exception. The deep emotional basis of stuttering was underlined in two graphic experiments: when a stutterer was artificially deafened so that he could not hear his own voice, he spoke with perfect diction; and three stutterers who, singly, could barely recite a sentence, did the same sentence with ease when they spoke in unison.

Envenomed Air. TV drama last week was having an awful time winding up its shows. On CBS' Best of Broadway, TV finally proved that it could do an adequate job on farce with an all-star production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. Viewers whose only experience of the comedy of insult had come from the cream-puff exchanges of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby may have been startled by the venom of Monty Woolley's lines. Practically his first one was an outraged shout of "I may vomit!" and, as on Broadway, he referred to Nurse Zasu Pitts as "Miss Bedpan." But it was Woolley's stage presence and precise diction that kept the farce from flying apart on TV screens. Both Merle Oberon and Joan Bennett were more beautiful than accomplished; Reginald Gardner added brightness to his impersonation of Noel Coward, while Bert Lahr was himself, which is all a viewer can ask. For some dark reason, the TV producers decided to give the play a new, outdoor ending, and the final scene included both messy camera work and acting.

On Climax!, Ethel Barrymore had a field day with an antique (1916) Broadway melodrama, Bayard Veiller's The Thirteenth Chair. This, too, kept viewers in suspense for two acts and then fell to pieces as though Adapter Walter Newman had decided that the plot was too preposterous to bother with explanations. On ABC's U.S. Steel Hour, the free world was triumphing over the Reds, as it so often does on TV. The Man with a Gun was that serviceable melodrama about the man who returns from a Red prison and is suspected of being a planted Red agent. Gary Merrill agonized for two acts while the colonel from Intelligence, and his wife and child, wondered about his true identity. The ending was so contrived, complicated and confused that it is a wonder Merrill and his family ever got themselves properly sorted out.

With Relish. In Manhattan, Comic Red Buttons relished a satisfaction granted to few TV entertainers. Dropped last year by Sponsor Maxwell House coffee, Red came back this year on a new network, NBC, and with a new advertiser (Pontiac). His competing show was CBS's Mama, bankrolled by his old sponsor, Maxwell House. Last week's Trendex ratings showed that Buttons had scored 18.9, v. 16.4 for Mama.

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