The Week in Review

Television set a furious pace that it may find hard to keep up. Most of the excitement of the week was generated by dramatic shows. CBS's Best of Broadway resurrected the 1941 hit, Arsenic and Old Lace, and filled it with a star-studded cast that Broadway today would give its eyeteeth to have. As the addlepated Brooklyn sisters who gently practice mass euthanasia on lonely old men, Helen Hayes and Billie Burke were the epitome of lethal charm. John Alexander recreated his memorable role of their nephew who believes that he is Teddy Roosevelt (and leads a spirited charge up San Juan Hill every time he gallops upstairs), while Orson Bean managed to bring fresh good humor to the part of the only sane member of the zany Brewster family. Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff made a satisfying pair of stumblebum villains. Few TV revivals of old Broadway plays have come off as entertainingly and inventively as Arsenic and Old Lace.

NBC's Lux Video Theater did nearly as good a job in its version of the 1950 movie success, Sunset Boulevard. Miriam Hopkins had some big ravaged moments as the faded film star who is convinced that her public still clamors to see her on the screen, but James Daly was altogether too wooden as the young man whose mixed motives of pity and greed turn him into a gigolo and, eventually, a corpse. ABC's U.S. Steel Hour offered another TV version of Henri Bernstein's The Thief (Kraft TV Theater did the same play in 1952), with Paul Lukas, Diana Lynn, Mary Astor and James Deane. An old-school melodrama, The Thief tells of an idealistic young man who takes the responsibility for an older woman's momentary weakness. The play, as well as the actors, was better in its parts than in its whole, but it made a satisfactory 60 minutes on TV.

The week's most-talked-about show was Ed Murrow's See It Now, which presented a half-hour "conversation" with Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, directing genius in the making of the atom bomb and last year (TIME, July 12) denied security clearance by a 4-to-1 vote of the Atomic Energy Commission.

The show was especially memorable for the impelling quality of Oppenheimer's personality and bearing. The talk ranged from pleasant academic jokes ("There's Panofsky, who is a historian of art. He has two kids--two boys--both physicists, and they are very, very bright boys, and one of them is first in his class at Princeton. The other is second. They call one the 'bright' Panofsky and the other the 'dumb' Panofsky") to Oppenheimer's own ideas of security and secrecy ("There aren't any secrets about the world of nature. There are only secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. Sometimes they are secret because a man doesn't like to know what he's up to if he can avoid it").

Filmed at Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer presides as director, the show was a 30-minute digest of a 2 1/2-hour interview. When the show went on the air the CBS switchboard at first received a "few calls of protest." Since then, the mail received at both CBS and Princeton has been heavily in Oppenheimer's favor, and Murrow reports that an additional hour-long film of the interview is being prepared for release to colleges. It will be financed by the Fund for the Republic, a division of the Ford Foundation.

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