The Week in Review

In a week studded with good dramatic revivals on NBC, the biggest and best was the Producers' Showcase lavish production of The Women. This feline free-for-all, written in 1936 by Clare Boothe Luce, remains an actresses' field day, and Ruth Hussey, Shelley Winters, Mary Astor, Nancy Olson, Valerie Bettis and Cathleen Nesbitt waged an exciting conflict for domination of the manless stage. A few of the more trenchant lines were dropped from the TV version of the play, and Paulette Goddard and Mary Boland seemed miscast as the viper-tongued Sylvia Fowler and the gigolo-collecting Countess de Lage.

Following the 90-minute telecast of The Women, Robert Montgomery took time off from his week-to-week job as director of Robert Montgomery Presents (see THEATER) to star in Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend. There was far more artistry in Montgomery's careful delineation of the tortures and cravings of a chronic alcoholic than in the oversimplified happy ending. Lux Video Theater supplied another revival with John Hersey's A Bell for Adano, the prototype of all scripts about relations between lovable U.S. officers and equally lovable natives of occupied countries. Edmond O'Brien was effective as the idealistic Major Joppolo, and Charles Bronson played that familiar folk hero, the tough sergeant with the heart of gold.

Television had its own revival when Kraft TV Theater repeated Rod Serling's Patterns, which was first shown a month ago. A study of war to the knife in a large corporation, Patterns employed the same cast (Everett Sloane, Ed Begley, Richard Kiley), to win the approval of those critics who had missed it earlier. But at week's end there was at least one strongly dissenting voice: the Watt Street Journal. In a long, viewing-with-alarm editorial, the Journal conceded the play's dramatic power but expressed shock at its ethical standards and concluded: ". . . It is a strange thing if this is what playwrights, critics and the public generally think of as the true mood, atmosphere and moral values of human beings in business. And if this is the general impression, it ought to send cold chills up to the upper executive reaches."

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