The Week in Review

TV was showing signs of spring fever. Most of the week's dramas ran in pairs like truant schoolboys. There were two broad farces, two plays about frustrated spinsters, two about boxers, two about lady spies, two about heartless fathers, and two about the general untrustworthiness of the men.

Out of this welter one spinster, one spy and one of the boxers emerged above average. On Studio One, pretty Nina Foch accomplished the considerable job of looking plain as a mud fence in a drama about a thirtyish spinster who gets her last chance at a sad-eyed, vintage bachelor (Edward Andrews). Their hesitant, tongue-tied courtship contained perhaps too many pregnant pauses and awkward gropings for words, but even though the drama bore a considerable resemblance to Paddy Chayefsky's Holiday Song of several years ago, it achieved the agonizing ache and flowering fulfillment of the loveless who finally find love.

NBC's Goody ear-Philco Playhouse scored a near miss with a literate, well-cast play called Shadow of the Champ. On a transatlantic voyage, Broadway's Lee Grant, the disenchanted sister of a sportswriter, is thrown together with Eli Wallach, the boyhood chum and adult hanger-on of the heavyweight champion of the world (Jack Warden), and slowly draws him away from his lifelong shadow-like attachment to the champ. Scene after scene was nicely drawn, particularly those sketching the almost Oriental retinue that trails after a champion boxer, but the play as a whole failed to carry conviction.

Kraft TV Theater looked into the case of Mary Surratt, hanged in 1865 for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and, like most historians, found her innocent. Doreen Lang captured believably the quality of a woman too pure-minded to know or guess at the plot that was hatched in her own house; the military court that condemned her to death had that toplofty disregard for the evidence that seems to identify all judges who hear cases with their minds already made up.

Armstrong Circle Theater offered a grim little farce called TV or Net TV. The plot line: when a group of suburban husbands feel abused because their wives and children neglect them to watch television, they cunningly arrange to botch the TV reception; but a few nights of listening to the incessant yammering of their TV-free families drive them to restore the status quo. Somewhere in this vicious circle the televiewer himself may well have felt tempted to risk the full fury of a family on the loose in preference to the typically bad TV farce represented in TV or Not TV.

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