The Week in Review

Television spent the week racing back and forth through history like a time machine. Omnibus set out heroically to recreate Homer's Iliad, and for 90 minutes the poetry was mostly drowned out in a clatter of tin swords on tin shields as Trojan and Greek struggled on the plain and seashore of Troy. The Trojans lost the war, but they won what few acting honors were available: Frederick Rolf displayed both majesty and grief as King Priam, while Michael Higgins' doomed Hector seemed far more a man and soldier than his rival, Achilles.

Sandals & Shooting. Kraft TV Theater also took a flyer at the toga-and-sandal crowd with Whim of Iron, a halfhearted comedy about Byzantine days and nights which came out so ineptly that its author, Michael Dyne, insisted on being identified over the air as "Michael Roberts." Explained Dyne's agent: "That's the only form of protest a writer on television has."

Next came a fat saddlebag full of westerns. On Tuesday night a viewer could find hardly anything but six-shooters and cowpunchers. Armstrong Circle Theater proved again that the good guy can always outshoot the bad guy; Danger tried hard to mix comedy with its gun fighting in The Last Duel in Virginia City, while Elgin Hour presented Black Eagle Pass, a homily on the evils of bigamy in the Far West. Paul Douglas got a single-tracked power into his role of the blackmailed and misunderstood bigamist, and the Western setting was apparently justified in the last act when Douglas' difficulties were neatly solved by a blaze of gunfire.

The Blue Danube ran merrily through the first of the week's color shows. In Robert Sherwood's vintage (1951) Reunion in Vienna on NBC, Greer Garson was beautiful enough and Actor Robert Flemyng nearly skilled enough to bring the play to life, but Brian Aherne's silly-ass Archduke made some viewers cease to care whether school kept or not.

Comings & Goings. CBS went to color for its hour-long production of Stage Door. As on Broadway, the action was confined largely to an actresses' boarding house, and the TV cameras had to hop to keep up with the frantic comings and goings of girls, guys and assorted spear-carriers. The play's moral--that the legitimate theater is devoted to the true and beautiful and Hollywood to the cheap and shoddy--is not only a dubious one (especially in the light of this year's Broadway scatology), but seemed to come with poor grace from television--where the play was regularly interrupted for hard-selling commercials by Westinghouse. Diana Lynn was somewhat characterless as the dedicated girl who spurns Hollywood's gold; Peggy Ann Garner shone briefly as the disappointed actress who tries suicide but (in TV's version of the play) doesn't succeed, and Nita Talbot, as a wisecracking bystander, got the few laughs registered by the studio audience.

On Ed Murrow's Person to Person, brains scored an easy decision over beauty. Marilyn Monroe was overwhelmingly blonde, breathless and inarticulate as she told millions of viewers how "wonderful" it is to live in New York, visit Connecticut, ride an elephant in a circus and aspire toward a "serious" acting role in the movies. Then the TV audience received what amounted to an intellectual cold shower when it was introduced to Sir Thomas and Lady Beecham, a pair of poised professionals who had little more to say than Marilyn but expressed themselves with infinitely more verve and venom.

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