The Week in Review

Television emerged last week from its strenuous holiday celebration feeling combative enough to take on the U.S. Army, world Communism and a trip to the moon.

For two acts of Studio One's production of Fair Play, the Army got an unmerciful going over. James Gregory, a sad-sack private accused of murdering a girl, is defended by idealistic young Lieut. Dewey Martin, who is soon convinced that his client is being framed by a pair of villainous MPs. The court-martial is as farcically one-sided as if it were being run by Judge Lynch himself. When Martin protests, he is placed under barracks arrest. In the last five minutes of the play, this monstrous parody of justice turns out to have been only a bureaucratic bungle: Gregory is cleared, Martin warmly praised, and the hidebound brasshats reveal with twinkling good humor that they had been suspicious of the real villains all along.

NBC next came to bat with Nightmare in Red, on Armstrong Circle Theater, its long-heralded story of "how Communism came to Russia and became a world menace." The early footage from old news films was devoted to the Czarist decay that made Communism possible,and there were fine shots of the Romanovs at play while revolutionaries were being ineffectually routed out of cellars. For the upheavals of the Bolshevik age, Producer Henry Salomon leaned heavily on excerpts from such great Eisenstein films as Potemkin and Ten Days That Shook the World. All in all, the story of tyranny rampant was pieced together out of newsclips and bits of movies from some 76 different sources. The film was often hauntingly effective with its firing squads, starving children, hanged partisans and iron-faced Red leaders. But its lesson--if any--was hopelessly lost in the maelstrom of scenes covering the past 50 years.

ABC took the week's honors with a dependable Disneyland feature called Man and the Moon. The first half of the show was an amiable, animated account of mankind's relations with the moon from the dawn of history until today. The second part took a leap into the future with Guided-Missile Expert Wernher von Braun putting on a sample flight to the moon and back with the complement of spaceships and space gear that must have had Captain Video gnawing his oxygen tube with envy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.