The Week in Review

Filmed TV last week easily outdistanced live television. The most impressive triumph was Sir Laurence Olivier's Richard III, which justified NBC's cultural gamble by capturing a huge audience (estimated, perhaps too optimistically, at 45 million viewers) and holding them for three hours, despite the involved plot and the soaring but often obscure language.

CBS checked in with Ed Murrow's filmed 1 1/2-hour See It Now, devoted to Arab-Israeli tensions. The report from Egypt, handled by Howard K. Smith, was particularly chilling as Arab after Arab stepped up to blame the U.S. for all the troubles in the Middle East and to chant fanatically that the only solution was war with Israel. Israeli citizens and leaders were a good deal more skillful than the Arabs in creating an air of reasonableness and common sense but were equally deaf to any suggestion of significant border changes or concessions.

Remembered Nightmare. NBC took an hour-long look at the recent past with The Twisted Cross, a filmed record of Hitler's rise and fall. Except for the very young, the show had all the horror of a recalled nightmare: the massed banners and goose-stepping thunder of helmeted battalions, the full-throated Sieg Heils of ecstatic crowds. The film, as a whole, was not illumined by any unifying idea, but it had value as a dread remembrance of things past.

At week's end CBS pre-empted Omnibus' hour and a half to present Out of Darkness. Filmed in cooperation with the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association for Mental Health, Darkness was designed to show the public what can now be done to cure mental ill ness, and as a full-scale attack on the national apathy that allots no more than an average of $2.80 a day for the care, housing and medical treatment of the 750,000 patients in U.S. mental hospitals.

Tremendous Experience. The story is compellingly told in terms of Doris L., a young woman admitted to California's Metropolitan State Hospital as a catatonic. Mute, withdrawn, her eyes blank and disregarding of the world, Doris nevertheless had a great natural dignity, an almost glacial repose that seemed invulnerable to any appeal. For 2% months a concealed camera recorded her psychiatric sessions with Dr. Louis Cholden. His slow struggle to reach a human being submerged in indifference had in it all the wire-thin inten sity of great drama. When Doris finally smiled and spoke her first word ("pretty"), it was as though the curtain had just come down on the tremendous third act of a moving tragedy. The dramatic line was strengthened by Orson Welles's occasional readings. In its way, Out of Darkness was as shaking a human experience as Richard III. Undoubtedly it will be shown again.

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