The Week in Review

In its long and lusty history, drama has never had as harsh a taskmaster as television, with its demands for a strong, simple story line, effective closeups, tight staging and split-second timing. Last week, with a brilliant series of first-rate plays, TV proved that, with all its demands, it is capable of producing a powerful and effective art form.

The week's most remarkable production was Kraft TV Theater's live adaptation of Walter Lord's A Night to Remember, the story of the first and last voyage of the Titanic. Producer-Director George Roy Hill's task was to create for the 21-in. screen the illusion of a giant liner foundering in mid-Atlantic, to give the feeling of the surging thousands with scarcely a hundred actors. To do this, he used 40 sets jammed into NBC's Brooklyn studio, making masterful use of his six cameras to combine action and symbolism; e.g., a rope spinning over a bitt was enough to suggest the lowering of a lifeboat. Seven sets--decks, staterooms, etc.--were built in duplicate, one set being shown "dry" for early scenes, the second set built to hold three feet of water for the sinking scenes.

A Look at Eternity. The cunning fakery of the sets was dwarfed by the outsize playing of the big cast. Director Hill, 31, an ex-marine fighter pilot, still cannot believe his luck: "If one actor had missed his cue, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Every single actor came in on the button. It was the most beautiful week I ever spent. Everybody realized that it was an experiment in trying to open up TV to the kind of fast, intricate cutting only possible to get in films."

Robert Montgomery scored with a taut production of Robert Wallace's The Long Way Home, starring John Beal as a Connecticut commuter stricken with a heart attack as his train pulls out of Grand Central Terminal. What gripped the viewer, as it did the readers of the original LIFE story, was Real's it-could-happen-to-you helplessness at the hands of strangers: the well-intentioned conductor who let him off the train at a deserted station where he faced a seemingly endless climb to reach the street, a calloused cop who thought that Beal was drunk, not sick, and finally the cold ministrations of the hospital staff. But Beal's own remarkable performance told most of the story: his tautened body and hanging jaw gave an eerie impression of the tempests raging inside his rib cage, and his wildly questing eyes had all the shocked horror of a man who has looked into eternity.

Embarrassing Riches. Joey on the Goodyear TV Playhouse was more in the classic TV tradition: a small story about an insecure boy, sensitively seen by Author Louis Peterson, and performed with wit and understanding by talented Kim Stanley and Newcomer Anthony Perkins, whose Lincolnesque good looks are certain to bring him offers from Hollywood.

Fred Coe's Playwrights '56, which loses its sponsor in June, offered Cyril Ritchard as a man who had nothing to give the world except embarrassing truths, even to the point of delivering a graveside eulogy recounting only the evil deeds ("He never did anything good in his life") of a village ne'er-do-well. The play was J. P. Miller's The Undiscovered Country. Using switches in time, theatrical asides and a downbeat ending (Ritchard is still defiantly standing alone against the world even after his daughter, Nina Foch, leaves him in disgust), Coe broke all the rules for capturing an audience. And in doing so he gave his play a kind of compelling honesty that added still another dimension to a fine dramatic week.

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