The Week in Review

The effort of putting on two first-rate shows last week left television with neither ingenuity nor wit for the rest of its schedule. NBC's Producers' Showcase brought Broadway's Katharine Cornell to TV for her dramatic debut with her best-known vehicle, Rudolf Besier's 1931 hit, The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In telling the love story of bedridden Elizabeth Barrett and Poet Robert Browning, the play seemed to have a full set of strikes against it for a mass audience, since 1) it was about poets and poetry, 2) its problem could have been solved at any time merely by the heroine's walking out on her domineering father, 3) it had been seen on CBS-TV (with Geraldine Fitzgerald and Sir Cedric Hardwicke) as recently as last summer. All these difficulties were overcome, to hold absorbed some 28 million viewers--more people than Katharine Cornell has played to in her long theatrical career.

Freudian Horrors. A study in Victorian vapors and villainy, Barretts struck fire from the opening scene, when Cornell's feckless brothers and sisters trooped in singly to wish her well. Stretched wanly on a chaise longue, Actress Cornell, 58, seemed too old for her role, but with her first big speech captured a youthful intensity that was an optical as well as an acting triumph. Henry Daniell gave one of his best performances, as a father tyrannical enough to cow a platoon of rebellious children, and in one searing moment--when he harshly kissed his fluttery niece, Bella--suggested the Freudian horrors that were revealed in the last act. Anthony Quayle made a Byronesque lover as Robert Browning, but his part was badly crippled by the playwright's trick of never permitting a confrontation scene between the ardent poet and the implacable father.

Sudsy Sagas. CBS made daytime TV drearier than usual by adding two new 30-minute soap operas to its already numbing roster. Like all sudsy sagas, these two have portentous titles (As the World Turns and The Edge of Night), vibrant organ "stings" at emotional moments, and time-consuming dialogue ("Penny, sometimes I don't get you." Penny, after a longish pause: "Sometimes I don't get myself"). Much of the nighttime drama was equally soapy. Robert Montgomery Presents featured Henry Jones as a lack-wit garage mechanic who first fails in an attempt to murder his wife, and then wants her to live when she has a near-fatal accident. Climax! sniffled over the woes of beautiful Ruth Roman as she gambled away her husband's nest egg, was accused of stealing $5,000, and made a gesture toward suicide before falling into hubby's arms in a roadside motel for the final clinch that solved everything. Lux Video Theater struggled hopelessly with a limp script about some papier-mache gangsters who were routed by the impassioned prose of a crusading sports reporter.

At week's end TV began acting its age again with the Ford Star Jubilee production of Hecht & MacArthur's Twentieth Century, starring Orson Welles and Betty Grable. The 24-year-old farce about how an unsuccessful theatrical impresario (Welles) gets together with his old flame, a successful movie star (Grable) on the Twentieth Century Limited between Chicago and New York is still young and funny. The plot is zany yet convincing, the characters oddballs yet winning (including an alcoholic pressagent and a lovable lunatic), the lines still fresh ("What a perfect death scene," sighs the star. "So simple. In her own bed"), the acting properly broad.

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