The Week in Review

Having gorged itself on plays, books, short stories, musical comedies, old movie plots and original scripts, television last week plunged into biography. Since it was dealing with real people, TV took a reverent tone; its opinions were uncritical and its emotions lachrymose.

E=mc2. The most ambitious project was Robert Montgomery's Portrait of a Man, which struggled to compress into less than an hour the life and times of Albert Einstein. Properly despairing of trying to explain E=mc2 to his audience, Producer Montgomery tried instead to build up a lovable Mr. Chips. He failed, largely because the camera never showed anything but the back of Einstein's head and because the human-interest anecdotes (Einstein flusters a colleague's wife by telling her how to cook calf's liver; Einstein flusters the parents of a little girl by doing her arithmetic homework) were played at tedious length. But Montgomery, who is also the White House television adviser, was consoled for his failure when he learned that President Eisenhower's TV speech explaining his veto of the farm bill got a large portion of the audience that tuned out the Einstein program.

CBS did somewhat better for William Jennings Bryan in a You Are There report on the first of his three nominations for the presidency. Ainslie Pryor, as Bryan, got a rococo fervor into his big "Cross of Gold" speech that captured the deadlocked convention and enabled the Great Commoner to enter--and lose--the presidential race against William McKinley. Circle Theater took another aghast look at Communist intrigue with The Case of Colonel Petrov,who defected two years ago from the Soviet embassy in Australia. As pictured on TV by Michael Gorrin, Petrov seemed far too dumb to have been head of Red espionage down under, and the show spent much of its time commiserating over the soul struggles of Sanford Meisner, playing the Australian counterspy who won Petrov to freedom.

Berra Ballet. The arrival of the baseball season was heralded with another brace of biographies. ABC's Cavalcade Theater offered the life story of Jackie Jensen, an outfielder for the Boston Red Sox, but its only dramatic high point seemed to be that, except for baseball, Jackie might have been expelled from junior high school. On Climax!, The Lou Gehrig Story possessed more inherent drama as paralysis ended both the career and life of the great Yankee first baseman, but unfortunately, the TV treatment was strictly soap opera. NBC got in another plug for the national pastime with Salute to Baseball, which made a couple of daring moves by putting Yogi Berra in a ballet from the Broadway hit, Damn Yankees (he uneasily swung a bat while dancers pranced about him), and Molly Goldberg in a locker room (she clucked at the sight of baseball spikes: "Look at the poor boys' shoes--the nails are coming through the soles!").

NBC's Alcoa Hour made history by discovering a new way of treating the classic TV western story--Writer Alvin Sapinsley put it in blank verse. Even more surprising: it worked. Franchot Tone, Lee Grant and Christopher Plummer played the three tragic figures who end as corpses on a dusty street, while Boris Karloff leaned confidentially into the camera as a one-man Greek chorus to give poetic expression to the eternal verities of life, death, and man's irreparable foolishness.

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