The Week in Review

The season's first spectaculars and a barrage of premieres fell on TV screens last week like a soggy September drizzle. In Bretaigne Windust's The Lord Don't Play Favorites on NBC's Producers' Showcase, a Kansas hick town was caught in a drought. A bankrupt circus only made matters worse by praying for a dry track on which to run its trick horse. The Lord let it rain and the horse won anyway, but as musical theater the whole carnival romp was a washout. Recording Artist Kay Starr's anvil voice (with a nice built-in sob) led a lusty counterpoint melody between town and clown. But Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong as bandmaster and oldtime Circus Comic Buster Keaton were so much wasted tanbark. The "original" Jo Swerling-Hal Stanley music and lyrics had a too-familiar ring. ("If fate should hurt you/ I won't desert you/ We'll be together/ In stormy weather").

The week's only other 90-minute production was the season premiere of Wide, Wide World (NBC), which began by asking viewers: "Will history be made this afternoon?" and then tried to bring in TV's first live pickup from abroad. For 15 minutes viewers looked at a desolate Long Island shanty with an enormous receiving aerial and a posse of NBC monitors inside widdling their dials. But only a BBC voice and some foggy images made it across the sea. (NBC will try again next week.) Elsewhere, World fared better, e.g., a noisy jazz session in a monastery with Brother Boyce Brown on the sax. But the whole panorama was marred by languid Narrator Dave Garroway's overripe prose ("Filter music through the soul and it becomes the clear wine of communication").

The week's TV heroines were mostly vintage Hollywood. On Robert Montgomery Presents (NBC) durable Cinemactress Constance Bennett sashayed nasally through a shrill domestic comedy called Onions in the Stew. Audrey Trotter was a voluptuous nuclear scientist in The Garsten Case on CBS's Climax! Blonde Virginia Bruce was dragged mercilessly through a bleak, attenuated version of Mildred Pierce on NBC's Lux Video Theater. The week's best drama, We Who Love Her, had Alexis Smith recover sufficiently from kleptomania to adopt her six-year-old orphaned niece on NBC's On Trial! Oscar-Winner Bette Davis couldn't resist some real-life emoting on Ed Murrow's Person-to-Person (CBS), on which she volunteered a friend's suggestion for her tombstone ("She did it the hard way"), while Husband Gary Merrill suggested that if Bette had not become an actress she would have been president of Lord & Taylor. Best bit: Bette reading from Robert Frost's Fire and Ice ("I hold with those who favor fire").

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