Review

Producers' Showcase stripped the Old Vic's 2 1/2-hr. Romeo and Juliet down to a tidy 72 minutes last week, and the operation was a dramatic success. Apart from the quicker tempo and TV's obvious advantages of closeups, fadeouts and greater fluidity, the presentation also contributed Otis Riggs's clean, spare scenery which released play and players from the Old Vic's 19th century picture-book designs. John Neville, in the role that Olivier once dismissed with Mercutio-like disdain ("Romeo is really a jerk"), was carved out of beaverboard; he crashed parties and climbed vines gracefully enough, but gave more a bloodless recitation than a performance full of the juices of life. But Claire Bloom, 26, was a prize Juliet who made even her more hackneyed passages sound fresh. Looking no more than the 14 Juliet was written to be, she was as soft and warm as a tea cozy, even if priggish NBC censors did raise her neckline by 3 1/2 inches.

Showcase had reason to be pleased with the success, and was. "This boy Shakespeare is a real comer," said Producer Mort Abrahams. "I'm going to use a lot of him."

TV Producer Ted Mills never takes his audience on a Baedeker-guided tour. With his Assignment: India, he probed modern India with a cool, relentless subjectivity that has been his trademark since his early days in Chicago's languid, sponge-rubber school of TV. He used the same technique to provide television fans last week with a highly personal film poem to Maurice Chevalier's Paris. Showman Chevalier, a redoubtable 68, doffed his straw hat and invited viewers to follow him and see "why Paris is Paris." Chevalier's Paris proved to be not the Folies Bergere, Napoleon's Tomb, the Deux Magots or the Flea Market, just as the ubiquitous Chevalier in Mills's film was not "the one with the lip who sings about love and the beauty of life." Rather, viewers got a wistful look at the seedy quarter of Menilmontant, where Chevalier was born and at 14 sang for pennies in the streets, at pimply kids clumping over cobbled streets, gossip-mongering concierges, young lovers in the Bois de Boulogne, and stunning panoramas of the city bathed in soft blue light. Men goggled in admiration at the stylish hustle on the sidewalks of the Champs-Elysees and inside the salon ol Designer Jean Desses, as the camera ogled with them some magnificent forms and fashions.

NBC gave Mills some $144,000 to spend in Paris, and he rewarded the network with a sound argument for color TV. Unfortunately, for more than 99% of those who saw it, the argument was invisible, and many of Paris' sunlit moments were overcast on black and white TV. Still the result was pleasant enough--and the reaction encouraging enough--to incite Mills to plan a lot more traveloguing. On his agenda: Anna Magnani's Rome, Laurence Olivier's London, perhaps even Marlon (Teahouse of the August Moon) Brando's Tokyo.

Playhouse 90 presented a western last week so "adult" that Hugh O'Brian, TV's impeccable Wyatt Earp, did not bother to shave. Invitation to a Gunfighter observed other latter-day western rituals that wear whiskers too; e.g., the soulful plunking of an offscreen guitar, a sheriff who turns yellow, an epidemic of spinelessness that afflicts everybody in town. Fortunately, the villain came to the rescue. As a professional gunfighter who takes over the town that has hired him to do a job of murder, Gilbert Roland did what little anyone could to make Invitation credible, and made it at least fun to watch. Roland, who plays a heavy with the lightest touch in Hollywood, is a broad-shouldered, slim-hipped swaggerer who oozes assurance with weapons and women--a model of nonchalant menace and graceful arrogance. When he was finally shot down, Roland fell with flair, demonstrated with a striking crooked sprawl that even playing a dead man he looks better than a lot of TV actors do alive.

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