Review

On Aug. 28, 1947, in a dusty arena in southern Spain, "the dark horn of death" seared the body of Spain's greatest matador and plunged the nation into mourning. On the basis of Playhouse 90's second-season opening, The Death of Manolete, it would be hard for most viewers to understand why all the fuss about one bullfighter. As the show's Co-Scriptwriter Barnaby Conrad has often said before, Manolete was a slight man of grace, warmth and gentle humor outside the ring; but as played by Actor Jack (Requiem for a Heavyweight) Palance, he was awkward, humorless and uncommonly large in his baggy traje de luces. When Palance was not glooming about the bulls and that other, more ferocious enemy--the crowd--he was busy swilling expensive hooch ("We'd pay through the nose for this," he says) or displaying a sweaty torso effectively scarred by the CBS makeup department. He also lapsed into some totally unrelated pseudo-Hemingway moods with high-priced ($120 an hour) Fashion Model Suzy Parker, a sort of un-simpatica Brett Ashley. (Suzy: Was it good today? Jack: It was not bad.)

Though the skilled directorial hand of John Frankenheimer showed through cleanly in the crowd scenes, Manolete was largely an attenuated and unlyrical hymn to the man. Only Actor Nehemiah Persoff as the manager brought emotional content to a bloodless script: "We kept asking for more and more and more," says Persoff after Manolete has been gored for the last time. "And more was his life."

There was a second-rate band on the air, beating out popular tunes from a supper club. Suddenly the announcer broke in with a "flash" about Martian explosions hurtling towards earth. Then listeners were returned to "the music of Ramon Raquello and Star Dust." There was a second flash and a third, and soon some 32 million people were hearing about an invasion of grey monsters who glistened like wet leather jackets and were attacking New Jersey with death rays. Thus on Halloween of 1938 did Orson Welles don a sheet and say "Boo!" to the radio audience with an adaptation of H. G. Wells's classic thriller, The War of the Worlds, and launch the most garish panic in the annals of broadcasting.

To open its tenth TV season, CBS's Studio One last week tackled the difficult chore of re-enacting the event from an uneven script called The Night America Trembled. There were some arresting scenes in the broadcasting studio, where the original sound man was back at his old Mars machines, but in trying to chronicle the reaction of different types of people in different situations, Night was forced to juggle more vignettes than it could handle, rarely managed to recapture the ensuing hysteria. Bogeyman Welles, who earned himself a national sponsor for his imagination, failed even to get a mention. Reason: Welles never acknowledged repeated CBS invitations to appear.

As narrator, Ed Murrow offered two reasons for Welles's chilling success: 1) the recent concern over Munich had badly spooked the U.S. public and 2), Halloween merely served to intensify man's "instinctive terror of the great unknown."

Ed Murrow also returned last week for his fifth season as the reassuring Peeping Tom of Person to Person. It was perhaps TV's best kiddie show yet. At the Bob Kennedys' 200-year-old estate in McLean, Va., young (2) son Dave did the scene-stealing by bawling obligingly all the way through Ed's conversation with the four other Kennedy youngsters. And in the show's other half, CBS's electronic gremlins blacked out some of mournful Hollywood Singer Julie London's more breathless moments while projecting Julie's seven-year-old daughter almost too clearly. Asked what she does when confined to the house all day, Stacy replied: "I watch TV and drink a lot."

ABC's Disneyland went into its fourth season with some hard-sell facts about the future. Instead of a birthday party, Walt Disney produced an hour-long trailer for Disneyland, the Mickey Mouse Club, and other Disney holdings including Zorro, a new film series full of the strangulated cliches of derring-do, and a six-part series called The Saga of Andy Burnett, featuring the standard heroes-errant of the frontier. Cartoon Impresario Disney was trundled about from one plug to another by his Mousketeers, who wound up the big sales convention with a tasteless routine on top of a giant birthday cake, plugging a movie called Rainbow Road to Oz. Peter Pan Peanut Butter interrupted a fetching cartoon depiction of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, which Disney dragged out of his attic of past hits for a commercial on its crunchy product. Even Alice in Wonderland got helplessly involved in the selling melee: "Was it the smile on my Cheshire cat," asks Alice, "or the smile on my Jello?"

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