Review

Omnibus: Prettied up for the color cameras and invited by NBC to take George Gobel's place on Tuesday night, this good grey lady did not quite know what to do with herself. Touted as a "hilarious report on the suburbs," Suburban Revue got about as far out of Manhattan as Central Park. Host Alistair Cooke showed up in skimmer, foulard scarf and blazer, to talk about the wonders of aluminum (spelled A-1-u-m-i-n-i-u-m, Ltd.). Bert Lahr, a mighty available Jones around all channels these days, blinked and "poo-poo-pa-dooed" through some excruciating jokes ("Are you Ivy?" "It's crawlin' all over me") and brayed his inimitable full-octave singing quaver. Digging into Broadway's attic of old goodies, Omnibus borrowed Lend an Ear's funny, picture-hatted Gladiola ("Skiddy, give me some hooch") Girl and a rollicking Prohibition Era chorus line to vamp the Long Island playboys.

The best Revue had to offer was a split-level pair of cafe comics named Mike Nichols, 26, and Elaine May, 25, whose satiric thrusts at the telephone company's "Organization Woman" were fresh, inspired stuff. Nichols and May also did a racy, offbeat skit called "The Dawn of Love or The Moon Also Rises in an Automobile!" Scratching her ear and nervously shoving her sleeve up and down her forearm, Elaine admired the "suicidally beautiful" lake while Mike talked of other things. "Every human being has got certain natural urges, and I've got some," he began.

Elaine: I don't know what George has told you about me in the locker room. I mean, this is our first date.

Mike: I know what you're going to say. I know you're going to say I won't respect you. Right? Listen, honey, I want to tell you right here and now I would respect you like cur-razee.

Elaine: Are you sure you wouldn't just be grateful?

Conquest: Alone with the universe, the astronomer peered into the eyepiece of the telescope that towered through the observatory roof and spied on the moon. His voice echoed in the empty chamber. "Now, I note about twelve impact craters, and the largest of these I shall mark on the map with an A." said Dutch-born Dr. Gerard Kuiper head of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory. By such sharply focused glimpses of scientists at work, Conquest (CBS) started to live up to its promise as a $1,000,000 series of ten science programs that will stretch into next season. After a talky start, the hour-long program settled down with Dr. Kuiper and Dr. H. Julian ("Harvey") Allen, a rumpled giant who devised the blunt-nose cone that can safely return a missile warhead through the atmosphere without burning up with friction. One startling sequence: a blunt-nose staying intact during lab tests while a white-hot, pointed-nose disintegrated. Conquest's point: science and scientists can make fascinating fare without the support of capering cartoons or high-powered hokum.

Twentieth Century: "Our truth was a half-truth, our fight a battle in the mist . . . and those who suffered and died in it were pawns in a complicated game between two totalitarian pretenders for world domination." So wrote ex-Communist Novelist Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler after he came home from Spain's civil war. As CBS's corrosive documentary, War in Spain, made grimly clear, the pretenders were Hitler and Mussolini on one side and Stalin on the other, and the game that divided a nation against itself was a grisly dress rehearsal for the greatest war in history. The "pawns" flashed tragically across the screen in confused images, but it had been that kind of war--lightning offensives, confusions and counter-confusions, and a million dead at their brothers' hands.

To catch its hackle-raising horrors, Twentieth Century searched around Europe last spring, out of a ten-mile tangle of celluloid salvaged 2,400 evocative feet, garnished it with an equally evocative script by Emmet John Hughes, author of Report from Spain (and now chief of TIME-LIFE'S foreign correspondents). There were some coruscant scenes: crying, cursing Madrilenos "running faster, faster along the very edge of the abyss," truncheon-wielding cops beating them back; women and children being evacuated under heavy air bombardment, their life's possessions tied in burlap on their backs, or black coffins slung across their shoulders. There were sad, wizened faces in endless bread lines, hemorrhaging bodies on grimy stretchers, and images of Christ lying mute and broken in the rubble.

There was a Chekhovian irony in seeing jaunty, paunchy Dictator Franco review Moorish. Spanish, German and Italian troops on victorious parade in 1939 and, an instant later hearing Narrator Walter Cronkite remind viewers that U.S. Sherman tanks roll down these same avenues today. As Scriptwriter Hughes explained: "Victory is a fragile thing, and history does not linger long in the 20th century."

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