Review

Du Pont Show of the Month: As a "renewer of old treasure," rather than a "maker of new molds," Thornton Wilder found in a one-act play by Prosper Merimee the seed of an idea for his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714," he began it, "the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." It posed the intriguing question: Did they die by accident or by divine plan? Its prose was clean and classical, its characters adroitly limned and it was constructed with the delicacy of a motet. But it was essentially a tour de force, and Wilder's publishers were surprised at its runaway success. Bridge won the Pulitzer Prize, sold more than 2.000,000 copies, was translated into some two dozen languages and two bad motion pictures. As produced for CBS by David (Prince and the Pauper) Susskind, the Bridge was cliffs-above-average TV, but it still creaked of banality, of too many artificial characters acting intensely about too little. And it completely missed Wilder's subtle mockery of Calvinist theology and his "animal repudiation of my father's notion that what happens to you is a series of express prizes and punishments from a minutely attentive, score-keeping God."

Though there were sound male performers in the cast (Steve Hill, Hume Cronyn), the TV play belonged to the women. As the perichole (half-breed bitch), Viveca Lindfors munched off the scenery with her "razor tongue" until the pox dulled her cutting edge and brought pathos to the role. Judith Anderson played the mad. fatuous marquesa in a style that would have fit nicely into a theater but came a little floridly into the living room. Yet both actresses gave the show its finest moment: a fateful mutual-humility act when the marquesa, in a weepy, alcoholic glow transferred her fierce love for her daughter to the peasant actress. Only Eva Le Gallienne's abbess managed to imbue the production with some of the pretty metaphysics of the original. "We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten,' she says. "But the love will have been enough . . . Memory is not necessary for love." Then a few seconds before final curtain, Actress Le Gallienne effectively recited the Beatitudes--tacked on by Adapter-Actress Ludi Claire.

Wilder himself took mild exception to what TV had wrought. "The addition of the Beatitudes is a crossing of the t's and a dotting of the i's,'' he said afterwards. "I prefer understatement." Of the show itself: "The book has a lighter tone. On TV there was too much concentration of misery. They caught the theme but not the tone of the book." Wilder's interpretation of the theme: "Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value."

High Adventure: Hacking his way through the adjective-matted underbrush of travelogueland last week, Lowell Thomas brought forth a fine specimen of indigenous fungus known as travelogue whimsy. While French African troops grappled with a bevy of Tuaregs in a mock brawl staged for his cameras, Thomas intoned between chuckles: "The bad guys. Versus the good guys . . . Make it look good, Achmed! My grandmother's watching on TV." All this and Timbuktu appeared in Thomas' latest color adventure, a grab bag of odds and ends on African superstitions. The oddest was a weirdly effective sequence showing how the Hova of Madagascar dig up their dead each year, roll them in shiny new wrappings and carry them about in a gay shuffle dance before returning them to their graves--a ritual precisely symbolic (though Thomas did not note it) of regular tribal practices among the TV idea men of Madison Avenue.

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