Review

Playhouse 90: Daphne du Maurier's gothic tales would appear to be packed with protein for TV drama. They are well fused, charged with suspense and athrob with elemental passions. One of the best, The Little Photographer, tells a brooding crime story about a beautiful marquise who dallies in the bracken with an impoverished young photographer, then shoves him off a cliff to a Mediterranean grave. In the televersion, retitled The Violent Heart by Adapter Leslie Stevens, the little photographer (Ben Gazzara) died when he accidentally crashed through the balustrade of a Riviera ruin. This sapped the story of much of its mystery. But what Heart lost in plot, it made up for in atmosphere and pictorial splendor--and a fine new twist at the end. Like Aeschylus' avenging Eumenides, the photographer's sister (chillingly played by Actress Vivian Nathan) swooped down on the unfaithful marquise with some sunny but telltale pictures, and sneakily implied that she would be around the house to haunt her for a long, long time.

As the marquise, porcelain-cheeked Dana Wynter, whose "lovely hands drooped down like lilies on either side," coped with blackmail and adultery with equally exquisite calm. Far flashier was Director John Frankenheimer, whose busy directorial conceits--trick angles, mirror shots, closeups to the pore, camera peeps through iron grilles, even the little photographer's aperture--often upstaged the work itself while accenting its hollow passion. Sometimes the tricks of the director, working in tandem with the star-crossed lovers and their rococo surroundings, were more attention-catching than the story.

Armstrong Circle Theater: This CBS regular has grappled with a series of difficult subjects, e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls, and produced a series of earnest failures. Last week Armstrong deftly dodged the main issue of a most unlikely topic and pulled off one of the best shows of its season. The subject: The New Class, the anti-Communist political tract by Recanting Red Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav long beleaguered and now in prison for turning on the party and Dictator Tito. Armstrong's program-saving trick was to ignore the dialectic of the book, concentrate instead on the spectacle of a man standing alone against his old comrades.

As the stubborn Djilas, Tito's buddy from the partisan days, Actor Fritz Weaver glinted with the self-possessed fury of a man who is supremely confident that he is right and his party wrong. One effective sequence: Djilas standing before the rapid-fire bursts of invective from his friends-turned-enemies, then answering: "I will not retract a word of what I have said or written."

Spillane's Hammer: He had the old familiar flair for violence and the leer for sex. And, true to fiction, Private Eye Mike Hammer was soon mixed up with a wild-eyed client and a wide-eyed doll. When the shooting was over, the client lay dead on the waterfront and the doll was off to the electric chair. "You burn me up," she murmured to Hammer as she was taken away. "No," Mike gently corrected, "the warden does that."

With such swaggering cynicism Broadway Pro Darren (The Rainmaker) McGavin, 34, last week treated a New York audience to the second of a 39-show series of half-hour programs based on the sadistic, satyric, free-lance detective created by Mickey ("I'm not an author, I'm a writer") Spillane. Soon to be shown by 122 stations, the series entangles Hammer with every evil from white slavery to the wayward son of a chambermaid. A onetime tailback for the College of the Pacific, Actor McGavin looks natural tossing heavies down flights of stairs and giving the leather to fallen enemies. But his performances as a whole are curiously uneven. In the first show he slurs his lines like a Bowery tough; in the second he enunciates like a schoolboy debater.

Spillane fans, used to getting their sex right out of Gray's Anatomy, will have to settle for shots of Hammer emerging messily from off-camera, off-color encounters with negligeed women. But the other Spillane requisites that have sold close to 30 million copies of his seven novels are preserved: furious action, a complex plot, a wow finish. Still, Spillane wants no part of the new series except his fee ($25,000 and a cut of the receipts). "The real Mike Hammer sits back and laughs at his own show," he laughs, sitting back. "How about that! Sits back and laughs."

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