Review

U.S. Steel Hour. "You see, I got four daughters. Each one takes turns having me for a visit. Every three months, like clockwork, I get sent out--like a quarterly dividend." This was the TV story of Walter Slezak, playing a retired furrier from Manhattan, whose bumbling social presence made his daughters uncomfortable and embarrassed their husbands. Visiting son-in-law No. 4, an ambitious Hollywood agent, Slezak lumberingly wrecked a cocktail party by commenting amiably on a guest's mink ("Say, that's a nice mutation you got there; it's not what you'd call real mink, but I wouldn't worry about it if I was you. To the untrained eye, there's no difference in quality"). Abashed, disheartened and in disgrace, he volunteered as patrol supervisor for a group of eight-year-old junior Rangers. His methods were unorthodox. The first course was artificial respiration--"what to do in case of drowning or being electrocuted." Slezak had the answer to that. "You call the fire department, naturally. There's an emergency truck they got, with oxygen inside--a pulmotor--everything you need. What's next?" The young called him Uncle Chuck, and he was happy. But soon he was in his usual jam --the boys found the camping ground cold and hard, and so did he; he bundled them all off to a motel, and everybody thought he had kidnaped them. Scripter John Vlahos could not resist the predictable switcheroo for a misty-moist ending (the Rangers discovered the publicity on the Beaver Patrol had been sensational, and Uncle Chuck finally felt wanted), sometimes seemed to be writing an artful recruiting appeal for parent participation in youth groups. But his simple story was redeemed by an authentic feel for the peculiarly Jewish blend of wry humor and forthright sense of Manhattan's Seventh Avenue, and the warm, shamblingly expert performance of Slezak, who can (and frequently has) played this kind of role so expertly that it seems disarmingly artless.

NBC Opera Company: For its final presentation of a handsome season, NBC's young and sprightly opera company presented a sparkling, two-hour show of Mozart's artful Cosi Fan Tutte (Women Are Like That). The cynical, silly, and charming tale--two gentlemen of Naples undertake to disprove the theory that all women are faithless by pretending to go off to the wars and returning in disguise as two gentlemen from Albania lately landed from a balloon, lay siege to each other's sweethearts, and, to their own discomfiture, succeed--has seldom been more merrily staged. Under the direction of Peter Herman Adler, Mozart's music was kept feather-light and crystal-clean. Soprano Phyllis Curtin and Mezzo Frances Bible were as pretty a brace of slim beauties as ever taunted a gallant; Tenor John Alexander and Baritone Mac Morgan sang warmly as the two gentlemen, who conclude: "Women cannot be faithful . . . You have to take them as they are." The production--light, stylized, and done as a great sunny joke--was a tribute to TV's growing sophistication in the use of color. Ed Wittstein's sets, painted with cartoon-like sketchiness on a beige ground, gave an effect of air and space and no place in particular, left the color concentrated in the costumes; against the neutral background the disguised gallants were Turkish delights in their long Oriental coats, the women vivid in gleaming satins. Wrote Variety: "A memorable performance that simply could not be outdone . . . This was television achieving its highest purpose."

Swing into Spring: "Benny," said Host Dave Garroway to King of Swing Goodman, "have you any idea how many couples met, danced, fell in love and got married, all because of you?" Fumbling for a figure, Benny Goodman at length replied: "1,327,463." After that improbable exchange, NBC valiantly set out to prove that swing not only scintillates on TV but is newer, "bigger and better" than ever. Visually tricked out with color, old-fashioned microphones and vignettes of young love (a car radio in a moonlit convertible of the '30s), Swing swung down the nostalgic side of the street. Besides tootling what is still the sweetest clarinet this side of the '30s, Maestro Goodman husked It's Gotta Be This or That, was spelled by such other oldtimers as Trumpeter Harry James in King Porter Stomp, Singers Ella Fitzgerald, Jo Stafford and Ray Eberle. But it was not until Benny meshed with his old quintet (including Teddy Wilson on piano and Red Norvo thrumming the vibraphone) that Maestro Goodman seemed to hit his old stride in syncopation so well arranged that it sounded like real jazz improvisation. His big band was helped little by a welter of panoramic views of its members, a well-intended effort by NBC to avoid a favorite TV bromide: closeup shots of musicians' tortured faces. Swing succeeded chiefly in establishing that Goodman's big-band brand of swing will probably never die because it has never been very much alive, will still be played in all those softly lit hotel restaurants for people who would rather dance than listen.

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