Best Foot Forward

Troubled by House and Justice Department investigators, bedeviled by singing quiz contestants, TV still managed to put its best foot forward last week with some topnotch shows.

As sometimes happens when TV programs reach for quality, some turned out to be merely earnest bores. On NBC, the Hallmark production of Maxwell Anderson's Winterset proved that the living-room screen can be an embarrassing setting for characters who speak stilted blank verse (with Hamlet echoes) and live amid the topical excitement of another decade. Playhouse go (CBS) chose to grapple with second-rate Shaw, and even an excellent cast--Robert Morley, Claire Bloom, Siobhan McKenna--could not cram the rapid-fire sex and social relations of Misalliance into a really meaningful hour and a half.

But on other top shows, TV came close to realizing its greatest potential: The Moon and Sixpence (NBC) presented Sir Laurence Olivier with a script that, despite faults, gave his immense talent full range. Somerset Maugham's biting novel of a man in the grip of artistic demons was formidable for transformation into less than 90 minutes of television drama. Before Playwright S. Lee (People Kill People Sometimes) Pogostin was called in, along with Director Bob Mulligan, two other scriptwriters had fumbled the job. After 48 hours packed with pencil work, pep pills and black coffee, Pogostin and Mulligan had built a play that pleased both Olivier and Producer David Susskind. In the process, they lost some of the novel's dark energy; they never adequately explained how a respectable British stockbroker named Charles Strickland (modeled on famed Painter Paul Gauguin) could abandon wife and family for a new career as an artist--or why, after he seduced Blanche Stroeve (Jessica Tandy), wife of his best friend (Hume Cronyn), Blanche later turned to suicide. But the play's bright scenes, brilliantly colored, were as bold and carefully constructed as the Gauguin masterpieces they were meant to match. Strickland in the South Seas was an eloquent portrait of the developing artist and the degenerating man. The combination of camera work, scene design, direction and acting was an example of television at its greatest.

Biography of a Missile gave Edward R. Murrow and the same CBS crew that put together other notable documentaries (Montgomery Speaks His Mind, The Lost Class of '59) another chance to demonstrate the most impressive techniques yet developed by TV journalism. From the cocky drawing-board confidence of the creators of Juno II, to the unforgettably tense faces of the missilemen when their bird was fired, Biography recorded every important aspect in the life of one of man's most intricate creations. The cameras sighted in on the meticulous welding of Juno's outer skin at the Chrysler plant in Detroit; they watched her engine-thrust (equal to 20 F-86 jet fighters) test at the Rocketdyne plant in Southern California. Artfully, accurately, never wasting a frame, they were on hand at Cape Canaveral on July 16, when the countdown began for the firing of the finished missile. Just 5 1/2 seconds after Juno II rose from her launching pad, she tilted crazily in flight and fell. "It came to be almost like a human being," reported Murrow's voice. "And then in 5 1/2 seconds it was all over." After that, the successful firing of another Juno three months later was an anticlimax for the film. But from drawing board until a Juno actually got into orbit. Biography was a blunt and forceful epitaph for the Army's career in space. The week before Missile went on the air, reported Murrow, the President transferred Juno's creators and all their future projects to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.