Talent Associates

Television seldom has a big moment, but this week it had a great one. On tape since June, David Susskind's two-hour dramatization of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, starring Sir Laurence Olivier, was finally broadcast. The show more than lived up to its press-agentry as the most important "TV event of the fall.

Set in the Tabasco state of southern Mexico during the era of religious persecution in the late '20s and early '30s, The Power and the Glory follows the last functioning priest to his inevitable destruction before a firing squad. His sense of obligation to God has kept him in the country while others have fled, but he is also corrupt, a drunk, and the father of an illegitimate child. The state that hunts him down is ruthless and godless, but its socialistic ideals are presented with both sympathy and conviction.

Holding steadily to these ambivalences, the TV drama rang true instead of ringing with packaged Truth. In earlier adaptations for stage and film, Greene's novel became little more than a frenzied search for a bottle of sacramental wine. But Adapter Dale Wasserman succeeded in dramatizing the infinitely more significant frenzy of a man in search of his own soul.

Olivier was masterful as the priest marked for martyrdom--bewildered at the force within him that keeps him from fleeing, shocked when his child spits in his face, agonized while watching "all the hope of the world draining away" in an emptied bottle of wine, despairing as he cries out for a Judas to betray him, collapsing in lip-quivering terror in the face of death. Producer Susskind surrounded Olivier with a supporting cast almost incredible in its depth. George C. Scott was superb as the police lieutenant who destroys his victim with cold intelligence and sympathetic understanding rather than simple brutality. As the slatternly mother of the priest's child, Julie Harris avoided the stylized ingenuousness that has almost become her trademark. Roddy McDowall was the subtle Judas in peon's tags who follows the priest through his furtive journeys and ultimately betrays him. There were other stars--Mildred Dunnock. Keenan Wynn, Thomas Gomez, Martin Gabel, Fritz Weaver, Patty Duke --for even the lesser supporting roles.

Curiously, The Power and the Glory was taped in a tremendous hurry, unusual even for television. Finishing the Broadway run of Becket last spring, Olivier told Susskind he would be available for only eight days before sailing home to England. That was a total of 192 hours, and the cast was on-camera for 130 of them. A strict believer in the authority of the director (in this case, Marc Daniels), Olivier did his job with quiet docility, making minor requests: he had his "brandy" changed from Coca-Cola to tea. But he soon became as exhausted as the fugitive priest himself, and called in a doctor to give him a vitamin injection (the doctor wrote out a bill for $15 and misspelled Olivier's name).

With 40 sets, including tropical vegetation flown in from Florida, the show eventually cost $725,000. But Susskind was gambling on an experiment. The show was taped and simultaneously filmed with 35-mm. cameras, so that it can be sold as a feature motion picture outside the U.S. Susskind himself provided comic relief in the drive to meet the eight-day deadline. When he pontificated polysyllabically over the loudspeaker system, Olivier cracked: "He uses such big words I can't understand him." Once Susskind was accidentally bumped by a prop pickup truck bearing the words VIVA LA REVOLUCION. "Caramba!" shouted the actor-driver. "I just got my first gringo." But in the end David Susskind had demonstrated again what even his most articulate enemies will readily concede: he is responsible for some of the best material that has ever reached the U.S. television screen.

* Center, Mildred Dunnock.

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