Brightened by Specials

As usual, the week began with football; pro games from coast to coast cluttered the autumn Sunday. Then, with athletic diversions out of the way, television turned to the week's news.' And inevitably, the major preoccupation was with varying aspects of violence. There were films of angry student unrest from Madrid to Manhattan, and the most familiar dialogue the viewer heard came from policemen ordering antidraft demonstrators to "Move! Move faster!"

For the most majestic program of the week, the networks moved their cameras to New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral for the funeral of Cardinal Spellman (see RELIGION). And strangely, with religious leaders from half the world parading, live coverage was restricted to local stations.

The networks showed no such reticence about their lavish specials that brightened prime time with an impressive range of entertainment. On NBC, Jack Paar and a Funny Thing Happened Everywhere turned a familiar TV art form into an hour of belly laughs --a collection of filmed bloopers and candid idiocies. Paar himself was the same old enigma. He made few new friends with his enduring self-awareness ("All that applause for little ol' me, Mr. Show Business?") and his growing fondness for corny gags ("I'm here for a worthy cause--the Eskimo Anti-Defamation League. It's not true they're responsible for crime in America"). But he had the old, keen eye for human foibles: a Hindu trying (unsuccessfully) to walk on water, a fluff by Barry Goldwater ("No American wants to be a rich slave; he wants to be a poor slave--I mean poor and free"), Mrs. Robert Kennedy being accidentally belted by a Japanese bandleader, and some of the nation's best football players fumbling foolishly in the rain.

Sexual Chairs. The best of the week's other specials reflected more dramatic ambition. NBC and the Hallmark Hall of Fame introduced French Canadian Actress Genevieve Bujold, 25, in Shaw's Saint Joan. Already known in the U.S. as the rebellious teen-ager from the French film La Guerre Ext Finie, the young newcomer to TV made no effort to match the mature emotion of Ingrid Bergman's oft-praised Joan in Maxwell Anderson's stage and movie versions or the mystical intensity of Julie Harris in Jean Anouilh's The Lark. She settled instead for her own ability to move between ingenuous youth and wide-eyed fanaticism as the script demanded. The sight and sound of her snapping the weakling Dauphin (Roddy McDowall) into action--"I shall dare, dare, and dare again, in God's name! Art for or against me?"--was a remarkable demonstration of her stage presence.

Playwright Reginald Rose's TV original, Dear Friends, got an equally talented performance on the second CBS Playhouse of the year. Though Playwright Rose's characters soon made it all too clear what they were up to, Dear Friends proved a thoughtful inquiry into modern-day marriage. After Mike and Lois (James Daly and Hope Lange) separate, three friendly couples trick them into coming to the same soiree on the theory that they can be talked back together again. But the evening quickly turns into a bitter, Albee-style game of sexual chairs that finally reveals what is bad about the other marriages and what is honest and realistic about Lois and Mike's separation.

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