High Polish

Peering through grillwork gates, over garden walls and from doors, windows and moving dollies, three television cameras probed last week into the anguished doings at the great house at Thornfield in Studio One's dramatization of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Not all of Studio One's hour-long shows are as moving and well-integrated as was Jane Eyre; like all TV dramas the quality wavers up & down from week to week. But what makes Studio One (Mon. 10 p.m., CBS-TV) outstanding in television is its invariable high technical polish.

No Respect. The professional sheen is applied by a cherubic-looking producer named Worthington Miner, 49, who came to television ten years ago with a directorial credit list of Broadway hits (Five Star Final, Reunion in Vienna, On Your Toes). Borrowing liberally from stage & screen (he also did a stint with RKO in Hollywood), "Tony" Miner has pioneered in TV with such effective techniques as the use of recordings for unspoken thoughts; the blending of film and live acting, and the combination of close-ups and long shots to get depth on the screen. His fondness for last-minute technical tinkering often moves CBS engineers to complain:

"Tony has no respect for the law of electronics."

As for dramatic quality, Miner admits that it's mostly a matter of guesswork: "Plays considered surefire ahead of broadcasting time usually end up at the bottom--that happened to comedies like June Moon and Boy Meets Girl. But Turgenev's Smoke, which was expected to leave people cold, was one of the most popular we've ever done." And he adds: "There are some shows I've put on that I personally hate, but I know there's an audience for them. TV's a mass medium and there has to be something for everybody. You have to make compromises."

No Tension. Though he can boast such entertainment highs as his modern-dress Julius Caesar, the tense The Rival Dummy with Paul Lukas, and the pyrotechnic pageantry of Battleship Bismarck, Miner feels that "the best type of play for us is the psychological melodrama--it always gets the best response and the highest rating."

Besides Studio One (sponsored by Westinghouse), Miner also produces for CBS-TV The Goldbergs and a weekly children's show, Mr. I. Magination (Sun. 6:30 p.m.), which is a good deal better than its coy title. He sees TV as more closely related to the theater than to movies--"No film is as good as what we can do live on television." He is also confident that it will never descend to the low mental level of radio, because it can deal with adult problems, "and we don't get chichi or phony about them." In TV, he has tackled such subjects as adultery and Lesbianism, both frowned upon in radio and movies, without causing any scandalized uproar. "We deflect tension," Miner explains. "We don't say people are going to bed together, we just have them do it."

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