One-Man Show

Jimmy Durante proved last week that the success of his first TV show was no accident. Returning for the second of his monthly appearances on Four Star Revue (Wed. 8 p.m., NBC-TV), he again effortlessly balanced 60 minutes of solid fun on his expressive shoulders and never once hobbled the load.

Though long a popular draw in theater and nightclubs, Durante was never a top smash in either radio or movies (see CINEMA) . It now seems clear that TV was invented, in part at least, as a frame for his special talents. The dynamic Durante personality, a sort of mixture of W. C. Fields and Donald Duck, triumphs over old routines and standard jokes. In an opera cloak and top hat, he achieves a Chaplinesque dignity as he insists that Tannhaeuser is by Puccini, and in his shocked horror at an ill-bred friend who, says Durante in moral indignation, "always behaved like a gentleman when we roomed together at Harvard."

Timeless Buffoon Durante had a superb foil in the Metropolitan Opera's strapping Wagnerian Soprano, Helen Traubel. From his first baffled exclamation at seeing her in Bruennhilde's armor ("Holy smoke, she's been drafted!"), through a passage from Die Walkuere (in which Durante was a voiceless, baffled Siegmund), to his piteous attempts to pin a corsage on her coat of mail, Durante brilliantly played the role of a frustrated longhair.

At frequent and happy intervals, he bursts from these poses into wild assaults on the earthbound sanity of his viewers. He restlessly roams the stage and studio audience, leaps from piano stool to microphone and back, urgently seizes and spurns his fellow actors, addresses furious asides to his network, his sponsor (Motorola) and other comics. He hymned his nose's birthday ("It was the first time in history that a nose outweighed the child!"); sang (with Stooge Candy Candido) an appealing duet called The Pussy Cat Song; displayed an entertaining low comedy that is as innocent as it is rare on TV--bending a tall girl backward in his arms, little Durante observes: "When my women are too tall, I fold 'em in half."

Almost every other comic has nervously surrounded himself with elaborate props for his entry into television. Jimmy Durante brought only his nose, his piano, his rasp-voiced songs and patter, and sat down like an old friend in the televiewer's living room. Durante and TV were a long time getting together, but it was well worth the wait.

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