Experiment in Realism

The star of the show was a moron (Don Hanmer) who didn't know his own age. The heroine (Olive Deering) was a mink-laden doxy with a pronounced streak of masochism. Joshua Shelley played an embittered musician who got a joyless amusement from baiting the moron. With this gallery of Jukes and Kallikaks, Danger (Tues. 10 p.m., CBS-TV) last week put on one of the most controversial of the year's TV dramas.

It was called The Lady on the Rock, and not all of its viewers liked it. The sponsor (Block Drug Co., Inc.) winced under a barrage of protests, ranging from charges that the show "set back the education of retarded children by ten years," to complaints about "unpleasant realism." One critic demanded that CBS send a kinescope to New York's Governor Dewey as Exhibit A in an argument for TV censorship. Nor were network executives and admen comforted by the fact that they got as many compliments as brickbats. In the complex world of commercial television, one boo means far more than 100 bravos, because it may represent someone who is so mad he'll refuse to buy the sponsor's product.

What was good about The Lady on the Rock was Author Arnold Schulman's vivid re-creation of an off-Broadway gin mill, a place alive with the yelps of syncopation, and feverish with the cynical wisecracks of men afraid they may have missed the last boat to Success. The story was the familiar one of the simpleton who, mistaking tolerance for affection and pity for love, belatedly learns the world's true opinion of him. It ended with the moron sprawled beaten and blubbering on a city street, abandoned by the girl who had been momentarily kind, and discarded by his only friend, the embittered musician.

The men responsible for televising-this mildly Chekhovian drama: Producer Charles Russell, 32, and Director Sidney Lumet, 27. As ex-actors (Lumet was a child player in the 1935 Broadway hit, Dead End), they are more interested in character than plot, and Danger is chiefly distinguished for fine camera work, the haunting theme music of Guitarist Tony Mottola, and a leaning toward psychological melodrama. Disconcerted by the response to The Lady on the Rock, Russell & Lumet may call a halt to further experiments in realism, get back in the groove with the uncomplicated mayhem and murder that are the staple of TV's suspense shows.

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