The Week in Review

TV drama concentrated on suffering women. On Robert Montgomery Presents, attractive Peggy Ann Garner toiled through an hour of unrequited love only to have her man drop dead of a heart attack. On Studio One, Gaby Rodgers was murdered before the show went on the air, but got her chance to act the fiery temptress in a series of foot-stamping flashbacks. On the U.S. Steel Hour, Gertrude Berg played a slightly touched matron whose relatives weuld not believe that she talked on the phone every Sunday to her dead husband. Climax! offered a double dose of misery: both Sylvia Sidney and Diana Lynn suffered and suffered because they chose careers instead of settling for marriage and babies. But the ladies shared some of the week's agony. The General Electric Theater offered Johnnie Ray, the crybaby singer, in a drama about an emotional vocalist named Johnnie Pulaski who nobly spurned fame and fortune because his boss wanted him to sing under an Anglo-Saxon stage name.

The week's drama was partially redeemed by CBS's Best of Broadway, which revived George Kelly's 1924 Broadway hit, The Show-Off, as a starring vehicle for Comedian Jackie Gleason. As Aubrey Piper, a vainglorious blowhard who enchants his wife but drives her family daffy, Gleason was playing a role not too far removed from his own Ralph Kramden in The Honeymooners. He posed and postured as man of affairs, thinker, dude and cocksure authority on everything from high finance to socialism. As his embattled mother-in-law, Hollywood's Thelma (Rear Window) Ritter had a fine, acerb time of it sticking pins in the balloons of his pretensions. Unfortunately, Director Sidney Lumet and Adaptor Ronald Alexander chose to dwell on the resemblances between The Show-Off and The Honeymooners instead of the differences.

Up until last week, radio had been unobtrusively celebrating its 35th anniversary, but then Ed Sullivan decided to give broadcasting a TV salute on his Toast of the Town. However, NBC, still pursuing the quarrel it claims CBS started, refused to let its brightest stars attend. Dependable Jack Benny ran off one of his faultless comic monologues; George Burns added some needed spice; and H. V. Kaltenborn did a funny job of imitating Harry S. Truman imitating H. V. Kaltenborn after the 1948 election.

At week's end attentive viewers of Ed Murrow's Person to Person got capsule instruction on how to become a comedian or a successful author. The recipe for being a funnyman was supplied by Comic Garry Moore: "Almost every comedian starts out by being too small or too fat to be an athlete and, to compensate, he becomes the class clown." Kathleen Winsor, whose Forever Amber has sold 3,000,000 copies, sat primly on a white bearskin and explained that in putting together her opus she had spent 1,303 hours in reading, 1,380 hours in indexing, and 1,284 hours in writing. She also felt that, in writing a historical novel, "it is a very good thing to have a knowledge of history." Author Winsor also had a sad reflective word on critics : "Reviewers often review the book they wish you'd written, not the one you did write."

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