The Week in Review

Two NBC shows stood out from all the rest on TV last week. One was a satirical fantasy, the other a reportorial narrative. The first realistically manipulated fictional characters for laughs. The second dramatically manipulated real people for tears. Each, in its own way, made first-rate entertainment.

Goodyear Television Playhouse presented the satire: young (29) Novelist Gore Vidal's Visit to a Small Planet. The small planet is the earth. The visit is made on an impulse by a cultivated space traveler named Kreton. He taxies his flying saucer from a distant galaxy somewhere in outer space right onto the rose-bed of an American family.

Kreton is moderately surprised to find himself in the second half of the 20th century. He wears long sideburns and Victorian clothes and had hoped to land in 1860 so that, among other things, he might help the South win the Civil War.

Asked if he is the first person from his planet to travel in space, he replies:

"Everyone travels who wants to. It's just that no one wants to visit you." But earthlings are Kreton's hobby, and he is happy to be with such delightful savages for whom "civilization is only just beginning." When the Army arrives and an interrogating general grimly wonders if this visit is a prelude to invasion, the amiable Kreton notes "the wonderful, primitive assumption that all strangers are hostile." By this time it is clear that Kreton's people would not have the earth if it were handed to them on a platinum flying saucer. Some earthmen noted early in the visit that Kreton was a mere eccentric. Otherwise, what was he doing returning "to the Dark Ages of this insignificant planet?" But his visit proved an illuminating spoof, and British Actor Cyril Ritchard proved a fine spoofer.

This Is Your Life provided the reportorial narrative. The show, blatantly corny and specializing in unabashed sentimentality, reaches far to pluck at the heart strings, and frequently succeeds. Its formula is close to foolproof. It selects some outstanding person, then gathers friends and relatives to fill in his life story and pay tribute. Never a bore, the show often verges on questionable taste, just as often raises a skillfully engineered lump in the viewer's throat.

Last week it reviewed the life of Kiyoshi Tanimoto. the Japanese Methodist minister who is the guardian of the 25 Hiroshima girls now in the U.S. to get plastic surgery for their A-bomb scars.

Tanimoto's early years--his conversion to Christianity, his studies in the U.S. for the ministry, his onetime congregation in California--led to a climax. He was at Hiroshima when the bomb dropped. Somber, inscrutable, he told what happened at that catastrophic moment and how afterwards, not wounded himself, he helped survivors. Then a young man was brought on stage whom Tanimoto had never before seen. He was introduced as Captain Robert Lewis, U.S.A.F., the copilot of the 6-29. Enola Gay, that dropped the bomb. After a slight hesitation, the two men shook hands. Then Lewis, now personnel manager of Henry Heide, Inc. (candymakers) in Manhattan, his voice unsteady with emotion, told how he had flown over Hiroshima the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, and how the bombardier had dropped the bomb that killed nearly 100,000 people, wounded another 100,000.

"As the bomb fell over Hiroshima," said Lewis, "and exploded, we saw an entire city disappear. I wrote in my log the words: 'My God, what have we done?' " It was easily the most dramatic and affecting moment of the TV week, and much too powerful for even the most imaginative scriptwriter to compete with.

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