The Week in Review

TV's relaxed and relaxing Dave Garroway this week passed his 2,500th hour on the air, topping the endurance record of even durable Howdy Doody (2,080 hours). In the years of Garroway's climb, the medium which now carries his placating gestures into 1,800,000 homes each day, has grown from a timid experiment, originating largely in Chicago, to a giant phenomenon dominating U.S. living rooms from coast to coast. Last week, perhaps in deference to its veteran, the whole industry seemed as relaxed as Garroway.

Formlessness, informality and a sincere respect for the sponsor's product have long been part of the Garroway formula. Masquerading in a misty domino of entertainment that only partly concealed its real intent, much of what passed across the nation's television screens last week was also devoted to selling some sort of product, tangible or intangible. At least three of the top shows of the week, Disneyland, Warner Brothers Presents, and the M-G-M Parade were blatant commercials from beginning to end, designed only to lure viewers away from their telesets and into the nearest movie house.

Sales Pitch. Even where the product was not readily identifiable, salesmen were hard at work as dramatic show after dramatic show peddled the quintessential goodness of man in one well-contrived happy ending after another. On the TV Reader's Digest, a lantern-jawed angel of goodwill named Charlie Faust did for the New York Giants what only Satan could accomplish for the Washington Senators in the Broadway musicomedy Damn Yankees. On Chrysler's Climax!, Betty Furness and Franchot Tone went to the trouble of killing off an expendable playboy on the operating table to bring understanding back to a busy doctor and his restless wife. The happiest ending of all was provided by Revlon cosmetics, which gave a 28-year-old U.S. Marine captain a check for $64,000 because he knew what King George VI ate for dinner on the night of March 21, 1939 (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

Even the most distinguished presentation of the week, NBC's two-hour-long production of the ANTA revival of The Skin of Our Teeth, was in some measure a sales pitch for mankind in general. Concocted for the theater when the iconoscope was still a gadget little known outside the laboratory, Playwright Thornton Wilder's crazy, mixed-up parable of the human race is a tale told largely in TV's own terms. Its soap-opera domestic situation, its firm reliance on interpolated newsreels, its constant comic interruptions and its narrow escapes from the maudlin and the mawkish by a hasty retreat into the reality of backstage confusion are all old television tricks. On TV itself last week, they served smoothly to give Wilder's persuasive talk a tart, tongue-in-cheek sense of proportion.

Sympathetic Look. Less wide-eyed in wonder than Wilder's play and a literate drama in its own right was the U.S. Steel Hour's A Wind from the South, starring Julie Harris and Donald Woods. James Costigan's play took a sympathetic look at an unmarried girl of 30, growing old with her unmarried brother in modern Ireland. It found no simple answer to the barren hopelessness of the young in a land where the old have forsaken their hope.

Virtually flawless performances by Harris, Woods and their supporters, and an authentic atmosphere of rural Ireland created by production magic in a Manhattan studio, were more than adequate compensation for loss of a happy ending.

Given time and patience, the television screen last week showed that it was capable of penetrating light. Too often, however, it seemed content to hold up its hand in benediction and, like Dave Garroway, mouth a meaningless "Peace!"

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