The Week in Review

By its own admission, U.S. television is committed to the seemingly impossible task of pleasing everybody. Last week the industry came closer to the mark than usual, with a bumper assortment of parades, pageants, period pieces and political themes.

On Thanksgiving, viewers could spend hours watching what seemed the same parade marching endlessly through the streets of Manhattan, Philadelphia and Detroit, while a variety of announcers mimicked each other's intonations of synthetic joy at the sight of inflated balloon-figures, lavish floats loaded with pretty girls baring all their teeth, and determinedly jolly Santa Clauses. Just about every news show on the air scored a mass Thanksgiving Day scoop by showing some 200 banqueting vegetarians in Manhattan eating soybean roast instead of turkey and trimmings.

Whining Paranoiac. For its vast middle-brow audience, TV served up a go-minute helping of Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, with most of the same cast that has carried the show to big-money grosses on Broadway and on tour across the nation. Lloyd Nolan re-created his memorable Captain Queeg, depicting the collapse of a personality, in one shattering crossexamination, from a man-to-man blaster to a whining paranoiac. Captain Queeg's character is complex yet dramatically clear, but most of the other characters in Caine Mutiny must operate as intellectual phobias or fantasies of the author. Barry Sullivan was savagely efficient as the attorney for the defense, but far less convincing in the final scene when he lauds Queeg as a maligned patriot; Frank Lovejoy seemed too intelligent to play the duped Lieut. Maryk, and Robert Gist struggled manfully with the role of Lieut. Keefer, the devious intellectual.

Posturing Conceits. The networks also offered caviar to the general: NBC collaborated with Maurice Evans in a revival of Bernard Shaw's 58-year-old comedy about the American Revolution, The Devil's Disciple. The Shavian jape had a slow first act (more Shaw's fault than the producer's), but when Dennis King swept onstage as "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne, he and Actor Evans had a rousing time matching paradoxes and genteel insults. On CBS, Omnibus journeyed back 184 years to resurrect Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, with a polished cast (Michael Redgrave, Hermione Gingold, Walter Fitzgerald) that made the conceits and posturings of Restoration comedy as palatable as they are ever likely to be on television.

At week's end, the American Revolution got another light working over: this time in NBC's bright revival of Rodgers and Hart's 1925 musical, Dearest Enemy, with Anne Jeffreys and Cornelia Otis Skinner as pretty rebels and Robert Sterling and Cyril Ritchard as happily hoodwinked British officers.

Compared to these revivals, TV's original dramatists cut a sorry figure. Rod Serling, who last year wrote the electrifying Patterns, had two hour-long shows on the air. The first, Incident in an Alley, on U.S. Steel Hour, took its situation from the headlines (a rookie cop shoots and kills a 14-year-old boy fleeing from a prank), but the script had little more excitement than the fine print in an insurance policy. The second, Portrait in Celluloid, on Climax, dealt with the degradation of a once great Hollywood writer, and, despite a full-throated, dominating performance by Comic Jack Carson, was too contrived for conviction. On NBC's Playwrights '56, Author Sumner Locke Elliott lost his way with a footling comedy called Daisy, Daisy that started from a promising situation and dwindled to nothingness.

Indian Dust. NBC added some weight to the Thanksgiving cheer with the 60-minute Assignment: India, narrated by Chester Bowles, onetime (1951-53) U.S.

Ambassador to New Delhi. Beginning with a tourist's-eye view of India--snake charmers, storied temples, quaint customs --the film was soon deep in the dust of an Indian village where a steady trickle of water has more value than a maharaja's rubies. Bowles's commentary sounded informed and was often witty, as when he remembered that "India had more Communists in jail than any country outside of Russia." The spirit of Gandhi was all-pervasive, and, between shots of India's ancient ways, the camera returned often to a filmed interview with Prime Minister Nehru, who sometimes undid the good will his earnest countrymen were building, as when he tolerantly observed that the Indian peasant is "a very sound person, limited in outlook but with depth."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.