The Week in Review

When audience research showed the TV networks that nearly as many fathers as kids watched western movies, they realized that they were missing a bet. So, with a clatter of hoofs and a hi-yo, the networks this season launched a flood of "grownup" westerns and began drawing a bead on the competition. Last week CBS's Gunsmoke shot up past an NBC Spectacular (Max Liebman's Dearest Enemy) by a score of 20.8 to 17.3 in the Trendex ratings. At ABC, the Cheyenne segment of Warner Bros. Presents has piled up so many more viewers than the other rotating segments (Casablanca and King's Row) that executives are planning to run Cheyenne on alternate weeks instead of every third week as before.

Petticoat Rustle. Not only is the TV western riding hell-for-leather in the ratings; it is turning woman-conscious in an effort to widen its audience. CBS's Annie Oakley frankly aims at showing that the female is more deadly than the male, and on NBC's Frontier, the rustle of petticoats is fast drowning out the creak of chaps. In last week's show, plucky Beverly Garland, though frail, put-upon and pregnant, drove her weak-spirited menfolk and a herd of cattle more than 600 long miles, through drought, ambush and ennui, from parched Texas to verdant Wyoming. Subsequent Frontier programs will tell of Poker Alice (Joan Vohs), the coolest gambler on the plains, and the Long Road to Tucson will relate the saga of seven nuns on the trail from San Diego to the Arizona territory. So far, Wyatt Earp (starring Hugh O'Brian) has permitted only the occasional intrusion of women, but Brave Eagle (with Keith Larsen and Kim Winona) and Gunsmoke each have a hot-eyed heroine ready and willing to buckle on the guns and go out after the badmen if Frontier's ratings decree that women belong in the saddle and the men should go back to the range --the kitchen range, that is.

Educational Frills. Ed Murrow filmed a different sort of western for his See It Now program on education. By poking into Colorado's Jefferson County, where student enrollment has jumped from 6,000 to 19,000 in less than ten years, the CBS cameramen were able to examine in microcosm many of the educational growing pains that are racking the nation. Because the county was arguing whether or not to pass a $7,000,000 bond issue, Murrow caught arguments at white heat: from farmers and businessmen against the bond issue ("Let's cut out the educational frills . . .") to the equally eloquent clergymen, parents and students on the other side ("If we've got to choose between schools and new cars or washing machines, let's choose schools").

One of the best scenes came from the isolated mountain village of Pine (boasted pop. 250), where three embattled women tongue-lashed Murrow and a member of the school board in what was obviously a long-sought opportunity to air their very real grievances. The film wound up with a televised debate between Alabama's Senator Lister Hill and New York Representative Ralph Gwinn that contained nearly as much nonsense as the preceding 70 minutes had clarity and intelligence.

NBC's Wide, Wide World ostensibly dealt with Our Heritage but this time its ranging from New Orleans to San Francisco, from Carlsbad Caverns to Canada had a postcard unreality: nothing that the viewer saw seemed to be actually happening. Everything--whether a Cajun picnic or a tour of a three-masted schoon-er--appeared to have been elaborately and ineptly staged for television.

The week's drama had two near-successes: on the Alcoa Hour, Thunder in Washington tried to pack into 60 minutes the entire story of a businessman in government, from his hopeful arrival, through his first miscues, to his humiliation before a Senate investigating committee. Author David Davidson struck boldly through the tangled swamp known as Conflict of Interest, but not even yeoman work by Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley could make the main issues clear. Climax! starred Michael Rennie in Man of Taste, a melodrama about an art dealer who had a method for improving the price on his artists' paintings--he simply killed them off after they had done enough canvases to give him a comfortable backlog. Like most such rogues, Rennie seemed far too intelligent to have been caught at his crimes, but caught he was, and made a satisfactory exit to the scaffold.

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