The Week in Review

Television, in an unusually sober mood, especially concerned itself with the death of cities.

Sandwiched between the ventriloquists, singers and jugglers on the Ed Sullivan Show was a 6 1/2 miinute animated short, A Short Vision, made by a young British couple, Peter and Joan Foldes, who scored at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival with their first cartoon, Animated Genesis.

The Vision deals with the apocalyptic explosion of a superbomb. Its ghostly passage across the sky startles the animal world. A leopard releases a captured doe, and both cower deep in the underbrush. In the city, men, women and children sleep, while their "leaders and wise men" anxiously scan the heavens, "but it was too late." There is a shudder of light and, in all the raised faces, eyes melt in their sockets.

A young woman wakes at the shock, and her features dissolve into a skull. An unemotional voice intones: "When it was all over, there was nothing else left but a small flame: the mountains, the fields, the city and the earth had all disappeared ... Then I saw it. still flying around the flame, and now it looked like a moth and it, too, was destroyed, and the flame died." Even in black and white, the Vision was so chilling that the studio audience sat in stunned silence when it was over. Wires and phone calls poured in, about evenly divided between praise and condemnation. Sullivan will give a repeat showing of the cartoon this week, and Distributor George K. Arthur, who brought the film to the U.S., is releasing it nationally.

CBS's Adventure traveled back in time to a city slain by nature rather than by man. In re-creating the terrifying last days of Pompeii, the show had the help of an excellent script--the contemporary letters of Pliny the Younger to the historian Tacitus--and dramatic excerpts from a pair of vintage Italian films. Sins of Pompeii and Fabiola. In somber contrast to the deluge of volcanic fire and dust that buried the city and its inhabitants, the camera strolled down the empty, cobbled streets of present-day Pompeii and glanced up at the peaceful, picturesque cone of Vesuvius.

Set beside such stark drama, the rest of the TV week had a trivial look. NBC's Producers' Showcase offered the 12-year-old Bloomer Girl. Like many Broadway musicals transferred to TV, it had some pleasant tunes and a deplorably outdated plot. At week's end CBS tried to cheer up viewers with its own musical version of John Hersey's A Bell for Adano. Some of the lyrics were unfortunate ("We think more of the bell than the belly . . ."); the chorus of happy villagers was led by a blonde Anna Maria Alberghetti while Barry Sullivan--like a supporting player in Your Hit Parade--stood around changing his expression from sad to happy to suit her musical sentiments.

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