Kudos & Choler
"He wouldn't agree that Monday was Monday unless it would help him," a U.S. China hand once said of Red China's Premier Chou Enlai. When Chou was asked, by way of Burma's U Nu, to sit still for a filmed interview for U.S. television, Chou must have believed it would help him. It did not. But it helped those who saw a special rush edition of CBS's See It Now this week to get a remarkable portrait-with-sound of the man who is in name one of the masters of a fourth of the world's people, and by reputation one of democracy's most eloquent enemies. The portrait was remarkable for the way Chou failed in appearance and performance to live up to his reputation. Chou agreed to make the show for Commentator Edward R. Murrow only if questions were submitted in advance, then arrived at his Rangoon rendezvous with Murrow and camera crew willing to answer only ten of them. (Among the many subjects he declined to discuss: U.S. prisoners in China, Titoism, Peking's offer of a governmental post to Chiang Kai-shek.) Murrow & Co., and viewers as well, were fortunate that Chou did not answer more. He sat, solemn, humorless and tired-looking, acting like a man who was far from being his own master. Though he understands English well, Chou insisted on reading his answers in mechanical Chinese for an interpreter to translate. The answers themselves were composed so clumsily and delivered so dispiritedly that the onlooker could wonder, vicariously, whether the contempt of Red China's Premier was directed only at his listeners, or also at what he was asking them to listen to.
Age (57) and the suggestion of worry showed in Chou's handsome, beard-tinged features as he plodded stolidly along the party line. Home from Rangoon, Murrow followed the filmed interview with a live discussion in which Nationalist China's U.N. Ambassador T. F. Tsiang and others meticulously picked apart Chou's words. Rebuttal was unnecessary.
As part of its usual year-end review this week, CBS presented an unusually fresh, informative survey of the progress of science in 1956. A mixture of filmed and live features. The New Frontier rounded up stories that TV covered inadequately or not at all while they were breaking, blended them into a fascinating hour of sights and sounds--mutterings picked up by radiotelescope from Mars and Jupiter, pictures of the origins of the universe reproduced in a test tube, the advance of headhunters of a South Pacific island from Stone Age barbarism to modern civilization in 25 years.
Produced with the help of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the show interspersed its film clips with informal question-and-answer chats by scientists. Some of the developments were not new, but the sight of them was. Samples: tranquilizer pills transformed a jabbering schizophrenic into a calmly rational man; the gelatinous flutter of an exposed human heart was deliberately stopped by injection to permit a surgeon to repair the heart while a machine pumped the patient's blood. To keep spectators abreast of scientific strides, CBS now plans a series of weekly half-hour shows.
One of the most controversial incidents in Colorado's robust past was the Massacre at Sand Creek in 1864, when the U.S. cavalry efficiently wiped out up to 800 unsuspecting Cheyenne men, women and children. The Cheyennes under Chief Black Kettle had camped at Sand Creek, near Fort Lyon, Colo., under a friendly officer's promise of protection. But the regional cavalry commander, Colonel J.M. Chivington, was a man dedicated to eradicating Indians, and his order to the troops was "Kill all, little and big." Chivington's raiders took no prisoners and carried 100 Indian scalps back to show off in a Denver theater. The massacre fired the Plains Indians to renewed warfare against the white man and shocked the East. CBS's Playhouse 90 had the sound idea of dramatizing Colonel Chivington's raid, but somehow the good idea got ambushed by the bad guys along the way. Made on film, Massacre at Sand Creek on TV last week seemed devoted mainly to assuring that young (30), wet-eyed Actor John Derek, in the part of a young lieutenant who was the Indians' friend, got his saddlebags full of heroic moments before getting a Cheyenne arrow in his back. For the third time in 13 weeks, Playhouse 90 deflated the promise of its charter and abused its 1 1/2 hours of prime evening time by substituting a shoddy, hastily made film for inventive live theater.
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