Review

Ham, often a fighting word in the theater, can also have its savory delights. Two blue-ribbon samples: Mickey Rooney and the late George M. Cohan, Broadway's celebrated Jack-of-all-theatrics. Last week, serving up a double helping, NBC presented Rooney as Cohan in Mr. Broadway, a 90-minute biographical spectacular with all the trimmings.

Cohan's own words and music and a show-wise script by Sam and Bella (Kiss Me, Kate) Spewack pleasantly evoked the furbelows and gimcracks of a theatrical era in which Cohan wrote shows called Little Johnny Jones and Little Nelly Kelly, and singers stretched "baby" to "ba-ay-ay-ay-bee." Rooney evoked Rooney. But if the tumultuous Rooney was not the debonair Cohan, he was still a sliver off the same shank, and great fun to watch as an outrageously brash song-and-dance man taking a reluctant theater by storm. At 36, Rooney is thin on top and thick at the jaw, but he still exudes boyishness, whether socking home Yankee Doodle Dandy in strutting, arm-pumping style, or getting moist-eyed over the last exits of Cohan's vaudeville teammates--his mother, father and sister. As the other three of the Four Cohans, Roberta Sherwood, James Dunn and Gloria De Haven seemed just right, and Singer-Dancer June Havoc also shone in a production well cast right down to the sponsor--Swift.

Bathed in an amber jungle glow, Caribee Joe writhed about his bongo drum. Suddenly, out of it slithered a sophisticated lady named Madame Zajj, and the blue moods of the orchestra panted toward violent climaxes. The show, U.S. Steel Hour's A Drum Is a Woman, was Jazzman Duke Ellington's most ambitious project in years, and also one of the fleshiest shows yet seen on the home screen. In fact Ellington's "allegorical tale of the origins of jazz" was a pretentious mishmash of primitive rhythms, pop tunes and sensuality. The sum of Drum was an interesting but meaningless collage, haphazard swatches of torrid rhythmic forms pasted on swirling globs of golds, indigos and vermilions. There were flashes of the Duke's fine musicianship. Ozzie Bailey sang Pomegranate with a seductiveness that might have tempted Persephone herself to try more of the fateful seeds, and there was ingenuity in the insolent whines of Johnny Hodges' sax on Ballad of the Flying Saucers, the staccato bleats of Trumpeter Ray Nance on Hey, Buddy Bolden.

The Mike Wallace Interview gives a national audience a chance to watch the interviewer whose no-holds-barred technique made him the most talked-about Manhattan TV personality of the season (TIME, Jan. 7). On the basis of his first two Sunday night shows on ABC, the U.S. may well wonder what all the talk was about. Mike Wallace so far is disproving the skeptics who predicted that network TV would make him pull his punches. But in flailing at setups, Wallace is displaying little more than an overeager, poorly calculated striving for sensation.

With both guests Interviewer Wallace wore himself out beating at a straw man. In questioning oldtime Cinemactress Gloria Swanson, his baiting, inquisitorial manner was not only impertinent, but--worse --not pertinent. It is too late in the century to treat either Actress Swanson's merits as a performer or the Hollywood morals of her heyday as if they were burning issues. For all practical purposes, the Ku Klux Klan is just as dated, but Wallace produced its Imperial Wizard Eldon L. Edwards in a flurry of bedsheets and a flourish of portentous announcements. Edwards, a tongue-tied Atlanta paint sprayer, was a sitting duck for Wallace's speechifying, loaded questions. He managed to emit a few typical noises; e.g., the Bible teaches segregation (though he could not quote a supporting text). But the K.K.K., long discredited in the South itself, is not a real issue. Segregation is, and the case for it-such as it is--could be made by more articulate and more respectable Southerners if Wallace wanted to report genuine controversy instead of basking in the glare of burning crosses. At his present rate, Wallace may work himself up to a hard-hitting expose of the man-eating shark.

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