Review

The show opened with the familiarly quiet voice: "This is Ed Murrow. Listen to an informer now in hiding, afraid he will be found and killed." With that, CBS radio last week told in the bone-chilling words of its participants The Galindez-Murphy Case: A Chronicle of Terror. The skillfully fleshed-out version of the story, first revealed by TIME and LIFE, made an impressive documentary-in-sound--so impressive, in fact, that CBS rushed to rebroadcast this week the suspenseful full-hour reconstruction of how Columbia Lecturer Jesus de Galindez, a Basque, was kidnaped from Manhattan, spirited out of the country and apparently murdered because of his opposition to Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo (TIME, April 2, 1956 et seq.).

The attempt to find out what it could of Galindez and the subsequent disappearance of Gerald Murphy, the young soldier of fortune who flew him to his fate, involved CBS in a sort of thriller of its own. Of 200 witnesses questioned by CBS reporters, 50 refused to talk. Many, asked for FBI protection, agreed to talk only anonymously. Witnesses were interviewed in darkened Manhattan offices in the middle of the night, some bringing lawyers with them. The wife of one witness told CBS that she got an anonymous call saying: "We know your husband's talking to CBS." Dominican representatives in the U.S. refused to participate. One informant led CBS sleuths to his apartment to hear a recording in which by his account Galindez' alleged assassin was identified. When they arrived the tapes had been stolen. CBS's frightening story within a story was manifest everywhere in the broadcast, and punctuated at the end by the fretful voice of the late Gerry Murphy's fiancee, Sally Ciare: "Even now, in Kansas, I can't actually say I feel completely safe."

Television, which likes its plots explicit, has had little success adapting the misty works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with their subtle concerns for class cravings, lost illusions and elusive ideals. But then, neither have the stage and cinema. In adapting Fitzgerald's frail short story Winter Dreams for last week's Playhouse go over CBS, Emmy Winner James P. Cavanagh came close to Fitzgerald's mood without sticking to Fitzgerald's theme. The play retained the tender struggle of the central characters, but juggled scenes and dialogue to capture the nuances of the separate worlds that preoccupied Fitzgerald--the middle class of "proud, desirous" Dexter Green and the cashmere-on-the-golf-links security of Judy Jones, whom Dexter saw always "in a soft deep summer room," peopled with the men who had already loved her. Talented young (28) Director John Frankenheimer extracted an extraordinary piquancy from British Actress Dana Wynter, who as Judy was a haunting re-creation of the ideal girl of Fitzgerald's generation. And TV's John .Cassavetes made a winning Dexter, "unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams" of glittery things. Fitzgerald said Judy always "looked as if she wanted to be kissed," and TV took that as a cue, produced some of the longest kisses ever to singe the home screen.

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