Review

Playhouse 90's version of Clifford Odets' "trio play," Clash by Night, was mostly a triumph of mien over message. When he wrote the play (a Broadway flop in 1942), Odets said he was trying to show "how men irresponsibly wait for the voice and strong arm of Authority to bring them to life and to shape ... So can come Fascism to a whole race of people." But TV Adapter William F. Durkee Jr. chose to tread the simpler level of the story--the interplay between a clod husband, a deceitful lodger, and a restive wife who dreams of escape from the back stoop of life. Ironically, the portraits seemed to fall out of television focus when wisps of Odets ideas slipped in. Actor E. G. Marshall was brilliant as the cuckolded husband who yearned for ''a little warm house in the snow where you were told what to do, like in school." Actress Kim Stanley, in another excellent performance, was the adulterous wife who talked about the supreme confidence of her first husband, a Pennsylvania politician, who "fights the blizzards and the floods for you, beats the world off when it rises to swallow you up." To her cheap lover, Lloyd Bridges, she said: "I see in you the governor of a great state." These thematic straws did not interfere with the brutal clash of character, and the clash is what made the TV play exciting. Against the seedy raffishness of a steamy Staten Island house and garish honkytonk. the actors caught all the color and dimension of the human beings Odets so acutely observed. As they talked, the idea gleamed that here was where TV Writer Paddy (Marty) Chayefsky first met many of the people he writes about.

As Ed Murrow opened a 90-minute See It Now documentary on automation, he said: "Several people have suggested to us that it's a little too heavy for a Sunday afternoon in June." It was perhaps a half hour longer than it had to be, but the skilled See It Now team made a formidable assignment seem like easy going. They showed not only the newly arrived marvels of "an age when the buttons push themselves" but also "the frustration of displaced workers and the cool, four-day-week visions of scientists, labor leaders and industrialists. The machines alone made exciting viewing: contraptions that land airplanes automatically, spot cancerous tissue through the microscope, run vast chemical plants, tell at a glance the position of every plane over the northeastern U.S. plus their speed, altitude and identity. Some of the automatons create jobs and whole industries--but also the immediate problem of displaced workmen and the long-run challenge of how the U.S. can use a new leisure. The CBS show struck a hopeful balance on whether automation is "weal or woe," even managed to find some humor in both the men and the machines.

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