Review

The Day Called X: "Our problem," said CBS Producer Harry Rasky, "was to take a dull subject and dramatize it." Rasky's subject: Civil Defense.

To inject it with drama, he had some 10,000 people in Portland, Ore., one of the U.S.'s 99 "critical targets," go through the motions of mass evacuation on the day "enemy" aircraft approached from the Aleutians, The Day Called X. Rasky's twelve-man technical crew, aided by publicity-eager federal Civil Defense experts and convoyed about the city by police motorcycle escort for three weeks, ably caught the mood of the day that began in an ordinary way. The cameras poked neatly around the well-stocked innards of the city's steel-and-concrete underground operations center. But Portland's citizens let viewers down. Mobilizing to the immobile narration of Cinemactor Glenn Ford ("quietly, with caution, but without panic"), the actors behaved with the equanimity of Perry Como in a high school fire drill, rendering unnecessary the slides CBS periodically superimposed over the actors to explain: "AN ATTACK IS NOT TAKING PLACE."

U.S. Steel Hour: Actor-Author Robert Emmett's You Can't Win lost its silly head completely but managed to keep its heart in the right place and a tickly hand on the viewer's funnybone. As he dum-tada-ta-ed the habanera from Carmen ("Greasy cup and dirty plate, I'll wash you up immaculate, da ta") in a cafe kitchen, Dishwasher Bert Lahr learned, that he had won an Irish Sweepstakes fortune. At last, he and his wife (Margaret Hamilton) could realize a great dream, "the one thing we both want most--a divorce." Instead, though, Lothario Lahr settled for a whirl at the posh Murmuring Sands Hotel and the charms of a predatory female who invites him skindiving. "You do snorkel?" she asked. "Oh, fluently," replied Lahr with outrageous, beady-eyed insouciance, and in a trice he has filled out a preposterous, knee-length bathing suit. With a meddling, mixed-metaphored assist from Comedienne Doro Merande ("Don't jump the gun half-cooked"), Lahr got away with bushels of bad jokes ("I was married, but now I'm estranged." "I'm a stranger here myself"), some broad-farce ribbing of stockbrokers ("I don't want to sell--might make the market nervous"), and a tycoon's diet of "caviar espresso, codfish benedict, vanilla mousse hollandaise," that prompted one hotel guest to remark, aptly: "I think he may be a Martian."

Kraft Theater: Farley Granger was chasing Julie Wilson around the dress racks, but it was almost too dark for him to see her. "I must kill you," he snarled, a 2-ft. flashlight swinging ominously from his hand. "And all the bells in hell can ring, but they can't stop me." Then the script, something called Come to Me, by Robert Crean and Comic Peter Lind Hayes, called for tool Julie to "gasp audibly" and for demented, drifting Farley to "move forward catlike, impressed with his cleverness," shouting in a "lyric brogue": "There's a radiance to you, Miss, that shines even in the darkness."

What radiance there was left to Singer Wilson by this time was put there by the NBC makeup department. And as for Farley, well, all the bells in hell couldn't stop him from agonizing over her for a full, tortured, bewildering hour. "I want only to tell you," he said ("in shy bursts") when they first met, "that I dearly love to hear you sing and to see your face aglowin' on the telly-vision." When he couldn't see her aglowin' on his pillow, Farley took up with Julie's plain sister, Margaret O'Brien, cuddled seductively with her in front of the telly-vision, then choked her to death with "lilac chiffon," (a piece of gossamer that happened also to be the title of Julie's best song). "I have seen the end of all perfection," screamed the now lone Granger.

Co-Author Crean mysteriously claimed that this was his first attempt at a serious play, but P. L. Hayes, who also wrote the lyrics to the title song ("Come to me, Hear what they say, Don't run away, Stay, stay, stay"), was more to the point. Confessed he: "The play has the dubious distinction of having been written almost entirely during station breaks while sitting in for Arthur Godfrey."

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