Review

Twentieth Century: In CBS's Gandhi, the scrawny, jug-eared little man in the white loincloth looked as Author John Gunther once saw him: an inscrutable "combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father." Fuzzy images from old films showed the gentle ascetic all but engulfed by the worshiping, hysterical throngs on the mass pilgrimage to the sea to carry out a plan of passive resistance during the British salt monopoly. There was the shrewd lawyer-diplomat putting his hand over an inquisitive British reporter's mouth or quipping on arrival in London in 1931: "You people have your plus fours. These are my minus fours." In the best sequences, faded with age, there was "your father"--with metal-rimmed spectacles, a big, near-toothless grin, the dollar watch dangling from the dhoti--who tenderly encircled a little girl with a garland of flowers that she had brought for him.

Yet Gandhi, like some other recent installments in this series, was a superficial show--a smattering of glimpses instead of a focused image. The trouble, as the producers explained it: "Even with the help of Gandhi's son Devadas, we didn't step into a mother lode of film."

Kraft Television Theater: Borrowing freely from Balzac's tale of the strange friendship between a lone soldier and a panther in the desert, Playwright Simon Wincelberg almost captured the novelist's eerie mood as well. In The Sea Is Boiling Hot, the panther became a stoical Japanese infantryman (Sessue Hayakawa) marooned alone on a Pacific island in World War II. His unwelcome visitor: a fallen U.S. airman (Earl Holliman). The two-man play dared to turn almost entirely upon monologues by the American, yet managed effectively to sweep its characters over their language barrier from enmity to camaraderie. Though obliged to make few sounds other than some grunted Japanese, aging (68) Silent

Cinemenace Hayakawa, who is up for a supporting-role Oscar for his work in Bridge on the River Kwai, performed eloquently in silence, let his craggy face show the nuances in the change from fear and hatred to humor and affection. Sea worked unnecessarily hard to make its point--misunderstanding breeds wars--because its airman, though well-played and fairly believable, was a simple-minded drugstore cowboy whose military indoctrination never seemed to have progressed beyond peeling potatoes.

Conquest: CBS's science report showed the first pictures ever taken of actual atoms--electronically magnified 1,000,000 to 3,000,000 times and falling in lacy, snowflake patterns on the point of an extra-sharp pin. But the show's most stirring segment was an open-heart operation filmed in a University of Minnesota hospital. The patient: a pretty five-year-old blue baby named Debbie, who was wheeled into the operating room with a toy lion perched on her chest. Dr. Richard DeWall was on the scene to explain how his heart-lung pump oxygenator would take the place of Debbie's heart and lungs during the surgery. Famed Heart Surgeon Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, a pioneer in such operations, went to work on Debbie's exposed heart as a narrator filled in crisp details: "Notice the oversized aorta and beneath it the narrow, underdeveloped pulmonary artery. Tapes are prepared for shutting off the main vessels which carry the blood to Debbie's heart and lungs. The plastic tubes are passed through a chamber of the heart to the large veins. Debbie's heart is opened." Then an injection of potassium citrate stopped the heart for 15 minutes; in throat-parching closeups, the hole inside Debbie's still, flaccid heart, too big for safe stitching, was repaired with a plastic patch made from stuff similar to kitchen sponges. Two weeks later Debbie went home--with every likelihood of a normal life expectancy.

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