Broadcasting Telecasting (Oct-Dec 1957)

TO TURN RANDOM TUNERS INTO VETERAN VIEWERS Now — in many markets — three great adventure action series combined into one great 5-day a-week show! Why pay a pretty penny for programs when you can get top-rated series in your market and hold on to all of your own cash! For complete details about this new plan, phone today. Or wire Michael M. Sillerman at TP A for your market's availability. Television Programs of America, Inc. 488 Madison Ave., N. Y. 22 • PLaza 5-2100 IN REVIEW THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS Someone once said a people is known by its heroes. The first program of the The Seven Lively Arts took a look at the U. S. through its "love gods and goddesses" attempting an essay on "The Changing Ways of Love." In spite of some wonderful moments, the net total was too much mind and not enough heart. An ambitious concept, a literate approach and flashes of wit illuminated the presentation. But three moderators (Messrs. Crosby, Perelman and Wallace), film clips, dramatizations, cartoons and conversations added up to too much to be a good thing. The individual personalities of the three moderators did not make an entirely compatible blend and the general tendor of things turned "The Changing Ways of Love" into a sociological study, complete with weighty pronouncements, instead of a charming habit in which people have been indulging for a long time. But, again, there were wonderful moments: Through film clips, Valentino and Gilbert, Clara Bow and Garbo, Cagney, Robinson and Gable moved once again across the screen. The script glittered intermittently: the prosperous 20's when "people who had everything couldn't be happy"; the crash, when "nobody had any money and that changed everything"; the advent of psychology, when "the problems of Americans in love started on one couch and ended on another. . . . There was Freud if you could afford it, and, if not, Our Gal Sunday." The young Frank Sinatra was characterized as the answer "to the urchin complex in every woman," and about tv, it was noted, "Love is always connubial, with nothing to distract from the toothpaste." Flashes of fun and brightness do not make a wholly successful entity, but enough was good in this first entry to kindle the desire for more. The promise of some Sunday afternoon excitement is there. Production costs: Approximately $200,000. Sustaining, on CBS-TV, Sun., 5-6 p.m. EST. Started Nov. 3, live from New York. Moderators: John Crosby, S. J. Perelman, Mike Wallace. Cast: Piper Laurie, Rip Torn, Jason Robards Jr., Dick York. Executive producer: John Houseman; producer: Judd Kinberg; writer: S. J. Perelman; director: Sidney Lumet; associate director: Bruce Minnix. LUCILLE BALL-DESI ARNAZ SHOW Fans of / Love Lucy, and that includes just about everybody, must have been relieved Wednesday on watching the first Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show on CBS-TV to find that the only things about the program that have been changed are the title and the length. Lucy is still the impulsive, rattle-brained, lovable, laughable creature she has been for the past six seasons. Desi (Ricky) is still the same bewildered male whose explosive Latin nature, after a strong assertion, always gives way to sympathetic consideration for Lucy. The Mertzes are still the same friendly neighbors, alternately helpful and interfer ing. Best of all, the program is still a wacky presentation of a world in which pratfalls are a normal part of the daily routine; in which the amateur, suddenly called on to replace the ailing star, is letter-perfect in the part, and in which any resemblance to real life is strictly accidental. The first show of the new series opens in the Ricardo home with Lucy, Ricky and Ricky Jr. being interviewed by Hedda Hopper. But, to answer her how-did-you-meet? bit, the scene soon switches to 1940 and two romance-seeking stenos (Miss Ball and Ann Sothern) on a vacation cruise to Havana, where they find romance as personified by Desi Arnaz and Cesar Romero. Highlights are the girls' shipboard pursuit of Rudy Vallee, ending only when he jumps overboard; an amazing love duet between Lucy and Ricky, done on bongo drums; the jail scene where the girls get innocently cockeyed, a sequence as hilarious as the situation is hackneyed. With a full hour at their disposal, in place of the previous 30 minutes, the writers and directors spread themselves so much — and so effectively — that Executive Producer Desi Arnaz refused to cut it below 75 minutes. So, with the assistance of U. S. Steel, which "for this night only" cut its Steel Hour to 45 minutes, the first of the Lucy-Desi hour-long program series ran for an hour and a quarter. The result thoroughly justified the extension. If a carp may be added to the cheers, the liberal use of close-ups of Miss Ball and Miss Sothern seemed a mistake. They're both charming ladies and gifted comediennes, but they've been out of the giddy young thing class for quite a few years now and their girlish clothes and hairdos did more to emphasize this fact than to conceal it. Production cost: Approximately $350,000. Sponsored by Ford Div., Ford Motor Co., through J. Walter Thompson Co. on CBS-TV as five special telecasts this season, the first on Nov. 6, 8-9:15 p.m. (others to be one hour each). Executive producer: Desi Arnaz; producer: Bert Granet; director: Jerry Thorpe; writers: Madelyn Martin, Bob Carroll Jr., Bob Shiller, Bob Weiskopf; director of photography: Sid Hickox. Seen & Heard Not all television is, to quote the bard, "gutless." Take Jack Paar's Tonight Tuesday nights when he plays host to acid-tongued social gadfly Elsa Maxwell. It takes sheer nerve on the part of both NBC-TV and Mr. Paar to allow this magnificently witty creature to go trampling on whatever topic she chooses. Last Tuesday, for example, she tackled that sacred cow named Jayne Mansfield, noted that her bosomy display was "disgusting." She also took apart New York Herald-Tribune critic-turned-performer John Crosby. Miss Maxwell said that Mr. Crosby, in trying to host what she called CBS-TV's "Seven Deadly Arts," was like a "man with a long grey beard" who lacked both humor and an ability to read the TelePrompTer. Mr. Paar, a potential victim of critic Crosby's Page 14 • November 11, 1957 Broadcasting