Variety (December 1957)

34 TELEVISION REVIEWS PteRIETY Wednesday, December 4, 1957 Jerry’s Win, Place & Show Paces 19-Hour Telethon With $750,000 Response Every ounce of muscle Jerry Lewis possesses went into his fronting of the -Muscular Dystro¬ phy songathon - talkathon - clowna- thon that spread across 19 hours of WABD,N.Y. t teletime this past weekend. There may have been better organized charity telethons in the metropolitan area but none could have been much better. The organization was planned by some¬ body else, but nonetheless the pro¬ gram was a personal triumph for Lewis. His show drew some $750,000 by shortly after closing time Sunday, . 'These stanzas have a way of get¬ ting messy In technique and maud¬ lin in tenor but nowhere:! in the three-and-a-half hours personally viewed was the* disturbance- exces¬ sive or the work of the guest stars sloppy. And one of the chief rea¬ sons is that Lewis devoted his Harge store of energy, wit and pa¬ tience to keep the show in tow. Lewis conducted the terrif Lou f Brown orchestra, which Was there through most of the session. Lewis gun-fought tv cowboy James {Ear¬ ner, played catch- with Brave’s Frank Torres, swapped stories MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY TELETHON With Jerry Lewis, host; Lqu Brown orch; guests: Steve Allen, Sarah Vaughn, Dodi Goodman, Jill Corey, Arthur and Katherine Murray, Martha Raye, Polly Ber¬ gen, Thelma Rit(er t Robert Q. Lewis, Ted Steele," Barry Gray, Murray Kaufman, Dizzy Gilles¬ pie, Teddi King, Peggy Wood, Paul Wlnchell, Jan Murray, Mike Wallace, George DeWitfc, Jerry Marshall, Anthony Per¬ kins, Peter-Ustinov, Rudy Val- lee, James Garner, Ln Ann Simm-', Jim Brown, Fran Alli- sen, Marion Marlowe* Cozy Cole Trio, Cab Calloway, Henry Jerome Orch, Dick Haymes, Pat J Boone, Milton Berle, Hal March, j Tom Tully, Warners Anderson, ' David Wayne, Margaret O’Brien, j Sam Levene, Kai Winding Sex¬ tet, June Havoc, Sonny Fox, Jim Backus,. Jack Carter, others . Executive Producers: Arthur Hale, Jules Baker J Producer: Ernie Glucksntan Directors: Jack Shell, Arnee Nocks, A1 Castle, Artie Forrest 19 Hrs., Sat. (Nov. 31)-Sun. (Dec. 1), Id pan. WABD, N. Y. with everybody, interviewed Mike Wallace, kept kids from wander¬ ing in and out of the playing area, did the same with adults, who somehow, act liked privileged char¬ acters whenever they donate a buck at one of these affairs, and when the amassed page boys, as¬ sistant director#*, telephone an¬ swerers, friends and relatives could no longer hold back some of the audience from slipping -through the wavering cordons on to the stage of the Grand Ball¬ room of the Hotel Roosevelt, Lewis displayed what for a tired man was-admirable patience and tact. Credit must also go to Arthur Hale and Jules Baker, who' make a living setting up telethons, for keeping -the raft of “testimonials” by the name stars on a dignified level. The cynical remember how. often in the past how ineffectual, tear-jerked and phony some of the pitches for cerebral palsied mop¬ pets, heart victims, or whathave- you, sounded. Some might object and say that the prepared scripts by Hale and Baker were patently •phony, ^simply because they didn’t come from the heart, but the heart, apparently, can he the. sources of considerable irritation when so many of the untutored make with their own brand of artifice for the ‘sage of us un¬ washed. When the tote hoard closed Sun¬ day at 5 p.m.,. Lewis and his many and varied -guests (most of ’em listed above) had collected rough¬ ly $702,000 in promises and. cash, not a bad tally when compared to the #575.000 Dean Martin & Lewis drew' at closing for the same charity la*;* rear.' It was some “T ’.■-■* '"J—t rmTjod alone for the City of Hope Tele- t me months ago, hut all the re -,. aren’t in yet for Lewis. Within 'two hours after the 5 p.m. deadline, another $50,000 came in building the Sunday sum to $752,000. Lewis’ tally jumped by about $300,000 in the last three hours before the final curtain. By then, it is safe to assume, people were forking out coin in testimony to Lewis, while others must have been taking side-bets on whether he’d make it to the finish line. Art. Tele Follow-Up Comment Frank Sinatra. Show . > Frank Sinatra, who: had his ups on ♦ ABC-TV this season , with a live leadoff show and. his downs with- the succession of filmed en¬ tries that' followed, resorted to live again last Friday (29) with fairly promising results. Not that the opus cleared up all that has ailed the show so far, /or it’s still .want¬ ing in smoothness and substance, but the star was in good voice this time,, and he seemed to enjoy the company of guestar Dean Martin even though they had little to talk about that whs amusing. Most of all, though, the show proved again that you can’t beat the immediacy, and palpability of a live, perform¬ ance. Two new writers for the show, Ray Singer and Richard Chevil- lat, came up with less than an in¬ spired script, one that was full of innocuous patter and routine rib¬ bing, but part of the problem , ap¬ pears to be that Sinatra does not yet have a well defined personal concept :for tv. Well spoken, and debonair he isn’t, so there’s not much point in forcing what doesn’t come naturally. As a talker, the Singer was most convincing and comfortable when allowed to fall into patterns with Martin that were, distinctly of the pool room, complete with shoulder scrunch¬ ing mannerisms. It’s an acceptable identity, and the shoe. fits. , Sinatra sang “Night atd Dav” and “Devil Moon” and Martin did “They’ll. Never Believe Me” before the two got together on’ a medley of tunes they’d each recorded, a piece of business, that seemed badly rehearsed, but- it had the. right effect because the boys seemed to be genuinely enjoying it. Sinatra wound- up the show with a potent job on “What . Is America to Me,” but it was slight-, ly over-produced with a still pageant, in the background. A number of pulchritudinous models had walkon parts at various points in. the. show, but without a fea¬ tured distaffer it was like spend¬ ing half an hour with the boys on the corner. Show emanated from the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood and didn’t fool much with set illusions and atmosphere, letting the home viewer see a couple of times the congestion of equipment and trap¬ pings behind the scenes. This kind of production honesty isn’t always a virtue, least of all on a show that can - use some atmos¬ phere and illusion. Chapter was underwritten by Bulova, with Chesterfield getting the alternate spot. Starting Jan. 3 all of Sinatra’s shows will be mu¬ sicals before live audiences.. LeSi ; The Voice ofFirestond The fact that “The Voice of Fire¬ stone” has been around somewhat longer than rockin’ roll should he of some comfort to partisans of good miisic. Last .Monday (2), in fact, this show marked its 30 years of broadcasting in both radio and television, making it the longest running series on the air. And the basic commodity; of this show re¬ mains, as always, the high calibre of its musical taste, covering the :best in. pops, - showtunes, light classical and opera. This .show’s, ratings aren’t likely to blow’ anyone over, but there’s no doubt that it has a loyal audience winch.; on a ber capita basis, probably has. a higher purchasing power than the. juve-angled musical sessions. For its 30th anni celebration, “The Voice of'? Firestone” reprised some of the fave numbers from previous year. From its first, show Dec. 3, 1928, it selected “Valencia,” and “Only a Rose”; from 1933, “Rio Rita,” and an aria from the opera, “Manon”; from 1943,: the year of this show’s video how ; “I’ll Get By”; from 1948, “My Hero’’;, and from 1953, another operatic aria. Metonera tenor Brian Sullivan and Dorothy Warenskjold, the San Francisco Opera! lyric soprano; han¬ dled the vocal assignments, with polish backed by an eight-person chorus. Howard Barlow 1 and: his symphonic orch were spotlighted in the “Carmen” prelude. Hugh James’ announcing strikes, the right note. * Herni. supporting cast translated the script into a diverting half-hour. Remarkably simple story related what happened to Astaire, a busi¬ nessman with punctual and precise habits, after a turned down pan¬ handler stuck him with an “imp On a cobweb leash.” This , imp, it developed, was. responsible.... for leading him into .“some kind' of subconscious revolt” . against con¬ vention.. Rather, than being upset by committing. such faux pas; as appearing at a board meeting with crew cut and Bermuda shorts, he seemed to be enjoying it. , Also joining in the overall spirit of . levity was Joan Tetzel, Astaire’s wife with a pronounced sense of | humor; Rhys Williams, who con- tribbed. a delightful characteriza¬ tion as the tramp; Howard Smith, as. a pompous executive, and Mar¬ garet Irving, the latter’s wife, among others,. Robert B. Sinclair directed the proceedings without making the situations appear too far fetched. Lionel Lindon’s cam¬ erawork was good as were other technical credits in this dramatic entry which William Frye produced for MCA-Revue Productions. Plugs accented the value of GE appli¬ ances as Christmas gifts. Ronald Reagan, per usual, was an unobtru¬ sive host. Gilb. Playhouse 90 String some tin cans, to the tail of a dog, , let it go, and hear the interesting noises: This somewhat approximates the effort, of Rod Serling in his: “The Panic Button” script, presented last week on “Playhouse 90.” By stringing his series of chafac-. ters. and incidents to an airplane crash and the resulting CAB in¬ vestigation, and by making these people react to the pressures of the investigation, Serling made enough interesting, noises to make a viewer stay with the story. But he never made his people—or even his story—believable;: or identifi¬ able with an overall point of view. Serling managed to bounce his little group along from incident to incident, from the time -the copilot remembers the crash Was his own fault, to the time when he hints he’s going to blame the dead pilot, to the next instance where he blames the pilot under oath, tb the : final denouement where he finally admits his guilt in a simulation of the fatal flight. Serling threw in a few odd charac¬ ters along the way! a wife who keeps analyzing herself for the co¬ pilot, a widow/for the pilot, all so much window-dressing with alLthe believability of; manikins. For all the zig-zaginess of the plot progression and for all the tinsel-like . .characterizations, direc¬ tor Franklin Schaffner and stars Lee J. Cobh (the investigator) and Robert Stack (the copilot) managed to keep “The Panic Button” mov¬ ing. along and fairly interesting! Cobh, as per usual, turned in one of those through-the-wringer per¬ formances that bolstered the script and made it all seem important;. Stack gave an. excellent portrayal of the . sick-at-r.heart reactions of someone who realizes he’s caused deaths^-if he wasn’t entirely be¬ lievable, it was the! fault of the script in its vague motivational approach. Except for a good, stint by Leif Erickson. other perform¬ ances—by Vera Miles and. Marion Seldes, were strictly stock. Schaffner’s. fluid staging, particu¬ larly some live & film integration that made the cockpit and crash scenes extremely realistic,, gave the play, the; semblance of briskness and movement iri a logical direc¬ tion,. something it 'never really had,. Chan , General Electric Theatre Fred Astaire, hitherto renowned for his dancing, made his tv dra¬ matic, debut Sundhy (1) on CBS- TV’s General Electric Theatre in an amusing fantasy that revealed him as an. actor with a flair for comedy. The Jameson Brewer tele- play 1 from a story by John Keasler was a whimsical piece aptly. titled “Imp on a Cowweb Leash!” It’s humor at times took oii a gossa¬ mer-like quality, but adroit per¬ formances by Astaire, and a fine . Tonight Thanksgiving Night on “Tonight” wais certainly no turkey. Jean Kerr, flounced in bubbling with enthusi¬ asm after attending the Broadway preem • of “Look Homeward. . An- gel,”. oii the. life of Thomas Wolfe. Mrs. Kerr, becoming less and less identified as. merely- “the wife :of” Walter. Kerr; drama critic of the N. -Y. Herald. Tribune (who’s he- .co mihg. more and more identified as “the husband of” Jean Kerr), had her own axe to grind in the form, of a. book. Her latest and probably greatest is “Please Don’t Eat The Daisies,” about bringing up children (four) and kindred sub¬ jects stemming from their unique Westchester. County abode, if. the absorbing palaver passing, between the. author:- playwright - humorist and the conferencier, Jack-of-all- rtrades-Paar, did not excite interest ; towiu’d purchase of the book, noth-, ing will; She was simply colossal; so was the host with the Paar- shaped tones—the man with the I imaginative counter-punch and the gentle riposte. Paar could have been serious— 1 and he should have been—when he prodded her on becoming a regular on his NBC-TV late-nighter. She would round out what’s fast be¬ coming the; snappiest repertory troupe in the country, what with the bland and heppery Dody Good¬ man and . the grand and peppery Elsa Maxwell. When? Tray; Mike Wallace Interview As with so many other onetime tv favorite entries, disenchantment with the “in depth” technique of interviews — Mike Wallace and others—seems to have gripped a sizable cross-section of teleview¬ ers. Bennett Cerf on Wallace’s Saturday might ABC-TVer was a pleasant enough subject, literate, authoritative, frank and interest¬ ing. Yet v somehow the zing and zest seems to have gone, out of so many of these interviews. . Cerf discoursed on television and, while Wallace sought to capi¬ talize on the versatile publisher- author-panelist’s observations about too-many-westerns and ‘‘Sunday afternoon as an intellectual ghetto” (meaning not prime time, hence some of the “best” things are lumped there), he was equally frank in describing himself as a “ham.” This frank personal ego makes him go on- “What’s My Line?”, as it has induced him to, |»expose himself to the Wallace in¬ terview, he observed. When Wallace grouped a bar¬ rage question of multiple values,. Cerf parried that the interviewer “stacked” that interrogatory. He applied himself to the main barb-^ “why do you .lend yourself to a panel show?”—by again reiterat¬ ing that being a panelist made him no tv “expert,” per se, and funda¬ mentally, once again, it’s “nice” to be on a successful tv show, for “ham”, (and, economic) reasons, Wallace pursued that by reading a. Chi critic’s quote of..Cerf’s indict¬ ment of. tv’s “sameness,”, and from that Wallace went into “too much sex” in books, paperbacks and hard-cover, alike, with “too much blasphemy” and Catholic group’s rating-system as “objectionable for youthful readers.” Cerf defended that by accenting that, proportion¬ ately, the percentage is small, and when church pressure groups go after writers like- Hemingway, Faulkner j Caldwell, O’Hara et al! because their works are “sala¬ cious,” then it is high time for the freedom of the press to be con¬ cerned.: Abel.. Ed Sullivan Show Ed. Sullivan’s layout on. Sunday (1) resembled closely a show by Alan Freed because of its stress upon singers of the r’n’r genre. With this kind of accent, Sulliv an seems to be departing from a vari¬ ety format, since there was very little of that item on his show. An¬ other factor militating against the layout was a lack of movement such as a; nearly all-singing show would result in. The two passages where motion entered into the pic¬ ture were, delightful. Martha Ann Bentley galloped through a series of rapid ballet spins for a show- stopper and the De Marcos (Tony & Sally) provided a graceful bit of ballroomology that made for an extremely pleasant respite^ despite Tony’s fall earlier in the day that was believed would make it impos¬ sible for him to perform. , There were some Unfortunate factors in the overall plot of the ' show, Firstly, this was to have been a dream show to be based on a poll conducted by Cosmopolitan mag. Early in the voting it became ap¬ parent that such a layout would be impossible. For example, it would be somewhat difficult to get Steve Allen over to perform to cite one case. Again, the Rays, a rock ’n’ roll group, were in an auto acci¬ dent, necessitating two substitutes. Well—it was just one of those shows. Other performers outside the ar¬ ray of singers were Jean Carroll, comedienne, with good, laugh-pro¬ voking material, who registered as .strongly as the best of her comedic f contemporaries:. who have worked ■this show. Another was Douglas Fairbanks Jr.,, who preceded his major effort by describing a world in crisis. He gave comfort to this suffering, globe with the recitation of Kipling’s “If.” • The musical brigade led off with , Ray McKinley’s orch in a series of' tunes in which three brief vocals were featured and which came off pleasingly. The Crickets, vocal- instrumental foursome in two slots, made little sense for adult listen¬ ers, as did the unfortunate Rays, (Continued on page 50) DEATH OF A SALESMAN With Albert Dekker, George Baker Vera Cbok, John Stratton, David Graham, Mavis ViUiers, George Woodbridge, Henry Oscar, Rob¬ ert Arden . . Writer: Arthur Miller TV adaptation: Stanley Mann Director;:. Silvio Narjzzano 120 Mins.,. Wed., 8 p.m. GRANADA-TV, from Manchester Arthur Miller’s “Death Of A . Salesman” provided Granada-TV with its greatest dramatic triumph to date. It was also apparently the fir$t time the play had ever been done on tv, and the first occasion on which a two-hour drama. had been screened on commercial tv. In both cases, it was more than justified.. The programmers brought over Albert Dekker to play the- lead role of Willy Loman, the salesman, and in doing so must surely have pro¬ vided him with the award of best British tv performance of the year.- After the excellent tv-adaptation by Stanley. Mann; and the equally good direction by SilVio Narizzano, it seemed' that Arthur Miller had written the piece especially for the medium, and made for a feeling of wonderment as to , how it had ever been produced on the stage. The programmers were certainly well justified in cancelling a quiz game jn order to develop two hours to the production^ The mixture of fact and fantasy, which was the basis of the play, was translated with -a great deal of feeling to tv. Camera work tanked among the best, and the sombre set added just that touch of grim reality to the production. The im¬ pact of the general outline of the play most certainly must have had 100% of the viewers identfying themselves with at least one of the characters. Dekker’s sensitive performance was notably supported by that of George Baker as Biff, who switched between the role of a 34-years-old who had achieved practically notlW ing out of life, and a raring-to-go teenager, with equal boxility. Vera Cook, as Linda Loman, gave a ten¬ der, touching performance, and John Stratton as Happy, filled the role With a lot. of . exuberance tinged with pathos.. Other notable performances: were ^given by Henry Oscar (Uncle Ben), and George Woodbridge (Charley). The production created a con¬ tinuous atmosphere of tension and frustration, which placed the offer¬ ing among the best of the year. '■ Bury. DER KELLER (The CeUar) With Gerhard Vogt, Rudolf Fleck, Dietrich Koerner, Gerhard Lau, Walter Kainx and Hans Lucke. Producer:. TV-DDR Director: Heinz Seibert Writers: Guenter Kalthofen, Heir mnt Schienuum 90 Mins.:. Sun. (24), 8 p.m. East German TV, from East Berlin. One must admit that; East Ger¬ many’s tele has greatly improved within the past months. Program- Wise, it’s now even more substan¬ tial than that of West Germany which, of course, is explained by the fact that the Soviet'German - video hasn’t got to. struggle along with such financial difficulties as its colleague in the West. It’s a matter of course that large part of the East German program still follows the “party line.” Yet quite frequently now E-Germany-s tv comes along with items that really rate highly, such as its. even¬ ing plays. Acting as well as direct¬ ing are 1 nearly always a/ plus in those offerings, while also their technical side deserves at least the classification satisfactory. Strictly on the positive side : this week: “The CeUar,” a 90-minute offering adapted from a stage play of the same name by Hans Lucke. This is a natural for video; It has only six persons plus one. setting; Latter is the cellar of a house some¬ where on the East Front during World War II. It houses a com¬ munication setup of a Germany Army unit arid its inhabitants are a German private (telephonist), and his corporal. Suddenly, the Red Army invades the territory and this small telephone service in the cellar, hot noticed by the Russians, is cut off from its unit. After a while the two German soldiers in the cellar get company, first German tank soldier and, then two SS men, all from a detachd body of troops/! The different characters in the ceUar make up the suspense: One of the soldiers wants to sur¬ render himself to the Ivan. The SS men, however, can’t do this because they have to face death if captured by the Red Army; An¬ other problem is imposed by the fact that upstairs lies the body of (Continued on page 54)