Parallels & Irony

To "help clarify the present by examining the past," the MARCH of TIME dipped this week into a 16-year backlog of M.O.T. films to put on a 26-week TV series called March of Time Through the Years. Cooperatively sponsored by leading U.S. banks, the show is telecast in Manhattan by station WJZ-TV (Fri. 10 p.m.) and at varying times and days in other cities.

For its first program, "Newsfronts of War--1940," M.O.T. compares the crisis climate of 1939 with today. At intervals, the filmed account of Nazi blitzkrieg and Japanese aggression in China is broken for discussion, by Commentator John Daly and Guest Correspondents David Douglas Duncan and Manfred Gottfried, of the ironies and parallels of contemporary history. An outstanding parallel: world peace, threatened by the 1939 Soviet-Nazi pact, is similarly threatened in 1951 by the Soviet-Red China pact.

Through the Years will not be all solemnity and heavy fare. Appropriate panels will also take up the problems of teenage girls, the beauty industry, U.S. music. M.O.T.'s television unit has plans for a ballet show (to be filmed in Paris), an afternoon program for women, a series of dramatized incidents from U.S. history, e.g., the attempt to impeach President Andrew Johnson. M.O.T.'s first series, the 26-week, prize-winning Crusade in Europe, is currently making its third successive TV run. In preparation for fall issue: a TV version of the war with Japan, Crusade in the Pacific.

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