The Week in Review
This was the week NBC unlimbered its big guns to recapture network dominance from rival CBS. With an expensive ($35,000 a week) film series called Medic, and with the first of its $300,000 "spectaculars," the network hopes to convince viewers that they should twirl their dials NBC-ward. What viewers got in the spectacular line was a musical comedy, Satins and Spurs, starring tireless Betty Hutton in her first TV appearance, and produced by Max Liebman, who won his spurs over the five-year run of NBC's Your Show of Shows.
Big & Tuneful. Both Medic and Satins and Spurs (telecast in color) proved first-rate. The spectacular (a word detested by everyone at NBC, except the publicity department and President Pat Weaver) was big and tuneful. The book (by William Friedberg and Producer Liebman) contained the usual musical-comedy eyewash: Betty Hutton was cast as an untutored cowgirl who comes to Manhattan, falls in love with a LIFE photographer, falls out of love, falls back in love again. But it was a fine vehicle for the Hutton bounce and enabled her to do her brash singing and dancing against a background of Broadway, a fashion show and an intimate nightclub. Betty got excellent support from a pair of cowpokes (Josh Wheeler and Guy Raymond), from Kevin McCarthy as the hero, and from a new French singer, Genevieve. The music, written especially for TV by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans (Buttons and Bows), was astonishingly good. Both Satins and Spurs and You're So Right for Me may be sounding from radio and jukeboxes for some time to come. Betty Button's most infectious number was a novelty called Wildcat Smathers that featured a rodeo dance on a trampoline-like bedstead in her dressing room.
Courage & Despair. Medic (Mon. 9 p.m.; NBC-TV), the second big NBC threat of the week, also wore the unmistakable mark of the professional. Created and written by James Moser (who learned how on Dragnet), the filmed show is one which NBC hopes will put a big dent in the top rating of CBS's / Love Lucy. Medic may well do the job.
The opening show was starkly simple in plot: after seven years of marriage, a woman finally becomes pregnant only to learn that she must die of leukemia, perhaps even before the baby is born. Blunt-featured Richard Boone carried authority as the doctor who fights to keep the mother alive until childbirth, and the delivery-room scenes were as sensational and convincing as anything yet seen on TV. Beverly Garland heartbreakingly suggested the courage and despair of the doomed wife, while Lee Marvin did remarkably well with the necessarily skimped role of the husband.
The saving of the child became almost unbearably moving as doctors and nurses tried one expedient after another to get it breathing; with each failure, tempers became realistically short, and men seemed helpless before the mystery of birth. The musical background, supplied by Victor Young, was a triumph of unobtrusive mood setting. Medic has the endorsement of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, and most of the film was shot in the rooms and corridors of the County Hospital. The only noticeable divergence from truth came at the show's end, when a nurse asked the doctor: "Shall I tell the husband his wife died?" Replied the doctor: "No--tell him his baby lived." Some physicians may protest that an obstetrician would never delegate that job to a nurse, but the incident did supply an effective upbeat ending to Medic.
Other new shows:
It's a Great Life (Tues. 10:30 p.m., NBCTV) will do just about anything for a laugh, from dressing oldtime Cinemactor James (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) Dunn up as Santa Claus to using a venerable bedroom-and-bath skit that has already been seen on CBS-TV in last year's Meet Mr. McNutley. Starring William Bishop and Michael O'Shea as a pair of Korean war buddies who have moved to Los Angeles for jobs, the show is produced by writers Ray Singer and Dick Chevillat at the Hal Roach studio. Bishop plays the handsome leading man, and O'Shea is cast as the dumb, good-natured, wolf-calling sidekick that Hollywood has decreed as standard equipment for every U.S. soldier-hero.
Dear Phoebe (Fri. 9:30 p.m., NBCTV) has Peter Lawford pretending to be the editor of an advice-to-the-lovelorn column. Most viewers can take it from there, as the expected foils march onstage in the expected order. There is the fiery girl reporter (Marcia Henderson), who "meets cute" with Lawford as both try to enter the same swinging door; the hardboiled, conscienceless managing editor (Charles Lane); the brash but dumb copy boy (Joe Corey). Faced with all these predictable characters and situations, Lawford still manages to infuse some wit and awareness into the stereotyped proceedings. But what little advantage he gains is lost when Lawford and the tough city editor sit down at program's end to rhapsodize about the glories of Sponsor Campbell's soup.
They Stand Accused (Thurs. 8 p.m., Du Mont) had an earlier four-year run on TV, which ended in 1952. It has begun again where it left off with the same hesitant direction, the overacting by bit-players (one blonde actress all but snapped her gum at the defense attorney), and the startled looks of other actors who unexpectedly find themselves on camera. The hour-long show attempts to simulate the drama of the courtroom, using real lawyers from the Illinois bar and having twelve members of the studio audience serve as jury. Sometimes the cases are interesting in themselves, and occasionally the lawyers achieve trenchant crossexamination. Mostly, though, the show is swamped in ineptitude.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.