The Week in Review

The airwaves crackled with the promise of choice entertainment; but, as usual, the promise was mostly unfulfilled. Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith returned from a brief trip to Russia and checked in with Ed Murrow and See It Now (CBS-TV). Ex-Newshen Smith reported little that was new, concluded: "The Soviet leaders smile only with their faces--never with their hearts; the little people smile with their hearts--when they get a chance to do so." Historian Arnold Toynbee showed up on the usually exhilarating radio show Conversation (NBC) to discuss "My Favorite Era," but offered nothing more than the desire "to be one of those professors on the staff of Alexander the Great and go all over the world with him. But as the father of a family, I'd like to live, say, in Holland in 1880." CBS-TV's new interview show, Face the Nation, had for its first guest Senator Joe McCarthy. Also giving out with little that was new or stimulating, he just horsed around plowing old furrows (the "lynching bee," "Communism in government").

Another important guest belonged to Comic Steve Allen, who had a televised talk with his boss, glib NBC President Sylvester (Pat) Weaver. Said Weaver, defending the network's heavily publicized "spectaculars" (color TV extravaganzas): "I have never met anybody who saw--that is to say, any just plain person as against a critic or somebody that is looking at it with a special frame of reference, usually his own witticisms--that saw these shows in color with the limited number of sets available, who just didn't flip his lid, as we say at the high executive level."

NBC's spectacular of the week starred Steve Allen, Judy Holliday and France's top pantomimist Jacques Tati, who played the Chaplinesque lead in the movie Mr. Hulot's Holiday (TIME, July 5). Tati was the hit of the show in a brief series of vignettes (a determined tennis player, a fumbling fisherman, a cowardly boxer, a prancing circus horse and rider) that showed off a remarkably agile and expressive 6-ft. 4-in. body. The week's second big color feature, Cole Porter's Panama Hattie (CBS), boasted Ethel Merman, but even Trouper Merman could not keep the show from becoming a busy, shapeless, cluttered mass of sight and sound.

Drama, as usual, was television's old reliable. CBS's Studio One production of An Almanac of Liberty, inspired by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas' book of essays on America's heritage, pitted a group of townspeople against a stranger with "radical" ideas. Frightened when they discover that time is standing still as a result of their mistreatment of the stranger, a few try to gang up on the intruder only to find that time moves backward with each infringement of another man's rights. At length, they realize that the day is Dec. 15, the 163rd anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights. When they repent, time, once again, moves ahead. Reginald Rose's expert script and a fine cast made Studio One the week's No. 1 entertainment.

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