The Week in Review

For stay-at-homes on New Year's Eve, television produced some fine coverage of the Times Square area, jammed with half a million revelers but marred, on NBC, by Ben Grauer's excessive commercials right up until the last minute of the old year. On Tonight, Steve Allen kept things consistently festive, and amused his viewers with an apt description of the holiday ("New Year's Eve is the night the A.A.A. and A.A. get together") and with his straight-faced predictions for 1955. Some of the predictions: Marilyn Monroe calendars will bring back 1954; Arthur Godfrey will fire his entire audience; Betty Furness will marry an iceman.

The week's dramatic shows filled the air with fleeing Communists. On Danger, three Soviet airmen in a bomber escaped over the North Pole to find sanctuary near Boston; on NBC's Kraft TV Theater, two refugee Polish ballet dancers came to earth in New Hampshire; on CBS's Climax, a Russian scientist, carrying a horrifying canister of newfangled germs for bacterial warfare, almost made it to freedom before his plane crashed somewhere near Copenhagen. U.S. military and U.S. intelligence agents came off superbly in all these brisk encounters with the enemy, but the plays themselves were not very good.

ABC's Kraft TV Theater offered the week's best dramatic fun by dusting off an old Italian chestnut, Alberto Casella's Death Takes a Holiday, which was first seen on Broadway in 1929. Actor Joseph Wiseman played the Grim Reaper taking a three-day fling at mortal follies, and was ably seconded by Stiano Braggiotti as the tortured duke and Lelia Barry as the girl who falls in love with Death. On NBC's Lux Video Theater, veteran Pat O'Brien had an actor's field day in The Chase.

Instead of portraying his usual role of the kindly parish priest, O'Brien zestfully acted the part of a blustering bully who alternately slapped Ruth Roman and groveled at her feet.

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