The Week in Review

In their scramble for a script a week, TV producers make a strong bid for name writers. Last week four of the better TV theaters touted four good writing names, but in serving up two originals and two adaptations, only managed to remind viewers that a good name is no guarantee of a good show.

Rerun Reunion. Robert Alan Aurthur is one of TV's topflight dramatists, and NBC's Goodyear Television Playhouse (Sun. 9 p.m., E.D.T.) liked his Spring Reunion so much that it reran the teleplay. Everything about it was good except the plot. It was handsomely produced, briskly acted, directed with point, and written with a knowing feel for mounting dramatic conflict. But like so much that is done with fine craftsmanship on TV, it was emptyheaded. The play is about a woman of 32 (Kathleen Maguire) who was voted the prettiest girl of her high-school class, but never married, and a man (Philip Abbott) who was voted most likely to succeed, but never made good. She is tired of waiting; he is tired of being on the prowl. When they fall in love, the girl still has to pry herself loose from an overfond father, fashionably borrowed from a Freudian textbook. The point (a father is no substitute for a husband) was so trite that its dramatic impact was dissipated.

Like Playwright Aurthur, Playwright Robert Howard Lindsay is a top-drawer TV dramatist. Like Aurthur's Spring Reunion, Lindsay's The Chess Game was so admired by his producer, NBC's Kraft Theater (Wed. 9 p.m., E.D.T. ), that it reran his literate and perceptive teleplay.

It is about a cynical, unbelieving old reprobate (Melvyn Douglas) who adopts a delinquent boy headed for a life of crime and imparts to him the insight that there is "no loneliness greater than not belonging to anyone." He has a series of friendly but deadly serious intellectual skirmishes with a divinity student as he transforms the boy into a fine, normal character. To save the boy from an old murder charge, the unbeliever tries to take the rap himself, and the divinity student, having, in effect, lied for the boy, tells the reprobate: "I'll have an easier time explaining to my God than you'll have explaining to yourself why you'd give your life for another." Unfortunately, the sharp point of The Chess Game was made at the cost of dramatic credibility, and it turned out to be overrich in those cardinal vices of TV drama--the schematic, the facile and the phony.

The Other Thing. CBS's Climax (Thurs. 8:30 p.m., E.D.T.) turned to Mark Twain for an hour's entertainment, but its adaptation of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn merely proved that what is wonderful to read can be terrible to see. Huck (Charles Taylor) was properly freckled and winning, and his father. Old Man Finn (Thomas Mitchell), was properly dirty and sadistic. But the adaptation consisted of a series of sketches without dramatic continuity, and lacked the one quality from which Huck always seemed inseparable--humor.

While Climax was showing how much funnier Mark Twain is between the covers of a book than on a TV screen, CBS's U.S. Steel Hour (Wed. 10 p.m., E.D.T.) was showing how much wittier Playwright J. B. Priestley is on the stage. The TV adaptation of Laburnum Grove, under the title Counterfeit, came around slowly to Priestley's engaging idea. A kindly English mediocrity (Boris Karloff) wants nothing more in the world than to live a quiet life in a London suburb, devoting his spare time to raising tomatoes. But since he is incapable of earning an honest penny, he tries "the other thing." His business, as he describes it, is inflation. To get more money in circulation, he manufactures it, and is so expert that for years he baffles Scotland Yard. Karloff made an endearing scoundrel, but the idea needed a sparkle it did not get from the production, and its routine moral ending gave it the taste of warm champagne.

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