The Week in Review

Television was busy last week with scalpel and sedative, and viewers had a vicarious whirl through the agonies of d.t.s, the miseries of migraine and the horrors of infanticide. On NBC's March of Medicine, Announcer Ben Grauer introduced the subject of alcoholism from a comfortable perch at Moriarty's bar on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue. His point: most of the bibbers in sight were capable of taking it or of leaving it alone.

Dazed & Damaged. The camera moved swiftly on for glimpses of drunken sots on Skid Row and a clinical study of alcoholics in Connecticut's Blue Hills sanatorium, ranging from the treatment of violent arrivals through the slow repairing of the dazed and damaged to the faintly hopeful prognosis of alcoholics about to be released. The most pitiful shots were morning-after scenes in a Philadelphia Magistrates' Court, where the drunk and disorderly were up for sentencing; the most unnerving came when, back in Moriarty's bar, Announcer Grauer hoisted his highball glass and took a final swig as the program ended.

ABC's Medical Horizons tried to get a hopeful note into its discussion of headaches, but the main conclusion drawn from its visit to the Duke University School of Medicine was that science, when it comes to migraine, is better armed with pain-killers than with cures. NBC's Medic is ordinarily more interested in shock values than in therapy, and last week showed a hysterical mother accusing her spinster sister of the willful murder of a three-month-old infant. After an endless autopsy, the coroner was able to prove that death had been caused by a bronchial infection. Unresolved in the story: what caused the infection and why there was no prior evidence of it. The best segment on NBC's Wide, Wide World also had a medical background, as the camera moved into a Baltimore schoolroom to record the moving responses of deaf children to the rhythms of music communicated through their fingertips.

Despair & Violence. The week's drama was also charged with painful clinical details. Playwrights '56 made a gallant try at reducing the prolix complexity of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to the rigid demands of the theater.

An excellent cast--Franchot Tone, Lillian Gish, Ethel Waters, Janice Rule--was able to suggest the last-gasp despairs of a dying order in the Old South, but the violence that flashes only fitfully in the novel seemed too concentrated to be real in the TV play.

The U.S. Steel Hour had a lighter and happier essay on the same theme of a family consuming its own, with a TV adaptation of the London and Broadway hit Edward, My Son. Britain's Robert Morley was superb as the oleaginous trickster who believes that nothing is too good for his son--or for himself, either--and is ready to burn down a building or buy up a school to prove it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.