Review

Back-alley exposes of TV comics have come into fashion on big and little screens this season. Notable examples: Hollywood's The Great Man and Studio One's Tale of a Comet. Last week on TV, Producer Martin Manulis of CBS's Playhouse go turned Ernest Lehman's novelette The Comedian into an X ray of the flabby soul of a top-ranking clown. TV Comic Sammy Hogarth, played by Mickey Rooney as if the part were fitted to him in Savile Row, is the man who gives the chuckle to TV's 40,000,000 chuckleheads, but to those who know him he is a "lumbering pachyderm with the face of a pig, the smell of a skunk, the appetite of a tomcat and the voice of Joe Miller." He has a tapeworm hunger for the attention, laughter and love of 40 million people, an insatiable craving to receive all the gifts he himself is incapable of giving.

Sammy froths at the mouth when he is angry, attacks with equal greed girls on the make or spaghetti on the plate at Lindy's. Even his director hates him: "He walks as if the whole studio were a sewage system--and he has to reach the door without touching anything." But the director, and all the others around him, need Sammy more than he needs them.

In Rod Serling's searing TV script, Sammy is four days away from "the biggest comedy show in the history of TV." He is surrounded by the usual coterie of chorines, con men, stooges and freeloaders. His head writer (Edmond O'Brien) plagiarizes to please him. His weakling brother (Mel Torme) can neither escape him nor lick him. Even a fox-sly gossip columnist fails to frame him and concedes that he must wait for revenge until "six straight men send him along the route to the great producer up yonder." The unpleasant honesty of the climax makes up for most of the play's faults: after pulling down the worlds of those around him, Sammy ends up more on top than ever.

Until last week Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark was chiefly a Broadway bird. In Hallmark Hall of Fame's skillful TV version, wispy Actress Julie Harris embraced the difficult role of St. Joan like the old friend it has been and, in striking closeup, breathed her special humor and humanity into a rare historic abstraction. As the play opens, Joan is seated on a crude stool, her head bowed, before her judges. In a series of subtly conceived flashbacks, she plays out her great scenes: from the meeting with "a man in a beautiful clean robe with two great white wings" to her final defiance before those who call her sorceress and heretic: "What I am, I will not denounce. What I have done, I will not deny." Hallmark Producer-Director George Schaefer's light-and-camera play brought splendor to the color screen, and elaboration to each of Joan's many moods and moments.

The Lark was seen by some 26 million viewers, roughly 125 times the number who saw Actress Harris' 208 Broadway performances, and probably many more than have seen all the Joans (including Winifred Lenihan, Katharine Cornell, Ingrid Bergman. Uta Hagen. Siobhan McKenna) of the American stage combined.

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