Review

Matinee Theatre: Once the Democrats' most eligible spinster, Margaret Truman Daniel, 33, of New York and Independence, Mo., returned to show business (after a 1½-year absence) to star in her first live TV drama. The play that caught Margaret's fancy: Iris, the story of an eligible spinster, aged 31, who refused to rush things with her undependable steady (Ray Montgomery). "Like a cake in the oven," she tells him, "you open the door too soon, you ruin it." In the end, though, Iris bravely chucked the cad when she realized he was not returning her love, only her kisses, and, with what the script called "a fine, quiet steadiness," was called upon to sigh courageously: "I am born again." Though Iris was the kind of frothy pink lady that TV shakes up every day, Margaret gave it the sort of warm, simple-blonde-and-blue-eyed glow that the headier highballs of TV drama often lack.

Wisdom: "Bob, are you there?" called Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky from the piano in his soundproof Hollywood studio. "Come here. Sit down. I want to show you something." Squinching like a mole into neat, penetrating closeups, Composer Stravinsky then proceeded to show a young protege, Conductor Robert Craft, as well as several million Sunday afternoon viewers on NBC, how musical ideas occur. "You have to touch the music," said Stravinsky, innocent eyes bugging and jowls aquiver, "not only to hear it--because touching it, we feel the vibration of the music."

A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky, filmed on the eve of the composer's 75th birthday, was an uninterrupted half hour of disarming intimacy and directness. Other conductors, he chuckled, get "furious" when he conducts his own works ("They consider it competition"), but "you earn more as a conductor" than as a composer. "Music," Stravinsky explained, "is an organization of tones--an act of the human mind." For him organization began at the age of eight. "I was playing a scale on the piano. I thought, if somebody invented the scale, I can change something in the scale and invent something else--and I invented."

The Revivalists: After scoring a success last week with The World of Nick Adams, a dramatization of five of Hemingway's early stories about a teen-age boy growing up in Michigan, CBS's The Seven Lively Arts this week firmly established itself as one of the season's brightest newcomers with The Revivalists, a hallelujah-breathing documentary film on militant evangelism. From the husky-voiced zeal of Billy Sunday to the polished fervor of Billy Graham, the camera caught arresting glimpses of believers throbbing with the joy of religion. A Negro named Cat-Iron Carradino croaked a hymn and plucked his guitar as he carried the message down Tin Can Alley in Natchez, Miss. The face of Negro Singer Mahalia Jackson seemed to take on a celestial glow as she belted her way through a hymn in her Chicago church. Narrator-Host John Crosby, looking better on film than live (TIME, Nov. 18), avoided any religious comment. His secular summation: "The history of evangelism suggests that Billy Graham's popularity will begin to wane in about two years. It also suggests that in about 40 years some other fervent proclaimer will come along and find a mass audience ready and waiting."

Telephone Time: As a host in his first commercial TV series, Educational TV's Shakespeare Scholar Frank Baxter has to present such combinations as Thomas Mitchell playing Socrates and Claudette Colbert portraying Mary Roberts Rinehart. In his latest drama from real life, I Get Along Without You Very Well, he managed more persuasive casting: Hoagy Carmichael and Walter Winchell playing themselves. The story was a treacly tale about a search for an anonymous lyricist, but Hoagy's sangfroid and Pommery piano made a nice counterpoint to Walter's Winchellisms ("Human interest always has a heart"), some of which were not even in the script. As an ABC publicist explained it: Columnist Winchell at 60 "has no trouble learning his lines, but he prefers to study their meanings and rephrase them in his own way."

Kraft Theater: Star vehicles are so named because they are custom-made to carry the star. Too often, however, the star winds up carrying the vehicle, and sometimes, as in the case of a comedy called The Big Heist, even such broad shoulders as Bert Lahr's cannot carry it as far as the corner saloon. Written with an eye on Damon Runyon and a finger in a dictionary of U.S. criminal argot, the play explored a quaint old vein of humor among thieves: Lahr, as a low man on the totem pole of crime, joined another aging juvenile delinquent (Fred Gwynne) to rob an armored car of $1,000,000 just to impress a lady (Mildred Natwick). Playing a sometime short-order cook whose sauces could give a hamburger that certain "jenny-say-kwah," Lahr mugged, pranced, bellowed ("Ngha, ngha, ngha-a-a-a-!"), did all that a master's timing could do for some jokes so long-fused they may explode on next week's show. By lavishing a lifetime of comic know-how on his role, Lahr salvaged a few minutes of fun from what may be the ultimate in ersatz--an hour of hothouse Runyon.

Frank Sinatra Show: "I've got it bad, and that ain't good," sang Frankie last week on the filmed half-hour show for which he has nicked ABC and Chesterfield some $4,500,000. He sure was right. Sinatra's ratings have tumbled steadily to put him below a run-of-the-mill crime series and a same-old-situation comedy that compete with him on the other networks. The electricity of Sinatra the performer has been short-circuited by his show's format and production. No filmed variety seems quite as canned as Sinatra's; it is shot without an audience and without any attempt to simulate a live show. The result recalls the half-hour musical shorts that Hollywood used to manufacture as filler for movie houses. One trade report says that Sinatra ground out eleven of his shows in 15 days. They look that way.

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