Television: Review

Green Pastures: With a deft Marc Connelly adaptation of his own 27-year-old The Green Pastures, a cast of talent and dignity headed by William Warfield as The Lawd, and superb singing, direction and color sets, NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame went into the lists against a tough one last week−CBS’s go-minute electronic botch of Mike Todd’s exercise in mass gaucherie at Madison Square Garden (see PEOPLE). Everything was on the side of Green Pastures−except the audience. The results, according to Trendex: Heaven, 12.5; Sodom and Gomorrah, 34.5.

Navy Log: “He was the skipper: Kennedy, John F.,” announced a voice on ABC’s Navy Log last week. On the screen flashed the story of PT 109, a re-enactment of the best known World War II exploits of the ambitious Democratic Senator from Massachusetts. A Japanese destroyer sliced Kennedy’s craft in two in the vicinity of the Solomon Islands one day in August 1943. Watertight bulkheads kept the wreckage afloat long enough for Skipper “Shafty” Kennedy, nicely played by Actor John Baer, to direct rescue operations and collect the remains of his crew. Soon all but one were languishing safely on a coral island. But Shafty was still at sea, towing in a panicky sailor who had been badly burned. “He’s a champion swimmer−Harvard team,” one crewman reassured the others. “Besides, it’s only three miles. He’ll make it.”

He did, but within seconds Shafty had redonned his life belt for another plunge. “I’m going to swim over to that next island and try to hail one of our patrols,” he said. From then until show’s end, day and night, Shafty swam and swam and swam; the camera caught him barechested, fighting currents, rolling almost unconscious in the swirl, negotiating dangerous reefs, coughing, stumbling through the underbrush. “Let me tell you,” says Crewman Maguire, “there’s a guy.” Soon some friendly natives were smuggling Shafty to safety and a rescue team. After a few more dips, the whole crew climbed aboard a U.S. PT boat, uncorked a “medicinal” bottle of hooch and sang Jesus Loves Me.

Hero Kennedy went to San Diego as a consultant for the filming of his saga, came back overwhelmed by the technical job but “slightly embarrassed” by the dialogue. Among those missing from the TV audience of PT 109: Senator Kennedy, who was in Jackson, Miss, making a campaign speech.

The Twentieth Century: Names make news, but do men shape history? For generations to come, while philosophers debate this question, historians will drape much of the story of the first half of the 20th century about the grand and portly frame of a name: Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill. The historians got a powerful exhibit for their case this week from a new and promising CBS television series dedicated to The Twentieth Century. Examining the events that make up the recent past, dominate the present and tinker with the near future, The Twentieth Century (Sundays at 6 p.m.) began its 26-week journey with a one-hour documentary on the life of 82-year-old Sir Winston Churchill that ranks among television’s greatest.

To start the story, the unmistakable voice soared like a chord out of the TV screen. In the end Narrator Walter Cronkite intoned: “This was the man . . . When will there be another like him?” The marrow in between was a combination of film clips, photographs and dialogue lovingly composed by Producer Burton Benjamin, Associate Producer Isaac Kleinerman and Writer John Davenport into a Concerto for Orchestra and One Man. Some rare scenes: a Soviet film of Lenin; an impatient Churchill pouncing up the gangplank of a World War II warship; a silently terrible shot of the British wreckage at Dunkirk; a boyish, 53-year-old General Dwight Eisenhower munching lunch on the floor of Franklin Roosevelt’s auto in North Africa. In the next 25 hour-and half-hour weekly installments the same technique and an array of writers will try to capture the times through film essays on specific subjects, e.g., the first rocket missiles, the FBI, Benito Mussolini, the Windsor love story, the Nürnberg trials. If only’ some of them equal the quality of the first, CBS’s Twentieth Century will be far ahead of the real one in that it can be pronounced a success.

Pinocchio: On TV’s big night of three spectaculars costing $1,325,000 (TIME, Oct. 14), NBC’s Pinocchio itself was worth the price of transmission. Collodi’s tale of the wooden doll who turns into a real boy is a moral fable; yet it is also a down-to-earth story of broad fun and cliffhanging climaxes, and it takes a sophisticated view of human foibles. NBC’s version was a rollicking production full of style and striking images, a bouncy score, and dances depicting the fluttery rhythms of liberated marionettes and the slow-motion gyrations of deep-sea fish. At the top of a first-rate cast, which included Walter Slezak, Martyn Green and Stubby Kaye, was 37-year-old Mickey Rooney, who somehow managed to keep ubiquitous Mickey Rooney out of the act and gave a remarkably apt performance as the wooden boy with the tent-peg nose.

Frank Sinatra: At first there were only the bony fingers on the screen snapping out the electric rhythms against a black backstop. Then the camera pulled back to pick up the little man with the zooty clothes, the sad, sunken face and the glandular voice that coiled around Lonesome Road (“Lord, I’m gettin’ mighty weary of this cotton pickin’ load”). With the assured grace of a precision instrument, Crooner Frank Sinatra was making a TV comeback (after a flop in 1952) with his own show and the fattest contract in show business. For 13 half-hour musicals, two one-hour spectaculars, 23 half-hour dramas, ABC and Chesterfield have also guaranteed Frankie complete jurisdiction over his material. Frankie’s material was narcotic. Using what the psychiatrists call “the melodic striptease,” he peeled yards of satin from Bewitched, I Get a Kick Out of You and The Lady Is a Tramp−smearing nostalgia and responding to each lyric with subtle emotion. It was Frankie’s guest crew (Kim Novak, Peggy Lee, Bob Hope) who somehow failed to return the charm and sincerity he oozed, though Hope was spasmodically funny: “The State Department is sending me to Asia to spread the American flu.” Frankie Boy’s most effective helpers appeared with him earlier in the week on the Edsel Show, a fluid, funny musical tour with Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Rosemary Clooney, which proved that in TV as anywhere else (see CINEMA) there is no substitute for style.

Patrice Munsel: When she first appeared on TV six years ago, agile Coloratura Munsel, 32, took one look at herself in the monitor and decided: “I televise like a plate of worms.” Last week Patrice came back with her own show looking more like a dish for the gods. The Metropolitan Opera’s pinup girl has always cut a lissome figure, and her voice fills with rills and lusty high Fs; away from the mustiness of the Met, on TV she is freer to indulge her self-confessed “innate ham” with quick changes and buoyant tunes. The first Met diva to have her own TV series, Patrice opened with wit, authority, bounce and ten costume changes. She gave plenty of evidence that she can handle a TV repertory that will probably extend all the way from Verdi to Vo-deo-do.