Show Business: The Badge of Courage

NBC saved the fall’s best new television series until after the election. Profiles in Courage, premiered last week and based on President Kennedy’s book, proves to be a bracing antidote to the plethora of two-dimensional teledramas in which tinsel laurels automatically crown the good guy. Adult in theme, effectively written and excellently acted, the series will for 26 weeks focus on characters from American history, many obscure but united by a common bond—their willingness to risk and if necessary sacrifice their careers for their ideals. Happily scheduled for early Sunday evening, a prime kiddy viewing hour, it also packs a grown-up message, articulated by Kennedy himself in a 1957 recording of the conclusion of his book: “The stories of past courage can define that ingredient—they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.”

Ruined Chances. Disconcertingly, for those who have read the book, the series started with two figures, one of whom was given only two paragraphs by Kennedy, the other mentioned not at all. Reason is that Producer Robert Saudek, who has been responsible for much of the best in television, from Omnibus to the New York Philharmonic, needed fourteen more profiles than President Kennedy had chronicled. But Kennedy himself approved the additional choices.

The series opened with Oscar W. Underwood, the Alabama Senator who could have stayed in the running for nomination in the 1924 Democratic Convention but chose to push for a plank condemning the Ku Klux Klan, thus ruining his chances and subsequently losing his seat in the Senate and his whole political career.

Hot Threats. Producer Saudek has hired good actors. Sidney Blackmer, who played the defense attorney in A Case of Libel, was an effective Underwood, and Victor Jory was full of smoke and chalk, manning the blackboards as Underwood’s campaign manager. But best of all, the Underwood program gave a beaded-forehead impression of oldtime political conventions, with 103 ballots and whispered threats in hot hotel rooms. Ironically, it was good television about the good old days before political conventions were ruined by television.

This week the show profiled one of Saudek’s added starters, Mary S. McDowell, a Brooklyn schoolteacher who lost her job in 1917 because she refused to sign a loyalty oath or do Red Cross work. She was a Quaker and a pacifist and she knew what she believed, even though her hope for marriage had ended when a boy who loved her died in France. Of the two plays so far, this one was somewhat the better, largely because Rosemary Harris was so gently formidable as an embodiment of unbreakable principle.