Television: Kudos & Choler

Kudos & Choler Oedipus the King has stood well the test of 2,400 years, of almost every spoken tongue, of a multitude of translators, interpreters and tamperers. When it appeared on TV last week, the test was strictly of TV. Was the narrow, circumscribed cathode world of 17 or 21 inches up to the big challenge of one of the most compelling and most perfect of plays? The answer, delivered lovingly by Omnibus, over ABC, was yes. In an uninterrupted hour and five minutes of clean-plucked verse and smoothly paced action, Producer Robert Saudek and Director Alan Schneider demonstrated that television can carry art into the living room and be at home there without touching forelock or shuffling in embarrassment. Drama Critic Walter Kerr condensed the Dudley Fitts-Robert Fitzgerald translation without wounding it. The cast was competent at worst, and particularly fortunate in having Robert Goodier as Creon. And as should be, the hero was Oedipus. Canada’s young (27) Christopher Plummer was a kingly king—handsome in bearing, condescending in modesty, impetuous in anger, regal even in his sudden descent to the living death decreed for the man who slew his father, lay with his mother and could no more than any other mortal “make the gods do more than the gods will.” Through TV, perhaps millions were able for the first time to see and hear the people of Thebes bid farewell to their fallen, blinded king with Sophocles’ final lament:

Let every man in mankind’s frailty, Consider his last day, and let none Presume on his good fortune until

he find

Life, at his death, a memory without pain.

Ed Sullivan faced a problem in planning last week’s show, but he made a decision worthy of Solomon. The problem: Trendex was to take its monthly rating, and that called for an appearance by TV’s tested rating tonic, Elvis (“The Pelvis”) Presley. Yet Presley’s pelvis-wagging in his last appearance on the Sullivan Show had raised a howl from many viewers. The solution: Sullivan cut Elvis in half; i.e., his cameras televised Presley exclusively above the belt, so that only the shrill of studio fans signaled the action below. Sullivan won a Trendex rating of 46.2, his highest yet. For Presley-haters there was little comfort but the wishful hope that by showing no pelvis, Sullivan had started a trend that would lead to showing no Elvis.

Original dramatic ideas come so rarely to TV that they deserve better treatment than The Ninth Day got from Playwrights Dorothy and Howard Baker last week on Playhouse 90. For more than half its length, the play was up to the idea. Seventeen years after a nuclear holocaust, the last hope of propagating the race lies in the-only two teen-agers of eight survivors on a California hilltop. After bickering through childhood like brother and sister, the boy (John Kerr) and the girl (surprisingly well played by Piper Laurie) are pressed, balking and shying, into marriage. The wedding preparations and the reluctant, ingenuous courtship are imaginatively scripted. Sample:

Woman: Is everything clear? Is there anything you don’t understand?

Girl: Babies.

Woman: But we’ve been all over that.

Girl: Oh, I know where they come from and how and all that, but what do they look like? I’ve never seen a baby.

But the Bakers’ play proves half-baked. Once they get their heroine pregnant, they shatter credulity by pulling and tugging to make the crisis of mankind’s survival conform to nice-nelly conventionality, sentimental clichés and the eternal TVerity of the upbeat ending.