Hollywood TVmen are inclined to look askance at Director Albert McCleery when he says, with deep conviction: “Television is only for those who believe in it like a religion . . . It is the dream of mankind, the magic box that will bring man the world.” Unlike many other TV boosters, ex-Paratrooper McCleery backs up his big words with ambitious actions. On his Hall of Fame (Sun. 5 p.m., NBC-TV), he has staged shows ranging from the two-hour Maurice Evans Hamlet to an hour-long excerpt from Thomas Wolfe’s gargantuan, garrulous novel, Of Time and the River.
Finding a TV drama in Wolfe’s torrential prose was not easy. McCleery chose an episode dealing with the last days of a Southern patriarch and the effect of his death on relatives and friends. The story was told mostly in the screen-filling close-ups that have become a McCleery trademark. Actor Thomas Mitchell gave a memorable portrait of the old man “who, knowing that he had often lived badly, was now determined to die well.” The show was alive with crosscurrents of affection and hate, small tyranny and big-souled resignation, all set to the orchestration of Wolfe’s sonorous words. Says McCleery: “If we don’t do things like this, we’re not doing our job. You’ve got to let people know that occasionally they’re going to. hear beautiful words, beautifully spoken.”
Most other Hall of Fame shows have been biographical playlets with upbeat endings, perfectly tailored to the TV market. Director McCleery does these standard items cheerfully, because he has worked out a tacit agreement with his sponsor, Hallmark Cards: “If I do four or five popular hits, then they’ll let me do a serious show.” Among his other serious shows to date: the trial of Socrates and a rather flat version of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid (“It laid an egg, but in ten years my sponsors will be proud they were among the first to produce Moliere on TV.”) Next month McCleery again turns to Maurice Evans and Shakespeare with a two-hour production of Richard II.
McCleery worked for little theaters and university playhouses before he made a name for himself on TV’s experimental
Cameo Theater (TIME, June 26, 1950). He thinks his television job is more exacting than directing on the legitimate stage, and he sees little future for Broadway: “I get a bigger audience for my flops than Broadway ever thought of having for its biggest successes.”
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