Radio: The Week in Review

Televiewers had reason to expect some pretty good entertainment last week. On the bill was a sampling of Musicomedienne Gwen Verdon (TIME, June 13), one of the most accomplished hip-flippers in the song-and-dance business; a play by Eugene O’Neill; a dramatic role filled by Maureen Stapleton, one of Broadway’s more gifted emoters; a new version of Kitty Foyle, that nostalgic, bittersweet tale of the between-wars world; and a dramatization of a true adventure from the life of former French Premier Pierre Mendès-France. But after going through the TV meat grinder, none of these promising offerings was up to expectations.

Target: the Funny Bone. Hip-flipper Verdon appeared on NBC’s Colgate Variety Hour (Sun. 8 p.m., E.D.T.) in a salute to Songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, who wrote the music for the Broadway hits The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Since Gwen was scheduled to do the numbers she originated in Damn Yankees, there was every reason to believe that she would prove as irresistible on TV as on Broadway. But her specialty is spoofing sex by seductively tossing her hips in all directions, while singing her songs. Although she aims chiefly at the funny bone, TV censors do not approve of hips as shapely as Gwen’s being waved in any direction at all. Result: the camera was mostly focused on her from the waist up, keeping the emphasis off her talent.

The O’Neill play, The Straw, a youthful (1918), three-act romantic tragedy, was presented on NBC’s Kraft Theater (Wed. 9 p.m., E.D.T.). It would have been difficult to pick an O’Neill drama that had a better chance of not coming off. It is the unhappy tale of a consumptive Irish girl, who falls in love with a writer at a sanitarium and wastes away when the writer is cured and leaves. The writer returns, and out of compassion gives her one straw of hope for life: the promise of his love. Although O’Neill’s youthful worst is pretty bad, by some miracle of bad taste, the changes made in his text for the TV version managed to make the play even worse. O’Neill’s final note stresses man’s indomitable hope in the face of hopelessness. The TV version concluded with a happy ending, sugar-coating O’Neill’s bitter pill.

Aim: a Mystery. Actress Maureen Stapleton also stumbled on the hazard of a bad play presented over NBC’s Philco Playhouse (Sun. 9:30 p.m., E.D.T.). Incident in July is the poor second best of Novelist-Playwright Calder Willingham, who adapted his own novel, End as a Man, a couple of seasons ago into an unexpected Broadway hit. Incident is about a married woman, incapable of having children, who pours her maternal affection on a 19-year-old boy, causes a painful scandal, finally realizes that she ought to adopt a child. The writing was aimless, the plot pointless, and Actress Stapleton had the ungrateful chore of playing a woman of monumental stupidity.

With Kitty Foyle, Author Christopher Morley hit a novelist’s jackpot: a bestseller and a Class A movie. It was that familiar, marketable love story of the 30s about a poor working girl (25% Irish) and a Philadelphia scion (seventh-generation Main Line). The well-paced narrative (girl meets boy, girl gets boy, boy does not marry girl) was not helped by the predictability of the incidents nor the faded charm of slick writing about young love. On TV, Kitty was just an old-fashioned tearjerker with not enough strength left to jerk the tears.

The Escape of Mendès-France, shown on CBS’s Climax (Thurs. 8:30 p.m., E.D.T.), was a dramatization of how the obscure Frenchman who was to become Premier escaped from his French fascist captors during the German occupation in 1940-41. As a true story, it is exciting; as fiction, it is a cliché. The hero is arrested, falsely accused and unjustly condemned to six years in prison, escapes by tying his bed sheets together and climbing down them. The climax of the show was ruined in a large part of the country by a transmission foul-up that blacked-out the escape scene. Louis Jourdan made a handsome Mendès-France, but never conveyed the impression that he had the brains to become Premier of France.