TELEVISION: New Patterns

Four years ago, TV Playwright Rod Serling made his reputation with Patterns, a cliche-ridden but highly effective drama about a ruthless power struggle inside Big Business. Last week, as if to even things up, Playwright Serling took on Big Labor. The Rank and File (on CBS’s Playhouse 99) sprawled across two decades of picket lines and meeting halls, was less neatly patterned than Patterns, with its close-order action around the directors’ table. But, because exectuive suites have become a show-business commonplace, while the union local is still relatively fresh territory, The Rank and File carried far greater interest.

Serling’s hero-turned-villain is Bill Kilcoyne (played to the hilt by Old Pro Van Heflin), a rough-hewn factory worker whom circumstance elects as first president of his local. An idealist to begin with, he sells out for a mess of spoilage (a union vice-presidency) by making a deal with a union thug named Tony Russo. Before long, Kilcoyne lands in the deadly end-justifies-the-means trap, winds up condoning mutilation and murder, puts union funds into such investments as race tracks and silk ties. By the time a Senate committee gets at him, he is powerful, self-assured, and cockily forgetful of his past actions.

Although Author Serling has denied that he modeled his hero on Teamster

Boss Jimmy Hoffa, Director Frank Schaffner left little doubt about whom he had in mind. Among other coincidences, the chairman of the Senate committee is gruff and dry-throated (Arkansas’ Senator McClellan), the Senate’s counsel boyish and shock-haired (Robert Kennedy). The Rank and File had more than its share of walking, talking cliches, was clearly less concerned with presenting moving characters than with characterizing a movement. But if nothing else, it succeeded in dramatizing the breathtaking reversal of political fortunes that transformed, in one generation, yesterday’s picket-line victims into today’s labor masters.

The Rank and File marked another reversal: Playwright Serling’s departure from live TV drama. At 34 the author of more than 100 TV plays, he has been one of the most voluble defenders of the serious playwright’s place in TV. But disillusioned Writer Serling announced last week that next season his world belongs to the series, has signed on to write a weekly half-hour science-fiction show called The Twilight Zone.