TELEVISION: Still Running

Sammy Click, the Horatio Alger of the dedicated heels, this week made his debut in television—a world in which he would have felt as much at home as he did in Hollywood. Literary case histories of ruthless ambition have greatly multiplied since Sammy first came running 20 years ago, but he still outpaces them all. Novelist Budd Schulberg himself trimmed his book down to a two-part, two-hour television show, and to judge from the first installment (the second is due Sunday, NBC, 8 p.m., E.D.T.), TV cannot dim the rage of Sammy’s mean-spirited race from Manhattan’s Lower East Side to Hollywood’s highest echelons.

Somehow it does not seem to matter in the early scenes that no makeup artist can change 33-year-old Larry (Flower Drum Song) Blyden into the angular, ferret-faced, 17-year-old copy boy he is in the novel’s opening chapters; Blyden’s lines still snarl with Sammy’s hungry, terrifying drive. Nor does it matter very much that the gutter gags had to be cleaned up, that the Jewish humor is sacrificed to the self-conscious contemporary convention that seldom allows so much as a smile with a racial or religious twist. Although the word is taboo, the poor exploited slob who ghosted Sammy’s screenplays is still a nebbish; every now and then, Blyden’s voice echoes with accurate Lower East Side accents.

Some of the lines sound merely pompous. (Sample: “What makes Sammy run? The answer to that is the answer to everything. Not just to you, to me, but to the country—maybe to the whole world.”) But Director Delbert Mann keeps the pace as brisk as Sammy’s own. As the heel-hero’s idealistic mentor, Al Manheim, John (Bachelor Father) Forsythe looks and sounds like the soft-hearted friend to man he was meant to be. Barbara Rush is Schulberg’s “Vassar smarty-pants” scriptwriter down to the last inflection; Dina Merrill plays the conniving heiress with icy charm. The measure of the production’s power is its faithfulness to Budd Schulberg’s “blueprint of a way of life that was paying dividends in America in the first half of the 20th century.”