Television: Review

General Motors. The automobile replaced the mare’s-nest on TV last week. To publicize its 50th anniversary, G.M. shucked out more than $1,000,000 and promised two hours of fine and lavish entertainment. What made the show different from the innumerable other big-money variety shows that have promised the same was that the promise was kept. In addition to lining up two dozen top performers and several hundred square yards of effective sets, G.M. also took pains to hire a producer with an idea, Jess (I Love Lucy) Oppenheimer, and a writer with ideas. Movie Scripter Helen (Lili, I’ll Cry Tomorrow] Deutsch. The two took their theme from a line in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” On that line Oppenheimer and Deutsch strung a necklace of artful sociological skits and musical numbers. It was a Cadillac-class variety show. Only a heedless sponsor will dare now to trot out another of those old-fashioned critters sway-backed with talent with no place to go.

The Innocent Years. With film that reached back almost to the cinema’s dawn of recorded time, NBC’s Project 20 last week conjured up “a time of incredible innocence and security”—the U.S., 1900-17. It was an era more innocent in retrospect than it seemed at the time; Producer Henry (Victory at Sea) Salomon glossed over its slums and sweatshops in favor of its Stanley Steamer and sheath skirt. Yet, with rare old film, some of it rephotographed from almost-forgotten paper versions in the Library of Congress, the show caught the bustling optimism and vitality, the men and manners, and such milestones as President McKinley’s funeral and the smoking ruins of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. It chronicled (at undue length) the rise of the automobile and, with delightful clips, the infancy of the movies and the prime of vaudeville. It illustrated such old tribal customs as the semaphoring of traders between the sidewalk and window sills on Manhattan’s curb exchange. Teddy Roosevelt wagged his finger at the voters as unsparingly as he wielded an ax against a tree. William Howard Taft, the first tenant to put a divot in the White House lawn, hefted his 340 Ibs. on the links. A white-maned Mark Twain, in the only surviving scrap of film taken of him, took tea with his daughters. The whole parade of quaintly jerky images from the past dog-trotted by to a deft commentary spoken by Alexander Scourby, and to Robert Russell Bennett’s eloquent orchestration of 23 vintage song hits.

Huck Finn. “Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time,” said Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, “but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing.” A body don’t know the truth of it without he’s seen what the U.S. Steel Hour borrowed out of the book about Huck and what they done to pay it back with their ”musical version.” They only took the part about how those two rapscallions, the Duke and the King, tried to smouch the Wilks girls’ inheritance, but they changed it around and put the wrong people in it so there warn’t nothing left that was any account. To see the shines that Basil Rathbone—Englishman, ain’t he?—and Jack Carson cut as the two humbugs, you’d ‘a’ thought they warn’t on a raft but on a showboat. When they warn’t cavorting and ajawing, they was singing the kind of songs that hadn’t been written yet by Rodgers and Hammerstein (except they was written for this show by a fellow named Frank Luther). Jimmy Boyd looked a sight better as Huck, even if he is 18 and Huck was only 13 or 14. Maybe that ain’t no matter, but it was enough to make a body powerful sick when they made Huck slushy romantical over Mary Jane Wilks (who was five years older ‘n Huck in the book), and had her batting her eyes and singing love songs at him. By jings, take it all around, you druther see the television people fouling their own nest than palming off such flapdoodle and hogwash in the name of the splendidest book an American ever wrote.