Hour of Gloom

Studio One opened its sixth TV season last week by boldly offering an hour of utter despair. A grim, gruesome, humorless show, it was television at its best. The teleplay: George Orwell's bitter satire, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Mrs. Orwell released to Studio One only after assurances that there would be no tampering with her late husband's blueprint of the ultimate police state.

CBS-TV Producer Felix Jackson, faced with the difficult job of making the Orwellian future believable ("without putting on a space-cadet kind of show"), hired British Playwright William P. Templeton to do the adaptation. Jackson also decided, with Director Paul Nickell, that the shape of the superstate could be suggested, rather than spelled out, by lighting tricks and simple, abstract sets.

Templeton filled out Orwell's spare dialogue in Nineteen Eighty-Four and focused, for dramatic purposes, on the torment of Oceania's petty bureaucrat, Winston Smith, who helps make history toe the party line in the Ministry of Truth. Actor Eddie (Roman Holiday) Albert, who has often skillfully played Hollywood's average man, portrayed Smith's crimethinking (dangerous thoughts) and search for ownlife (individualism). His short-lived love affair with Julia, the rebellious Anti-Sex Leaguer (Norma Crane), was carried on against a background of omnipresent two-way telescreens and the horrible, bloated face of "Big Brother."

Studio One did not flinch at an unhappy ending. Smith groveled in a prison pit, was tortured into admitting that two and two make five, came screaming out of a chamber of hungry rats, and confirmed his fealty to Big Brother in an emotionless, post-brainwashing meeting with Julia. It was a production that could easily have gone embarrassingly grotesque at one false move, but maturity of view and painstaking execution (stagehands were fitted with felt shoe pads to keep out distracting noises) combined to make the first tele-version of Nineteen Eighty-Four a major TV achievement.

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