Friend & Foe

While seeming to throttle stage & screen with one hand, television is generously offering help with the other. On Broadway last week, theatergoers and critics gave a modest approval to a TV import: Horton Foote's new play, The Trip to Bountiful, starring Lillian Gish (see THEATER). Last March millions of televiewers saw an hour-long version of the same play, with all but two of the same cast, on the Goodyear-Philco TV Playhouse. Robert Howard Lindsay's The Chess Game, seen in February on the Kraft TV Theater, is scheduled for a Broadway opening later this season.

Television has been even kinder to Hollywood, supplying moviemen with such hit films as Bing Crosby's Little Boy Lost and Jose Ferrer's Anything Can Happen (both originally shown on TV Playhouse), and Rosalind Russell's Never Wave at a Wac (from Schlitz Playhouse). Last week Hollywood Producer Harold Hecht and Actor Burt Lancaster bought the script of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, also seen on TV Playhouse.

With the networks putting on more dramatic shows than ever before, U.S. TV may soon be duplicating the success of British TV drama, which has already given four successful plays to the London stage: Anastasia, Dial "M" for Murder (also a Broadway hit), Morning Departure and The Happiest Days of Your Life.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.