The Week in Review

Televiewers are hardened both to superlatives and long commercials. But last week, in hailing the 1955 models of automobiles, the networks pulled out even more stops than usual. On CBS's Shower of Stars, Sponsor Chrysler gave its viewers almost a solid hour of commercial as it unveiled an endless succession of Plymouths, Dodges, DeSotos, Chryslers. This, an announcer assured the nation, "is the night all America has been waiting for!" A covey of actors, including Groucho Marx, Ed Wynn, Danny Thomas and Eddie Mayehoff, were asked to coo and croon over convertibles, station wagons and sedans. In between plugs there were occasional songs by Betty Grable, horn tootings by Harry James and jokes by Ed Wynn. Groucho had nothing noncommercial to do except hide in the back seat of a roadster--and he did that badly. To many viewers, after such a drumbeat of ecstatic praises, it seemed only fair that the door on one of the new cars didn't open.

Lincoln & Sex. Most of the other car manufacturers were content to take the amount of commercial time normally allowed them under the code of the National Association of Radio & Television Broadcasters (a maximum of seven minutes in a one-hour evening show). On NBC's Producers' Showcase, in addition to an excellent, if somewhat dated, production of State of the Union, Sponsor Ford devised a pair of inventive commercials. The first, featuring an actor and a model, managed a provocative, if somewhat cloying, combination of Lincoln and sex; the second used the rhythmic movements of 18 actors (as many as were employed in the cast of State of the Union) to create a mock political parade and rally that ended up as a plug for Ford cars. Adman Blake Johnson of Kenyon & Eckhardt reported that the commercials, which were colorcast, cost five times more than usual and were rehearsed for three days instead of the customary few hours. Pontiac commercials concentrate on good "portrait shots" of the car while an off-screen announcer raves about "this year's sensation that thrills the nation!" Oldsmobile has produced the most eye-catching commercial: a flood of white convertibles moving smoothly along a parkway and into a cloverleaf exit. Only 40 cars are used, but skillful camera work makes it seem like hundreds.

Arts in the Cabinet. Viewers were treated to a better-than-average week of pure entertainment. Jack Benny, playing the part of the New York Giants' Shortstop Alvin Dark, co-starred with Giant Manager Leo Durocher in a parody of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. But the mutiny (Benny takes over the management of the Giants during the World Series) was a good deal funnier than the court-martial. ABC's Disneyland scored another ten-strike with a show devoted to Donald Duck from his inception until his final glowering flowering. CBS's Ed Murrow had another good Person to Person program, with Lillian Gish arguing charmingly but ineptly for a Secretary of Fine Arts to be added to the President's Cabinet, and Robert Q. Lewis surprising few viewers by denying that he is a comedian. On Omnibus, Composer Leonard Bernstein analysed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and showed, with orchestral help, how Beethoven made repeated false starts and fruitless excursions in composing his masterpiece.

Even radio made news. Bing Crosby began a new show on CBS Radio that was noteworthy for the fact that he was without a sponsor for his first time on the air. In Philadelphia, Manager Murray Arnold of radio station WPEN was traitorously watching TV when he heard Singer Gordon MacRae suggest to Soprano Dorothy Kirsten that they do a duet as they used to in the old days of radio. "You remember radio," MacRae gratuitously reminded Kirsten. Outraged, Manager Arnold banned the playing of any MacRae records on his radio station.

The biggest radio ruckus was caused by ABC's Disk Jockey Martin Block who virtuously announced that he would no longer play Columbia Records' Mambo Italiano. Reason: he had been told that some Sicilian words in the lyrics, particularly the word for "cucumber" (spelled phonetically in the lyrics as "jadrool"), had a dirty meaning. Mitch Miller at Columbia Records promptly produced letters from an Italian-American priest and a professor of languages at New York University denying that the vernacular words used in the song "could possibly be construed as offensive to anyone." At week's end Block, still sticking by his ban, explained: "The lyrics are only wrong to people who know dirty, low-down slang. In high-class society, 'jadrool' might just mean knuckle-head."

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