Review of the Week

In spite of the approaching season of holiday cheer, television's week began like a vast coast-to-coast autopsy. March of Medicine performed a gory operation on a man's heart artery in front of the TV cameras. Medic, sounding less and less like a Dragnet-in-bandages and more and more like daytime soap opera, told a pathetic story about a young girl with breast cancer. Robert Montgomery presented a full hour of smilin' through muscular dystrophy and multiple sclerosis. But while he recuperated, the televiewer was able to find cheerier fare.

Drama, Comedy. In his first straight dramatic role, TV Comic Jackie Gleason gave a taut and convincing portrait of an unscrupulous politician on Studio One, in a play by Carey Wilbur called Short Cut. Gleason not only looked the part, with his suety face and alderman's stomach, but for most of the play he put aside the comic's tools of obviousness and loudness in order to make his character dramatic and believable.

This week's other dramatic standout was one of those ventures that seemed calculated never to come off. But it did. To blunt the sophisticated Philip Barry dialogue for living-room consumption, and to pick as heroine an actress so typed for guppylike roles as Dorothy McGuire, suggested in advance that it might be a bad idea to revive the 15-year-old Philadelphia Story for TV. But on CBS's Best of Broadway, Actress McGuire made an excellent Tracy Lord, tawny and yare, as the script said she should be. To help her through the comic but caustic dilemma of casting off a new fiance (Dick Foran) and remarrying the one and only (John Payne), she had an engaging cast.

Some of the week's most noteworthy events took place offstage and underwater. Colgate-Palmolive, sponsor of CBS's nighttime version of Strike It Rich, the show that trots misery right onto the stage and peddles soap with it, announced it was dropping the show at year's end. This good news for good taste was tempered by the fact that the same sponsor apparently plans to continue the NBC daytime version of Strike It Rich.

Phones, Flippers. Arthur Godfrey, having gotten into trouble during 1954 with humility, the Civil Aeronautics Board and the breeders of Weimaraner dogs, added followers of Senator Joseph McCarthy to his list. On the heels of McCarthy's break with the President, Godfrey commented on his show that "Dwight D. Eisenhower is a great President." The CBS switchboard was busy for a while with irate calls from McCarthyites announcing that they were down on both Godfrey and his sponsors.

Walt Disney, in the seventh of his one-hour Disneyland shows on ABC, produced a motion picture of a motion picture being made undersea. Cameramen, who stood and floated behind the cameramen who filmed Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea off Nassau and Jamaica, recorded an eye-catching documentary on the difficulties and hazards of making movies below the surface. At one point a huge, uninvited shark swam into the middle of a scene. Cameramen, directors and technicians, wearing light Aqua Lungs and flippers, could swim away, but actors weighted down by 225-lb. costumes could only gesticulate pathetically. The shark eventually got bored and swam away, but Disneymen manufactured a more dramatic finish to the shark's visit and spliced it into 20,000 Leagues.

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