Coast to Coast

NBC's chief idea man, President Sylvester L. ("Pat") Weaver, with his customary leaning to hyperbole, last month promised that he would wrap up the world and deliver it in a super-spectacular package to U.S. televiewers (TIME, June 13). Last week he delivered. The package was not quite as spectacular as promised, but Wide, Wide World, seen on NBC-TV's Producer's Showcase, was nonetheless a brilliant demonstration of how far and fast TV can travel. It was easily the most rewarding show of the week.

As guide to Wide, Wide World, Dave Garroway was pleasantly relaxed as he led viewers on "a summer's night's entertainment." But along with his deceptive casualness came a swift succession of effectively planned pictures and sound. Operating live in the wide, wide world, the camera focused on Manhattan's skyscrapers at dusk and on Times Square as New Yorkers started heading theaterwards. Then, with grandiose ease, it swept by stages across the American continent and its time zones. It hopped to Chicago, where diners looked out at Lake Michigan. It came down to an Iowa farm, where the cows were just getting in from pasture. It moved on to Denver, where office workers were homeward bound, jumped to Salt Lake City on the other side of the Rockies and on to the Pacific, swelling with awesome beauty in the setting sun. This cross-continental panorama of a nation, simultaneously caught at work and play within the same bracket of time, had the impact and immediacy of a kind of electronic miracle that allows people to see what once could only be grasped by the imagination.

The coast-to-coast trip took only about four minutes; the rest of the hour-and-a-half show never strayed too far from the routine (with one exception), although it continued to jump from East to West Coast and up to Canada for a scene from Julius Caesar at the Stratford Festival. The exception was Cantinflas, the famed Mexican comic, fighting a small (700-lb.) bull in a Tijuana bullring. Cantinflas came out wearing a crushed, narrow-brimmed fedora and pants that hovered uncertainly halfway down his hips. The bull took one look at him and seemed frankly baffled. The band struck up a rumba, and Cantinflas, stomping his feet to the rhythm, moved in with his cape. For a while the bull seemed to paw the ground in time to the music, too. Then, as the music changed to a tango, Cantinflas glided in and made a series of passes without ever losing a step or even treading on the bull's feet. Finally Cantinflas pulled the bull's tail and planted a symbolic death sword in his neck. The arena crowd roared at the burlesque of "the noble sport." There was no death in the afternoon, but there were plenty of laughs.

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