The Week in Review

The forecast for good TV entertainment was largely in the stars. TV's pitchmen offered Julie Harris, Cyril Ritchard, Walter Slezak, Lee Tracy, Hume Cronyn, Bette Davis and Peter Lorre. Unhappily, the stars were not always bright enough to twinkle through the cloudy scripts.

The week's best prospect was Ferenc Molnar's The Good Fairy, produced by Maurice Evans on Hallmark Hall of Fame (Sun. 4 p.m., NBC). For a while it looked as if three expert players could bring off the tender, sophisticated, 25-year-old Hungarian fantasy about a "little glowworm" usherette (Julie Harris) who wants to be a good fairy to a highly moral but impoverished lawyer (Walter Slezak), is pursued by an immensely wealthy but engagingly unethical Lothario (Cyril Ritchard), and winds up in the arms of her own true love. But in a quarter of a century, The Good Fairy has aged, and not even saucy playing could conceal the fact that the goulash has lost its paprika and the champagne that accompanies it has gone flat.

Expensive Sabotage? Whatever hopes anyone might have had about Bette Davis on television film were headed for a crackup when she appeared in Crack-Up on the 20th Century-Fox Hour (Wed. 10 p.m., CBS). For two acts of a dreary version of a 1952 film by Writer Nunnally Johnson, Bette did not even appear, as the dialogue driveled on between drama ("We belong together; I know we do") and comedy ("It's raining cats and dogs; I just stepped in a poodle"). When she finally did appear as a bedridden sage spouting inspirational cliches, she was as stiff and formal as Queen Victoria issuing a proclamation. It all seemed like an expensive piece of sabotage in which 20th Century-Fox was trying to convince viewers to stay away from TV.

TV took a beating of another sort on the Kraft Theater (Wed. 9 p.m., NBC), when Lee Tracy drew a sharply defined portrait of a tough, successful TV star in David Karp's Good Old Charley Faye. The principal characterization was well done in the writing as well as in the acting, and there were some nice, nostalgic throwbacks to the vaudeville of the '20s as old jokes were recalled during a soft-shoe routine ("You take a shower this morning?" "Why? Is one missing?" And: "Care to join me in a cup of coffee?" "Is there room for both of us?"). But the play had little to say, and fuzzed it badly at the implausible climax.

Amiable Idiots. In The Fifth Wheel, Climax (Thurs. 8:30 p.m., CBS) seemed to have an engaging little item. It was made up of a couple of crooks, a couple of priests, the Never Worry Finance Co., a magenta automobile that one of the priests calls Rosey, and $35,000 in cash, robbed from a bank, that the crooks have hidden in Rosey's spare tire. Unfortunately, neither the author, the director nor the actors seemed to realize that the strength of farce rests on credibility and surprise. The incidents that were not predictable were unbelievable, and both crooks and priests were written as amiable idiots. Hume Cronyn as one of the priests and Peter Lorre as one of the crooks did not help matters.

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