Review

CBS's Playhouse 90 last week staged a remarkable drama of the real-life achievement of a remarkable woman. When she was only 21, Anne Sullivan of Boston went to Tuscumbia, Ala. to be coach and tutor to seven-year-old Helen Keller, who was both blind and deaf. Annie's first act was to thrust a doll into the hands of her pupil. "When I had played with it a little while," recalled Helen Keller years later, "Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word 'd-o-l-l.' I was at once interested in this finger play ... I did not know [for several weeks] that I was spelling a word or even that words existed." For almost 50 years Annie Sullivan lived in the shadow of the golden night of Helen Keller's world. She died in 1936, mourned as one who had given her own life completely to another.

To illuminate Annie's redoubtable spirit, The Miracle Worker, a play by William Gibson, focused only on the first few weeks of her life at the Kellers' home in 1887. Helen was not far from being a willful little animal because no way had been found to bring her into meaningful association with others. As Helen, eleven-year-old Patty McCormack brought to the play many of the tantrum qualities that won praise for her part in the hit play and movie, The Bad Seed. As superlatively played by Teresa Wright, Annie was a no-nonsense teacher who refused to turn the other cheek. She fulminated against her charge ("pigheaded little jackass"), even slapped her occasionally. Nor did she mince words with the too-solicitous Captain (Burl Ives) and Mrs. Keller (Katharine Bard): "Helen's worst handicap isn't blindness, it's your love and pity . . ." The story closed movingly on Annie's first real triumph with Helen. As water trickled from the garden pump over her fingers, Helen made her first association between a word--water--and a thing. Although Annie had repudiated love throughout the ordeal, in the end she wrote in Helen's hand: "I, love, you," and rarely in TV drama have those words seemed so meaningful.

Comedians traditionally harbor an urge to play Hamlet; in television, a newer tradition has it, they play him offscreen all the time. In Robert Alan Aurthur's Tale. of the Comet, Studio One offered a case history of the TV comic as a tragic hero--a lonely figure tortured by self-defeating uncertainty amid the debris of his fallen ratings. Tim Tully is a onetime top banana who trampled 19 writers in three seasons in his frenzy to stop slipping. As the play opens, he is on the eve of an attempted comeback that seems doomed by his panicky fear of failure. In a series of skillfully managed flashbacks, Tully tells where the skids led him. As the comic, MC Hal March of The $64,000 Question gave a fine performance. Unfortunately, Tully's salvation, i.e., the love of a good woman, is almost as glib as his wisecracks. But thanks to Author Aurthur's grip on the character, the problem and the jangling atmosphere, TV's own version of a tired old theatrical and movie staple--the backstage story--proves in this case to have freshness and bite.

TV's most intentionally monstrous show last week was Frankenstein, produced in color by NBC's ambitious, daily Matinee Theater. Boris Karloff, whose creation of the monster's role made his name a haunting household word, was not available--he was rehearsing as a Norman bishop for another NBC show, The Lark. But Producer Albert McCleery decided that when a fellow needs a fiend, he can hardly do better than'ex-Heavyweight Champion Primo Camera (6 ft. 6 in., 270 lbs.). Camera, 50, wore elevator shoes, a snowsuit, and an unhealthy complexion that ranged from green to mauve, depending on the receiver's color-knob. Out of a wealth of dramatic experience as a wrestler, he emitted horrible noises and (unlike the film version) even some dialogue. Sample: "Make another. A woman. My size. Everything the same so no one else will want her." While the monster eagerly began digging up bones to get the project under way. Scientist Frankenstein's bosom friend offered an objection sure to strike a chord in Matinee's audience of housewives: "Build another? You're insane. She might not even have him."

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