Review

At the outset of Hallmark Hall of Fame's production of There Shall Be No Night, Katharine Cornell posed grandly before the camera in an "eggplant-colored chiffon velvet hostess gown" by Valentina and said to Charles Boyer: "Say something thrilling, Karoly. Something profound." That was quite an order for even so formidable a talent as Boyer's, considering the staggering handicaps of the script. In his 90-minute TV adaptation of the Robert E. Sherwood play, Radio Writer Morton (The Eternal Light] Wishengrad shed little light on the character of the Nobel Prizewinning medical scientist who has a hard time realizing that "intelligence is impotent to cope with the brute of reality." The reality in this version of the oft-revised play was the revolt of fellow Hungarians. Until his final hour, the pacifist-minded doctor could see little purpose in getting involved, though it was violence to achieve freedom. As the hero's son, Bradford Dillman, 26, was tender and affecting, but in summing up his parents he also summed up what was wrong with the whole show: "They are wonderful people, but they are unreal and they don't really live in this country --in this time."

Hemo the Magnificent, presented by the Bell Telephone System on CBS, was a costly monument to the low opinion that some broadcasters hold of the U.S. viewer's intelligence. Written and directed by Frank Capra as the second in a special science series (the first: Our Mr. Sun), the film told the story of the blood and how it gets around. It was doubly condescending in assuming that 1) viewers must be approached at the grade-school level to woo their interest in science, and 2) the circulatory system is so intrinsically dull that it takes the act of Capra to improve on the Lord's handiwork.

The patronizing vulgarity with which Capra jazzed up the lesson threw a blight on scientific footage that, in itself, was as good as anything of its kind ever televised. Especially effective in color, these sequences showed a pounding human heart, the hearts of a turtle, a rabbit and a bird, and the passage of blood, a corpuscle at a time, through the microphoto-graphed capillaries of live animals. But as the price of admission, the audience had to face a tasteless jangle of gimmicks: a Superman-like "Hemo" to personify blood, dialect comedy, crude mechanical cartoon analogies of circulatory functions ("groceries and garbage"), and a screenful of Disney-like animals spouting slang. In a coy story-within-a-story device, a researcher (Dr. Frank Baxter) and a fiction writer (Richard Carlson) tried to make their material palatable to the cloddish cartoon animals. The total effect of Hemo was unhappily that of a choice filet mignon smothered with gobs of marshmallow sauce.

"Wait till you see Playhouse go" matronly Party Giver Perle Mesta was telling everybody in Hollywood last week. "You'll feel sorry for me." Perle was right, but for the wrong reasons. She had hoped to de-emphasize her reputation as a gay social lioness. Instead, in her first TV biography, The Hostess with the Mostes', Party Girl Perle was caught in a clichee-ridden gusher that coated with crude her life as oil and machine tools heiress, society matriarch, diplomatic envoy and social worker. Young Evelyn Rudie and veteran Shirley Booth wrestled hopelessly with Perle's hoked-up TV life: her eighth birthday party to which no one came ("I'll show them. When I grow up I'll give a party where the mostes' people in the whole world come!"); the social errors in Pittsburgh ("Escargots? I thought they were snails"); the Washington party at which the offstage "voice" of Harry Truman sounded like Tennessee Ernie Ford. At show's end Perle Mesta presided in person over the teavee, pouring on more whipped cream about her good works with foreign students ("This is the kind of hostess I like being best").

Hostess was the firstes' Playhouse go show since the program won a deserved and unprecedented six Emmy Awards. If its reputation had been based on a show like last week's, Playhouse go would not even have been invited to the party.

After ten years of breakfast-table chatter with some 15,000 headliners on TV and radio, Tex and Jinx McCrary have learned the ABCs of interviewing. In their latest inquisition, a five-a-week daytime TV show called Close-Up, they have overextended themselves, and the result is a sort of compost: a pinch of Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life and a watered-down heap of Mike Wallace's Night Beat (which McCrary says is "a carbon copy of one of my old shows"). Last week the McCrarys snagged a performer who had turned Wallace down cold: Negro Singer Eartha Kitt. Eartha talked charmingly about such things as doing "primitive dances" with James Dean, and recalled her recent visit with Nehru. Said Tex: "Nehru is a widower and twice your age; he's demanding, possessive, of another race. Would you marry him?" Eartha: "That's a very silly question. Of course I would if I was inclined to be in love with him. But one or the other of us would have to go into the background." Unabashed, Tex swung again: "Would you marry a paleface?" Victim Kitt, still taken aback, said: "Yes, if I loved him."

The five-week-old show, which is carried by 37 NBC stations, is often less notable for the answers it evokes than the questions it asks. A few examples from the McCrarys' interview with Actress Mary Martin: "Do you envy Marilyn Monroe? Do you dream in color? If you had married Winthrop Rockefeller, would you have just loafed? Do you get jealous of your husband's old girls?" Says Tex: "We try to hurt only people who are able to defend themselves."

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