Review

NBC-TV's Outlook, narrated by Commentator Chet Huntley, turned national attention this week on a shocking case of juvenile crime and punishment. The crime: the wanton beating to death of a 17-year-old Negro youth by a pack of 15 Chicago youths, aged 15 to 20, who capriciously set out one night last month to "get ourselves a nigger." The punishment demanded by State's Attorney Ben Adamowski of Illinois' Cook County: death in the electric chair for all 15. Soberly and quietly, Prosecutor Adamowski told Outlook: "I shudder as a father, but I've got to treat with criminals as we find them, and impose a man's punishment for a man's crime." How deep-seated is the disease that could warrant such drastic treatment? Outlook suggested an answer by interviewing an 18-year-old in jail for burglary, a member of one of the wolf packs of as many as 100 members that prey on Chicagoans and on each other with guns, crowbars, chains and knives. Why do they do it? For kicks. Why did he join? "I had to." And if he had not joined? "They'd call me chicken. And afterwards, every time they saw me they'd beat the hell out of me."

The man was a delightful fraud. With a knowing leer, he flounced around the set, his long legs swathed in black skirts, his voice vibrating with falsetto as he spoke a line straight out of the Roquefort cave of comedy. "I'm Charley's aunt," announced Comedian Art Carney on CBS' Playhouse 90. "You know, from Brazil, where the nuts come from." For an hour and a half Comedian Carney masqueraded masterfully as the chaperon for his friends' lady callers at Oxford, won the heart of prissy Mr. Spettigue. When the romping was over, Carney had proved again that he is one of television's most versatile performers. Carney learned his trade on the nightclub and vaudeville circuits, has been an artful straightman for a flock of name comedians, including Fred Allen and Bea Lillie, finally hit the top as the stooge for the loud-mouthed clownings of Jackie Gleason. Wisely, Carney did not turn Charley's Aunt into a personal vehicle, stayed within the framework of the show even when drinking a glass of ale with his wig drunkenly cocked over one eye, and concocting a pot of tea by tossing in every ingredient within reach--tea, lemon, milk and sugar. "This seems to be turning into fudge," Carney mused, and his haughty grandeur gave a fresh sheen to Brandon Thomas' aged (1892) farce.

The camera caught the stare of a bored little girl caught up in a group of gesticulating farmers, flickered over the strained, sweat-lined faces of steelworkers stoking their furnaces, and watched while a painfully earnest schoolgirl in a Warsaw classroom rattled off a quaintly colorful description of the U.S. Revolutionary War. Excerpt: "So the farmers rose up. At the head of the fighters stood a farmer, George Washington. And the distinguished Thomas Jefferson was there too. The great Polish fighters, Kosciusko and Pulaski, also took part in the fight. In 1776 the uprisers were victorious. The Congress of the U.S. adopted the Constitution, and the President of the U.S. was the former leader of the fight for freedom, George Washington." By such deft vignettes, CBS's See It Now presented "Poland, 1957," an engrossing, hour-long documentary on the Communist satellite since it gained a limited amount of freedom from Russia last year. Occasionally, the brisk pace was slowed to a walk, as when Poland's brooding, egg-bald Premier Jozef Cyrankiewicz deadpanned noncommittal answers to Correspondent Daniel Schorr's questions. But for the most part the pictures, the reporting, and the narration by Edward R. Murrow succeeded in projecting their intended impression of "a nation on a tightrope," still unsure about its new status. "The typical Polish gesture," summed up Reporter Schorr, "is a shrug."

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