One Hit, Four Errors

Big TV drama let the women take over on all three networks last week, and the results were enough to make a girl cry.

With nuns all the rage this season, Playhouse 90's Four Women in Black put Helen Hayes through some listless paces as a saintly pioneer in Arizona, but she was largely overborne by Apaches, mesas of filmed cacti and a soporific script. On G.E. Theater's The Bitter Choice, Anne Baxter was hopelessly involved--and tearily terrible--as an Army nurse whose deliberate anger was supposed to scalpel through a G.I.'s shell of apathy. As Social Lioness Dolly Madison trying to make a Washington comeback, a bespectacled and bewigged Bette Davis had her moments on Ford Theater, but Bette's vehicle, Footnote on a Doll, was far too rickety for the big Potomac. And Kaiser Aluminum's musicomedy jape, A Man's Game, went a long way toward scotching the prevailing theory that baseball can be successfully dramatized. As a lady pitcher. Nanette Fabray tossed the ball as girls always do and gave a valiant imitation of a musicomedy actress behaving as if she were in a great show. She wasn't.

Of all TV's working women last week, only Kim (Bus Stop) Stanley, in Studio One's Traveling Lady, scored. For so formidable a talent, it was a limited victory because it slipped by the critics relatively unnoticed. The Horton Foote adaptation of his 1954 play, which made a star out of Kim, was pared down by some 40 minutes for TV but lost little of its tenuous, dreamlike quality. As a homely, stammering drudge who is trying to reclaim her no-account husband just out of jail, Actress Stanley gave a sunlit performance. Like a hand picking up broken glass, she limned her character with tentative little twitches, awkward hesitations and mute expectancy. For TV's dramatic ladies, the unhappy score at the end of their week was only one little-noticed hit and four glaring errors.

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