Review

In Washington's strife-spiced Senate caucus room last week, witnesses before the Senate Labor Rackets probers squirmed through the best soap opera that daytime TV could provide (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Although the major networks decided that one of the year's best running stones did not justify the heavy cost of carrying it, Manhattan's public-service-minded Du Mont Broadcasting Corp. was forking out $50,000 to cover the 5 1/2 hours of hearings daily for three weeks. The telecast unfolded first on Du Mont stations WTTG in Washington and WABD in New York, by week's end was being transmitted to three other cities.

Though no match for the 1951 crime investigations and the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, the labor hearings provided compelling, real-life drama in which well-scrubbed Bob Kennedy, the committee's chief counsel, emerged as TV's newest matinee idol. Older Brother Jack, member of the committee, made a winning supporting character. "Just Plain Bill" was Committee Boss John McClellan, who scowled formidably behind his plain-as-rain, legalistic rumblings. Before them paraded a motley collection of sullen ex-Communists, pudgy labor pariahs and Vitalis-smooth lawyers. Unlike Mobster Frank ("Hands") Costello, this year's gallery was relentlessly exposed to the viewing public under an unprecedented ruling by Senator McClellan denying "uncooperative" witnesses the privilege of remaining off camera.

Looking like something out of an old Warner Bros. gangster film, hulking Ted Rij, Racketeer Johnny Dio's ex-bodyguard, slurred through the Fifth more than 35 times: "Standin' on my Con'stutional right, I 'cline to answer on grounds o' 'crimination." Woebegone, egg-bald Sam Zakman provided a sharply etched picture of a disillusioned Communist and displaced labor-racket boy. Zakman also provided the rare commodity of humor in describing Union Organizer Benny ("The Bug") Ross: "There's a fellow who did everything wrong, but he organized better than all of them. He would just walk into a shop and pull the switch and say, 'O.K., everybody out. The place is on strike,' and they would all run out and sign up." There was an occasional virulent clash of words. New York's Senator Irving Ives blew up as a jug-eared Manhattan lawyer buzzed the ear of his gum-chewing client, tough Anthony Topazio. Said Ives: "It's high time he learned to talk."

If the show lacked the hippodrome theatrics of other-day TV hearings, it was a smoothly professional job, with Labor Reporter Clark Mollenhoff (Des Moines Register) and Du Mont's Matt Warren providing knowledgeable commentary. The show was marred only once: as Senator Kennedy illustrated shakedown techniques by playing tapped phone conversations involving extortion, Mollenhoff intruded with extraneous commentary.

This week's star: Johnny Dio.

Soulless Big Business, one of TV's favorite whipping boys, took another drubbing last week on Kraft TV Theater. In a playlet called Success, Actor Kent Smith limned a clean, incisive portrait of an able executive who proves, if nothing else, that the boss is not always right. With uncommon cunning, Executive Smith is squeezed out of the big corporative setup and eased into the humiliating role of a shoe salesman at I. Miller. In injured tones, his social-minded wife (played by Andy Hardy's old valentine, Ann Rutherford) reminds him: "We haven't even paid the caterer for the party we gave last year." But even after he reaches a point of possible return, Actor Smith renounces his venal boss's offer of his old job and success, measured out in such tired cliches as mere money, prestige and social standing. Instead, he clings nobly to his massive martini shaker and the vague notion that he would rather be "some place down the ladder where he can use his energies naturally--not be afraid all the time--be himself." Despite an occasionally listless script ("Oh dear, I can't stand the sight of blood"). Success got its savor from fine performances by Dependable Actress Eileen Heckart and TV's perennial Big-Business Boss Everett Sloane, stood in a class apart from the summer insipidity by managing to meet some of TV's toughest demands: a neatly organized plot, pitiless closeups and split-second scene switching from one effective set to another. But in the end it foundered on the debatable thesis that Success is mostly a matter of being able to tell the boss to go to hell.

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