Review

The Prince and the Pauper: For its one-night stand on the DuPont show, CBS's 90-minute version of Mark Twain's souffle of make-believe, abounded in virtues that spell "longrun" to Hollywood--a sumptuous production, an exciting, neatly organized story, topflight performances soundly directed. Producer David Susskind, searched seven weeks in the U.S. and abroad to find a pauper (Johnny Washbrook) to match Rex (The King and I) Thompson's prince, coddled his show through three weeks of rehearsal. Amid a staggering 19 sets, Director Daniel Petrie moved his cameras and 100 players with the fluidity of a movie. "We also put inordinate effort into the script," said Susskind, "on the outmoded theory that in the beginning was the word." Adapter Leslie Slote's words had dash and swagger, especially as wielded by Canadian Actor Christopher Plummer, the prince's droll derring-do-it-all.

Prince also had villainous intrigues, swashbuckling swordplay, brawls on bridges and effective vignettes of a dark, cruel 16th century England, e.g., a weepy woman waiting in a cell to hang for stealing a yard of yarn; a bandaged old man who lost his ears for criticizing the Lord Chancellor; and the prince's whipping boy, hardly bigger than the Great Seal used by the pauper to crack nuts in the palace. But the play's most memorable image was its gentlest: a lovely little girl (Patty Duke, 8) finding the tattered prince--by then the king--asleep in a haystack. The prince identified himself as "the king" and, while a tiny kitten pawed at her long tresses, she asked with disarming, grave eyes: "Oh, what king?"

"The King of England."

"Oh."

Pat Boone's Chevy Showroom: Some new 1958 cars got in the way on Singer Pat Boone's show, where Guest Bea Lillie was introduced as "the imitable." Bea showed plenty of mileage for an older model: she poked her thimble nose through big fluttering fans, slipped off the piano a time or two, tripped over her long chiffon scarf. With limp, well-scrubbed adoration, Pat said: "You sure deserve the reputation you have," to which worldly-wise Bea replied: "Thanks--I think." Before she got hopelessly boxed in a square dance, Comedienne Lillie, 59, and Singer Boone, 23, did a spritely spoof of country music called I Got Tears in My Ears from Lying on my Back in my Bed While I Cry Over You. But when Pat offered her a cup of coffee, Bea let out the awful truth about the rest of her host's show: "No thank you. Might keep me awake all through this."

Twentieth Century: Tersely titled FBI and scripted by bestselling Author Don (The FBI Story) Whitehead,* the latest edition of CBS's new documentary series bulged this week with mystery, mobsters and storied shots: closeups of Killer John Dillinger spreading his dimpled, farm-boy charm counterpoised with his hairy, half-covered corpse in the morgue; the sad-faced mourners at his funeral (where a photographer got slugged for being "disrespectful"); a Hollywood extortionist waiting on a street corner for money from Actress Betty Grable, getting caught by agents disguised as gardeners. There were absorbing glimpses of malefactors from George ("Machine-Gun") Kelly to Fritz Kuhn and his Nazi German-American Bund, as well as behind-the-scenes sleuthing heroes at work in the FBI's Quantico, Va. laboratories. From secret files came a sequence of rare excitement. Filmed by G-men through a transparent mirror in his office wall, it showed German Spy Frederick Joubert Duquesne clandestinely removing diagrams of the M-1 rifle from his sock.

Wisdom: What artistic differences put asunder 26 years ago TV joined last week when Dancers Ruth St. Denis, 80 and Ted Shawn, a flabby 66, did a conversational pas de deux for NBC's Wisdom. Though the long-married, long-separated ancients displayed some vigorous dancing form--"Miss Ruth" can still kick up a ripply Oriental routine--they were liveliest when kicking TV. Shawn on TV choreography: "The cameras are so nervous they're always coming up under the girls' skirts or having wind machines or closeups. The camera ought to stay in one spot and let the dancer have his day." Said silver-haired Ruth: "I'm green with envy at the space TV gives to baseball. Do you suppose we will ever grow up like the Athenians--where we really put art first and just entertainment things second?"

Budapest String Quartet: Almost as unlikely as Wyatt Earp at Carnegie Hall, but much more welcome, the famed chamber-music ensemble made its debut on TV last week in an hour's recital of pieces by such rare television tunesmiths as Beethoven. Debussy and Cesar Franck. Manhattan's WCBS and Metropolitan Educational Television Association deserved the hosannas they got for putting on a rare treat. They also fell into a pitfall of TV culture worship. It occurred to no one to point out that chamber music was returning to the living room, where it started, and to stage the presentation with informality befitting four musicians playing for their own enjoyment. Instead, in its grave, concert-hall atmosphere and the overearnest tone of introductions by Composer Norman Dello Joio, the TV men presented the music as if it were spinach--very good for you, but rather forbidding.

* Who last week resigned as Washington bureau chief of the New York Herald Tribune because of ill health and was replaced by Trib-man Robert J. (Eisenhower: The Inside Story) Donovan.

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