Review

Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show: Lucy and Desi, who could do nothing wrong for six years of / Love Lucy, did very little right last week in Lucy Takes a Cruise, the first of their new hour-long "musical variety" shows. Because Desi felt his filmed show was "just too funny to cut," Lucy cruised to Havana with Guest Stars Ann Sothern and Rudy Vallee through 75 minutes of bumbling sight gags and strangulated cliches, e.g., a loveless Lucy's groan, "They weren't kidding when they said this ship was on its maiden voyage." Fortunately, saucer-eyed Lucille took her lumps with undiminished zest and even worked her putty face through one funny bit in which she and Desi, meeting for the first time in a Havana night club, swapped pitter-pats in a love duet on the bongo drums. The messages between them grew more frantic, and after beating out an abandoned rhythmic burst, Lucy shrieked in astonished self-admonition: "What am I saying!"

Playhouse 90: Farley Granger appears to try twice as hard as most young actors, but the end product is often not good enough by half. Last week The Clouded Image doubled the odds by casting him as a pair of English twins named Peter and Gerald. Peter inherited the family estate because Gerald, his elder by half an hour, had disappeared at the age of 13 and was declared legally dead. Suddenly Granger as Peter was confronted by Granger as Gerald. But was Gerald genuine? Peter thought not, and for good reason: he had killed little Gerald by shoving him off a cliff. Gerald turned out to be a contrite fake, schooled in his masquerade by a conniving uncle (Vincent Price) with an eye on a hunk of the estate. Peter ended up dead at the bottom of his favorite cliff, and Gerald walked off with the heart of Peter's sister, whose female instincts had flagged her long ago that here was no brother. Through all this, Old Pros Judith Anderson and John Williams could do little but stand by helplessly as the script licked two Grangers singlehanded.

High Adventure: Lowell ("Hello Everybody") Thomas, 65, has finally found a spot on the globe where nobody ever heard of Lowell Thomas: the "uncontrolled territory" of New Guinea. In fact, the local headhunters had never even heard of TV, and when Lowell ran off the "rushes" for some native chiefs, they were "utterly bored." This week Thomas put U.S. viewers to the test with the first of seven new color travelogues on CBS. Gleeful headhunters waded shoulder-high in scummy New Guinea swamps to catch crocodiles with their bare hands; the barebreasted "debutantes of Kambaramba" skimmed along opal waters in narrow canoes at breathtaking speeds, and Headline-Hunter Thomas appeared every few feet to remind viewers of the "increasing perils." There were hackle-raising scenes of wizened, bedizened village elders carving tribal designs into the backs of young boys in manhood initiation rites, and, water-borne again, Lowell waving "Hi, there" at "wary and suspicious" natives. "We push on, and the navigation grows more dangerous," at last to reach the May River territory--scene of recent festivities where "the hosts ate the guests, 32 of them, keeping their heads for trophies." Thus the high pasha of Pawling shuttled between the exotic and the exasperating, displaying characteristic glimpses of the old world as it revolves around Lowell Thomas.

Studio One: Less a play than a mood piece, The Bend in the Road nonetheless offered some good acting and a grown-up theme: how an elderly minister and his wife adjust to the prospect of sitting out the rest of their lives. Onetime Glamour Boy Franchot Tone, 51, donned whiskers and did his husky-voiced best to play a spry octogenarian fighting the years. Cathleen Nesbitt was fine as his gentle wife. But Playwright John Vlahos never crystallized in a dramatic moment just why the minister surrendered to a tranquil life and moved off to a home for the aged where his friends "sit like potted plants." As a result, Vlahos did not lay the groundwork that could have built power into a touching last scene in which Tone, finally accepting the fate his years have brought, sang a hymn to God in an empty church.

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