Review

Seven Lively Arts: "The blues to me," said hard-luck Singer Billie Holiday sipping a cup of coffee, "are like being very sad, very sick--and again, like going to church and being very happy. We've got to do right by the blues on TV, because the blues deserve the best." At air time, Billie sat on top of a bare stool and cuddled up to an old jazz-cult favorite, Fine and Mellow ("My man don't love me, he shakes me awful mean"), and did just dandy by the blues. And, for the balance of CBS's one-hour The Sound of Jazz, the art got what it has so long deserved: a TV showcase uncluttered by the fuss and furbelows that burden most musical telecasts. In the murky, smoke-choked studio, more than two dozen of the best jazz vocalists and sidemen worked through eight of the best jazz numbers with the kind of love, wonder, almost mystical absorption they usually summon up in the most free-wheeling jam sessions.

Soon after the show, however. Seven Lively Arts's producers heard a long, sad note from CBS. In spite of some artistic successes after a faulty start, Arts had wooed no sponsors in five weeks. So CBS decreed that on Feb. 16--after only ten of its projected 22 shows, and a loss of $1,250,000--Arts will close shop. Executive Producer John Houseman blamed the lack of sponsors partly on the critics, added: "But if you fail when you're doing something that's fun and good, it doesn't matter."

All-Star Golf: A golf tournament played exclusively for TV audiences is the sport world's freshest attempt to score with home viewers since bowling proved to be right up television's alley. Originated by Chicago's Peter DeMet, who is also the kingpin of TV bowling, each hour-long golf show (Sat. 4 p.m., ABC) boils down to an 18-hole match between two top pros, e.g., Gary Middlecoff, Sam Snead, Gene Sarazen, playing before six simultaneously grinding movie cameras. The winner of each match gets $2,000 (the loser, $1,000) and the right to keep playing as long as he wins. Players can win bonuses of $500 for an eagle, $10,000 for a hole in one. With tensely whispered commentary by Announcer Jim Britt. the games drum up genuine suspense, made somehow more tantalizing by the fact that the results are foreordained on film shot far in advance. But the producers have succumbed to only one request for advance screenings by a golf buff who could not bear the suspense. Dwight D. Eisenhower had seen all the shows before he left for Paris last week.

Suspicion: NBC's new series of hour-long melodramas, half on film and half live, usually seems deader than either, but it sat up and began to move last week with The Deadly Game, adapted by James Yaffe from a story by Friedrich Duerren-matt. A sales executive (Gary Merrill) stumbled out of a New England blizzard to find shelter in an old-fashioned mansion where four retired men in dinner jackets almost seemed to be waiting for him. They plied him with food and brandy, and he amiably agreed after dinner to join them in the parlor game that enabled them to practice once more their former professions as judge, prosecutor and defense attorney. Merrill would be the defendant. The crime? He could think of none that he had committed. But soon, between Prosecutor Joseph Wiseman's sharp questions and his own loose-lipped, boozy euphoria, Merrill found in growing confusion and fear that he was on trial for murder--and that his fourth host was the former state executioner. The crime: inducing a fatal heart attack in the boss whose job he coveted.

At once urbane and eerie, Deadly Game achieved some of the quality of a Lord Dunsany shocker, benefited from skilled construction as well as from Actor Merrill's supple playing at the head of a sure cast, including Boris Karloff and Harry Townes. Closing scene: Merrill's widow, no angel either, drops in unexpectedly, agrees to stay for dinner and perhaps a parlor game afterward to take her mind off her bereavement.

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