Review

The Last Word: Groucho Marx collided with CBS's witty-genteel panel on how to use the English language--and the result suggested a custard pie hitting the electric fan at the faculty club. Speaking mostly in interruptions, Groucho hilariously showed how to use the language to bully, bluster and bewilder, spewed insults, non sequiturs, puns, and--when he turned to Panelist Harriet Van Home, pretty, blonde TV critic for New York City's World-Telegram and Sun--leers. In a calm moment, he gargled a bit from lolanthe. When Moderator Bergen Evans despaired of getting either silence or a straight answer from Expert Marx, and announced: "I'll go straight to Miss Van Home; I've already beaten her down," Groucho hoisted his eyebrows and cracked: "Who wouldn't? I'd like to go straight to Miss Van Home, too." At Critic John Mason Brown he shot: "John, you give us the learned and scholarly explanation--either that, or give us your own." The panel differed in its advice to a woman who wrote in about a semantic quibble with her husband, but Groucho cleared it up fast: "My suggestion is that she get rid of her husband." He dubbed Professor Evans "Bergie." After the guest expert, in the manner of his own show, kept asking whether letter writers were "married or single." Brown challenged him on his "obsession" with sex. Retorted Groucho: "It's not an obsession; it's a talent." As Evans bravely signed off by inviting viewers to "send us anything further to confuse us, if you can," Groucho had the last interruption: "Oh, I haven't done well enough?"

Sid Caesar Invites You: Reunited with Imogene Coca for the first time in 3 1/2 years, and ending his own seven-month layoff, a tense, thinner (by 26 lbs.) Caesar had an off night by the standards of the funniest man in television. Yet even drizzle is welcome in a drought. Into his new half-hour show on ABC, Caesar crammed two sketches: one, too long, cast him and Imogene as a pair of chronic not-marrieds who were flung at each other by well-meaning friends; the other, too short, was a spoof on the current rash of TV shows built around singers on stools. Taking Frank Sinatra as his chief butt, Caesar prattled: "The whole show is live except me. I'm on film. And now from my latest album, Songs to Make Money By, here's a swingin' tune, Love Is a Gasser." By coincidence, ABC's Sinatra was appearing against Caesar as a guest on NBC's Dinah Shore Show. Caesar drove home his needle by scoring a Trendex rating of 25.8 against Dinah's 14.5. "You can't tell much after one show," he said afterward, but it was plain at least that TV was the richer again for a pair of comic artists who go together like, well, like Caesar and Coca.

Playhouse 90: As The Gentleman from Seventh Avenue, fat, Austrian-born Actor Walter Slezak, 55, had reached "that dangerous age." A warm, voluble Jewish immigrant, he had made a success of his garment business, but his private life was caught in a rusty presser. To get French toast for breakfast, he had to "make out a requisition" the night before; his teenage daughter dispatched him to a movie because "we've got to turn out the lights now and neck." And in the sanctity of his own rooms was a frumpish wife (Sylvia Sidney) who read psychology books, plastered her face with cold cream, put her hair in "irons" and her head in a beauty-lift "hammock." For a long, gentle interlude, the gentleman turned to his sexy-voiced dress designer, Patricia Neal, who was having her own problems with Robert Alda, a rapacious playboy known as "the Jewish Errol Flynn." Over Pat's stingers, Walter grunted and groaned about the young generation, whose books are all titled Kiss Me Deadly, Kill Me Lovely or Love Me Dreadful, or lamented mating in the movies when the lovers "come together finally for a kiss, the mouths are open, on the big screen it's half a block long, you could see the tongues, like from a cow, this is not love any more, this is delicatessen!" In the end, of course, both Slezak and Neal went back to their old playmates, having come to know that "the main thing is a little understanding and a little humor." The play had a little of both, thanks to attractive performances and to authentic Seventh Avenue argot by Elick (The Fabulous Irishman) Moll.

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