Review

The Twentieth Century: To explore one crisis in U.S. education, CBS cameramen and reporters visited Bridgeport, Conn, and spent five weeks with the Class of '58 of Warren Harding High School. The frustrating question, not only at Harding but at most U.S. high schools: Why do two-thirds of the brightest graduates, with IQs at least equal to it, fail to go on to college? The answers were not new-lack of money or initiative, intense competition for a handful of college scholarships-but they were vividly personalized. By prolonged exposure to the camera crews, Harding's students and teachers were shorn of self-consciousness, caught with their real quandaries, hopes and disappointments showing.

Class also brought fresh impact to its sidelight on the plight of the teacher who is so underpaid that he must find an extra job. In a faculty bull session one teacher remarked to a colleague: "Somebody told me at one time you were pumping gas and one of your students came in and asked for a tankful. How did you feel about it?" The reply: "Well, that doesn't happen very often, but it does bother you. I mean, they want you to wash the windowshield and check the oil--things like that. They give you the full treatment--checking the tires!''

Studio One in Hollywood: As a chronic stutterer who masqueraded as a deaf mute to avoid speaking, Fledgling Actor James MacArthur, 20, turned The Tongues of Angels into one of the best hours of Studio One since the rating-rickety show deserted Manhattan for Hollywood last January. The adopted son of Actress Helen Hayes and the late Play-Mright Charles (The Front Page) MacArthur, young MacArthur caught the withdrawn dignity and explosive rage of a troubled teen-ager who was befriended and helped by a farm girl (Margaret O'Brien). His acting persevered over a plot that did wonders for the hero's stammer but never overcame its own. Though he won praise for his playing of The Young Stranger in the movies (TIME, Jan. 28, 1957)--which he played first on TV--Jim MacArthur's closest critic was "utterly amazed" at last week's performance. Glowed proud mother Helen Hayes (who squeezed in most of the show on a dressing-room TV set between her cues in Broadway's T ime Remembered): "It was extraordinary. I feel self-conscious talking about him, but I'm not ever biased about acting. There was no possible element of accident in this performance. It was an awful challenge, and he showed he is a real actor."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.