Review

Hallmark Hall of Fame: In a faultless presentation of the modern crime classic Dial M for Murder, Actor Maurice Evans again showed the British capacity for making the gentle art of homicide good clean fun. Once again, in a role he played on Broadway for some 500 performances, Evans decided that he preferred his wife's money to his wife (Rosemary Harris), then saw his plans go agley in a monstrous inversion of his custom-built plot. Brilliantly adapted for TV by its playwright, Frederick Knott, Dial M was a marvel of mobility, leaped from pub to club to living room with movie-like ease, confirmed Producer-Director George Schaefer as a Hitchcockian master of the telltale closeup shot, and provided a triumphant finish for Hall of Fame's fifth year as a series of drama spectaculars.

Back in 1952 Hallmark was a series of half-hour plays of vaguely inspirational intent presided over by Sarah Churchill. Hallmark's Executive Producer Mildred Freed Alberg, then only a freelance TV scriptwriter, persuaded Actor Evans to try his famed Hamlet on TV, sat down and wrote an impressive two-hour adaptation of the play. She persuaded Hallmark Cards' canny President Joyce C. Hall to back her. In those days, two hours of Shakespeare was a heady gamble, but Evans' Hamlet was a whacking success, and Hallmark was credited with breaking TV's time barrier. Since then, Hall of Fame has put on some of TV's best dramatic shows, ranging from The Corn Is Green to Annie Get Your Gun and Twelfth Night, with such able actors as Mary

Martin, Julie Harris, Alfred Drake, Katharine Cornell, Charles Boyer, Ed Wynn. Mrs. Alberg's credo: "Other shows try to make popular things good. We try to make good things popular." They have. While many other dramatic shows (Studio One, Kraft Theater, Climax!) are rumored to have dismal prospects of autumn survival, Hall of Fame is already signed to produce its regular six-a-year slate of shows next year.

Studio One in Hollywood: Straight off an unpretentious cuff, The Desperate Age probed an oft-hacked situation, offered an unhackneyed dramatization. The problem: Does a 28-year-old girl (Barbara Bel Geddes) continue her hapless romance with a married office chum (Wendell Corey) and ruin her chances for a normal life, or does she destroy her present happiness for an acceptable future emptiness? "I'll never love anyone as much," she says. "Maybe you can learn to," pleads her mother (Aline MacMahon). Retorts her daughter: "Maybe I'll have to learn to. That's what you mean, isn't it?" By ending the play at that point, Director Herbert Hirschman avoided both facile moralism and easy sentimentalism. Though Actor Corey was as good in his moments of stress as he was bad in those of tenderness, main focus rested on Barbara Bel Geddes, who was so poignantly convincing as the tortured heroine that The Desperate Age came desperately close to art.

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