Moment of Silence

The acting, the writing, the direction, just about everything on CBS's Playhouse go last week gave eloquent testimony to television's real potential. Judgment at Nuremberg was a bitterly moving reminder of Nazi Germany's era of evil--so moving, in fact, that for once the commercials supplied some necessary moments of relief. But they were also the source of some of the most naive censorship ever to be inflicted on a show.

After the film clips of concentration camps with their crematoriums, Judgment built to its climax in a live scene in which an American judge (Claude Rains) faces the Nazi jurist (Paul Lukas) whom he has sentenced to life imprisonment. "How in the name of God," asks Rains, "can you ask me to understand the extermination of men, women and innocent children in ______?" For an odd moment the sound went off. Rains's lips moved, but no words came. The missing words: "gas ovens." The show's sponsor, who insisted on the fadeout in sound: the American Gas Association, which supplies some 95% of the gas used in U.S. kitchen ranges.

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