Novels into Plays

Two above-average novels made two far-above-average TV plays last week:

P: A. J. Cronin's The Citadel (ABC) was superbly acted by James Donald and Hugh Griffith, retelling the story of an English physician whose Hippocratical beginnings disappear in a hypocritical practice on London's fashionable Harley Street. If the play suffered from an excess of blood sugar, Dr. Cronin's professional authenticity more than compensated. No one could write Medic so well.

P: Edith Wharton's Ethan Frame was the Show of the Month (CBS), skillfully adapted and powerfully acted. With angular hulkiness, Sterling Hayden as Ethan, the Yankee farmer, all but invented a cubist style of acting. Caught in a nightmare marriage with a termagant hypochondriac (Clarice Blackburn), he falls in love with her winsome young cousin (Julie Harris). In the end, the lovers decide on suicide--downhill on a toboggan, crashing into a thick-trunked elm. Viewers who had not read Ethan Frome then got one of the most abrupt shocks ever delivered by television: Julie Harris, seen years later as a survivor of the wreck, her voice shrill, her disintegrated mind making her more shrewish than the wife ever was, and her unweathered face a makeup man's achievement of scarred disfiguration.

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