One Out of Three

From the sound of the listings and the fury of the drumbeating, last week was no time to leave the TV set. ABC was offering an updated version of the 1944 film mystery Laura; the adapter was no less than Truman Capote, and Princess Lee Bouvier Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy's sister, was in the title role. NBC, meanwhile, had ponied up an unprecedented $112,500 for TVs first preview of a Broadway-bound drama, William Hanley's Flesh and Blood, starring Kim Stanley, E. G. Marshall and Edmond O'Brien. Yet neither work played up to its billing.

Bouvier's performance was only slightly less animated than the portrait of herself that hung over the mantel. And Adapter Capote, who is now writing an original play for his friend Lee, apparently needs a change in muse as well as Duse; the melodramatic script was scarcely the sort of thing he does best. Hanley's Flesh and Blood is the saga of a construction worker's family with all the woes of Eugene O'Neill's Hartford clan but none of the dramatic impact. Even such a formidable cast could not sustain the numbing two-hour trickle of unspeakable secrets.

What saved the week was a BBC dramatization of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, carried by 35 U.S. public TV channels. Thanks in large part to authentic exteriors shot in India and an impeccable cast headed by Dame Sybil Thorndike, this was as sharp a TV drama as U.S. audiences have seen all season.

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