A STANDARD type among Hollywood movie makers has been the fairly sensitive producer whose yearning for a huge cultural audience is coupled with a knack for inflicting a price-tag sheen on every actor, wisecrack or furniture item in his “altruistic” films. Today, the rich thumb that belonged to Irving Thalberg and Sam Goldwyn has become a catastrophe in TV, where the self-elected thinker and artist (producer Robert Allen Aurthur or writer Budd Schulberg, always heard in Sunday supplements and on TV panels pleading for more truth and less claptrap) has been pasting play after play with a peculiar quicksilver schmaltz. Such “stamp-of-quality” creativity has been turning fall TV into chandelier art: Most of the specials and showcases are similar to the nouveau riche smartness that can be seen any day exiting clumsily from a mile-long Chrysler and then doing a parody of dignity and grace, dragging a mink stole toward the Four Seasons restaurant.
What has been turning up in more ambitious TV is the safe-playing conservative producer who is invariably haloed in public prints. Try as he may, and though he is always near the target, this quality-stamp artist turns out work notable for languor and over-padding that is usually acclaimed as “handsomely mounted” and belongs on the air Sunday evenings, when the audience is naturally overstuffed and half-asleep.
What’s he up to, this lofty artist? First, he is a great believer in proven art, being almost incapable of moving without a sure shot from fiction (Turn of the Screw), movies (The Fallen Idol) or theater (Robinson Jeffers’ luncheonette-talk version of Medea). Second, he has a knack for finding deep-dish name stars and cramming them into the one vehicle in which they are bound to lose their off-beat potential.
Next, he is a fall guy for dialogue that has a brassy message (“They wouldn’t sell a gun to a spick. I have to steal it”) or a sophisticated death-rattle that is out of line with either character or period (“The woodwork’s full of zombies” is the plaint of a Puerto Rican pug). Finally, this producer, obsessed with the need for plays that make a challenging statement, seems to infect his actors and directors with a destructive positivism that leads to moralizing ballads rather than credible drama.
None of the opening plays this fall had directing style so much as collisions, shotgun marriages of fate and death (in What Makes Sammy Run, a celebration for the hero’s latest movie feat is interrupted by an announcement that he has failed to attend his aunt’s funeral) that beat a bongo on the picture table. Adding to the sing-song was a jabbing dialogue track (fast cracks in which a character frequently set himself up to be knocked down as a symptom of the nation’s crassly commercial ailment) and a simplistic acting style that worked with one-note conviction, as though its script were a Congressional report on corruption in movies or boxing. In Body and Soul, Ben Gazzara’s overly gentle minority boxer had to contend with a Cassandra-like mother; a Puerto Rican friend whose goodness had the conviction of a soft, soggy handshake: a Negro ex-champ whose big punch-drunk scene at night in a training-camp ring (accompanied by that trite movie fixture, a distant train whistle) demotes Kirk Douglas as champ of space-devouring emotionalism.
Except for the Deputy Western series, which is directed by an alumnus (David Butler) of Bob Hope films, the new action items evidently learned to walk watching the latest false innocence from the Talent Associates Ltd. factory. Each Bonanza face is a battleground for goodness, gentleness and showbiz cunning. The plots of Riverboat are dedicated to overcoming as much congested immorality as swarms in a Hieronymus Bosch painting; rich framing bloats each installment, which boasts such production intricacies as Darren McGavin’s bravado laugh and a Debra Paget dance over bales, crates and stray deckhands that Cecil DeMille might have designed. Happily, at least two crime serials, including a sedate version of last year’s Desilu pilot for Untouchables, have been considerably improved by the flexible acting of Nehemiah Persoff.
An odd rivulet of extreme amateurism has started up, almost as a protest against the suave productions of mature artists. Some of these bowlegged productions—Steve Allen’s broadcasts from Hollywood, an ABC midnight comedy show, the first photographed play on a New York channel dedicated to immobility—have the uncorseted fascination of TV wrestling. Also, ABC’s Everything Goes Paar-ody offers miles of Dayton Allen comedy, which is almost bruisingly funny. On the whole, TV seems committed to the questionable ceiling and garment-district touch of a David Susskind, whose idea of artistic heaven is a big audience soaking up the sure-thing culture practiced by DeMille, Darryl Zanuck or Elia Kazan.
October 26, 1959