Word: eyeful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like the 21-in. image on the television tube, TV news commentary lacks depth. The big eye can survey, but it runs into trouble when it tries to interpret or explain. Last week, in an unsponsored effort to supply TV news coverage with the rare dimension, the Columbia Broadcasting System introduced a news program designed to examine more than the profile of big events: Behind the News with Howard K. Smith...
...visual aids with his own commentary. But more time is not enough. Smith's first two programs (devoted to the U.S. visit of Russia's Anastas Mikoyan and the ascendancy of French President Charles de Gaulle) were not very deep. As usual, television's all-seeing eye dominated the show, and Smith and his associates, for all their worthwhile effort, added little depth to either subject. The screen was still 21 inches across; giving it a new dimension was still a major challenge...
...well concealed by the other: a good-will salesman, radiating charm, beaming his subtle pitch directly at the people, and possessing the built-in news value of a mysterious visitor from a mysterious land. The dilemma was: How to report on the fascinating, amiable salesman while keeping a clear eye on the suspicious nature of his wares...
...acting-a common fault in Hollywood's period pieces. Actor Boyer, for instance, falls somewhere between Paris and Hollywood, but wherever it is, it is not New Orleans. And he seems understandably embarrassed by many of his lines-"Death! Ha! Whan eet come, speet een eets eye." Actress Bloom intrudes a British note, and Actor Heston, as a sweet-talking, milk-sopping Old Hickory with a phony Tennessee accent, makes just about the silliest of the screen's counterfeits of the face on the $20 bill. And Actor Brynner does little more than bound about parapets-probably...
...through with accurate and telling thumbnail sketches of the crowd around F.D.R. There is Henry Wallace ("At a certain point, his mind seemed almost to break through a sonic barrier . . . into rhapsodic mysticism"), who could speculate whether the reverse side of the U.S. Great Seal, with its all-seeing eye. did not prefigure the Second Coming of the Messiah. There is erratic, hard-drinking General Hugh Johnson, who. when he was finally forced to resign from NRA, in his farewell speech to his staff tearfully quoted (in Italian) the lines sung by Madame Butterfly before she commits harakiri. Author Schlesinger...