Word: hoffmann
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...Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). Tales of Hoffmann with Richard Tucker...
Located some 14 miles north of West Palm Beach, Salhaven was named after U.I.U. President Sal B. Hoffmann, who has spent $2,500,000 of his union's welfare-fund profits to build a 634-acre community that will eventually cost $5,000,000, house 500 union members and their families in 240 air-conditioned, completely furnished cottages and ten apartment lodges. Since Salhaven's residents will live primarily on their union pensions and social-security checks, they will have to pay only $50 a month rent for a cottage with one bedroom, $12 more for each additional...
...Munich there was a butcher named Strauss who bought poultry from a breeder named Heinrich Himmler. Opposite the Strauss butchershop, at No. 50 Schellingstrasse, Heinrich Hoffmann owned a photographic shop; a frequent visitor was a pale man with a wispy mustache named Adolf Hitler, who wore a trench coat and nervously slapped his boots with a dog whip. A goggle-eyed witness of the spectacular rise of Hitler, Himmler & Co. was the butcher's stocky son, Franz Josef. Catching his son distributing Nazi propaganda one day, Butcher Strauss, a staunch Catholic, gave the boy a thrashing right there...
Richard Duprey, as the divinity student Lind who is dissuaded from following his deeply-felt mission in life, had all he could do to stumble through his lines. James Ruberti and Ralph Hoffmann, as the wholesaler Guldstad and law-clerk Stiver, made poor starts but improved greatly by their big scenes in the third act. Donald McAllister, who played Paster Strawman, has a serious diction problem. He must get rid of his awful accent, and can start by watching his vowels and sibilants...
Producer-director Ted Hoffmann's handling of the cameras was disappointing, compared with Ray Wilding-White's fine job last summer. We got only frontal views of portions of the chorus or rear views of Schmidt almost exclusively. Now this is precisely what we can see in any concert hall. What TV alone can do (and should have done) is to include plenty of side-view shots of the conductor, especially close-ups. Few things are more fascinating to watch than the face of a top-notch conductor at work...