Word: susskind
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Television seldom has a big moment, but this week it had a great one. On tape since June, David Susskind's two-hour dramatization of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, starring Sir Laurence Olivier, was finally broadcast. The show more than lived up to its press-agentry as the most important "TV event of the fall...
...from fleeing, shocked when his child spits in his face, agonized while watching "all the hope of the world draining away" in an emptied bottle of wine, despairing as he cries out for a Judas to betray him, collapsing in lip-quivering terror in the face of death. Producer Susskind surrounded Olivier with a supporting cast almost incredible in its depth. George C. Scott was superb as the police lieutenant who destroys his victim with cold intelligence and sympathetic understanding rather than simple brutality. As the slatternly mother of the priest's child, Julie Harris avoided the stylized ingenuousness...
Curiously, The Power and the Glory was taped in a tremendous hurry, unusual even for television. Finishing the Broadway run of Becket last spring, Olivier told Susskind he would be available for only eight days before sailing home to England. That was a total of 192 hours, and the cast was on-camera for 130 of them. A strict believer in the authority of the director (in this case, Marc Daniels), Olivier did his job with quiet docility, making minor requests: he had his "brandy" changed from Coca-Cola to tea. But he soon became as exhausted as the fugitive...
With 40 sets, including tropical vegetation flown in from Florida, the show eventually cost $725,000. But Susskind was gambling on an experiment. The show was taped and simultaneously filmed with 35-mm. cameras, so that it can be sold as a feature motion picture outside the U.S. Susskind himself provided comic relief in the drive to meet the eight-day deadline. When he pontificated polysyllabically over the loudspeaker system, Olivier cracked: "He uses such big words I can't understand him." Once Susskind was accidentally bumped by a prop pickup truck bearing the words VIVA LA REVOLUCION. "Caramba...
This week, in what Susskind called his "first serious show" of the new season, sobriety returned to Open End in the person of Harry S. Truman. The proceedings were no more boring and a lot shorter (the program has been trimmed to two hours) than Susskind's long night session with Richard Nixon last year. Susskind approached the former President with what seemed abnormal relief. "I'm so grateful that you're here," he gushed. "You're 77 years old. You look marvelous. And I wonder-how do you explain your good health and your ebullience...