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Studio One: Psychiatric gimmicks have become such glib clichés on TV, as in most modern fiction, that writers are too often exposed with" their own craft ebbing. Last week The Deaf Heart performed the rare feat of tackling a psychiatric subject with freshness and a driving sense of drama that never marred its authenticity. Based on an actual case in Minneapolis, it was the story of a girl who went psychosomatically deaf in emotional flight from her role as the ears of a deaf father, mother and brother. It unfolded like a mystery story, beginning with the girl's arrival at a hospital psychiatric ward, developing as the staff ferreted out the causes of her malady, reaching a high pitch of suspense with an attempt to make her hear again through the ingenious use of a lie detector and the shock of an emotional confrontation. Under Sidney (Twelve Angry Men) Lumet's direction, the play combined compassion and extraordinary visual impact in scenes in which the mute father and mother flung their feelings into sign language—taught to the actors by a specialist—and the brother (well-played by Richard Shepard) vented his own anxieties with the laborious croak and articulating grimaces of a man who has never heard his own voice. In the girl's part, Piper Laurie showed again, as she did in an uneven Playhouse 90 show last season, that Hollywood has wasted a first-rate actress as a B-picture harem houri. The Deaf Heart belongs to the handful of TV dramas that deserve to be repeated. Beyond that it holds added promise: it is the first solo effort on commercial TV by Chicago-born Mayo Simon, 29. He is a welcome addition to the depleted company of talented television playwrights.
Cosmic Rays: For his third show in the Bell System's science series (Our Mr. Sun, Hemo the Magnificent), Producer-Director Frank Capra again trotted out entertainment as the handmaiden of education. Before a panel of Dostoevsky, Dickens and Poe, played by Bil Baird puppets, Dr. Research (Dr. Frank Baxter) and Actor Richard Carlson submitted their scientific candidate for a detective-story prize. Between fancy patter with the panel, the pair used film, animated cartoons and laboratory models to show how the sleuths of science discovered, clue by clue, what little is known about the cosmic rays that bombard the earth. The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays was an instructive hour, much less vulgar in its popularization than Hemo the Magnificent, but it could have done with less sugar-coating ("These science dicks will knock ya for a loop!"), even for the sweet tooth of the bubble-gum brigade.