Leave It to Beaver: The season's most amiable new comedy series and most agreeable surprise is deftly dedicated to the proposition that boys will be boys. Its hero is an eight-year-old boy named Beaver ("Is that your given name?" asks a puzzled teacher. "Yes, my brother give it to me"). Beaver (Jerry Mathers) and brother Wally (Tony Dow). 12, and their attractive parents (Hugh Beaumont and Barbara Billingsley) add up to a pleasant, occasionally touching image of togetherness in sunny suburbia. But the boys are also lineal descendents of Tom Sawyer. Penrod and Skippy in a tradition of carrying a dead goldfish in pants pocket, enduring the first black eye and the first crush on teacher, selling water on the hottest day of the year and seeing through the emperor's clothes with such remarks as "A picnic is when you go out in the country and eat food off the dirt." Writer-Producers Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, who are fathers as well as savvy old hands at scripting radio-TV shows, e.g., Amos 'n' Andy, manage to combine low-pressure comedy with universal family situations and such keenly observed detail as a wife's nettling way of pulling electric plugs by the cord, or how a small boy can reduce a kitchen to shambles in the simple act of trying to get a drink of water, or how two boys gravely fake taking a bath by wetting washrags and towels and tossing a handful of "turtle dirt" into the draining bathwater because "it leaves a good ring."
See It Now: Marian Anderson, a stout and stately 55, took a relaxed look at this week's film digest of her 40,000-mile triumphal sing-swing through Asia earlier this year and said: "It has the look of having been made with love." So it had. The Lady from Philadelphia faithfully recorded the rich, heart-stirring artistry of the Negro woman who began as a Philadelphia choir singer; at the same time it illustrated how sharper than a diplomat's wile can be the sweet song of a woman of great talent and simple dignity. Contralto Anderson acknowledged an honorary degree from Seoul's Ewha Women's University with the emotion-charged Negro spiritual, He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, sang Home, Sweet Home with homesick U.S. 24th Infantry Division troops on Korea's front lines, explained Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation to schoolchildren in Bangkok, told schoolboys in Malaya: "I might bring to your attention that hate and fear are two things with which babies are not born." There were many, but not too many, songs—Schubert's Serenade in Manila, Mon Coeur S'ouvre a Ta Voix from Samson and Delilah in Bombay, Schubert's Ave Maria in many places—and some long, too long, interviews in between. She went to an old church in Viet Nam to sing Let My People Go, to a meditation temple in Rangoon to talk religion with a Buddhist scholar, to Gandhi's shrine in New Delhi to pray and deliver—a little shakily—Lead, Kindly Light. Only once, before Burma's Premier, did modest Marian Anderson show any sign of discomfort. Eulogized U Nu for the CBS cameras: "The beauty and charm of your mind are fully expressed in the pair of your dazzling eyes and your childlike lips."