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Pocket-Size Dramatics. Televised plays are often more embarrassing than entertaining. NBC's Kraft Theater and Theatre Guild are the best; the directors, after a few cluttered mishaps, have wisely stopped trying to paint extravaganzas on their Lilliputian canvas. The intimate kind of show they settled for hardly rivals the razzle-dazzle-of Hollywood, but it fits neatly between the living-room sofa and the book case. One recent success: Great Catherine, with Gertrude Lawrence, who back in 1938 appeared in the first televersion of a Broadway play (Susan and God). CBS, screening digests of current Broadway hits, made a cramped marionette show out of Mister Roberts, but last week's television of The Play's the Thing was tailored to size.
News telecasts rarely get off the ground: an announcer reads from a script, with downswept eyes, pointing occasionally to a map, a cartoon or a still photograph. A few (notably the NBC Camel-Fox Movietone News and Du Mont's Tele-News) offer first-rate, up-to-the-minute newsreels. But mostly spot news pickups are only a lick & a promise. Exception: such foreseeable events as political rallies where the cameras, being set in place, catch unscheduled incidents. Television looks forward to the summer's forthcoming conventions, which will be carried by 18 stations (LIFE will cover with NBC), to do for their industry what the 1924 conventions did for radio.
The Toscanini telecasts, with their remarkable, moving close-ups of the maestro and the orchestra, were a television milestone (TIME, March 29). But pictures of jazz bands tootling are as dull on television as they are on a movie screen. Crooners, in particular, are finding the telecamera's unwinking stare an embarrassing experience. (Notable exception: NBC's pretty Singer Kyle MacDonnell, an unknown to radio listeners, but already becoming television's No. 1 pin-up girl.)
What else does television offer? Mostly a routine stew of quiz shows, man-in-the-street interviews, cooking lessons galore, charades, fashion shows, vaudeville turns, illustrated weather forecasts, and pickups of radio broadcasts (beginning June 1 We the People will be seen as well as heard). And then there are films, the wilted coleslaw on television's bill of fare. The ancient cabbages that are rolled across the telescreen every night are Hollywood's curse on the upstart industry. Televiewers, sick of hoary Hoot Gibson oaters and antique spook comedies, wonder when, if ever, they will see fresh, first-class Hollywood films.
It won't be soon (though WPIX and Chicago's WGN have arranged to televise some less ancient English pictures). One stumbling block is Hollywood's fear that television will kill its theater market; another is that release rights of recent films are wrapped up in expensive red tape. More important is the fact that television's purse is no match for its appetite. The top price tag for a radio program (around $25,000 a week) would not pay for two, minutes of a big Hollywood movie, and the entertainment budget of the entire television industry is not as much as the soap companies alone spend on radio.*