The nation's secret files may be successfully barred to Communists, and sometimes to just plain newsmen, but they are wide open to television writers. TVmen boast that they have their grubby fingers in the file cabinets of the Treasury Department (Treasury Men in Action), the Bureau of the Chief Inspector, Post Office Department (The Mail Story), the Los Angeles Police Department (Dragnet), the FBI (I Led Three Lives), the National Legal Aid Association (Justice). the Los Angeles County Medical Association (Medic), and the San Francisco Police (The Lineup'). Public Defender ranges from coast to coast in grabbing "actual cases on file in courts across the country," and U.S. newspaper morgues are looted to get plots for The Big Story. Last week Du Mont presented a new show. Secret File, U.S.A., that was so classified that no one connected with it was quite sure just what supersecret file they were into. An executive of the producer, Official Films, Inc., said mysteriously: "There's a tie in there between the chief writer and somebody in the OSS during the war."
Secret File stars Robert Alda, and its first script had a touchingly old-fashioned air. Alda, dressed in Nazi uniform, crept into wartime Germany to locate the factory where Hitler was manufacturing a bacteria bomb. There were squads of brutal and booted Gestapo, a beautiful barmaid (Was she enemy or friend?), a German professor who recoiled from making weapons for mass destruction. Alda had plenty of opportunity to make a stiff upper lip and to say things like "I'm only doing a job that has to be done."
Other new shows of the week:
Spectacular No. 3 (Sun. 7:30 p.m., NBC) starring Judy Holliday, Steve Allen and a new comic named Dick Shawn, was a disappointment. Intended as a salute to Manhattan's City Center of Music and Drama, the show never got airborne. Funnyman Shawn opened with a long and painfully unfunny monologue about the Confederacy, while Allen and Holliday were given little material with which to overcome that initial handicap. The best number featured Judy as a short-order waitress who gets involved in a ballet rehearsal; the most tedious—except for confirmed balletomanes — was a 20-minute dance revolving about a filling station.
Honestly, Celeste! (Sun. 9:30 p.m., CBS) lets Comedienne Celeste Holm play hob with a newspaper office and appears to have been created by the second-string writers of NBC's Dear Phoebe, which is also a situation comedy laid in a newspaper office.
Father Knows Best (Sun. 10:00 p.m., CBS) is another one of CBS' patented family comedies that bear far more relation to each other than they do to life. Everyone from father Robert Young to Junior (Billy Gray) handles his untaxing chore with competence. All the situations and every response to them should be completely familiar to experienced televiewers.