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The Search (Sun. 4:30 p.m., CBS) is a worthy addition to Sunday afternoon's "cultural" programs. Worked out over the past two years in cooperation with U.S. colleges and universities, the opening show traveled to the speech clinic of the University of Iowa for an engrossing examination of stutterers. It began with the reassurance to parents that the mere repetition of words by a six-year-old may bear no relation at all to stuttering: an examination of "normal" children in a nursery school proved that word repetition at that age is the rule rather than the exception. The deep emotional basis of stuttering was underlined in two graphic experiments: when a stutterer was artificially deafened so that he could not hear his own voice, he spoke with perfect diction; and three stutterers who, singly, could barely recite a sentence, did the same sentence with ease when they spoke in unison.
Envenomed Air. TV drama last week was having an awful time winding up its shows. On CBS' Best of Broadway, TV finally proved that it could do an adequate job on farce with an all-star production of The Man Who Came to Dinner. Viewers whose only experience of the comedy of insult had come from the cream-puff exchanges of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby may have been startled by the venom of Monty Woolley's lines. Practically his first one was an outraged shout of "I may vomit!" and, as on Broadway, he referred to Nurse Zasu Pitts as "Miss Bedpan." But it was Woolley's stage presence and precise diction that kept the farce from flying apart on TV screens. Both Merle Oberon and Joan Bennett were more beautiful than accomplished; Reginald Gardner added brightness to his impersonation of Noel Coward, while Bert Lahr was himself, which is all a viewer can ask. For some dark reason, the TV producers decided to give the play a new, outdoor ending, and the final scene included both messy camera work and acting.
On Climax!, Ethel Barrymore had a field day with an antique (1916) Broadway melodrama, Bayard Veiller's The Thirteenth Chair. This, too, kept viewers in suspense for two acts and then fell to pieces as though Adapter Walter Newman had decided that the plot was too preposterous to bother with explanations. On ABC's U.S. Steel Hour, the free world was triumphing over the Reds, as it so often does on TV. The Man with a Gun was that serviceable melodrama about the man who returns from a Red prison and is suspected of being a planted Red agent. Gary Merrill agonized for two acts while the colonel from Intelligence, and his wife and child, wondered about his true identity. The ending was so contrived, complicated and confused that it is a wonder Merrill and his family ever got themselves properly sorted out.
With Relish. In Manhattan, Comic Red Buttons relished a satisfaction granted to few TV entertainers. Dropped last year by Sponsor Maxwell House coffee, Red came back this year on a new network, NBC, and with a new advertiser (Pontiac). His competing show was CBS's Mama, bankrolled by his old sponsor, Maxwell House. Last week's Trendex ratings showed that Buttons had scored 18.9, v. 16.4 for Mama.