Viewers last week were treated to the raciest—and most profane—language that has ever been heard on TV. The author: Noel Coward, who also acted with silky efficiency in his Blithe Spirit, on CBS's Ford Star Jubilee. As for the sprinkling of "hells" and "damns" in his play, Coward observed coldly: "People who object to the profanity in Blithe Spirit are crackpots, and Mr. Ford should be happy if even one of them doesn't buy his car. They would be a menace on the highway."
The show itself was one of the highlights of a drama-studded week. In telling the story of a husband bedeviled by the ghost of his first wife (and then of his second wife), Coward got notable support from Mildred Natwick, who played a zany medium with all the comic zest she had brought to the part in its Broadway opening some 15 years ago. Claudette Colbert and Lauren Bacall, as the materializing wives, looked their parts more adequately than they played them, and Actress Bacall sometimes seemed uneasy when reciting the litany of her infidelities, as if she expected at any moment that an implacable censor would step onscreen and stop the proceedings.
Unaccustomed Polish. As though rising to a challenge, the rest of the week's dramatic shows were far above average. Maurice Evans and Hallmark combined to produce a first-rate version of Emlyn Williams' The Corn Is Green. Eva Le Gallienne was crisply dictatorial as the do-gooding English spinster, while John Kerr smoldered like a burning coal as the boy brought from the bowels of a Welsh mine to the stately quadrangles of Oxford.
CBS's Omnibus kept the drama level high with the James Barrie play, Dear Brutus, especially selected by Helen Hayes to celebrate her 50 years in the theater. In the 1918 opening of the play, Actress Hayes had played Margaret, the child who "might-have-been," opposite William Gillette. On TV she was the world-sick Mrs. Dearth who gets a chance to relive her life and does even worse than before. Helen Hayes played with authority and was well-supported by Franchot Tone, Martyn Green and Lori March. But teen-ager Susan Strasberg—in Helen's old role of Margaret—nearly stole the show in a beautifully stylized scene in Barrie's -enchanted forest.
Even TV's original plays showed an unaccustomed polish. The best was Alcoa Hour's presentation of Man on a Tiger, adapted from a short story by Adman David Levy. It was a plunge deep into the Madison Avenue jungle, where admen fight for accounts, TV comedians fight for prestige and the small fry of television fight for their very existence. Keenan Wynn was the comic whose ratings have begun to slip and Melvyn Douglas the account executive who had risen to a vice-presidency on the comic's back and now decides it is time to get off. The flaw in the play was that none of the characters were virtuous enough to be morally sympathetic or villainous enough to be theatrically sympathetic. But its speech and action had the ring of authenticity, and it was filled with accurately observed scenes, as when two bigshots spend a day futilely trying to reach each other by phone and are thwarted because each of their loyal secretaries is too proud to put her boss on the wire first.