Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show: Lucy and Desi, who could do nothing wrong for six years of / Love Lucy, did very little right last week in Lucy Takes a Cruise, the first of their new hour-long "musical variety" shows. Because Desi felt his filmed show was "just too funny to cut," Lucy cruised to Havana with Guest Stars Ann Sothern and Rudy Vallee through 75 minutes of bumbling sight gags and strangulated cliches, e.g., a loveless Lucy's groan, "They weren't kidding when they said this ship was on its maiden voyage." Fortunately, saucer-eyed Lucille took her lumps with undiminished zest and even worked her putty face through one funny bit in which she and Desi, meeting for the first time in a Havana night club, swapped pitter-pats in a love duet on the bongo drums. The messages between them grew more frantic, and after beating out an abandoned rhythmic burst, Lucy shrieked in astonished self-admonition: "What am I saying!"
Playhouse 90: Farley Granger appears to try twice as hard as most young actors, but the end product is often not good enough by half. Last week The Clouded Image doubled the odds by casting him as a pair of English twins named Peter and Gerald. Peter inherited the family estate because Gerald, his elder by half an hour, had disappeared at the age of 13 and was declared legally dead. Suddenly Granger as Peter was confronted by Granger as Gerald. But was Gerald genuine? Peter thought not, and for good reason: he had killed little Gerald by shoving him off a cliff. Gerald turned out to be a contrite fake, schooled in his masquerade by a conniving uncle (Vincent Price) with an eye on a hunk of the estate. Peter ended up dead at the bottom of his favorite cliff, and Gerald walked off with the heart of Peter's sister, whose female instincts had flagged her long ago that here was no brother. Through all this, Old Pros Judith Anderson and John Williams could do little but stand by helplessly as the script licked two Grangers singlehanded.