Radio: The Week in Review

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NBC's Wide, Wide World ostensibly dealt with Our Heritage but this time its ranging from New Orleans to San Francisco, from Carlsbad Caverns to Canada had a postcard unreality: nothing that the viewer saw seemed to be actually happening. Everything—whether a Cajun picnic or a tour of a three-masted schoon-er—appeared to have been elaborately and ineptly staged for television.

The week's drama had two near-successes: on the Alcoa Hour, Thunder in Washington tried to pack into 60 minutes the entire story of a businessman in government, from his hopeful arrival, through his first miscues, to his humiliation before a Senate investigating committee. Author David Davidson struck boldly through the tangled swamp known as Conflict of Interest, but not even yeoman work by Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley could make the main issues clear. Climax! starred Michael Rennie in Man of Taste, a melodrama about an art dealer who had a method for improving the price on his artists' paintings—he simply killed them off after they had done enough canvases to give him a comfortable backlog. Like most such rogues, Rennie seemed far too intelligent to have been caught at his crimes, but caught he was, and made a satisfactory exit to the scaffold.