Television: Review

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General Motors. The automobile replaced the mare's-nest on TV last week. To publicize its 50th anniversary, G.M. shucked out more than $1,000,000 and promised two hours of fine and lavish entertainment. What made the show different from the innumerable other big-money variety shows that have promised the same was that the promise was kept. In addition to lining up two dozen top performers and several hundred square yards of effective sets, G.M. also took pains to hire a producer with an idea, Jess (I Love Lucy) Oppenheimer, and a writer with ideas. Movie Scripter Helen (Lili, I'll Cry Tomorrow] Deutsch. The two took their theme from a line in Thornton Wilder's Our Town: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?" On that line Oppenheimer and Deutsch strung a necklace of artful sociological skits and musical numbers. It was a Cadillac-class variety show. Only a heedless sponsor will dare now to trot out another of those old-fashioned critters sway-backed with talent with no place to go.

The Innocent Years. With film that reached back almost to the cinema's dawn of recorded time, NBC's Project 20 last week conjured up "a time of incredible innocence and security"—the U.S., 1900-17. It was an era more innocent in retrospect than it seemed at the time; Producer Henry (Victory at Sea) Salomon glossed over its slums and sweatshops in favor of its Stanley Steamer and sheath skirt. Yet, with rare old film, some of it rephotographed from almost-forgotten paper versions in the Library of Congress, the show caught the bustling optimism and vitality, the men and manners, and such milestones as President McKinley's funeral and the smoking ruins of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. It chronicled (at undue length) the rise of the automobile and, with delightful clips, the infancy of the movies and the prime of vaudeville. It illustrated such old tribal customs as the semaphoring of traders between the sidewalk and window sills on Manhattan's curb exchange. Teddy Roosevelt wagged his finger at the voters as unsparingly as he wielded an ax against a tree. William Howard Taft, the first tenant to put a divot in the White House lawn, hefted his 340 Ibs. on the links. A white-maned Mark Twain, in the only surviving scrap of film taken of him, took tea with his daughters. The whole parade of quaintly jerky images from the past dog-trotted by to a deft commentary spoken by Alexander Scourby, and to Robert Russell Bennett's eloquent orchestration of 23 vintage song hits.