Television: Review

In a weak moment Gossipist Walter Winchell confided to his readers: "The reason I talk fast is that if I talk slowly people will be able to hear what I say and find out how dull and unimportant it really is." But for his return to TV last week on ABC's filmed crime series, The Walter Winchell File, the columnist-turned-actor slowed down his Teletype voice; what he said was still unimportant but, thanks in considerable part to a good script by ex-New York Daily Mirror Reporter Adrian Spies, never dull. The story concerned a psychopathic killer, who haunts a frightened cop, "a man without guile, walking perhaps to death when his heart was full of new life." Winchell's old vaudeville training stood him in good stead, especially when he had to talk about "the tabloid fury of the only city that never truly goes to sleep" or play amateur detective and whoosh across town in his radio car, sirens screaming, to beat the New York police force to the scene of violence. And then, the plain little moral: "It's all right to be afraid—just as long as you still do what must be done."

The Winchell of File, white-haired and 60, was a tame version of the once combustible keyhole crier. Gone were the high-decibel-count croak and Morse-key jangle, the creaky song-and-dance routines of last year's variety show. Now there was only the occasional clatter of the typewriter—onscreen and off—and on TV even this was restrained enough to be realistic. Though File claims to be based on his "private files," Winchell admits there are fictitious strokes "to avoid any trouble legally." Did he always beat the cops to the scene when prowling around Manhattan? "Normally the cops were there when I arrived," says he, then adding, like the more familiar Winchell: "Once or twice I got there too early."

Its own officials deplore the U.S. postal service as a relic of shabby inefficiency, but no harsh words do it quite the justice of The Great Billion Dollar Mail Case, which brought Edward R. Murrow back to a new season of See It Now on CBS this week. Cameras behind the scenes of Manhattan's main post office caught the overwhelming frustration of an archaic system, dispirited employees and a staggering, endless load of work. They also recorded pent-up grievances of clerks, letter carriers and their boss, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield, presented the contrast of smooth modernity in the mails of Switzerland and The Netherlands and such private U.S. businesses as United Parcel Service, explored the problems of whether and how the post office should pay its own way—instead of losing $2,000,000 a day. Murrow gave both sides of such thorny issues as whether to charge more for magazines and periodicals that enter the mails at second-class rates. Summerfield told Murrow that the rates amounted to a $250 million a year "subsidy" to publishers. For magazine publishers the Reader's Digest's Albert L. Cole hotly disputed such figures, argued that Congress intended low magazine postal rates to promote education and the public interest.