Radio & TV: The Week in Review

In Hollywood, Moviemaker Dore Schary predicted that a minor depression would hit his industry when color TV is widely seen in U.S. homes. But Schary expressed no dismay over the threat to movies of current black-and-white TV. Judging by most of last week's shows, he had little to worry about.

Temper Tantrums. Possibly the biggest disappointment of the new season is the failure of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca to produce even a fraction of the fun separately that they did together in years past as co-stars of Your Show of Shows. Imogene seems hopelessly bogged down in inferior material. Caesar has been saddled with a story line that succeeds in making him a good deal more cantankerous than comic. Perhaps unconsciously, his show appears designed as a replay of Jackie Gleason's The Honeymooners on a considerably higher income level. Caesar's continuing sketch, The Commuters, deals with suburbanites. In this framework, he plays a grown-up juvenile delinquent whose temper tantrums and general unpleasantness make him the despair of his wife (Nanette Fabray) and his friends. Writers and actors give the strong impression that they cannot fill the 60 minutes of Caesar's Hour without repeating each gag twice and sometimes three times. To date, few of the jokes have been good enough to be used once.

Brisk Gallop. What little novelty and brightness was around last week was again supplied by the dramatic shows. On CBS's Climax, William Faulkner's An Error in Chemistry journeyed to storied Yoknapatawpha County for a study of a carnival confidence man as casually evil as a rattlesnake. Edmond O'Brien played the role with a fine malevolence, although the mistake that finally trapped him was both too forced and too trifling to support an hour show. Kraft TV Theater ambitiously tried Camille on NBC and Kitty Foyle on ABC. Signe Hasso coughed and swooned appropriately as the lost lady of the camellias, but as her burning lover, Jacques Bergerac (currently Ginger Rogers' husband) had scarcely as much animation as a wooden Indian and spoke his lines as if he had learned them phonetically. Cloris Leachman did pretty well as Kitty Foyle, although for most of the play she was more long-suffering and put-upon than Christopher Morley had intended his spirited heroine to be.

On Robert Montgomery Presents, viewers were off on a brisk gallop with the gentry of Old England. Margaret Phillips played the haughty lady who falls in love with a young schoolteacher who knows his place but cannot keep it. There is a murder, and the young man will hang if the lady doesn't reveal that they spent the night in question together. Will she tell? Won't she? Since the story was by Britain's sardonic A. E. Coppard, the lady confesses, but the young man hangs anyway. Studio One, presenting The Deserter, had a fine opening scene where a bitter soldier is released after serving seven years for desertion under fire. But from there on, the play's course was rapidly downhill.