Bathroom Mirror Sinceratease
FARBER, MANNY
On TELEVISION By Manny Farber Bathroom Mirror Sinceratease WHEREAS the early silent film developed quickly into a director's medium, television has become the happy haunting ground for actors,...
...Sterling Hayden's convict stranded with a pregnant woman in Faulkner's flood story, Ralph Meeker manacled to a detective in a Pullman thriller on the "Pursuit" series...
...James Witmore as a racketeer-fixer hemmed in a boy's camp by a forest of sentimental progressives, are examples of TV's best acting which, repeating notes like a woodpecker, uses the mirthless, narrow range of the TV camera to present a savagely As Is portrait...
...Logical casting is another theory that should have been left to fester in the movie bosom...
...For instance, there is enough stately ennui in Henry James's writing without actors (James Donald, Dana Wynter, John Baragray) bred on the hot-house manners of a Jamesian story...
...There doesn't seem any doubt that Dick Stark's sandpaper directness delivering a Remington Rand commercial packs more intrigue and vitality than the caricatured Critics' Award performance of David Niven as a perverted doilie in Separate Tables...
...The most imitable is the all-star cast: sinking reputable pillars in focal points, so that the play is anchored and squared with carefully nurtured tiresomeness...
...Bishop, accusing the spectator with every despondent flick of his face, displays a type of toughness rarely seen in allied arts, where the stakes have become so high that acting has taken on a heavily over-refined effect...
...Like the subway rider forced to explore a co-rider's impassive face, the spectator gets a performance of a consistently unreadable hard note...
...TV's gift to this age is an actor who, neither deadened by style nor interested in making the space nimble, amiable, hopeful or poignant, admits all limitations of his locked position looking straight at the spectator...
...And in the non-actor shows, narcissistic meanderings have become the juice-hiding basic material...
...A few Odets types or some of Preston Sturges's dyed-in-evil plebian gypsies might have pushed "Wings of the Dove" into a spectacular mediocrity...
...Seeing Nina Foch (ladylike jitters), Keenan Wynn (humorless plodding), or E. J. Marshall (hangdog burrowing) has become a divertisement as predictable as Tiger Jones on the weekly fightcast...
...There is a negative salesmanship about Joey Bishop's sensitive dead-panning on "Keep Talking" which recalls the infectious hopelessness of the "Out Our Way" comic strip, where the wrinkle of a boy's sloppy knickers seemed possessed by a dead octopus...
...Where Julie Harris's cunning comes through the TV set as a reek, Klugman's unforgettable bartender in Saroyan's Time of Your Life succeeded by being believably flat, colorless and gripping, something like the rug near most TV sets...
...Unfortunately, many thespians try to close this close relationship further with a wealth of inside chicanery that oversells the actor and over-befriends the viewer...
...J. Perelman's script for a recent "Omnibus" disaster) are logging semi-unconscious Marxist protestations, using the fog-horn style of the depression writers...
...The actors own television, partly because TV's best directors are mired in Hollywood's 1930s and the writers (S...
...TV acting, seen in rear view only in the burlesque walk-off that cheesecakes the well-acted "Bob Cummings Show," is plopped, inescapably, front-faced, halitosis-close before an audience in an intimacy new to popular art...
...This drugged, on-the-job vitality, which appears even in the pantomiming of TV's non-actors, is a curious throwback to the 1920s, the Sennett actor as well as the proletarian cartoonist...
...Sucked dry of sentiment, ungiving, tightly closed to any spectator's ready insight, the- finest TV acting makes any current theater attempt at forbidding individuality seem as soft as custard...
...Another clammy notion is that familiarity breeds excellence: During one decade Selznick used the Joseph Cotton-Jennifer Jones-Shirley Temple cast on the American movie audience as though it were a brand...
...Until the production crews can create an authentic plasticity on a screen that looks like a thumbnail, televised emoting would wisely follow the tough-flat projectionist and forget about any acting that resembles salesmanship...
...TV's consistent victors—Martin Baisam, Jack Klugman, Jack Warden—are technicians who, having grown up with the living-room medium, now create mundane rooks in plays that are obsessed with mobility and never able to achieve it...
...On TELEVISION By Manny Farber Bathroom Mirror Sinceratease WHEREAS the early silent film developed quickly into a director's medium, television has become the happy haunting ground for actors, particularly those closer-my-face-to-thee actors who are adept at bathroom mirror sinceratease...
...The songs of Perry Comotose are overpowered by slowly straying eyes and a wandering forefinger...
...Despite its dated construction, the average TV effort is saved by a type of acting that is ruthlessly unsuccessful in either Broadway or Hollywood...
...Finally, TV's acting freshness is needlessly sapped by casting ideas picked up from the Goldwyn-Selznick mentality...
...Within a short video span, Jackie Gleason has done some smiley-genial face popping on "Playhouse 90," Jack Lemmon has over-explained a neurotic barrister by rubber-faced communion with his audience...
...What's My Line" is another example of the real thing hidden by pantomime, such as smiles that walk on elephant's paws...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 5
