On Television

...Wells Fargo, NBC), Andy Lewis (writer of somber, anachronistic outlaw scripts that are like forced marches), and Harry J. Fink (like Lewis but more ferocious...

...The French treatment sentimentalized every trick it stole from its American antecedane The Quiet One...

...With the nicely worn, clamped down acting of the cops in Naked City (ABC), you are back in the home of seriously engineered entertainment...

...Some other aces who are way ahead of their competition by daring to walk their reputations on an invisible tight rope are: Jack Carter, a standup comic...

...77 hauls its all-butinert girth after the bouncy, adolescent sex of Milt Caniff's 1940s comic strip or Busby Berkeley's campus musicals...

...Perry Mason, CBS), Jeanette Nolan (robust stoicism...

...real life is pushed to the edge or even out of the frame...

...and Peter Gennaro, an athletically fast dancer on the Perry Como Show (NBC...

...By contrast, another less interesting street epic, the movie Hiroshima, Mon Amour, plays in a sort of empty canyon...

...Both in distant or close shots, the camera is situated directly over the quarterback's figure and most of the unfolding pass pattern is lost...

...There is room here to mention only a few other limelight TVers who, instead of type-casting themselves with a style that has their signature glued to it, are always striking into new territory...

...Route 66 is about as similar to 77 Sunset Strip, with its male wampus baby stars, as Rosa Bonheur is to Jean Gericault—both of whom painted horses...

...In this Resnais film, slack neo-realistic actors can be "sensitive" without worrying about relative truth...

...Cara Williams (Lucille Ball with toughness, exactness, weighted tenderness...

...There has been much talk lately about the irresponsibility of TV programing and the medium's domination by Westerns, Mysteries, Crimes, or a combination of all three...

...Serious critics have a strange notion that there is something automatic or easy about an art form that wears the garments of pulp literature...

...Leonard is a nut for authenticity, and is apparently locked in combat with a story supervisor's fondness for "heart," which sometimes dissolves the series into lachrymose nonsense...

...Even the weekly football feast on Sunday afternoon is ruined by a feeling that the central attraction, the T-formation quarterback, holds the key to the entire show...

...Alongside Boone's, Gabrielle Ferzetti's intellectual in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, is sawdust portraiture—safe, incomprehensible, without muscle or a single subtle or believable invention for springing a weak egghead architect into life...

...Intramural uplift like David Susskind's interviewing and the John Frankenheimer-George Schaeffer dramas consists mostly of close twos and threes bored into by the camera eye...

...A Newsweek TV judge recently streamed pity on the Friday night spectator who at 8:30 has a choice between Route 66 (CBS), 77 Sunset Strip (ABC), or The Detectives (NBC...

...Martin Milner and George Maharis of 66, however reminiscent of boy's book adventurers, have the good fortune to be used for their edginess and weathered qualities—in short, for their maleness...

...So is most of the pro game, which happens to be three pass plays and punt...

...But criticism that lumps together shows dealing with the same subjects has gone beyond the irresponsible into the area of malicious over-simplification...

...Kildare (NBC), which provide the edge pieces, the world of urgency and crowds, and particularly the background that has been stripped from art and made the time-honored pedestal seem more like a soap box...

...Dick Powell (NBC), the producer-actor of three series notable for quick pacing and an observant tough-guy approach that ends in a tight, clean hour, has long been one of the misrated talents in popular art...

...rape, etc., on Have Gun...

...THE TV week is always strewn with tortures, entertainment and surprises...

...the other a Philip Roth tale of a boy sculptor's inability to compromise a five-inch clay figure) jam together time, moral reversal, integrity and various story threads with more success than the young French directors who are doing the same synopsis style with flat feet and much more pretension...

...The great accomplishment of Naked City, its dug-in malaise, comes from taking chances with running reality—things like surging diners or a lunch hour in a phone booth...

...Boone's acting may be a bit stuffed for a cowboy performance but it is a fairly impressive portrait of the intellectual in his rigid, thoughtcompressed, glum modern stride...

...The result of this frontal approach is to cut down the peripheral excitements that transpire after, near or behind the action that is the center of a film or painting...

...Unlike the settings in Have Gun or Naked City, it is rarified, limp, postcard photography, lying like oatmeal over the screen...

...Rudy Cardenas, a fantastic juggler fixture on Ed Sullivan's hour (CBS...

...Unfortunately, TV is not exempt from this trend toward aggressive egotism in high culture...

...Its intermittent excitement consists of watching the usual murk being transected by skill that seems unaware of itself...

...Each Wednesday evening we are treated to an hour-long skirmish between a real Metropolitan miasma and three actors who have that special attraction of a Stash Clemens Dead End Kid movie performance: the ability to look happy and tough while actually being mediocre and squashed...

...The tendency today—to rarifyedit and then assault head-on— crops the area potential in art...

...Chasing after ambulatory toughguy truth in the extreme ugliness of New York City or Cordova, New Mexico, Bert Leonard, producer of the documentaries Naked City and Route 66, is one of the few moderns reminiscent of the undergrounders who did their best work long ago in films like High Sierra and To Have and Have Not...

...Two of Alfred Hitchcock's half-hours on NBC (one featuring Eileen Heckert, brilliant as a near old maid outdueling a pair of dominating moms...

...Even the conspicuous TV artists react with more hardiness and free flowing subtlety under fire than a Billy Wilder or a Robert Motherwell, those effete, carefully restricted refiners of film or thinly sized linen...

...The best of the 66 shows (Sylvia Sydney as a thwarted boss shill in a floating troupe of dance-hall chicks) was a rubbed gem of acting in a Western scene inlaid with a feeling ot burnt-out frustration that reached back to the fanged "Out Our Way" comic strip of the 1930s...

...This inclement style—hurt effects distilled from a hard-to-enter scab situation and underplaying that is trying to sift within it—also produced a gem on delinquency in Los Angeles, which was less precious but far superior to Francois Truffaut's recent film on the same theme, The 400 Blows...

...Sporting faces like old union suits, the show's principals— Harry Bellaver and co-actors—are so low-key that they often achieve a bull's-eye performance by being indistinguishable from New York's grimy, ugly gray atmosphere...

...The absurdity of the critical comment, "It isn't even a good Western," should be apparent to anyone who has watched Richard Boone, a bulwark of lucidity and shrewdness, operate in his weekly Saturday evening shoot-'em-up (Have Gun, Will Travel, CBS...

...featured on CBS' Pete and Gladys), Robert Simon (sonorous rabbinical heavies...

...Holding a stiff staccato rhythm under tons of social pressure, playing by ear inside a wierdly hirsute ugliness, Boone's spoofing inventions seem to catalyze director and actors into work that is always in the area of self-knowing art...

...The most provocative craftsmen are relatively lesser lights like Robert Vaughn (a slippery, jaunty actor who looks like William F. Buckley Jr...

...The Italian film's camera work also strikes a false note: rugged seascape in low-angle focus, endlessly crawled over, re-examined and admired...

...Into the void left by the high artist and his efforts to pinpoint comes a show like Roy Huggins' Hong Kong (ABC) or the Boris Segal-enlivened Dr...

...Life may be more poetic on the intricately jazzy surface of an Alan Resnais film or a Jasper Johns painting, but there is always a feeling of people walking over you overstating their case: forcing home hot pincers of elegance and safe sophistication that have nothing to do with anything real, except possibly a private drive by the artist to aggrandize himself...

...Hitchcock's new film style—Kafkaesque morality thrillers told with glass-blown lightness and speed—has finally been getting home to critics, but it was spawned long ago by Norman Lloyd and others associated with Hitchcock's critically slighted TV show...

...ON TELEVISION By Manny Farber Our Home-Screen Renegade Art Though some of our glummest people are insiders like Gilbert Seldes and ad-agency executives who know how crass television's tomorrow will be, the medium is actually pretty lively compared to present-day movies, painting and comic strips...

...When the producer emerges victorious, though, the story becomes a fascinating stonechipping game in which case-hardened types beset by all sorts of obstacles, try to wring some tiny truth or real situation out of good dry dialogue...

...Andrew McLaglen's direction is a nice, humorous, but stagebound reincarnation of his father Victor's bravura acting in films like The Lost Patrol...