The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • Page 118

Cart Wihon 7U Jeopfc NEW YORK, N. Y. Jack Carter had begun to think it would never happen but finally, he's in pictures ft y. mb ffi tuL' I tAi Harris and Olivier In "The Power and the Glory" Will Show Stir a Storm? Rifttcttoni on TV TV Music: Futile Plea? By Option Dwlght MAX RUDOLF, conduc tor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, recently told 32 American music critic (who didn't need to be told): "The complete failure of U. S.

radio and television to do something for good music, give it a chance to he heard, and develop and enhance taste, is disastrous." He is correct in the main, of course, and cannot be challenged although a few determined long-hairs know where and when they can find serious music on radio, especially M. However, it was not to (or for) these dedicated ones Rudolf was plc-iding. I lis conc ern, shared by many national leaders, is that an ennobling musical heritage should be much more generally diffused through the mass radio-TV audience. (By "muc more" Rudolf said he means a measly per cent.) SAD SHOWING Television's performance In this field is. by its own admission, worse than terrible.

The matter is not even arguable: four afternoon NBC operas, a half-dozen CBS potpourri symphony concerts, a couple of brief religious operas and one U. N. concert on ABC plus odd bits and pieces now and then. Therefore it should be applauded as a short for ward step that this season CBS Is going to televise six sponsored New York Philharmonic hours, four of them for young people, at 6:30 p. m.

(central time), one a month beginning In November. The only other classical music on TV in the evenings straight, without gimmicks will be six weekly two-hour concerts by the Boston Sympliony Orchestra (via National Educational I I -sion videotape, beginning Dec. 22 on DPS-TV, Des Moines) and brief show-off selections wedged into the "Telephone Hour." PRE-TAPED Extremely high ratings for the "Sing Along With Mitch" series on NBC By Jim Doyle NEW YORK, N. Y. Tonighfi two hour telecast of "The Power and the Glory" is modestly described by CBS as the most ambitious TV a a i project ever undertaken.

It cost $750,000. It has 50 sets and a cast of 150, headed by Sir Laurence Olivier and Julie Harris and liberally populated by other stars. The story by novelist Graham Greene is of the last Roman Catholic priest in the Mexican state of To-basco, whose fanatically communistic and atheistic governor, Garrido Canna-bal, took advantage of the anti-clerical climate of socialist Mexico in the 1 9.10s to persecute the clergy unto death. The last priest is, as script writer Dale Wasser-man puts it, "a bad man and a bad priest." He is a coward, a drunkard, the father of, an Illegitimate child, and a man who is tortured by doubts of his faith. Nevertheless, he chooses to stay on until he is hunted down by a relentless police officer and killed.

It goes without saying that the show Is a blazing-ly controversial one, and that quite a few necks have been stuck out all along the line. CBS started production without having sold it to a sponsor and was prepared to put it on unspon- as an actor. Says 'Real Gable Had His Grudges By Harold Heffernan HOLLYWOOD, CAL The first anniversary of Clark Gable's death (Nov. 16) is ncaring and the pens of his biographers haven't yet run dry. But few of the Gable "inside" tales, including a volume recently published by his widow, Kay Williams Gable, have caught up on the real Gable, who was a "loner" in every sense of the word.

In one passage, Mrs. Gable refers to Clark as "a man who hated no one." Actually, during his 20 years as a top star on the MGM lot, Gable gave a thoroughgoing demonstration of a man who could nurse likes and dislikes, even grudges. Over that long period he had but three close friends. One was Howard Strick-ling, studio publicity director, who guided him steadfastly through three of his five marriages. A second was Otto Winkler, another studio publicist who was best man at Clark's wedding to Carole Ixjmbard.

Winkler died with Miss Lombard in a plane crash at the start of World War II. The third pal was Al Monesco, a Culver City auto dealer, who proved a true and helpful friend for Clark in his fascination for hot motorcars. Otherwise, Gable was extremely choosy about associates. There were only a few newspaper people he would even talk to. Once In an angry mood, he had a woman gossip writer tossed off his set, and never allowed her to return.

Gable did mellow a great deal toward the press in later years, especially after putting his own money Into production. But he was a human being like the rest of us and he could dislike, maybe even hate, a little. Soviet Space Films NEW YORK, N. Y. Soviet films of the space flights of Maj.

Yuri Gagarin and Maj. Gherman S. Titov will be presented on "Crossing the Threshold" over NBC Nov. 24. "To those guys in Hollywood, I was eight minutes on the Ed Sullivan show and that's all I could do," says Jack.

"And they didn't want any comedians trying to act. "Then Red Buttons broke through as an actor and now Jackie Gleason's proving it." And now Carter has finished his first important movie role in Joe Pasternak's "Horizontal Lieutenant." "I played the comedy way down," he says. Young Jim Hutton plays the horizontal lieutenant he's always getting knocked cold. Carter seems to have spent most of his life in uniform he plays a sergeant in this picture, but he was in "Call Me Mister," "Operation Madball" (his only other picture), and in a unit of "This is The Army" which operated out of Dayton, Ohio, and was called "the Flying Varieties." JACK CARTER It finally happened Boxer Is Given First Film Role HOLLYWOOD, CAL. Roland La Starza, who fought Rocky Marciano for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world, has retired from the ring and is a fledgling screen actor.

He has signed for a featured role with Ben Gazzara, Ray Walston and Sammy Davis in "Reprieve." The 34-year-old boxer will play the fistic champ of Dannemora prison in the story of John Resko (Gazzara), who became a famed painter behind the walls of the New York penitentiary after a last-minute reprieve from the electric chair. 1 HSLWjl. sored if neCessary. But sponsors, who have been mercilessly belabored for their timidity recently, were not hard to find. The unofficial reaction of the clergy is interesting.

No Catholic authority was consulted before production, but the completed tape lias been shown to high members of the hierarchy. They did not condemn it, but neither did they endorse it. They felt the theme's implications were perhaps too complex to be fully understood by many a superficial viewer. Wasserman says, in discussing the theme: "I think I have been faithful to Graham Greene's idea. There is good in the oppressors, bad in the oppressed.

The priest and his persecutor eventually realize that essentially they are the same sort of men. "The priest himself blindly stumbles toward his inevitable end, tortured by the belief that he has been I ess, that his fumbling efforts to fulfill his duty have been waste and mockery. "This precisely is the compelling force in The Power and the Glory. That man, sinful and imperfect, has a compulsion toward good. That what he is is less than what he serves." Duke to Narrate Series About Himself Nw Vnrk Tlmi MrrirlM NEW YORK, N.

Y. The Duke of Windsor has agreed to a television series based on his life story. The former king of Great Britain has the fir arrangement with Jack Le Vien, a producer and the man who created "Winston Churchill The Valiant Years," the distinguished series televised last season on ABC. Le Vien said last week that both the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor would personally appear and help narrate the series. Production is not expected to begin until arrangements have been made to put it 5l beating Untouchables" indicates that music can attract large audiences comparable to blood-and-f ist programs.

Max Rudolf's partisans, however, wish (hopelessly?) that Miller's 25 next-door-neighbor glee clubbers, good as they are, would sing along with fewer ballads, mouthed in pantomime, and out of synchronization to a pre-taped voice track. The music is comfortable (for those who enjoy ft), but even its fans could agree that the level might be raised a few artistic inches without going highbrow. THK 1)1 KB TUB PUCHFSS Film to Portray Kennedy in War HOLLYWOOD, CAL. Ralph Taeger, who bears some resemblance to President Kennedy, Is bfcing considered for the led in "PT 109," a war film be made by Warner Bros. on the air, he said.

The series will be based on the duke's book of several years ago, "A King's Story," and on photographs and films made by the duke which have never before been shown in public. Le Vien said he has at his disposal about 10,000 feet of 35 millimeter film which he described as "elegant home movies." October 29, 1S6t Dei Moines Sunday Register 3-TV.