Broadcast & Film: The Public Arts

BROADCAST
Maurice Evans will produce and star in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman on November 25, 9:00-10:30 PM (Hallmark Hall of Fame, NBC-TV). This is a fitting celebration of the Shaw centennial year. NBC Radio should be persuaded to rebroadcast its "Biography in Sound" of the playwright, preferably a few weeks before the telecast, for this aural essay by friends and acquaintances of Shaw is a first-rate production. Write Joseph Meyers, NBC, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, to obtain such a rebroadcast, promising an audience.

Meanwhile, you can prepare your classes with the special GBS issue of the Saturday Review (July 21, 1956); a two-page sampler of his writings from the New York Times Sunday Magazine (July 22, 1956); and the many paperbacks of his work. "My Fair Lady" (Columbia OL 5090, 12" LP, $4.98), a recording by the cast of the brilliantly acclaimed Broadway musical, would seem an excellent approach to Pygmalion.

A study guide for the Evans' telecast is slated for the November issue of The English Journal and for Scholastic Teacher (October 4). Ford Star Jubilee (CBS-TV) starts its in the story of the first trips to the moon. Jim Stanley is back on the project to help construct the moon ships at the space platform. As in the earlier book, he has some difficulties with his human relations and finds that he drives the men under his command too hard and accomplishes less than do other foremen.

The project is plagued by political problems between the two great alliances: the Western World and the Eastern. Finally, however, a compromise is reached and men realize that space must be international. The great interest in the Del Rey space stories, other than their accurate scientific speculations, lies in their presentation of political and social problems arising from the advancing frontiers. Well paced and good reading.

ALMOST APRIL. By Zoa Sherburne. Morrow. $2.75. The adjustment of a teen-ager to a change in location and to a stepmother is a theme on which we need more books. Karen has been passionately devoted to her father, and she is instinctively jealous of her stepmother when she goes to Oregon to live with them. She is hardly prepared for her stepmother, a friendly, outgoing person not much older than herself, who does everything in her power to make Karen feel at home.

Karen finds some outlet for her bitterness in her friendship with Nels Carlson, a rough and tumble boy, who like herself fights a constant battle with life. Karen's conflict with her father deepens throughout the story; but as in most such tales, after building up a situation beautifully, Sherburne solves her character's problems a little too patly and a little too rapidly. However, the book fills a real need.

OLD YELLER. By Fred Gipson. Harpers. $2.75. It is only once in a long time that we get the rare, warm animal story of man and beast inextricably bound together in their life patterns. The Yearling was one and Goodbye, My Lady was another. Now comes a third in Gipson's Old Yeller. Fourteen-year-old Travis is charged by his father with watching after the family on their Texas farm while he goes up the trail with cattle to Kansas. Old Yeller, a huge old brute of a dog, makes his appearance and does everything wrong, though he is stoutly championed by five-year-old Archie.

Travis comes bit by bit to a growing admiration for the beast, but he finally has to kill the dog in the end in a neat set of circumstances. You will cherish this book both for yourself and for your students.

FILM
Cole Porter is not the only musical dramatist that deserves consideration in the Eng- lish classroom. Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I is a brilliant film, ideal for an introduction to a serious discussion of the musical comedy in America. The fact that Carousel and Oklahoma, two other successes of this team, are still playing some theatres makes such a unit all the more auspicious at the present time. Ellen Kennedy, research associate of the mass media program of the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation, has written a study guide for The King and I in Clearing House for October.

Life's color essay on the film (May 28, 1956) would grace any bulletin board. Anna and the King of Siam, on which the film is based, is a current Teen Age Book Club selection (33 West 42nd, New York 36). There is excellent background material on the musical comedy available. Richard Rodgers' essay, "Son is Wedded to Story in Our Musical Dramas," New York Herald Tribune (July 29, 1956, Section 4, p. 1), is an inside story. Cecil M. Smith's Musical Comedy in America (Robert M. MacGregor, New York, 1956) is the best study of the genre.