1966 CBS-TV "Glass Menagerie" production found, restored

It was a lot of work, but after years of research, rights-clearing and painstaking restoration it will air on TCM tomorrow night, 50 years to the day after the original telecast
A Lost “Glass Menagerie,” Rediscovered »

 

Pretty cool. To be televised 50 years after the original broadcast date!

 

Was the "angel" Scorsese?

 

More details here at this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/nyregion/glass-menagerie-restoration-paley-center.html?_r=0

The restoration was done by David Crossthwait at DC Video/Burbank, and he's pretty much the best there is on getting the most out of old videotape.

 

Contemporary 1966 reviews under spoiler.

Spoiler

Chicago Tribune
Robert Goldsborough

Show:
The Glass Menagerie…was last night’s major contribution to one of television’s most memorable weeks. The play, with minor variations, was faithful to the original and was a moving evening of entertainment.

Cast:
Miss Booth was competent, but the real standout of the four-member cast was Hal Holbrook as her dissatisfied, foot-loose son, who chafes at the restraints of life in their cramped pre-World War-II St. Louis apartment. Holbrook played the role of the son and the narrator with depth and sensitivity. If a fault could be found with his performance, it was the occasional artificiality of his southern accent.


Los Angeles Times:
Don Page

Show:
The two-hour production sustained magnificently, with exceptional performances by Shirley Booth, Hal Holbrook, Barbara Loden, and Pat Hingle. It was delicately directed by Michal Elliott, an Englishman who has labored for the BBC for the past decade. Obviously, Elliott has a definite facility for television direction as the play maintained a live stage quality on the 21-inch screen. Of course Williams’ setting is compact, but it could have been smothered without skillful direction.

Cast:
It was good to see Shirley Booth playing something besides Hazel and although she was outstanding as Amanda, you thought perhaps she was slightly soft in the role. Barbara Loden displayed great sensitivity and Pat Hingle was believably locked into the part. Holbrook emerged with the best performance.


New York Times:
Jack Gould

Show:
In last night’s production, CBS and David Susskind again provided an evening of superb theater. [the play] was brought to television with lean beauty and eloquence. Michael Elliott’s direction reflected taste and perception and the sets of John Clements unobtrusively contributed to the environment of wasted years.

Cast:
Barbara Loden played the shy and limping Laura. The vision of her glowing face after her lips had been touched by the caller will stand as a close-up of almost unbearable loveliness. In Miss Loden’s touching tenderness of expression there was embodied all the agony of human yearning for another and all the ecstasy of being wanted. Pat Hingle matched Miss Loden’s magnificence in his uncanny effectiveness in realizing the Williams design of the caller as a sensitive extrovert. The poetry of everyday speech is not often spoken with such naturalness. […] The gentle confrontation between Miss Loden and Mr. Hingle tended to overshadow all else. Shirley Booth was a consistently absorbing Amanda. She was fluttery, appropriately intrusive as the perennial Mrs. Fix-It and moving in her recollections of girlhood social successes that ended with marriage to a straying charmer. Yet at times her belle seemed a shade mechanized and not intuitively Southern. Hal Holbrook was exceptionally fine as the son who also serves as the play’s narrator. He was completely persuasive as the poet of the warehouse who is drawn back to his own dark trap.


Washington Post:
Laurence Laurent

Cast:
Barbara Loden was simply superb as Laura. This is a beautiful woman, self-contained but continuously withdrawing. Pat Hingle was excellent as Jim, the gentleman caller. There was a dreadful honesty about his defeats and his faith in “the future of television.” Hal Holbrook demonstrated the dimensions of his acting skill. Shirley Booth was tough and pitiful, brave and silly, strong and defeated by life and times. Miss Booth has the range to handle all the dimensions of a complex and indomitable character.


Variety:

Show:
The reviewer described the gentleman caller scene between Loden and Hingle as “television at its most sublime.” This person also wrote that, “Elliott staged [the presentation] pointedly and framed the camera shots beautifully.” However he/she devoted most of their review to criticizing decisions made by the producer, director, makeup artist, and scene designer that they felt undercut the power of the playwright’s intent. Nevertheless, the reviewer described the presentation as, “easily the high point of the current television season – two richly rewarding hours of television that proved again that the home theatre can be immensely effective with noble literature.”

Cast:
Shirley Booth “was simply too charming and light for a role that asked her to gnaw insensitively at the souls of her children. Instead of nagging, prodding, and railing corrosively, Miss Booth was merely gabby. Pat Hingle was outstanding as the gentleman caller, his extroversion subtly faceted with understanding and genuine compassion. Hal Holbrook was first rate playing his desperation sardonically rather than self-pityingly, which was apt. Miss Loden left little to be desired in her portrayal of the crippled girl.”

 

I came here to post about this. I considered starting a thread for lost TV programs -- is there one already? If not, somebody needs to start one.

 

On in Phoenix (Cox cable) at 6 PM tonight.

 

Radio versions:

1. Theatre Guild on the Air in 1951 starring Helen Hayes as Amanda with Montgomery Clift as Tom, Kathryn Baird as Laura, and Karl Malden as Jim.



2. Jane Wyman recreated her film role of Laura for a 1954 adaptation on Lux Radio Theatre with Fay Bainter as Amanda, Frank Lovejoy as Tom and Tom Brown as Jim

https://archive.org/download/OTRR_L..._Theatre_54-03-08_871_The_Glass_Menagerie.mp3

3. In 1964 Caedmon Records produced an LP version of the Glass Menagerie as the initial issue of its theatre series. The production starred Jessica Tandy as Amanda, Montgomery Clift as Tom, Julie Harris as Laura, David Wayne as the gentleman caller.

Tennessee Williams - The Glass Menagerie (Act One) »

There was another version produced in 1953 for the radio series Best Plays, starring Evelyn Varden as Amanda and Geraldine Page as Laura, but this is not known to survive.

 

I watched but unfortunately I missed the first 15 minutes. I DVRed the repeat but haven't looked yet.

I was watching and thinking that it could not have looked nearly this good when broadcast in 1966. This version was cut together from the original raw video takes, with professional restoration and grading of those - what was shown on CBS in 1966 was edited and second-generation.

I noticed a small section of about 15 seconds where the lipsync was off.

How could this get lost? How much did they spend on this then, and then they just lost it? Shirley Booth was savvy, she owned a piece of the Hazel series. I would think she had a copy of this, even if a kinescope. Maybe Hal Holbrook too, who was keeping recordings of his various shows of all kinds, even if just audio. One article notes it was originally sponsored by Xerox. Wouldn't Xerox have been supplied a copy, even a kinescope?

It's claimed this was part of the "CBS Playhouse" "series". But listings of that "series" do not include this. Apparently it was a one-off special.

Oh well. This was well worth watching and I hope TCM keeps it in their mix.

 

Darn, just seeing this now for the first time. Wonder if it will run again?

Or are there any clips online anywhere yet?

 

No, I have rarely found professional celebrities who keep broadcast-quality copies of their work. There's a famous case where Jerry Lewis wound up with a 2" master of a Tonight Show appearance he did, but he would be among the rare people who did so.

Many dramatic and variety specials like this were looked upon as "one-offs," where it would air once and then never be rerunned. One of the exceptions would be the NBC Mary Martin Peter Pan show, but even that was only aired a handful of times. There's 1000 shows like this that have either disappeared, or the master tapes are badly damaged, or nobody wants to pay to restore them, or there's a cloud over the rights. The single biggest factor is: the people who own the shows are unconvinced that there's a big enough audience to watch 50-year-old shows to warrant spending hundreds of thousands of dollars cleaning them up and putting them out in 2016.

 

This is also how we have a color video survivor of "Hullabaloo", as the hosts of said surviving episode were none other than Jerry & Gary Lewis.

 

So, any clips available on-line?? Just curious to see what the quality is like (and don't need to see the whole thing for that).