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Reviews
Frances Farmer Presents (1958)
Frances Farmer Presents
I remember this show well, and as the show came on TV just after I got home from school, I was a regular. Ms. Farmer was an elegantly coiffed and dressed older woman who didn't just model the clothes provided by one of the sponsors (clothing provided by L.S. Ayres and Company, a local department store who's investment paid off.) She provided a complete contrast to the comparatively dowdy housewives of my small town, and I suspect they despised her because they thought that they could look like that, too, if someone gave them the clothes.
She had a lot more than the clothes. She had presence, and actually had something intelligent to say about the movies, some of them great but some awful.
She was at a minimum competent, and on her better days far better than that. I didn't know anything about her sad history at the time, and she was too good an actress to let anything show.
12 O'Clock High (1964)
Started out GREAT, and then the fixed it...
I saw this show during its original release. I can remember that it came on rather late on Friday night (10:00 pm sticks in my mind) so I generally got to see it on Friday night, after the high school basketball game.
I always considered the stories and the acting, at least in the two seasons, to be first-rate. I was pretty young at the time, so I wouldn't have known gritty from the Easter Bunny, but the stories were interesting, and held the attention of this then early teen aged girl. I knew at the time that a lot of the "aerial" footage was leftover DOD WWII film, but it was rather skillfully inter cut with the live action scenes, and the fact that the whole shows (first two seasons) were in black and white, and everyone had to use "rabbit ear" antennas rather covered over what I suspect I'd now see as considerable flaws.
As I recall, Robert Lansing (Col. Savage) was replaced at the end of the first season by Paul Burke, on theory (or so I read in the "fan magazines" of the time) that he was younger, and would appeal to a younger audience. At the time, as another writer has already noted, Burke was actually a bit older.
In the third season...well, the less said about it the better. I do seem to recall that they might have gone to color, but the stories (and for the matter, the entire series) didn't hold together, or make much sense.
On a minor note, Hazel Court, whose obit appeared in the April 18, 2008 New York Times and Washington Post (among others) was an English actress best known (though not to be) as a horror movie "scream cream." I remember she played, in at least two or three episodes, Col. Savage's love interest, and did so with considerable grace and elegance.