Delbert Mann Returns to TV Roots in ‘April Morning’

The golden age of live television lasted hardly more than a decade--from 1948 until roughly 1958, when tape began to take over. But some of the talented producers, directors, writers and actors who began to work in those infancy of the medium are still--40 years later--continuing to fill our days and nights.

Delbert Mann had never possessed a television set when he went to New York in April, 1949, and became a floor manager at NBC. By Thanksgiving he was a director, his first assignment an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Last Tycoon” with John Baragray. They moved fast and fearlessly then, although much of the work survives, if it survives at all, only on cloudy kinescopes.

Sunday night, Mann’s latest television work, “April Morning,” airs on CBS (Channel 2, 9 p.m.), as the 157th “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” It is an adaptation of Howard Fast’s 1961 novel about the first shots of the Revolutionary War, fired at Lexington, Mass., on April 19, 1775.

By a nice irony, Lexington had to be built from scratch on a field outside Montreal. Present Lexington would do better as a backdrop for a high-tech thriller about silicon chips or a docu-drama about freeway design.

The drama, scripted by James Lee Barrett, makes the battle itself the catalyst in a father-son relationship between Tommy Lee Jones and Chad Lowe, with Susan Blakely as the mother and Rip Torn as a short-fuse local who may have fired the first shot. (No one knows who it really was.)

Mann bought a copy of the Fast novel the day it was published, he says, and tried for 27 years to get it made. There has been a curious reluctance to do films and television about the Revolutionary War period.

Jack Warner’s film of the musical “1776” was unsuccessful and the recent “Revolution” with Al Pacino was a costly flop. But John Ford’s “Drums Along the Mohawk” in 1939 continues to demonstrate the thrills and possibilities the period holds.

It may be that a present nervousness about the revolutionary impulses elsewhere in the world has caused a reluctance to dramatize the revolutionary determination that created the U.S. But it seems timely and provocative to be taken back to the frustrations and heroics of 1775.

Mann was honored by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences on March 1 for his long career. Reading his credits is to be reminded not only of what Mann has done but also what the medium has aspired to do from those early years.

There were those 108 live television shows he did for the Philco/Goodyear Playhouse, one of which was Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty.” In 1954, “Marty” became Mann’s first feature film and it earned him an Oscar. (“I got the film because Paddy insisted I do it to protect the material from the Philistines of Hollywood.”)

In 1955 there was a live musical version of “Our Town,” with Frank Sinatra as the stage manager and a pair of young actors named Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint as the boy and girl, and with an original score by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen that included “Love and Marriage.”

In 1958 there was a version of Victor Herbert’s “The Red Mill” with a cast that included Donald O’Connor, Mike Nichols and Elaine May and Harpo Marx.

The ‘60s were primarily movie years for Mann, including “That Touch of Mink” with Cary Grant and Doris Day. But in 1969 he began his procession of handsomely mounted and finely acted adaptations of the classics, commencing with “David Copperfield,” whose cast contained almost every British actor of note, including Olivier and Ralph Richardson.

History remembers live television for the great writers and the fine original dramas that it produced, like Chayefsky’s “Marty,” “The Bachelor Party” and “Middle of the Night.” But Mann says that those excitements came later.

“Philco began with adaptations of plays and then found that there weren’t that many plays available to television. They switched to novels and only in the last few years drifted reluctantly into original material.

“But look who they found: Paddy, Tad Mosel, J. P. Miller, Irwin Shaw, David Swift, Robert Alan Aurthur . . . Paddy and I did seven shows together. I’ll tell you how ‘Marty’ came about. A script had come in from another writer that was impossible and unfixable. Fred (Coe) called Paddy, who was working on a script then called ‘Love Story.’ Paddy said he’d finished the first act and would have the rest in two weeks. ‘How about Thursday?’ Fred asked him. That gave him four days. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it, and it was ‘Marty.’ ”

Mann attended Vanderbilt and then, after wartime service as a bomber pilot, the Yale Drama School. He became resident director at the Town Theater in Columbia, S.C., where his first production was “The Magnificent Yankee.” He had followed Coe in the Columbia job and then took Coe’s suggestion to try television in Manhattan.

For five years Mann has been writing a memoir of the live television years--”the accidents, the catastrophes, the people, the lessons we learned. I want to get it down before I forget it, before we all forget it.”