'Bonanza' Points Way

By Dan Jenkins

An hour-long television show' called "Bonanza” has been on the air for eight years now, 52 weeks a year, including repeats. For six of these eight years the show has been rated as the No. 1 show in the nation. Every week it is seen by an estimated 350,000,000 people in some 82 countries around the world.

It stars three men, none of whom was in the least wellknown at the beginning of the series, and only occasionally is a girl brought in. Its central theme is a strong, moral family of outgoing men, dominated by a warm granite rock of a fatherfigure, in almost constant competition with a weak, immoral world.

There must be a lesson in here somewhere for moviemakers.

"Family" pictures today most generally depict a family in which the mother hates her son, the son hates his sister, the sister hates her father and the father hates the mother. Because it can't be called entertainment, it is called art or avant garde or new wave or a happening, or now.

(A recent trade-paper review of a major new Broadway play

described its characters as follows: "ludicrously whining, moronic mother," "spiteful, homosexual son,' "robot-like husband," "preposterously possessive he-man father," "jellyfish suitor," "disturbed son," "mayhem addict," "kookie preacher" and "psycho detective." This is known as culture.)

Two recent pictures, brazen enough to have disinterred the tired old bones of the "Judge Hardy" kind of family, have flown in the face of the artsynow cult. One of them is on its way to becoming the greatest box-office grosser of all time. The other is breathing heavily down its neck. Their titles: "The Sound of Music" and "Mary poppins."

The lesson of “Bonanza” and "Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins" would seem to be that while sweetness and light and stern morality and good clean fun may be sickeningly square in the eyes of the hip ple, the number of the hipple is not exactly legion. The vast Indian territory that lies roughly between the western border of the city of New York and the eastern border of the city of Los Angeler is quite apparently populated by close