In the late forties, film was unsure about the nature of its enemy. Fledgling television, really the wireless with pictures, was just beginning to chip away at film's sacrosanct audience. Borrowing radio's format and often its talent, TV appeared to be the high-falutin extension of an established medium. When Champagne for Caesar hit the screen, this ambivalence was most apparent. The much-maligned enemy wavered between television and radio like an unconscious stutter (or a continuity problem in the script), making it perhaps the first, if tentative, foray into the tyranny of The Tube. Here, Ronald Colman plays Beauregard Bottomley, a walking Encyclopedia Britannica determined to bankrupt a TV (and radio) quiz show, "Masquerade for Money." Sanctimonious Bottomley is outraged by the vulgarity of the show's host Happy Hogan, a clownish philistine played with uncanny prescience by Art Linkletter. And he equally despises the show's sponsor, a despotic soap peddler named Burnbridge Waters (Vincent Price). The cloistered egghead, Bottomley values knowledge above all else and views television as the great lobotomizer-"the intellectual destruction of America." Ironically, his soaring success on the quiz show stimulates sales of "the soap that sanctifies," a fact graphically noted through charts displaying audience share versus product. Vintage '50s, Champagne for Caesar gets distracted by its own bubbly substance and uncorks a convivial ending. But the film remains praiseworthy for its early caveat about the flagging I.Q. of the airwaves. Steve Seid