From the Big to Little Screen

We had faces,” silent-screen star Norma Desmond says in “Sunset Boulevard.”

And voices too, which made it possible for some of filmdom’s first faces to make it in talking pictures and do television guest shots near the end of their careers.

Desmond woulddhave been appalled if she had known that Mary Astor would wind up playing second banana to Ben Casey or that ZaSu Pitts would co-star with Perry Mason- and on the small screen. She would even have raved when Mae West, a star of those cursed talkies, got second billing-after a speaking horse.

But no reputations have been hurt by these three trips to TV land. It didn’t harm Astor’s memory to play an aging opera diva living in a dream world on “Ben Casey” (3 a.m. Saturday, KDOC). She is still remembered as a sophisticated beauty. And Pitts managed to keep her wild-eyed, silent-screen look on “Perry Mason” in “The Case of the Absent Artist” (noon Friday, KDOC). And West, of course, is still a legend-even if she can be seen adopting the star of “Mr. Ed” (12:30 a.m. next Sunday, Nickelodeon).