Sidney Poitier deserves better than "Children of the Dust."
The four-hour, two-night mini-series, which begins at 9 tomorrow night on WJZ (Channel 13), isn't the worst mini-series of the season. In fact, it has patches of splendid acting and moments of great emotional intensity.
Furthermore, it reminds viewers that America had a race problem long before slavery, and, like it or not, we've been a multi-cultural society since the first European stumbled onto land.
But "Children of the Dust" is so calculated that ultimately it feels like one of those old movie serials -- the ones that flash "to be continued" across the screen just as the cowboy hero is about to leap across a gorge on horseback to escape a herd of charging buffalo or a gang of no-good varmints.
Based on a novel of the same name, the mini-series follows the fortunes of whites, blacks and American Indians on the frontier circa 1890. The cowboy-hero at its center is Gypsy Smith (Poitier), a bounty hunter with both black and Native American ancestry.
Smith is hired by a black politician to lead a group of former slaves from Tennessee into the new territory of Oklahoma, where they hope to homestead. Because of his ancestry, Smith is able to move among both the black settlers and the Indians on whose land they plan to settle.
From Poitier's make-up and costuming to David Greene's direction, featuring innumerable shots of Smith riding tall in the saddle, "Children of the Dust" strives for the heroic, mythic feel of "Lonesome Dove."
It never achieves that epic sense, but it is still a pleasure to see Poitier get the hero treatment. As an actor, he has an incredible range and an ease of delivery that makes him a delight to watch, whether in love scenes with Regina Taylor or in shootouts with the many forces of evil.
Racism, the Klan, lynching and wife-beating play large roles in the mini-series, as does what CBS is calling "forbidden love." The affair is between the white daughter (Joanna Going) of a minister Michael Moriarty) and the Native American (Billy Wirth) who was raised alongside her.
Viewers who tune in to see Moriarty are not going to be happy with his cardboard role, and will probably leave wondering, "This is why he gave up 'Law & Order'?" Viewers who tune in to see Farrah Fawcett are going to be equally disappointed; miss the first 20 minutes tomorrow night and you miss her entire performance. She plays the minister's wife who, without giving too much away, finds the loneliness of frontier life too much too bear.
However, the lack of screen time for Fawcett and the one-dimensional wimpy role for Moriarty are not the film's worst flaws. In the end, what drags down "Children of the Dust" is that it's so black and white and calculated all over.
It's a mini-series that seems to be built around several hot-button, I've-seen-this-before-scenes guaranteed to elicit certain predictable emotions: a burning cross, hooded night riders, whites denigrating Indians and blacks.
It never hangs together as a work of its own, as a story that has its own identity and personal truths to tell. Instead -- like last year's sequel to the "North and South" mini-series, for example -- it seems like it was put together on an assembly line using television's cookie-cutter versions of images from our national past.
And then there's Poitier. For all the epic scenes of torture, death and violence, the film's finest moments involve Smith in quiet conversations with his lover, Drusilla (Taylor), and the young Native American played by Wirth. The film's real power is in their words, as they talk about who they are and where they see the country heading.
"Children of the Dust" could have been a great mini-series, if the filmmakers had trusted the words instead of visual cliches.