Network television has something to prove this year: that it can make movies better than cable. And that means better viewing options for the audience in this final weekend of the first major "sweeps" ratings month of the season. Audience ratings taken in November will help determine future advertising rates on network row. And instead of cheap, women-in-jeopardy or disease-of-the-month movies this weekend, CBS and ABC have films -- a Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Anne Tyler's "Saint Maybe" and a remake of "Rear Window" starring Christopher Reeve -- that are better than the best HBO has to offer: Stanley Tucci in tonight's "Winchell," a docudrama on the life of gossip Walter Winchell. Before you declare network television a dinosaur, think back to how much you enjoyed NBC's "The Temptations," or tune in to "Saint Maybe" or "Rear Window" tomorrow night. The beast of broadcasting is fighting for its life, and that's good news for us.
'Window' not Hitchcock. So what?
The most important thing to know about Christopher Reeve's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is that it isn't really "Rear Window."
That's not to condemn it. In fact, it is a fascinating film in its own right, in the way that it takes all we know about Reeve and his tragic equestrian accident and weds it to the Cornell Woolrich story about a man who has taken to watching his neighbors through a courtyard window and becomes convinced one of them is a murderer. In that sense, ABC's "Rear Window" is an engaging, entertaining and clever piece of post-modern, pop-celebrity voyeurism.
But standards are standards, and I need to make this clear before dealing with the remake on its own terms: If I were to compare ABC's made-for-TV version airing tomorrow night with the 1954 classic point by point, it would not be a very happy experience for Reeve and Company. I went back and rented the original to see if memory was casting a false, rose-colored glow over it, and I found that Hitchcock's "Rear Window" is even better than I remembered.
We use the adjective "luminous" to describe every second actress these days, from Keri Russell of "Felicity" to Lisa Kudrow of "Friends." But Grace Kelly was luminous, and the first glimpse we get of her -- a tight shot of her face from the point of view of a waking Jimmy Stewart -- defines movie glamour.
Daryl Hannah plays an updated, briefcase-toting version of Kelly for ABC and, well, let's just say she's better than she was in "Splash."
And there is nothing in the ABC version that starts to compare with the witty, biting, adult repartee between Stewart and his nurse, played by the brilliant Thelma Ritter. The nurse here is played with a Caribbean accent and some mild grousing by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.
So, why bother watching?
If you are a die-hard Hitchcock fan, maybe you shouldn't. But for anyone else, there is a lot to like in this film, especially what Eric Overmyer, of "Homicide: Life on the Street," has done with the screenplay.
On one level, he hooks us into the film by exploiting our voyeuristic interest in Reeve's personal story. Instead of opening in the apartment with a photographer (Stewart) in a wheelchair as Hitchcock did, this film opens with a auto accident in which an architect, Jason Kemp (Reeve), is seriously injured.
The first 10 minutes or so takes place in the hospital, as Kemp comes to grips with being a quadriplegic. The big scene is one in which one of his life-support tubes pops off the machine to which it is attached. Kemp gasps for breath as a nurse frantically searches for the problem. He is on death's door before the problem is fixed.
Those who have followed Reeve's recovery know this actually happened to him.
The speech a doctor makes about Kemp's "work ethic" in rehabilitation, as well as Kemp's conviction that a cure will be found, will also sound very familiar to Reeve's fans.
Then, there's another level of voyeurism. Once back in his apartment, Kemp starts spying through the windows of people in a building behind his. The building and the windows here are considerably different from Hitchcock's. In the remake, they look much more like giant television screens, which Kemp passively watches alone in the dark.
We watch Kemp on our TV screen as he watches his neighbors on his. His voyeurism into their personal lives and struggles is paralleled by our voyeurism of Reeve. By the time you realize all of this, you are too deeply involved to walk away without knowing how it's going to end for Kemp and his colleague (Hannah).
The ending is not a tidy one. But, then, our post-modern world is a far messier place than the one Stewart and Kelly graced in 1954.
"Call me Citizen Voyeur," Kemp says at one point in the film.
Call the remake of "Rear Window" a victory for Reeve both as executive producer and star. But, be warned, it's not Hitchcock.
Where: ABC (WMAR, Channel 2)
When: Tomorrow, 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.
I would watch Stanley Tucci in anything -- even "Winchell."
That's not to say the HBO docu-drama about the life of gossip columnist Walter Winchell is bad. It is just that nothing angers me more than made-for-TV movies that are dishonest in their dealings with history.
"Winchell" is a one-dimensional whitewash of Winchell's life based on a book by a man who worked for 30 years as one of Winchell's ghostwriters. The book, "Walter Winchell: His Life and Times," by Herman Klurfeld, and the HBO film by Paul Mazursky are apologies for a life lived badly.
With a career that ran from the 1920s into the 1960s and an estimated audience of 50 million for newspaper columns and radio broadcasts at the height of his success, Winchell was one of the most influential journalists of the century. He also was one of the most dangerous and unprincipled -- a demagogue with a typewriter and microphone.
His worst hours were in the 1950s, when he got into bed with Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and allowed his column and broadcasts to be used to label anyone a communist. A number of people victimized by red-baiting journalists like Winchell during that era committed suicide as a result.
You won't see anything about the horrible consequences of Winchell's work during those dark days in 'Winchell." And, without that context, you have no idea why Klurfeld (Paul Giamatti) is so passionate in telling his boss to quit playing ball with McCarthy. That's the other thing about this film based on Klurfeld's book: It spends so much time telling us what a decent and wonderful guy Klurfeld was.
Who cares? Let Klurfeld tell it to a shrink.
The film also has stylistic problems. Executive producer Rob Fried says one of his priorities was to re-create the high-society culture of New York from the '20s to World War II -- the Broadway, Stork and 21 Club world in which Winchell worked.
He and Mazursky do give a sense of the energy, glamour and high style of that world. And it's pretty to look at. But it's all appearances -- a look -- and it is so stylized that the film feels more like "Guys and Dolls" than history.
In the end, that theatrical feeling of all artifice and no soul even infects Tucci's performance. While it's a joy to watch Tucci become this character in term of such physical characteristics as the famous staccato vocal delivery -- "Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea" -- when the film ends, you realize you have no idea who Winchell really was or why he made the choices he made. Tucci gives us a Winchell with no center.
The script is probably more to blame than Tucci. The screenplay explains almost everything Winchell does as the result of a poor childhood and a horse kicking Winchell in the head when he was a boy. Such psychology is almost laughable.
The best thing I can say about "Winchell" is that I hope HBO paid Tucci lots of money for starring in it and that he uses the dough to make another great independent film like "Big Night."
When: 8 to 10 tonight
Where: HBO cable channel
"Saint Maybe" is absolutely the best made-for-television movie I've seen this season.
Quiet and daring, original and traditional, mainstream and eccentric, this Hallmark Hall of Fame adaptation of an Anne Tyler novel of the same name is one of the most honest and intelligent celebrations of family that has ever been done on network TV.
It's about values, morality and the life of the spirit, and it is so good that it rescues those concepts from the spinmeisters of the left and the right who have distorted and debased them for political gain. Like the novel, CBS' "Saint Maybe" reconnects the words to moments that are meaningful, moving, humane, quirky and real.
What a cast. Edward Herrmann, Blythe Danner, Mary-Louise Parker and Thomas McCarthy are all part of the Bedloe clan, a middle-class, suburban Baltimore family that looks greeting-card perfect and Plymouth-Rock solid on the surface. Underneath, though, there are tensions, uncertainty and insecurity.
When Danny Bedloe (Jeffrey Nordling) marries an offbeat and somewhat mysterious woman (Mary-Louise Parker) with two young children, his 17-year-old brother, Ian (McCarthy), starts to have suspicions. Throw a little unacknowledged brotherly rivalry and never-spoken sexual tension onto the smoldering suspicions a confused 17-year-old, and you have the makings of an incident that can tear a family apart.
The main story line of "Saint Maybe" is the spiritual journey of Ian after his actions lead to tragedy for the Bedloes. The journey includes joining a York Road storefront congregation called the Church of the Second Chance, dropping out of college, learning a trade and raising three children whom he did not father. Ian is Tyler's Saint Maybe. And, while you can't expect the same kind of inspired ambiguity in a network holiday movie that you do in a Tyler novel, the screenplay by Robert W. Lenski ("What the Deaf Man Heard" and "Breathing Lessons") respects our intelligence by giving us enough room to use our own moral compasses in judging Ian and the other characters.
The script takes Ian from 17 to 38 years old, and McCarthy manages to be convincing at both ends of the dial. It's not about makeup, either. The script forces you to concentrate on the essence -- some might say character or even soul -- of Ian once he starts his pilgrimage toward personal responsibility. That essence is not defined by years; it is a kind of force that you feel -- a small-screen version, perhaps, of what filmgoers felt when they saw Jimmy Stewart in a Frank Capra film.
The supporting players have some of the best moments. Take Herrmann; I started the film thinking I was absolutely burned out on him. With all his PBS documentary work (Ken Burns' "Frank Lloyd Wright"), he has become the voice of white, male, middle-class authority. And I was just plain sick of seeing that same persona in all those car commercials.
But while that persona is the surface of Doug Bedloe, sweater-clad patriarch, Herrmann plays against it, taking us inside the man to show his insecurity and pain.
There is a scene in which Doug comes upon Beastie, the family dog, who has died in his sleep. In the lonely hours of pre-dawn, Doug and Ian bury Beastie in the back yard.
Doug never says a word, but Herrmann uses every gesture -- from the first stroke of the shovel to the choking sobs that finally overtake him -- to make us feel Doug's anguish not just for the dog but for all the loss he and the other Bedloes have suffered. What could have come off as sentimental or even schmaltzy is transformed into a moment that is profound and deeply moving.
In a way, the whole film is like that. It is talking about very spiritual matters -- redemption, forgiveness and, above all, faith. Yet you never feel it is being preachy or holy-holy about it. Its treatment of the Rev. Emmett (Denis O'Hare), of the Church of the Second Chance, is refreshingly original in that he is pictured as neither saint nor nut -- the usual madonna-whore dichotomy for TV depictions of such ministers. He's simply a guy whose words help Ian get started on the hard work of living a moral life.
Any complaints about "Saint Maybe"? Just a teeny one from us little folks in Baltimore: WHY WAS IT FILMED IN CHARLOTTE? The script is full of Tyler's Baltimore references, but you will not see Baltimore. What you will see are things like Ian and his date leaving a movie theater with a sign on it that says "The Senator," and you can tell in half a second that it is not the Senator.
But don't let such relatively trivial inaccuracies of local color blind you to the great truths that "Saint Maybe" has to offer. Network films shown in sweeps ratings months are not supposed to be this winning and wise. Don't be foolish enough to miss it.
When: 9 p.m.-11 p.m. tomorrow
, Where: CBS (WJZ, Channel 13)