I think Bill Clinton should find time to watch ”Grass Roots,” a two-part mini-series airing at 8 p.m. Monday and Tuesday on NBC-Ch. 5. He might feel better, for the political shenanigans and dirty dealing taking place in
”Grass Roots” make Clinton`s recent gantlet look like a stroll.
Listen to this: ”That`s not a civilized question, but getting elected is not a civilized process.”
That`s lawyer and senatorial candidate Will Lee (Corbin Bernsen), responding to a reporter`s query about his alleged homosexuality.
That`s the way things are supposed to be in a mini-series from the factory of executive producer Aaron Spelling. For those who loved his
”Dynasty,” ”Hart to Hart” or ”Charlie`s Angels,” ”Grass Roots”
offers a familiar feast: sex of various kinds, racial hatred, murder, suicide and other dubious delights.
Lee is at the center.
He is defending a young white man accused of raping and murdering a black teen. He`s running for the Senate because his political mentor, a bourbon-swilling senior senator, has taken ill. He`s got a girlfriend (Mel Harris)
whom he has to see on the sly because she`s a CIA bigwig. He has a male aide who hangs himself because he`s in love with Lee. He`s also watchful of a white supremacist gang bumping off folks in Georgia.
The mad muscle for that gang is one Sgt. Perkerson, chillingly played by John Glover. When we first meet him, he`s unrecognizable under a huge nose, protruding ears and other disfiguring makeup. After plastic surgery, he`s back to looking like the Glover we know, but he`s no less weird.
Glover is TV`s great risk taker. Given the chilly acting of Bernsen, Harris, Katherine Helmond (as the senior senator`s daffy sister), Reginald VelJohnson (as a cop on Perkerson`s tail), Joanna Cassidy (as a sleazy journalist) and Rod Taylor (as a right-wing nut), Glover is as impressive as Michael Jordan would be playing against high school kids.
As far as mini-series go, this one is without any pretensions to art. For fans of this sort of thing, it`s an awful lot of fun.
– If I were a character in a movie and in that movie had to take a plane ride, I`d feel a lot safer if I could see Charlton Heston in the pilot`s seat. He`s such a steady presence.
Although the last time Heston occupied such a seat was in the silly
”Airport `75,” he justifies my faith in the surprisingly effective
”Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232” (8 p.m. Monday, ABC-Ch. 7). He`s a rock in the cockpit.
This is much better than the average airplane picture. It`s based on the 1989 disaster when a jet en route from Denver to Chicago was forced to make a crash landing in Sioux City, Iowa. The videotape of the fiery landing was a TV news staple for days after the crash, and is used here as well, for the sake of video verite.
One of the most refreshing things about this film is that it eschews the personal life of passengers. We do not get to see the familiar cliche crowd.
In fact, we see no passengers at all until after the crash and ensuing fireball. When we do meet them, they are walking out of a corn field, as dazed as the characters who walked out of the spaceship near the end of ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The scene setting that precedes the crash mostly involves the turf battles between James Coburn, as a grizzled fire chief, and Richard Thomas, as the politically savvy head of the county`s Disaster and Emergency Services. They squabble and snipe. Coburn calls Thomas a ”a big-mouthed yuppie.”
But when the crisis comes, all concerned perform with courage and energetic harmony. And the way in which director Lamont Johnson relates the crash chaos manages the tricky task of being exciting without being exploitative.
In the end, about 110 of the plane`s 296 passengers perished. But captain, crew and the rescue forces are heroes: 186 survived.
The reason has more to do with ground forces than pilot, but Heston is wonderfully cool. You`ve just got to admire the pluck of a guy who, in answer to the question, ”Do you think you can land this thing?” looks straight ahead and says, ”We`ll give it heck.”
– ”Duel of Hearts” (7, 9 and 11 p.m. Monday, Turner Network Television) is a paperback romance novel brought to costumed, and badly acted, life.
Taken from the novel by that maven of mushy romanticism, Barbara Cartland, the film tells the story of the noblewoman (Alison Doody) who poses as a servant to be near the man she loves (Benedict Taylor), who is being framed for murder by evil Michael York and more evil Geraldine Chaplin.
The film has some fancy bodices, a Gypsy or two, a lot of horses, the estimable actress Bille Whitelaw, castles and the familiar madness, greed and murder subplots that Cartland fans and Gothic lovers know so well and, inexplicably, love so much.
