From the first time we see him, as a snot-nosed little kid bullying a waiter, until many years later, when he`s lying in a hospital bed ravaged by AIDS and railing against his doctors and any number of high-profile ghosts who frequent his room, Roy Cohn fascinates.
Few figures of the 20th Century have cut such a strange path. Cohn was a snake slithering along the corridors of American politics and power.
In ”Citizen Cohn,” a fascinatingly frank HBO original movie premiering at 7 p.m. Saturday on the cable network, the lawyer is captured by James Woods with all his malevolent mores and in all his self-loathing manipulations.
The actor`s performance is boldly breathtaking, for he gives the character a devious drive that is compelling and horrific.
The smug sneer that appears on his face when, as the prosecuting attorney in the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, he hears the guilty verdict, is symbolic of the evil later manifested when Cohn acted as the chief counsel on Sen. Joseph McCarthy`s communist-hunting Senate committee and became a power-brokering, rule-bending Manhattan lawyer.
His life was one of intimidation fueled by arrogance and paranoia. His gallery of cronies included gangsters, millionaires, presidents and such celebs as Walter Winchell (who became an on-air public relations tool for Cohn) and Cardinal Francis Spellman.
A dinner scene features Cohn nibbling off Winchell`s and Spellman`s plates. The two companions watch in fascinated horror at Cohn`s behavior. They say nothing.
It was probably because Cohn`s arrogance was so natural and genuine that he was able to so successfully bully his way around rules and morals.
The film makes a case that his overbearing mother, played with ruthless energy by Lee Grant, was a primary instrument in his arrogance, while his father, a liberal New York State Supreme Court judge, sat quietly on the sidelines.
The Cohn this movie displays is monstrous. To see him berate witnesses before the House Un-American Activities Committee is to see a modern day Torquemada. But he could also play the toady when necessary.
One can sense his quiet contempt for the booze-swilling McCarthy (Joe Don Baker), even while bootlicking. And his relationship with J. Edgar Hoover (Pat Hingle) showed the most obsequious side of Cohn.
The film covers events episodically, in the form of flashbacks from Cohn`s hospital bed. It`s a cagey if risky method, but even more chancy is the use of ghostly visitors to that room-a parade of past associations commenting on Cohn`s actions and berating him.
But screenwriter David Franzoni, adapting from Nick Von Hoffman`s biography of the same name, and director Frank Pierson manage these many cinematic gymnastics without stumbling.
Ethel Rosenberg is one of the ghosts, demanding, ”Why did you do it? You were a Jew who persecuted Jews, a homosexual who persecuted homosexuals. Why?”
”I did it for the headlines,” Cohn answers.
The film does not shy away from Cohn`s homosexuality, nor that of Hoover. It shies away from nothing in giving us a vilifying portrait and in giving Cohn the unflattering film biography he probably deserved.
– Pretty people do not always make a lousy show.
The proof is on display in the style and the substance of ”2000 Malibu Road,” a new CBS series that heretofore was lumped, not without some justification, with such other pretty-people parades as ”Beverly Hills, 90210,” ”Freshman Dorm,” ”Class of `96” and ”Melrose Place.”
It stars a bunch of beauties-Lisa Hartman, Jennifer Beals, Drew Barrymore and, less beauty than beast, Tuesday Knight-as unlikely roommates in the sumptuous beach house of the title address. Around them flit the requisite number of flat-bellied, pearly toothed boys.
But the special two-hour movie (8 p.m. Sunday, WBBM-Ch. 2) that precedes the 8 p.m. Wednesday series debut displays a tougher and more biting and satisfying manner than anyone might have expected.
It`s Hartman`s house. She plays Jade O`Keefe, a high-priced hooker who, having given up her $2,000-a-stand trade, needs to take in boarders to pay the rent.
She takes in Perry Quinn (Beals), an attorney; an aspiring actress named Lindsay Rule (Barrymore); and her sister Joy (Knight), a protective sort, versed in the New Age arts and quite adept at some of the darker ones, too.
There`s much transpiring in the film. There`s a murder, some Hollywood hanky-panky and a number of budding romances. Each of the characters is neatly drawn and the plots overlap like layers in a tasty dessert.
Executive producer-director Joel Schumacher, the master stylist of such films as ”Lost Boys” and ”Flatliners,” brings a distinctive look and feel to the show and its characters.
Working with the script by another executive producer, Terry Louise Fisher, who co-created ”L.A. Law,” Schumacher has created an environment in which characters and events are believable.
None of them is more interesting than Joy, the self-proclaimed ”fat sister.” Calling everyone ”honey bunny,” she is devious in the extreme-lying, cheating, blackmailing and generally as Machiavellian as Alexis Carrington and as unstable as any of Stephen King`s sad souls.
Make no mistake, ”2000 Malibu Road” is closer in sensibility and sexual charge to ”Dynasty” than it is to ”L.A. Law.” Still, it`s polished and engaging and the classiest new address the networks have had in some time.
– In the wake of the success of the play and the big-screen version of
”Driving Miss Daisy” there was much talk about its inevitable TV life.
Here it is, not in series doses but as a one-time-only deal. Although one could not ask for more capable stars than Robert Guillaume as chauffeur Hoke and Joan Plowright as Miss Daisy-or a better stage-to-TV adapter than the original playwright, Alfred Uhry-one certainly might have expected a more lively vehicle than ”Driving Miss Daisy,” airing at 7 p.m. Friday on CBS-Ch. 2.
There are some small, quirky charms here-and that delightful movie theme music-but not in sufficient amount to make a smile or touch a nerve. This comedy just sits there, with Guillaume falling back on old habits so often that he turns Hoke into a Southern-fried Benson.
– ”The Living Room Campaign,” the latest and quite timely edition of
”Investigative Reports” (8 p.m. Friday on A&E cable), explores the impact of political commercials. Well organized, it drifts back to the Eisenhower years, when candidates for high office first started selling themselves with the help of advertising gurus.
We get images of some memorable spots, words from such pros as Roger Ailes and Bob Squier, and rather cogent analysis of what makes negative ads work and of the subtleties of positive (i.e. self-promotional) spots.
As the commercial action-good and certainly bad-heats up in this season`s presidential race, this program is a worthy and incisive primer.
