Late January is something of a dumping ground, and, sure enough, three television movies-one from NBC, ABC and CBS-get dumped on Sunday night, all pretty bad, despite occasional spots of relief.
“A Family Secret: Incident in a Small Town” (8 p.m. Sunday, CBS-Ch. 2), is third in a series of television movies teaming Walter Matthau and Harry Morgan as grumpy old men who are also post-World War II attorneys.
As always, they’re fun to watch: Matthau’s rumpled, improvisational air is a perfect bookend to Morgan’s stoic, puritannical stiffness, honed in his years on “Dragnet.” Film director Delbert Mann (“Marty”), who also oversaw the second TV movie in this series, directs again, and he can take credit for the film’s lazy, summertime evocation of postwar lull, along with its sunny images of undisturbed vistas of farmland greenery in late 1940s Plainfield, Ill., which, sadly, had to be recaptured, according to the credits, by location shooting in modern rural Ontario.
The implausible courtroom plot is riddled with holes. This time Matthau and Morgan are dispatched to Plainfield, where Morgan’s alienated daughter, Lily (Stephanie Zimbalist), is in trouble. She and her father severed all ties when she had a child out of wedlock 13 years ago; now the boy’s abusive, unstable father has returned from combat and threatens all kinds of mischief, enough that Lily swallows her pride and asks her father for help.
After Matthau and Morgan arrive, an off-screen skirmish occurs, and the troublemaking father is slain. Lily says she killed him in self-defense, and she goes on trial, with Matthau handling the case. The resulting plot twists tend to negate each other; Lily’s reason for holding back vital info turns out to be irrelevant given the identity of the actual killer.
The show flirts with too many themes, tossing in father-daughter and mother-son conflicts, not to mention hints of a May-December romance for Matthau and the woman prosecutor, without enough time to focus successfully on any of them. The only real virtue is Matthau’s ambling shuffle throughout, a folksy, soothing afternoon walk with the lovable old coot next door.
The ABC venture, “French Silk” (8 p.m. Sunday, ABC-Ch. 7), doesn’t have Matthau, but it does have Susan Lucci, everyone’s favorite annual daytime Emmy runner-up. Here she plays the New Orleans head of a sexy lingerie company that’s the target of a crusading evangelist. The evangelist is murdered in the opening moments, and she’s instantly suspect, though New Orleans homicide cop (Lee Horsley) can’t decide whether to interrogate her or take her to bed.
He does both, in a saga that thrives on sex, scandal and sensationalism. Shari Belafonte, as a high-priced model, is Lucci’s partner and having an affair with a New Orleans congressman.
All that gets entangled in the murder plot, along with Lucci’s southernly gothic fruitcake of a mother (abandoned years ago by her fiance and a Delta Dawn nut case ever since). The location shots of New Orleans are colorful and leisurely, including a romantic stroll near a moonlit Cafe Du Monde.
The murder plot is transparent and silly, leading one to shudder at the thought of “Death in Small Doses,” another ABC movie scheduled for this slot, but snatched and replaced at the last minute.
“In the Line of Duty: The Price of Vengeance” (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC-Ch. 5) is part of another series of TV movies, the seventh installment in a string of fact-based films about law enforcers slain on the job. This one focuses on detective Tom Williams (Michael Gross), who becomes the target of a vicious, ruthless robber kingpin named Johnnie Moore (Brent Jennings), whose gang of fulltime assistants are fond of leaving no witnesses, no matter how minor the robbery.
Certainly this movie resonates with chilling evidence of burgeoning American crime. Moore is a kind of high-tech Al Capone, not only shooting elderly couples who readily hand over their cash, but maintaining his own in-house sting and surveillance operation, following detective Williams as he takes his kid to school and then planning his assassination with scientific precision. Even from jail, during the trial, he’s able to call some of the shots, subtly threatening star witnesses and almost managing an acquital.
But in its effort to make sure the good guys are distinct from the bad guys, director Dick Lowry and writer Keith Ross Leckie go a little too far in painting one side as saintly and the other as Satanic. There’s a cipher quality to Gross’ virtuous detective, to the angelic loyalty and love of his wife (the marvelous Mary Kay Place) and to the iron-fisted determination of his fellow officers (mainly Dean Stockwell) intent on avenging him.
The polished, refined Gross, too, seems a tad miscast as a policeman, more an aging college professor than believable robbery dick. Given the hard reality of courtroom proceedings many viewers now see daily on cable’s Court TV channel, the trial proceedings harken back to a time of stagey melodrama.
