`Race to Freedom: The Underground Railroad” is a gripping, hair-raising account of that historical wonder, one of the more harrowing and uplifting stories of the struggle for freedom prior to the Civil War.
Actor Tim Reid, who serves as executive producer on this film (premiering in simultaneous telecasts at 7 p.m. Saturday over cable’s Family Channel and BET) and takes a cameo as ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, is right when he says the story of the railroad is underexposed. Because of its secretive nature, much remains a mystery, including any exact estimates of how many actually slipped into freedom.
The railroad was a covert, loosely connected network of sympathizers who helped escort and sequester runaway slaves as they made their way to Canada, a requisite mecca after passage of the notorious Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed for the recapture of escaped slaves, even in free states in the American North.
The railroad was never the streamlined, automatic enterprise sometimes suggested by cursory history texts. The journey was fraught with gaps, uncertainties, deadly gulps of treachery and no particular route or orderly mechanisms. Anything could go wrong along the way and often did.
This movie overview is well-acted and suspenseful in relating the plight of four North Carolina slaves who are helped by a Canadian ornithologist who insinuates himself into their master’s graces. They face capture at every turn once they take their midnight leave, unable even to build fires to cook their wild rabbits, and scourged along the way by everything from bounty hunters to rattlesnakes.
Though sometimes simplistic in characterization, “Race to Freedom” makes for a moving, exciting historical melodrama, a saga of our history steeped in both extraordinary evil and virtue. Janet Bailey and Courtney B. Vance head a solid cast as young lovers among the slave quartet barely overcoming their trek’s innumerable obstacles. (Part of the time, Bailey, whose character becomes separated from Vance’s, masquerades as a corpse, hiding in a pine box aboard a freight train.) In addition to Douglass, Harriet Tubman (the tireless “Moses” of the railroad) and abolitionist Alexander Ross are among the real-life characters portrayed.
– Another nod to Black History Month arrives in the form of “Presenting Mr. Frederick Douglass,” an installment of “Bill Moyers’ Journal” airing at 10 p.m. Friday on PBS-Ch. 11.
The program presents actor Fred Morsell delivering one of Douglass’ actual speeches, this one occurring in 1894, a year before his death and a time when resurgent white supremacy had resulted in some 2,000 lynchings.
Morsell’s performance-taped in the same Washington, D.C., Metropolitan A.M.E. Church where Douglass himself gave the speech nearly 100 years ago-brings to life Douglass’ gift for detailing great horror in beautiful, alliterative rhetoric.
“A crime that awakens the intensest abhorrence,” Douglass calls the atrocities, though he uses the occasion to craft his vision of how black Americans should move forward with their freedom. A scholarly, low-key enterprise for television, “Presenting Mr. Frederick Douglass” is mostly a lone actor, filmed plainly and without video adornment, engaging in a somewhat lost art-the high-flown style of American oratory that reached a kind of pinnacle with its 19th-Century practitioners.
There are no charts or colorful graphics; just Douglass, his history and his gifted way of embellishing forceful argument with glorious language.
– “Hart to Hart: Home Is Where the Hart Is” (8 p.m. Friday, NBC-Ch. 5) reunites Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner in what at times resembles a cross between a PBS “Mystery” and a small-town, Gothic Stephen King thriller.
Jennifer Hart (Powers), with her husband (Wagner) tagging along, returns to her hometown, a small coastal fishing village, after the mysterious death of a beloved old friend (Maureen O’Sullivan, “Tarzan’s” original Jane and Mia Farrow’s mother). Kingman’s Ferry turns out to have all sorts of secrets and twisted characters, including a village idiot who may hold the answer to the murders and a police chief who may be out to stifle the law rather than uphold it.
Atmospheric and off the beaten path, “Home” is a beautifully photographed mystery, but one with a slow pace and a lot of predictable turns. Powers and Wagner, at least, rekindle their chemistry, ably served by the likes of Roddy McDowall (as a Dickensian town attorney), Howard Keel and Lionel Sanders.
– “I Know My Son Is Alive” (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC-Ch. 5) is a somewhat sensationalistic thriller starring real-life husband-and-wife Corbin Bernsen and Amanda Pays as a couple whose infant disappears.
Hints of some mysterious intruder go all but unaccepted by everyone but the frightened wife herself, who insists someone is playing tricks on her. When the baby finally disappears, everyone assumes she is a baby killer suffering from severe postpartum depression.
There are all sorts of other suspects, including a neighbor who is severely depressed after suffering two miscarriages, and a strange, live-in baby-sitter.
The picture relies a bit too heavily on parental fears and somewhat callously concocts a routine mystery out of horrifying, primal terror, oversimplifying its topic in the process.
