You may not recognize venerable villain Jack Palance in “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” a snow-melting CBS holiday movie premiering at 7 p.m. Tuesday on WBBM-Ch. 2.
Palance, whose evil glory has been on full display in such TV classics as “Dracula” and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” is all smiles in this production.
In “Home,” Palance is completely out of character as the sweet, lovable Bob, but at times it looks as if he can’t completely shake his legacy of playing menacing characters.
Bob is getting “scarier every year,” according to Jilly Greiser (Ashley Gorrell), the man’s granddaughter.
“Bob? Scary? You must be thinking of somebody else,” Mike (Robert Hays of “Airplane!”) tells his daughter about her grandfather, whom they’re going to see for Christmas.
Jilly later tells her grandfather, “I used to be scared of you.”
“Sometimes I am kind of grizzly,” Bob says with a wan smile.
Palance even says “Merry Christmas” in a slightly chilling whisper.
Bob and Mike are from tiny St. Nicholas, Iowa, which was voted one of the top 10 towns with a population under 1,500. Mike is the local hero made good, a star athlete and all-around good guy who went on to become a hotshot surgeon in Minneapolis.
But Mike also is grieving over the death of his wife four years before, a tragedy that affects him so much that he can no longer function in the operating room. Thus, he reasons that the trip back home might do him some good.
But St. Nicholas has sinister plans in store for its Mike. Okay, they’re not so sinister, but with someone like Palance around, you’re never really sure.
The town needs a doctor to take over for the town physician who recently passed away. Without a replacement, St. Nicholas’ hospital will close, putting the town’s health care in jeopardy. In the meantime, the facility is being run by the town mayor (perennial television fixture Ann Jillian), who doubles as a veterinarian.
“She’s mighty good at stitching people up,” Bob says, although he jokingly adds that “people are a little leery about letting her work on them, being as how her idea of what to do for a broken leg is euthanasia.”
The mayor/vet also happens to be Mike’s old high school girlfriend, who definitely wants him back in town to run the hospital. It also helps that Jillian is too busy to be attached.
Meanwhile, the entire town, hot for a new doc, is killing Mike with kindness: Various slack-jawed townfolk shower him with stories about what a good kid he was; he’s getting free meals left and right; and he’s chosen to hit the switch to officially light St. Nicholas’ Christmas tree (which is the only indication, besides the title, that this movie has anything to do with the holidays).
If you know your yule-time flicks, you know how everything turns out in the end.
For Palance, it wasn’t the pat climax that turned him onto “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” but the gentleness of the piece. But he needed a little help before he was convinced the part of Bob was right for him. He passed the script along to his daughter for her advice.
“She said, `You’ve got to do it,’ ” Palance said during a telephone conversation. “She loved it . . . there’s an awful lot of warmth, she said. A lot of warmth and tenderness. And just wonderful family relationships.”
If things had turned out right, Palance could have had a double-whammy for the joyous holiday season: He’s in a feature-film version of “A Christmas Carol” set in the Wild West, with Palance returning to his villainous ways as a cowboy Ebenezer Scrooge, but the movie’s release has been delayed.
“I did see it; it does work well,” he says. “I think it needs a little sharpening in the cutting, but they’ll certainly have time enough to do that.” Palance says the movie should be out this time next year.
– Where’s the remote: Where exactly did the Christmas tree come from? Why is mistletoe an aphrodisiac? What’s up with fruitcake? These and other holiday lore (well, maybe not the mystery of the fruit cake) will be explored in “Christmas Unwrapped,” a History Channel special with CBS’ Harry Smith, which airs at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
– “Ed Bradley on Assignment,” an occasional series with the veteran “60 Minutes” reporter, kicks off at 9 p.m. Tuesday on Channel 2 with an examination of Grand Bois, La., a small town that believes it’s being poisoned by a toxic waste facility operated by the oil industry.
– How “The Tom Show’s” Tom Arnold was named grand marshal of the Hollywood Christmas Parade is anyone’s guess. Of course, that it happened in Tinseltown is a clue. In any case, the annual star-studded parade will be televised at 7 p.m. Tuesday on WGN-Ch. 9.
