A Little Corn, Lots of White House

By Frank Rich

Hepburn shines in revival, NBC creates Washington waxworks

The Corn Is Green (Jan. 29, CBS, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) is the latest collaboration of Katharine Hepburn and Director George Cukor, who have worked together off and on since A Bill of Divorcement in 1932. Theirs was one of the movies' great creative partnerships: in such films as Holiday, The Philadelphia Story and Adam's Rib, they set the standard for sophisticated light comedy in American pop culture. Unfortunately, The Corn Is Green does not play to Hepburn and Cukor's strengths. This made-for-TV movie, a new adaptation of Emlyn Williams' play, is mainstream sentimental drama. Hepburn plays Miss Moffat, a no-nonsense English schoolteacher who arrives in a poor Welsh town to educate young coal miners. Right away she finds a gifted pupil, Morgan Evans (Ian Saynor), whom she puts into strenuous training to compete for an Oxford scholarship. Despite a few unspectacular mishaps, a happy ending follows with all too deliberate speed.

Cukor stages the story well enough against lush Welsh landscapes, but there are very few openings for his usual flourishes of wit and romance. James Costigan's mechanical teleplay often italicizes plot developments; a second-half plot stratagem, in which Morgan fathers an illegitimate baby, comes across as crude turn-of-the-century melodrama. One also wonders why Costigan has not bothered to open up the play's naturally constricted action. When Morgan travels up to Oxford to take his exams, the audience expects to go with him: the Welsh boy's first encounter with upper-crust British intellectuals could be a both tense and amusing scene. But Costigan hasn't bothered to write it. Instead of dramatizing the events at Oxford, he has Morgan, once he returns home, recite what happened.

Despite these failings, The Corn Is Green at times is carried by the sheer force of the Hepburn-Saynor tutoring sessions. Saynor makes Morgan's transition from scruffy youth to literate gentleman seem fully credible. Hepburn, as always, is a handsome paragon of moral rectitude and common sense. When this actress commands the screen, who could dare turn away?

Backstairs at the White House (Mondays, starting Jan. 29, NBC) is the gaudiest illustration yet of why many TV viewers would rather undergo root-canal work than tune into downtrodden NBC. Intended as a keyhole view of 20th century American Presidents, this nine-hour miniseries quickly proves to be a trivialization of history. In lieu of incisive political drama or even licentious fun, NBC offers a cavalcade of boring anecdotes and a rogues' gallery of often laughable cameo performances. In Backstairs, power is not an aphrodisiac but a soporific.

The show appears to be an attempt to crossbreed Roots with Upstairs, Downstairs. It purports to tell the story of eight Administrations (from Taft's through Ike's) from the homely vantage point of Lillian Rogers Parks, a black maid whose bestselling 1961 memoir is the series' source material. Apart from an early and crippling bout with polio, Parks (Leslie Uggams) led a rather stable life. She met many famous people but played no role in great events.

Parks' White House experiences do not begin to fulfill their intended function as a civil rights parable. Her personal life does not contain enough turmoil to sustain even two hours of television time. The First Families, as presented here, are scarcely more fascinating. Too many of them come across as interchangeable ciphers modeled on sitcom couples of the '50s. Most of the Presidents are avuncular prattlers; the First Ladies run the household and often their husbands as well.

In the show's first five hours, the Chief Executives can mainly be told apart by their most mundane domestic foibles and the relative shrewishness of their wives. Taft (Victor Buono) ate too much. Wilson (Robert Vaughn) was cheap. Coolidge (Ed Flanders) kept animals in the White House, while Harding (George Kennedy) ordered toothpicks and spittoons for state dinners. Though the show's title promises a smattering of gossip, only that old whipping boy Harding receives less than reverential treatment. Instead of dirty linen, there's clean linen: in one scene we learn that Harry Truman (Harry Morgan) regularly laundered his own underwear! The attempts to humanize the Presidents are childish. Does it really tell us anything that Wilson once danced to Balling the Jack?

Though such fatuous footnotes are graphically dramatized in the show, large events whiz by. Buzz words like Teapot Dome or League of Nations or World War I turn up in dialogue with little explanation of their significance. Political debates rarely figure in the action. The only ideology in Backstairs emanates from the series' writers. The show unthinkingly promotes such stereotypes as an all-knowing black matriarch (Olivia Cole) and a raucous Irish maid (Helena Carroll).

Ironically, Backstairs might be more tolerable if it were at least effectively trashy television. But this show doesn't even rise to the level of juicy soap opera -- a must for any miniseries from I, Claudius to Washington: Behind Closed Doors. There are too many scenes of cooking, cleaning and dusting, not to mention list less chitchat in underlit rooms. ("Lord have mercy, I forgot to trim the President's other sideburn," says a White House barber in a typical example of Backstairs wit.) Only a sketchy attempt is made to re-create the nation's capital during the periods covered by the story. The one continuing dramatic conflict derives from the cardboard characterization of a mildly officious real-life housekeeper, Mrs. Jaffray (Cloris Leachman). Other wise, the show's major dramatic scenes all too often feature medical crises, which occur as regularly here as they do on Marcus Welby.

Some intermittent suspense is provided by the Backstairs makeup artists, whose work varies from serviceable (Buono's Taft) to rudimentary (Vaughn as Wilson) to outright ghoulish (John Anderson and Eileen Heckart as the Franklin Roosevelts). No matter how intriguing the cosmetics, however, the characters mostly remain lifeless: Backstairs at the White House might be more aptly titled Backstairs at Madame Tussaud's. -- Frank Rich

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