Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams

By Frank Rich

American Short Story, PBS, beginning Feb. 4

Whenever PBS produces its own dramatic programs, it tries to be all things to all its constituencies. There is almost always a dash of intellectual pretension (to please the grant-bestowing foundations), a splash of uplift (to humor the corporate sponsors) and a rustle of period costumes (to attract the BBC fans). The result is often tiresome television, but occasionally there is a glorious exception. Such is the case with American Short Story. Though this returning series satisfies all the dreary institutional demands of PBS, it also provides remarkably sophisticated entertainment.

The man behind American Short Story is Robert Geller, the same producer who transformed some John Updike stories into a fine network movie, Too Far to Go, last year. This time out he has created eight new movies based on stories by such diverse writers as Thurber, Hawthorne and Twain. The lead-off shows, adapted from Ring Lardner's The Golden Honeymoon and Willa Gather's Paul's Case, are standouts. Geller has an uncommon knack for translating literature to the screen.

The Golden Honeymoon would seem an especially hazardous undertaking. Like many Lardner stories, this account of an elderly couple's Florida vacation is told in '20s slang by an inarticulate character. The narrator here is a gabby, boorish husband who never really grasps that he is describing a near fatal crisis in his 50-year marriage. As he prattles lightly about painful events, the gap between his words and deeds becomes the basis for a classic black comedy.

The TV version re-creates the story's ironies without ever resorting to voice-over narration. The setting is a sunny resort out of an oldtime picture book, but the drama is full of ominous shadows. Noel Black's unsentimental direction captures Lardner's subtle point of view, and so does the controlled acting of James Whitmore and Teresa Wright. When this couple is stung by bitterness, jealousy and regret, they never quite know what is happening: instead of stormy scenes, Whitmore and Wright offer flickers of anguish.

Director Lament Johnson's Paul's Case is also a tragedy ripe with '20s detail. Paul is a dreamy high school kid who yearns to escape wintry Pittsburgh for the Broadway high life he has read about in Sunday supplements. Once he achieves his goal--by stealing money--his ambitions are easily satisfied. He takes a suite at the Waldorf, buys clothes and eavesdrops on the swells. Unfortunately, he has no idea how to turn his briefly realized fantasy into a lasting reality.

Eric Roberts is a perfect Paul. His eyes have that "certain hysterical brilliancy" Gather described; he is exactly the kind of pretty, wide-eyed dilettante who, in 1980, would drift un noticed through the underbelly of New York show business. In Paul's Case, the young man commits suicide--but not before the audience has felt the full force of Gather's lonely, haunting vision.

--Frank Rich

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