Worth the Wait

By RICHARD CORLISS

A TOWN LIKE ALICE

PBS, Sundays to Nov. 8,9p.m.

For decades, Australia's chief entertainment export was raw talent. The land of English immigrants was a billabong from which promising young artists, actors and singers lost little time in emigrating. Then, out of government grants and an informal consortium of gifted newcomers, there emerged an Australian film industry, which in the past decade has become the world's most vital national cinema, extravagantly creative, fiercely indigenous.

Now, some of those same film makers are bending their energies to improving the quality of Australian television, and programs from Down Under have started showing up in the U.S. The astringent soap opera Prisoner: Cell Block H broke the ice in 1980, but with the cleaver of melodrama. Then the mini-series Against the Wind, a saga about the settling of the Australian frontier, won critical applause and respectable ratings in syndication. No question; the Aussies were coming. With A Town Like Alice, the six-hour drama that opens Masterpiece Theater's eleventh season, they may have arrived.

It is quite a pedigree of raves and ratings that Alice brings with her. In Britain this summer, the series scored with the critics and drew an average of 30% of the audience, close to the record set by Roots and Holocaust. Back home it was something of a national event, averaging 70% of the audience in most major cities, and going as high as 75% in Adelaide.

Based on Nevil Shute's 1950 novel, the script by Tom Hegarty and Rosemary Anne Sisson begins in Malaya in 1941. An English typist named Jean Paget (Helen Morse) is 20 and moseying through a life of blissful boredom on a cricket pitch when the Japanese invade the country.

They force the women into an aimless odyssey, trudging on blistered feet from one village to another. Many die; all lose their imperial hauteur. But Jean shows her spine and sinew, arguing with her captors, keeping order in her depleted ranks. She is man enough for every adversity--and woman enough for Joe Harman (Bryan Brown), a raffish Aussie ranch hand whom she meets on the road. Joe is strong, abrupt, resourceful, a right charmer who falls for Jean but will not make a move because he believes her to be married. After the Japanese catch him stealing some chickens for Jean and the other women, Joe is tortured and left to die.

This is the story Jean relates, back in London after the war, to an aging solicitor (Gordon Jackson) who is surprised to find himself in love with this remarkable woman. He will help Jean and hinder Joe as they try to re-establish contact over the years and across the British Empire.

Made for $1.4 million, Alice looks as handsome as any Heaven's Gate (with location shooting in London, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand). At times, Producer Henry Crawford and Director David Stevens linger indulgently over this spectacular sunset, that dramatic moment. Alice might have had twice the impact at half the length. But there are rewards for its attenuation: the viewer gets to share six hours with some remarkable actors.

Gordon Jackson, best known as Hudson, the starchy belowstairs patriarch of Upstairs, Downstairs, can mull a line of dialogue as if it were a mouthful of old port; but it's best just to watch the life and color seep out of that creased and kindly face as he says goodbye to the woman he dares not tell he loves. Brown, who co-starred in Breaker Morant, has fine, sharp features and a sharper tongue and wit; he conveys an assured, untamable masculinity. In Hollywood he could be the new Gary Cooper; in Australia he can be himself.

Brown is the diamond-in-the-rough to Helen Morse's star sapphire. Dark-eyed, long-necked, plain and serenely beautiful, Morse has some of the aristocratic reserve of Jane Alexander, and a lot of Vanessa Redgrave's passionate intelligence.

Whether as a wily survivor of war or a kind of Harvey Girl entrepreneur of the Outback, Morse acts, behaves, reposes splendidly. And when she and Brown finally declare their mutual love, the Queensland night sends up skyrockets.

"Was it worth the wait?" she asks Joe, who grins and grunts, "Whadda you reckon!" His reply might serve as the viewer's response to Helen Morse and the best of A Town Like Alice. --By Richard Corliss

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