A Domestic Reign of Terror

By Richard Zoglin

The Burning Bed, NBC, Oct. 8,9-11 p.m. E.D.T.

TV's issue-of-the-week parade marches on. Abortion, drunken driving, homosexuality, drug abuse, child pornography, rape, cancer: one by one, TV movies take up a topic, adorn it with stars and promote it as another prime-time breakthrough. As drama, these TV crusades have such familiar faults--too simplistic, too preachy, too ponderously "educational"--that a good one can easily get lost in the shuffle. In the case of The Burning Bed, that would be a shame.

The issue this time around is wife beating; the story, as usual, is based on a true incident. On March 9, 1977, Francine Hughes, a Michigan housewife, resorted to desperate action against the ex-husband who had beaten her repeatedly over more than a decade. As he lay sleeping in a drunken stupor, she poured gasoline around his bed, lit a match, packed the children into the car, and drove off as the house went up in flames. The TV movie, written by Rose Leiman Goldemberg from a book by Faith McNulty, tells the story of Francine's marriage, mostly in flashback, as she relates it to the attorney appointed to defend her on a murder charge.

What could easily have been routine marital soap opera becomes a domestic horror story of extraordinary power. The movie's biggest surprise is Farrah Fawcett, who gives a remarkably intense and believable performance as the battered wife. Her cover-girl face disfigured with cuts and bruises, the former Charlie's Angel movingly conveys both the helplessness and the courage of a woman trapped in a nightmare. As her husband, Paul LeMat reveals the flip side of the character he played in the 1980 movie Melvin and Howard. The lovable lout has turned into a dangerous brute; LeMat's subtle achievement is to s show that both are one. The rest of the cast, especially Richard Masur as Francine's bland, earnest, ultimately heroic attorney, is uniformly excellent.

Directed by Robert Greenwald (whose credits include the fine 1982 TV film In the Custody of Strangers), the movie avoids both sentimentality and sententiousness. Its portrait of a lower-middle-class marriage is as incisive and coldblooded as anything TV has shown. Yet the violence is frequently underplayed to good effect. In one scene, the couple's three children huddle together on a bed and listen impassively to the screams and blows coming from the other room. When the front door slams, they troop in unison to the window to watch the fight continue outside. A dozen graphic scenes could not tell us more about the numbing familiarity of this domestic reign of terror.

The Burning Bed does not hide its sympathies; this is Francine's story all the way. But the human complexities are fully recognized. Between his violent rages, Mickey is sincerely repentant, even charming as he whines for one more chance. Significantly, he never beats the children. And the various relatives and authorities to whom Francine turns in vain for help are not evil or callous, just ineffectual.

There are a couple of false notes. Though the setting is Michigan, the hick accents seem to have wandered up from somewhere near Little Rock. The early scenes of Francine and Mickey's courtship depend too predictably on '60s pop songs for period flavor. But most of the details ring true, from the woefully inadequate bromides offered by elders ("a woman's got to take the bitter with the sweet, you know") to the constant background din created by the children, to the way Mickey childishly brandishes his fists at his cowering wife, a neighborhood bully grown to frightening stature. The Burning Bed makes its case, and a lot more. It is an eloquent and gripping drama, and the best TV movie of the year. --By Richard Zoglin