Golden, But No Glitter PBS Takes a Fresh Look At

By Richard Zoglin

Of all the dramatists of TV's putative golden age, Paddy Chayefsky was certainly the most golden. But who cares about his 1950s TV work anymore? His most acclaimed teleplays (Marty, The Bachelor Party) live on chiefly because of their movie adaptations, and Chayefsky himself (who died in 1981) is destined to be remembered more for his savage 1976 satire of television, Network, than for the work he did when he and the medium were on better terms.

But PBS' new production of The Mother, originally seen on the Philco Television Playhouse in 1954, is something of a revelation. By today's lights, it seems rather dated, obvious and slight. The plot is minimal: despite her children's pleas, a 66-year-old widow insists on looking for work. She manages to get a job as a seamstress but is fired after one day. Depressed and lonely, she spends a night with her daughter and son-in-law. Then she decides to try again. Fade out.

The production, directed by Simon Curtis, is spare and uncompromising. Black-and-white shots of a rainy New York City in the 1950s punctuate the scenes. Anne Bancroft, as the mother, looks lost inside her drab overcoat, while Joan Cusack and Adrian Pasder etch small, sad portraits of her well- meaning daughter and son-in-law. The camera focuses patiently on everyday details: a woman reaching into the refrigerator for a glass of milk or trying to thread a sewing machine. Then there is Chayefsky's fabled naturalistic dialogue, which faces up to cliches ("I don't want to be a burden on my children"; "My mother worked like a dog all her life") and finds in them the homely poetry of the struggling class.

This is realism of a much different sort from today's "gritty" cop shows or socially conscious TV movies. The Mother deals with a social problem -- what is best for old people? -- yet it has no agenda, makes no statements, foments no outrage. There are no bad people to blame for the old woman's plight: a self-involved son, say, or a callous bureaucrat. Even the garmentmaker who fires her is a decent man under cruel commercial pressures. Nor does Chayefsky rail against "the system." If there's any culprit, it is simply -- pardon the expression -- the human condition.

/ The Mother has one other element that stamps it unmistakably as from another era. Though it ends on a superficially hopeful note, the emotional climax is the old woman's almost heartbreaking cry of despair in the penultimate scene: "I'm 66 years old, and I don't know what the purpose of it all was. An endless, endless struggle. And for what? For what?" Don't look for cries of existential anguish in today's prime-time dramas, where every story must be uplifting, and even bad things teach good people heartening lessons. The Mother is dated, all right; it's television for grownups.