Tragi-Triptych

Television specials scheduled for this season bank heavily on entertainment, but not all entertainment is--well, entertainment. In the past week, for example, the networks have shown three specials that dealt with the plight of old people, the plight of a rape victim, and the plight of a family with a mongolian child.

CBS, in Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, had Melvyn Douglas shunted off to a nursing home by his grown children. ABC, in Johnny Belinda, showed Mia Farrow, in a waist-length wig, playing a deaf-mute who is raped and framed for murder; and an updated version of its 1966 documentary, The Long Childhood of Jimmy.

The tragi-triptych fortunately leaned on a combination of honest grappling and pure stagecraft, give or take a few lapses. Douglas was by turns crusty and touching as the rebellious old man who refuses to settle down as a withering weed. When a thoroughly resigned oldster (Shirley Booth) gurgles, "You've given me so much," Douglas rasps back, "Anger, I hope." All the same, many aged Americans could well envy Douglas' solution: he merely packs up and goes back to his own house.

Mia Farrow's Belinda suffered mainly from plot problems. With admirable poise and much mercurial hand acting, she found her redemption in sign language and education, and in love for her illegitimate child. Trouble was that all the uneven edges of the story--two murders and a court trial--had to be wrapped up in the last 30 minutes.

Perhaps the hardest look at an unpleasant dilemma came in the Timmy documentary. The family was shown cradling, criticizing and coddling the ten-year-old child, triumphing every labored step of the way over tragedy. It is a true story, told without sentimentality--and all the more dramatic for that. Real life always does have a way of coming through in documentaries.

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