Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL, Mayo Mohs

THE CORPORATION, to be seen Thursday, Dec. 6, on CBS Reports (10-11 p.m. E.S.T.), powerfully demonstrates that that archetypal figure of the '50s, the Organization Man, is still very much alive--and thinks he is well.

He seems to flourish best in small, company-dominated towns like Bartlesville, Okla., headquarters of Phillips Petroleum Co., the nation's 36th largest corporation. Producer-Writer-Reporter Jay McMullen uses Phillips employees to demonstrate in vivid human terms the truth of the generalization that a large number of Americans are eager to trade most of their autonomy as individuals in return for the security and group identification that the organization offers.

What sets McMullen's documentary apart, turns it into a cautionary tale the impact of which is close to tragic, is its central figure, William W. Keeler, 65, who retired earlier this year as Phillips' chairman and chief executive officer. Like every Phillips leader before him, he had devoted his entire life to the company and to the search for his room at the top, sacrificing most of the pleasures of family and leisure along the way. McMullen picks him up a few months before retirement, as he undertakes his last major task for Phillips: making smooth the transfer of power to his hand-picked successor, William Martin, 56.

Tough, quiet-spoken and by no means an unattractive figure, Keeler nevertheless gives the impression of a spirit deliberately blunted, an intellect deliberately narrowed in order to achieve his goal. He makes it across the finish line--a retirement banquet at which he receives diamond-and-emerald cuff links patterned after the Phillips trademark--only to pay, at last, the price for his unquestioning belief that what was good for the corporation was good for him and, indeed, for everybody else. Keeler is now under investigation for authorizing an illegal corporate donation to the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.

The corporation's official position is that Keeler authorized the donation "without the approval or knowledge of the board of directors." As McMullen says: "Yet to be explained is how one officer can dispatch $100,000 of corporate funds without the knowledge and acquiescence of other senior officers." McMullen's account of Keeler's triumph and downfall--both based on the fallacy of loyalty to an institutional structure rather than to himself and to generally accepted standards of moral accountability--adds up to one of television's fine hours.

Richard Schicke

CATHOLICS is a play that, according to the ads, you do not have to be Catholic to love. Maybe not, but Catholics of all stripes must have found something particularly provocative in this rich, fine and haunting "fable," which last week got CBS'S revived Playhouse 90 series off to a splendid start.

The action is set in the near future. The Fourth Vatican Council has come and gone, the Latin Mass and private confession are outlawed, and the church's ecumenical embrace is even touching Buddhists. Theological liberalism and social activism, canonized by Rome's authority, have become the new orthodoxy. Rome is still Rome, however, ready to enforce the new dogmas with some of the same thumbscrew pressure that it once used to enforce the old.

When the Vatican hears that pilgrims are flocking to a remote coastal town in Ireland to hear a Latin Mass and make their confessions, it dispatches young Father James Kinsella (adroitly underplayed by Martin Sheen) to put down the insurrection. Fashionable in Castroesque fatigues and shouldering a musette bag, Kinsella drops by helicopter into the rebel stronghold, an ancient island monastery called Muck Abbey.

The young priest's confrontation with the monastery's father abbot (Trevor Howard) is the heart of the drama, trenchantly adapted by Brian Moore from his own 1972 novella. Moore's point seems to be not so much the changes in the church as the problems they pose for the individual conscience. Abbot Tomas, his face all crags and valleys and wind-worn heaths, carries the weight of the story's dark irony. He has nurtured the old ways, it turns out, to protect the faith of simple people -- but it is a faith in which the abbot himself can no longer find any solace.

Executive Producer Sidney Glazier saw to it that the contest is played out against the right backdrop: Irish locations, filmed lovingly by Gerry Fisher, and a cast of splendid faces, as hard and gnarled as blackthorn walking sticks. As directed by Jack Gold, Catholics fairly aches with monkish verisimilitude. When Kinsella's arrival at the abbey prompts Father Manus (a delightful cameo by Cyril Cusack) to rustle up a feast of fresh salmon, the viewer can almost taste it.

In Catholics' chill and poignant ending, the abbot capitulates to Rome, then has to repair the shattered faith of his charges by leading them in prayer, a communal task he has long avoided. He knows, as he begins to pray, that the action will plunge his bleak but compassionate soul into an endless spiritual void. As the camera closes in on Howard's tortured, searching eyes, it captures all the anguish of the dark night of the Soul.

Mayo Mohs

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