Viewpoints

By * Richard Schickel

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (CBS, Jan. 31, 9 p.m.

E.D.T.) is not the first made-for-TV movie that takes on a serious subject, but it is one of the very few that sticks uncompromisingly to its intentions from the first frame to the last. Miss Jane is not a real person. Her "autobiography" is, in fact, a narrative convention adopted by Novelist Ernest Gaines in order to create an archetypal "life"' encompassing the essence of the black experience in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the civil rights movement. The year is 1962, and Miss Jane is 110 as she tells her story into a young journalist's tape recorder.

It is not a complex tale. Born a slave in Louisiana, she sets forth with a group of freedmen and -women for Ohio after Emancipation. Only she and a boy named Ned (whom she raises as her son) escape massacre by vigilantes determined to keep her people in their place --that is, in the old slave quarters of the plantations. Indeed, it is to this world that she retreats to work as a field hand in order to support the child. She escapes briefly when she marries a dashing black cowboy and goes to Texas, where he has a good life as a broncobuster. What she can never escape is violence.

Her husband is killed by a wild horse. Ned is murdered when he tries to establish a school for blacks. Finally, another young man whom she has helped to raise, and who she believes is the great leader her people expect to rise among them, is killed after a confrontation at a drinking fountain for whites only. At the film's moving climax it is Miss Jane, bent under the burdens of age and history, who drinks from it.

Much of the movie's strength comes from the script by Tracy Keenan Wynn (Keenan's son, Ed's grandson). Miss Jane is never merely a symbol or a stereotype. Whether responding shyly to the kindness of a Union soldier, umpiring a baseball game or teasing her earnest young interviewer, she emerges as a human being full of surprising quirks and depths. John Korty, a director whose feature films (Funnyman, riverrun) have lacked emotional fire, here employs his unobtrusive and objective camera to excellent effect. Violence is seen as a constant element rather than a shocking intrusion on a black's existence. As such, its impact is all the more terrible. Finally, Cicely Tyson, whose muted fury was the driving force in Sounder, plays Miss Jane. Once again she demonstrates (even when handicapped by an old-age makeup that is literally too thick to believe) that she is a subtly skilled actress who can convey not just the history of a character in a gesture or an inflection, but an entire century's cruelty and bravery as well.

UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS. PBS Masterpiece Theater, Sunday, 9 p.m. E.D.T. If the family ever dies, as radical social psychologists keep predicting, Public Broadcasting may go out of business as well. Among its best and most popular offerings have been series that, one way or another, examine that institution. First there were the Forsytes, then the Louds. Now there are the Bellamys, masters of an Edwardian town house in London and, to their way of thinking, masters of the known world as well.

The Bellamys are the most complex of all the families. Originally created by British commercial television, the series brings the household serving staff in from the cold periphery of drama, where they have traditionally lurked, to its center. Viewers are thereby given a chance to study at close hand the base on which the elaborate social pyramid of pre-World War I England was based.

The first four episodes have been equally divided between the problems downstairs and the ones upstairs. In the servants' hall, a restless and romantic underhouseparlormaid named Sarah has come and gone, returned and left again, unwilling to accept the notion that all life will ever offer her is a uniform and a shared attic bedroom. In the latest episode she has gone on the music-hall stage--except for prostitution, one of the few ways out of domestic drudgery for girls of her class. She has also contracted a secret liaison with the Bellamys' guardsman-wastrel son. Above-stairs, Daughter Elizabeth is already beginning to regret her marriage to a limp-wristed, birdbrained poet whom she met in the course of a youthful rebellion that consisted mainly of mingling with dilettante aesthetes and socialists.

The elder Bellamys' highly developed sense of class proprieties is sup ported by most of their servants. They derive their personal security from the belief that in a well-run society there is a place for everyone and everyone is best off in his proper place. The help are ev ery bit as appalled by promiscuous crossings of class lines as their masters are.

All the episodes are self-contained, but there is a solid cotton thread tying them together, namely Rose, the head houseparlormaid, played by Jean Marsh -- who is also one of the show's co-creators. Having flirted with lesbianism, Rose now seems on the brink of a health ier relationship with a new manservant. Yet she remains stiffened against her own prettiness, frightened by her way ward impulses.

Already one has come to care greatly about her. Already one resents the fact that WGBH-TV, the program's American packager, has only bought half of the existing 26 episodes in the series, for the scripts are expertly crafted and wittily written ("Not many valets be come prime ministers," the poet sniffs to his manservant. "Not many poets do either," is the retort). The shows are acted with the entertaining slickness -- brisk but not taxingly deep -- that one has come to relish in the Masterpiece Theater imports. And, as is the British custom in TV family sagas, deft direction tends carefully to period details, clarifies the interaction of a large cast and long plot lines. All in all, Upstairs, Downstairs holds an elegantly framed mirror up to a perennially fascinating historical moment.

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