Truths and Consequences

By -- Frank Rich

KING, NBC, Feb. 12-14;

RUBY AND OSWALD, CBS, Feb. 8

The clash and carryings-on over Soap aside, television's instant-history movies have been the season's most hotly debated entertainment. When ABC let loose with its twelve-hour Watergate roman `a clef, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, last fall, half the critics and columnists in the country attacked the mini-series for playing fast and loose with recent political fact. Then the same network aired a so-called docudrama, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, to even harsher criticism. Now NBC and CBS are getting ready to take their lumps. King, a six-hour miniseries consecrated to the life and times of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has already been assailed by King's second in command, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, for overstating the role of a white adviser during King's crusades. CBS's new three-hour account of Ruby and Oswald in Dallas may drive the nation's army of assassination addicts to yet another round of exasperated press conferences. The louder the debate, of course, the higher the ratings.

Yet argument over the factual batting average of such shows is not entirely relevant. A nonfiction TV movie with every line of dialogue taken exactly from the public record can still be a subjective work: each time a director casts an actor as a historical figure or chooses a camera angle, he is shaping the facts to serve a personal point of view. The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, for example, was scrupulously researched but managed to transform history into nonsense. Washington: Behind Closed Doors, for all its fictionalizations, presented a symbolically credible portrait of moral chaos in Nixon's White House. Both King and Ruby and Oswald claim to be based on fact --and contain obvious inaccuracies. But such things matter less than the grand design--the overall impression that the facts, both real and suspect, deliver.

Of the two projects, King is far the better. Written and directed by the pious Abby Mann (Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools), it makes a decent attempt to explain the meaning of a remarkable man's life. Audiences too young to remember the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s may find King a revelation. The struggles of Montgomery and Birmingham, of Selma and Chicago are all re-enacted with corrosive force. So, too, are the many efforts to block King's progress, whether by thugs or Southern sheriffs or J. Edgar Hoover. Against this tumultuous background, King's courageous devotion to nonviolent activism assumes appropriately heroic proportions.

The film gains authority from Paul Winfield's performance in the title role. He manages to convey the inner power as well as the mild outer surface of the public King and delivers those famous sermons with restrained gospel fervor. Scenes that depict King's private life are markedly less successful. The film's deadly first half-hour, which chronicles King's courtship of Coretta (blandly played by Cicely Tyson), looks like a sitcom pilot. Later attempts to focus on the hero's humility and self-doubt seem repetitive and mawkish. The audience is asked to believe that King's only defect was an occasional hankering for a cigarette. Mann also falls into the trap of overloading his script with Big Names. King not only features bad impersonations of various Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson but also includes gratuitous and self-serving cameos by Ramsey Clark, Julian Bond and Singer Tony Bennett, playing themselves.

If King is simplistic and flawed, its mistakes are at least put to the service of a valid drama. Ruby and Oswald is up to no good. This film exists only to exploit the pornography of violence. Indeed, it is constructed like a porno flick: long and dreary expository scenes pay off in the orgasmic murders of Kennedy and Oswald.

Along the way, the film does point out that Ruby and Oswald (Michael Lerner and Frederic Forrest) are both psychotic paranoiacs, but this is far from startling information. While an announcer explains that every scene "has been drawn from sworn testimony," the facts of Ruby and Oswald are nothing more than a front for the film's ghoulish intent.

Scattered throughout Ruby and Oswald is actual TV footage of Kennedy in Dallas, his still blood-spattered wife Jacqueline returning the body to Washington and the funeral cortege. Unlike anything else in the movie, these needlessly abbreviated clips bring back the grief of those days, and they are a teasing reminder of how powerful television can be when face-to-face with real-life history. They also point up the true absurdity of the docudrama format. If the networks would only rebroadcast the news film in their archives instead of re-enacting it, they would waste less of their money and less of the audience's time.

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