Death Drama Stirs a Royal Row

Saudis cry foul over a ''false" film about a doomed princess

Never had a Public Broadcasting show appeared with such impassioned advance notices. Even before it was aired this week, Death of a Princess, a British-American two-hour "dramatized documentary" dealing with the 1977 executions of a married 19-year-old Saudi princess and her young lover, prompted angry blasts from top Congressmen and some of PBS'S biggest corporate backers, as well as much top-level squirming in the State Department. The cause: a sharply negative review from the Saudi Arabian government, which protested that the show presented a "completely false" picture of the desert kingdom and warned that it could "undermine the internationally significant relations" between the U.S. and its largest oil supplier.

The Saudis had reason to feel wronged. Like so-called faction literature, the TV hybrid known as documentary drama typically consists of real-life events embedded in a marzipan of speculation and romance. In Princess, co-produced by Britain's independent Association Television network and WGBH, the PBS station in Boston, the marzipan is the message. South African-born Director Antony Thomas set out to film a straight drama on the life and death of Princess Mashall, a lively young grandniece of Saudi Arabia's King Khalid. Mashall, whose arranged marriage soured, supposedly went to study at a Beirut university and there, by one account, acquired her lover, a Saudi commoner; the two were publicly executed in Jeddah (she was shot, he beheaded) for their all-too-public transgressions after they were caught trying to flee Saudi Arabia. But when Thomas found it difficult to pin down facts about the princess, he decided to use her in his film as "a symbol, an excuse to probe into the private center of the Arab world."

The result is a sometimes tedious, fitfully organized Rashomon-styte film that intersperses scenes purporting to show how the princess lived with what are presented as interviews with people who knew her and her world. In fact, all the characters in the film, which was shot mainly in Egypt, are actors. What they say about the princess and the indolent ways of Saudi royals is distilled from what Thomas claims to be 300 hours of conversation with well-placed Arabs and other sources (though he spent only two weeks in Saudi Arabia itself). What irritates the Saudis, besides the film's presentation of many surmised events as social and historical fact, is the way it depicts the Saudi royal women.

As Princess would have it, the titled women of Araby are giggly nitwits whose chief interests are TV, pop music and illicit sex. In one episode, an actress playing a Saudi boutique owner confides that many smart Saudi women come to such shops for assignations. In one lurid segment, royal ladies are shown cruising a desert lovers' lane in chauffeur-driven limousines in search of casual amours. In fact, people familiar with Saudi Arabia assert that there are no such pick-up strips outside Jeddah or Riyadh, and that the whole picture of royal carnality in the film is a gross distortion. Reports TIME'S Beirut bureau chief William Stewart: "In Saudi Arabia, of all places, such a scene is unimaginable. By and large, the Saudi rulers are staunch Wahhabis, a sect with in Islam roughly akin to the Puritans. No doubt the thought of sexual dalliance must occur to some princesses (there are a lot of them), but that does not make Jeddah or Riyadh an Arabian Nights version of La Dolce Vita."

After Princess was shown in Britain last month, the Saudis demanded the recall of the British ambassador and threatened a review of the two nations' economic relations: no small matter, since the British sell nearly $2 billion worth of goods annually to the Saudis and rely on them for about 10% of their oil. To avert a similar predicament in Sweden, a private firm bought rights to the film, then promptly shelved it to "protect Swedish business interests."

As the U.S. broadcast date, May 12, approached, PBS came under public relations pressure to do the same, although much of the pleading seemed pro forma, recognizing that the First Amendment would make any real effort to censor the program not only impossible but counterproductive--a fact of life about U.S. freedom of expression that even the Saudis acknowledged. Exxon, which spends $5 million a year on public TV and is also one of the four U.S. partners in the Ara, bian American Oil Co., issued a statement that it would be "extremely unfortunate" if the show were to hurt U.S.-Saudi relations, but insisted it would not try to inhibit its being shown by threatening to cut off its PBS spending. Mobil, another PBS angel and Aramco partner, ran an ad on the New York Times's Op-Ed page denouncing the film as "a fairy tale" and urging PBS management to "review its decision" to run the film "in the light of what is in the best interests of the U.S." But again, there was no economic arm twisting.

In Washington, Saudi Ambassador Faisal Alhegelan sent a letter to Acting Secretary of State Warren Christopher expressing "concern" about "many inaccuracies, distortions and falsehoods" in the film, which he described as "offensive to the entire Islamic world."

However, the ambassador's letter, which was forwarded to PBS President Lawrence Grossman, emphasized: "We recognize your constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and expression, and it is not my purpose to suggest any infringement upon those rights." In a covering letter to Grossman, Christopher reiterated: "I want to assure you that the Government of the United States cannot and will not attempt to exercise any power of censorship."

Throughout the controversy, PBS never wavered in its determination to air the show, but decided, as it has done on other occasions, to follow it with a discussion of the film's veracity by a panel of experts. At week's end only six of the 141 PBS stations originally slated to run the show had decided to scrub it.

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