TV programs worth watching
Sun September 28 — Sat October 4

Marion Davies was only a chorus girl when she snared the biggest sugar 
daddy of them all in the person of press baron William Randolph Hearst. 
Unofficial hostess at Hearst's Hollywood mansion San Simeon, and with 
Hearst's innumerable papers and radio stations at her command, Marion 
quickly became a movie star.

But she was starred in big budget dramas for which she was ill-suited. Not 
until she turned to light comedy did critics and public alike discover that 
she had real flare in this area.

Marion Davies was not the only media mogul's mistress to be given a shove 
in the wrong direction: Hearst's rival, Colonel Robert McCormick, tried to 
make his mistress into an opera star, complete with her own opera house. 
She had a weak little voice and the result was embarrassment all round.

Orson Welles developed the central character of his film Citizen Kane 
as an amalgam of Hearst and McCormick. Kane's girlfriend had more 
affinity with McCormick's mistress than with Davies, however.

Nevertheless, Captured On Film: The True Story Of Marion Davies (ABC 
3.00pm Sunday) still claims that Kane is the story of Marion and Hearst. In 
the best Hollywood tradition, why let the facts spoil a good story?

The core of The Tramp And The Dictator (ABC 7.30pm Sunday) is a 
rediscovered 16mm colour film Charlie Chaplin's brother Sydney had taken 
during the shooting of his brother's masterpiece, The Great 
Dictator.

The Great Dictator is a merciless comic assault on Hitler (in the 
film, the Nazi-style dictator Adenoids Hynkel, The Phooey). Chaplin, as 
both Hynkel and a little Jewish amnesia victim, is brilliant and the film 
has gained in stature in the half century since it was made.

The Tramp and the Dictator celebrates Chaplin's famous film, but 
also draws some rather tenuous links between Chaplin and Hitler: "Born only 
four days apart, Hitler had just gotten through his Vienna time in a 
homeless shelter when Chaplin invented his immortal tramp in 1914.

"While the actor was promoting subscriptions for war loans in 1918, Lance 
Corporal Hitler was recovering from a war wound." And so on.

Although there are plenty of talking heads in the film commenting on The 
Great Dictator, actual anti-fascists are conspicuous by their absence.

Noel Coward's wartime production This Happy Breed (ABC 1.55pm 
Tuesday) was clever anti-Nazi propaganda. Like Chaplin's film, it pitted 
"little people", the ordinary people of Britain, against Hitler.

Hitler and the Nazis don't appear in the film, but there's no mistaking the 
intent as Coward follows the lives and loves of a typical suburban family 
from 1919 to 1939. The view is a middle class one, and it is inevitably 
romanticised, but it is also surprisingly true and honest.

It became a classic, a film about ordinary people, played by Robert Newton, 
Celia Johnson, John Mills, Stanley Holloway and Kay Walsh.

The Whiteguard history of the Soviet Union proceeds apace: now it's the 
siege of Leningrad that receives the "crimes of Stalin" treatment, in 
True Stories: Stalin And The Betrayal Of Leningrad (ABC 10.00pm 
Thursday).

This one claims to feature "documents stored in Stalin's personal archive 
for 60 years", so it must be an accurate account and analysis, mustn't it?

It's a week for interesting repeats, including Tuesdays With Morrie 
(ABC 11.25pm Tuesday), the last major role by the late Jack Lemmon. In 
it, a visibly withered Lemmon won his sixth Emmy Award for his portrayal of 
a retired university professor, Morrie Schwartz.

Based on the best seller by sports writer Mitch Albom (played by Hank 
Azaria, who also won an Emmy for his role), the film also took out an Emmy 
for "outstanding made-for-television movie".

The film, like the book, is the true story of how a busy sports writer 
whose life somehow lacks something he can't define discovers understanding 
and fulfilment when he starts a series of weekly visits to his old college 
professor who is dying of the debilitating Lou Gehrig's Disease.

The film's cracker-barrel philosophising might impress US television 
viewers who think Oprah Winfrey's show is serious television, but it is 
unlikely to change the life of many Guardian readers. Winfrey, 
incidentally, produced the film and introduces it.

However, don't dismiss it: the performances, especially Lemmon's tour de 
force as the dying Morrie, are excellent and the film is good TV drama 
(which is not quite the same as good drama).

It may also be the most lachrymose film of all time: Lemmon's character 
cries practically non-stop (he feels things deeply), but so, at one time or 
another, does just about every one else in the cast. In Lassie Come Home 
or The Yearling there wasn't a dry eye in the house, but here 
there isn't a dry eye on the screen! Weird — and so very USA.

Writer Rob Heyland and director Simon Langton must take the blame for the 
stodgy lump that their adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel (ABC 
9.30pm Saturdays) turned out to be.

It was previously screened in 2001 as three movie-length episodes. These 
have now been cut in half so it can be repeated as a six-part mini-series. 
It will still be a turkey — well dressed, but a turkey all the same.

Its appalling right-wing bias was probably inevitable given the source 
material (Baroness Orczy's counter-revolutionary novels), but this series 
adds insult to injury by being dull and turgid with it.

Unlike the previous film versions of the story, this series lacks the 
necessary sense of romance. Its derring-do is vigorous but graceless.

It seeks a curiously unflattering authenticity of make-up and costuming for 
its female characters but the script is full of glaring anachronisms of 
speech and behaviour.

Sir Percy (the Scarlet Pimpernel) is only sufferable as a hero if his pose 
of an empty-headed fop is amusing in itself, and his elegant wit is allowed 
to sparkle as his enemies are confounded. Heyland has given actor Richard E 
Grant (playing Sir Percy) wit as heavy as the boots he clumps around in.

John Ford was not the best choice to direct Mary of Scotland (ABC 
10.20pm Saturday), the 1936 film version of Maxwell Anderson's novelettish 
play about the conflict between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots (in 
which the big issues of history are dumped in favour of personal rivalry).

As Tom Milne noted in Time Out, Ford "remained univolved by the 
polite conventions of historical costume drama" except in occasional 
scenes, such as the "hellfire sermon delivered by Moroni olsen as John 
Knox".

Nevertheless, almost inevitably in a Ford film, Milne praised the look of 
the film ("marvellously shot by Joe August, and with Ford making striking 
use of the imposing RKO sets").

The performances, by Katharine Hepburn, Fredric March, John Carradine, 
Florence Edridge and Donald Crisp, also received their due (of sorts): 
"fascinating in their careful, slightly stilted way".