Of Life & Death

Television seems to make its living mistaking melodrama for drama and canned laughter for joy. But last week three very good documentaries treated the human tragicomedy with unaccustomed honesty.

On ABC, How Life Begins began, literally, with the birds and the bees, covered marine life and then the lower mammals (a spaniel bitch lovingly licking life into a pup emerging from her womb). With humans, the program called a sperm a sperm, and showed a natural birth at Manhattan's Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospitals. The mother's face, at first view contorted during her contractions, suddenly suffused with pleasure at the first cry of her child. ABC also edited in segments of the famed Swedish film on the growth of the fetus that had been shown the week before on Public TV stations.

Hitler's Rage. Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, syndicated by Sports Network Inc., stirringly recalled the Summer Olympics of 1936. There was chilling footage showing more than 100,000 fans hailing Adolf Hitler as the games were opened. The test was on for the Nazis' myth of the master race. Closeups caught the Fuehrer clucking with pleasure as his Aryans competed in the qualifying heats against the U.S. team with its Negro stars. But then in the finals, as Owens, the Alabama sharecropper's son, won one, two, three and finally four gold medals, the camera caught Hitler's face as he smoldered with rage. He would not shake hands with the winner. Owens, now a fit 54 and in public relations, narrated his own story with commendable understatement. Revisiting the empty old Berlin Olympic Stadium 32 years later, he declared that he had not been embittered by Hitler's snub. "I'm here. He's not," reported Owens. "That is enough answer for me."

CBS's Don't Count the Candles was an "essay" on aging, stunningly directed and filmed by Britain's Lord Snowdon. "Ours is an age that venerates the young," said a narrator. 'The old we tolerate." So much for narration. The rest of the story belonged to the eloquent black-and-white cinematography, the first ever attempted by Snowdon. Among the telling vignettes: desolate faces and palsied hands fighting dinner hour in an old folks' home; Cecil Beaton, 64, describing his "first signs , of , loneliness" and his denture problems; a' Septuagenarian marriage ceremony in which the bride momentarily forgot the name of the groom; a daughter guiltily registering her arthritic father in a home. A visit to Continental spas showed elderly people desperately trying" to reverse the clock by means of surrealistic exercise machines and lamb-gland injections. But perhaps the most poignant was the closing scene --a tottering music-hall hoofer, reduced to playing a pub, tearfully singing When I Grow Too Old to Dream.

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