Viewpoints: A Lot of Nerve

By Richared Schnickel

There is nerve--and then again there is nerve. The kind they have lots of --too much of--in television is exhibited in its ripest form this week (NBC, Wednesday, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) by Jack Lemmon, starring in a remake of John Osborne's The Entertainer. Archie Rice, that talentless, foul-spirited denizen of show biz's low depths, is, of course, the creation and sole property of Laurence Olivier--perhaps the greatest performance in a nonclassic role by the man who is our age's prince of players. There is no hope of duplicating what he did in that part. So it is hard to know what possessed Lemmon to put himself in a position where comparisons are bound to be inevitable and unfavorable.

The story has been reset on a West Coast amusement pier in order to accommodate the American accents of the star and his supporting players. Lemmon, who is nothing if not an earnest actor, works hard to be a total heel, destroying wife, children and finally his father (a beloved former star hauled out of retirement to save his son's awful act), not because he has any ambition left, but because the stage, however tacky it is, is the only arena in which he dares hope for survival. But the best Lemmon can manage in the role is a certain technical proficiency.

There is nothing startling or even wayward in his work. Nothing seems to bubble up unbidden out of his unconscious, out of those memories he must surely share with all actors, of bad ideas tried out in rehearsal and found embarrassing, of nights when he must have felt he was going to boil in his own flop sweat. It was those memories--a performer's kinship acknowledged--that informed Olivier's work and, finally, humanized and redeemed his Archie. The recognition of self in the role of Archie and the willingness to admit it are beyond Lemmon. He is distant, predictable and therefore boring.

Gutsy Actor. The kind of nerve that raises modest hopes for the medium is, however, available on two other specials. Song of Myself (CBS, Tuesday, 10 p.m. E.S.T.) offers a sketchy biography of Walt Whitman, which is really an excuse to hear a well-selected anthology of his poetry. Poetry in any form is rare on commercial television, and just hearing Whitman well read in a Carl Sandburg singsong by Rip Torn is reason enough for gratitude. But Jan Hartman's script confronts Whitman's homosexuality with good bluntness, and Torn, a gutsy actor who has long deserved better of his trade than he usually receives, plays the populist bard instead of embalming him. There is something fine and wild in his spirit, in his very eyes, that is a perfect match for Whitman. It is hard to think of a historical drama that has dared to be as lively with a great historical name as this one.

On a quieter level of chance taking, Farewell to Manzanar (NBC, Thursday, 9 p.m. E.S.T.) deserves respect too. It is a semidocumentary drama about the internment of our Japanese citizenry during World War II. It gives a good general picture of how the internees turned a collection of ill-constructed barracks at Manzanar into something resembling a community, of the conflicts between those who counseled open rebellion against their absurd imprisonment and those who advised patience. The Spirit at Manzanar became a dignified resistance in which individuality was not sacrificed to the survivor's ethic. The story, in which a family called the Wakatsukis endures in a short span most of life's large experiences (birth, death, new love, even madness), never seems forced or schematic. The result is a work that is modest and touching and refreshingly free of melodrama. It is not at all the sort of thing you expect to find on Thursday Night at the Movies, but which you could hope for more of. Richard Schickel

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