Six Tales, Twice Told

By John Elson

Translating a written tale into TV drama has its pitfalls. Excessive fidelity to the text can emphasize a story's origins on the page. Departure for drama's sake can suggest that what's onscreen came solely from a script. Those perils are present in 90-minute video anthologies -- something of an endangered species these days, like westerns -- that HBO and Showtime coincidentally offer for late-summer viewing. (Both debut Aug. 19.) Differently flawed, they nonetheless make for more satisfactory evenings than network reruns.

HBO's Women & Men: Stories of Seduction goes heavily Hollywood -- marquee- worthy directors, proven scriptwriters, a cast of (mostly) stars -- in its rather literal rendering of three modern classics. In Mary McCarthy's The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt (adapted and directed by Frederic Raphael), a radical journalist (Elizabeth McGovern) meets a crass business executive (Beau Bridges) who makes use of his booze and her boredom to lure her into a one- night stand during a transcontinental railroad trip. (Those were the days!) Owlish and pudgy, Bridges is right for his role, but pillow-soft McGovern is wrong for hers. And many of Raphael's arch lines -- "Stand by for a Fascist invasion," the reporter murmurs to herself just before sex -- sound like candidates for the New Yorker's old "Sayings We Doubt Ever Got Said" department.

Comic artifice is better served in a static rendering of Dorothy Parker's Dusk Before Fireworks (directed by Ken Russell, adapted by Valerie Curtin). In the giddy days of bathtub gin -- much guzzling in all three stories, by the way -- the coitus of an aging rake (Peter Weller) and a nubile flapper is rendered interruptus by untimely calls from his other women. Former teen queen Molly Ringwald delivers her lioness's share of the Parker sallies with engaging zest but seems a bit too twentysomethingly modern for a tart of the Roaring Twenties.

Last is best. Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants (directed by Tony Richardson) is a vignette from 1925 Spain. At a dusty rural railway station, a writer with wanderlust (James Woods) and his pregnant girlfriend (Melanie Griffith) warily discuss what is never explicitly mentioned: an abortion. Writers John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion produced dialogue that is Earnestly true, not faux Papa. Woods, edgy as usual, and Griffith, her little- girl voice on the edge of tears, generate real sexual tension.

By contrast, The Showtime 30-Minute Movie, premiere of a series, takes a no- frills, no-big-names approach to three first films by new directors. In Conquering Space, a girl discovers first lust, learns to drive and watches her family fall apart at pre-moonshot Cape Canaveral. In 12:01 P.M., a twitchy corporate flunky has terminal deja vu, condemned to repeat endlessly one hour of a single day. In To the Moon, Alice, a homeless family takes nightly refuge on the comfy set of a TV sitcom.

Overall, Showtime's trio of adaptations packs some emotional punch, but there is a slick professional sameness to the stories that suggests production by committee. Meanwhile, HBO's Hills Like White Elephants, a haunting brief encounter frozen in time by good acting and writing, shows how it can and ought to be done.