Television:

...Washington, which should have deterred Lear in the first CBS has now been left with a blank space in its Sunday place...

...in the case of and, unhappily, no division of the population is immune from Norman Lear he certainly is...

...enters carrying the breakfast tea...

...Distraught, she leaves home in her car that woman-what was she really like...

...said about sion or movie roles make any difference...

...Television has recently joined those other N ORMAN LEAR recently had the idea of producing a series national institutions determined to know what's good for us...

...Walker...

...The cameraman on Agatha is Vittorio Storaro, have taken a divot out of the felt...

...Why this is I am not prepared to say, but the record is programming, and Lear and his associates have carried out abundantly clear...

...The clues are in the direction, though, more than moment she may end sprawled on the table...

...In this instance Lear wavered and ran, and a blow was Convnonweal: 272 struck for our own national version of Socialist Realism...

...ON TV extent, a dishonest refusal to look at things as they are...

...Mister Dugan" was supposed to be a comedy...

...Storaro is distinctive missed the shot, which was at a slight angle to the corner for his ability to work in very low natural light and to achieve pocket but looked, nonetheless, direct...

...example, my mother is a lawyer, and so if the producers of Furthermore, no producer has ever fully grasped what "Perry Mason" had not cleverly cast Raymond Burr in the Washington is about, and it may be impossible...

...Norman Lear, and him...

...In a flight of pure fancy, Agatha one moment in the film which isn't lit in the characteristic turns something that actually happened in Dame Christie's Storaro manner is the one when the ball drops in the corner life-her unexplained disappearance for a number of days in pocket, the twist which suddenly causes the whole, convoluted 1926-into a story she herself might have written...

...Certainly she must the writing...

...When William Powell played sional Black Caucus, and political sociology of the thickest a buffoon in "The Senator Was Indiscreet" how many young sort...

...Agatha's director Michael Apted and writers Kathleen Tynan and Arthur Hopcraft carefully surround Agatha's break with her husband in the movie with much the same atmosphere...

...done in-but because it is the sort of thing that embarrasses Screen one in front of the servants...

...All have failed...

...An interesting book was published recently entitled know, is that everyone is aggrieved by television, regardless of The View From Sunset Boulevard by Ben Stein, a television race, creed, national origin or whatever...

...She is not to be the victim in this mystery after all, elegant shawl she wears with her evening dress off her shoul- it seems...

...For cocted and nourished by an incestuous crowd of Hollywood every Florence Nightingale, after all, there is a Lizzie Borden, producers and writers...

...We watch with pleasurable incredulity as the plot ders...

...What is a Goes to Washington" came and went this past season, with positive role model...

...And one man in his time plays many parts...

...The next thing we know, ing with the murderer and disliking the victim in a Christie she is on a train somewhere and the police are dragging a marsh story, but Agatha makes it a bit more complicated than that 11 May 1979: 273...

...The EVERY WASHINGTON SERIES FAILS doyens of role modeling would have television eliminate all human characteristics, a scheme, sad to say, undoubtedly under discussion right now at the Department of Health, Education and Welfare...

...They would have as a young congressman's assistant, Hal Holbrook as a tough, been happy if Norman Lear had contrived a casual combina- committed young senator...

...in mind, but someone more closely resem- been Karen Valentine as a young Nader Raider, Inger Stevens bling their own perception of themselves...

...It that children form unshakable and sometimes damaging im- is certainly true that Washingtonians find it difficult at times, pressions about their fellow man from the characters they and so it is not surprising that the inhabitants of television land encounter in books, on the screen, and in everyday life...

...He may well be right...

...If Apted is trying to turn her life into right amount of momentum to drop neatly in...

...The programs title role when I was at an impressionable age, I might today have run the gamut in that respect: the shows are either heavyfind it difficult to accept the notion that men can be lawyers, handed, with habitual solemn-voiced references to "the Presitoo...

...And she has-obviously who has done all of Bertolucci's films...

...Her the ball comes ambling down the table again, taking its own novels today are period pieces, enjoyable for their quaintness sweet time, and arrives back at the corner pocket with just the as much as their suspense...

...He does this to disencumber her arms, which she now follows a route as circuitous as any Dame Christie herself holds as if they were embarrassed to be caught naked...

...white boys were thereafter discouraged from becoming Television senators...

...The the plot of this movie as well...

...No, it is all a matter of self-indulgence, and, to an WHY NO D.C...

...The commotion of this AS AGATHA (Vanessa Redgrave) is about to attempt a scene followed by the car crash starts Agatha on its way with shot, Wally Stanton (Dustin Hoffman) enters the the same, smart jolt that its central character delivers to her snooker room...

...Having discovered that her husband Ar- metaphor-shock value...

...We are used to sympathiznight, but crashes into a tree nearby...

...But then, to the even greater amazement of us all, Christie's own writing is part of the romance of the 1920s...

...I they had borne in mind some simple truths about television...

...Perhaps youth is the problem...

...He whispers something further, his secretary, who is now to come without him...

...From the first category, "Grandpa ject a positive role model of a black congressman...

...For should prefer to be entertained elsewhere...

...chibald (Timothy Dalton) is philandering with his secretary, The mystery that Agatha is trying to solve is of course not Agatha confronts him at the breakfast table and is told she is to Whodunnit?, but rather, Who was she, this famous yet elusive be thrown over...

...Like one of plot to make sense...

...Get out," yells Archie, slamming the dining room door with one hand while trying to pull Agatha to her feet with the other...

...The way she goes to that resort, the world, who has mysteriously disappeared some days ear- she seems to be in a daze...

...But Apted has a further motive which plot of one of Agatha Christie's own mysteries, and very like doesn't become apparent until the very end of the film...

...one of her own mysteries, it's only fitting he should give it the The course described by that snooker ball is very like the right atmosphere...

...Once Agatha over the objections of one of the other players...

...She is rebound from this violent beginning and roll off vaguely as if of course Agatha Christie, the most famous mystery writer in Agatha were bungling her life...

...After all, anything...

...She then strokes the Every good Agatha Christie ends with a twist, and this one is ball with such abruptness and ferocity that we fear for a no exception...

...Lear has been so many times its own knaves and fools...

...BUT WHO WAS SHE...

...She hesitates...

...traced her to this resort hotel where she is, among other things, And like the snooker ball, the plot of the movie seems to playing snooker with strangers under an assumed name...

...Stanton discreetly pulls the of her own...

...suspect the answer lies partly in a sort of unconscious hostility It all has to do with role models...

...one of their own members, convicted felon Rep., Charles cupine, whom one soon grew to loathe...

...Where every few years it disappears just as quickly: they have been did we go wrong, they have plaintively asked...

...Every few years a series comes along, and some unaccustomed soul-searching in the public print...

...Just as Agatha goes completely to MISSING MISS CHRISTIE pieces and falls to the floor clutching Archie's legs, a servant NOT WHODUNNTT...

...tion of Reggie Jackson, George Washington Carver, and Washington is a temperamentally middle-aged city, and transRalph Bunche, who was not only wise, handsome, honest, planting sun-bleached Californians to the capital of the free brave, clean and reverent, but side-splitting as well, since world somehow doesn't work...

...the bumper and goes wandering crazily up toward the other This is what he does here, imparting a lush romanticism to the end of the table, the other players are too taken aback to say many mist-filtered, window-lit scenes in Agatha...

...Smiling ever so discovers that the secretary is there, she begins to hatch a plot slightly, she re-addresses the ball...

...the chalk on the bumper for her to aim at...

...As she addresses the ball, back toward the corner pocket again when we learn it was in Stanton walks over and, without benefit of introduction, whis- this very resort that Archie planned to spend the weekend with pers in her ear...

...In the past there have Diggs (D-Mich...

...They could funny and dramatic, high-minded and mindless, dealing with easily have spared themselves much socio-political agony if Washington from every conceivable angle...

...In his role as television statesman he sought to give to the the Black Caucus for that matter, seem genuinely to believe world a Hollywood black congressman, and found himself that they are capable of making social history, or are tampering face to face with the equally fanciful notions of the Congreswith the psyches of a generation...

...Apted has retained Storaro's Rembrandt her own mysteries, Agatha begins with a bump, with an light up until that moment so that the harsh, white arc light of unexpected lurch, a violent breach in the decorum of upper- the moment itself will have-to use the appropriate class English life...

...But then the plot begins to double lier after a car crash near her home...

...uncovered...

...It can be safely assumed they didn't have Jack Albertson as a suffocatingly honest, irascible old por...

...He is an American journalist who has snooker ball...

...What sort of role model did Lana Turner ever proI vide, or William Bendix, or, as of late, Norman Lear's own creations, Carroll O'Connor, Louise Lasser, Jimmie (J.J...

...dent" and contrived dialogue about the Constitution, or lightThe Congressional Black Caucus, predictably enough, ob- hearted situation comedies that only incidentally happen to jected that "Mister Dugan" (the ill-fated series) did not pro- take place in the capital...

...congratulated for his comedies of class warfare that he has What is curious is that it should still be thought that televi- undoubtedly begun to believe the things that are...

...What the It was that self-contained paradox that doomed "Mister Caucus was unwilling to admit, and what Lear seems not to Dugan...

...It close to the wrecked and abandoned automobile...

...As the ball caroms off the effects of "Rembrandt" lighting with color film stock...

...remains somehow to be proven that "All the world's a stage Thus the deed is done, the mystery in need of solving...

...In the world which Agatha Christie's own characPHILIP TERZIAN ters inhabit, murder is a crime not because it breaks the law-we almost always feel the victim deserves to have been...

...might have concocted, and then drops surprisingly into the He steps around to the adjacent side of the table and places corner pocket...

...It is a presumption writer who contends, from a self-confessed right-wing point of that television can do nothing to dislodge, and a problem that view, that television characters inhabit a fantastic world conawkward remedies like "Mister Dugan" leave intractable...

...about a black congressman, and when the Congres- Which leaves a further, practical point, and that is that sional Black Caucus recoiled in horror from the pilot, television has never carried off a successful series about he unceremoniously yanked it from its place in the schedule...

...Role model" is a quaint that most Americans have toward "Washington" and which American concept of the late 20th century where it is believed prevents them from being much enchanted by its goings-on...