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...What makes Gless special is that she seems fully aware of what she's doing, fully aware that her little twitches and voice cracks and misdirected eye-movements are the building-blocks of a new version of one of the most venerable arts...

...RICHARD ALLEVA MEDIA THE TRIALS OF TV ACTING THE TRIUMPH OF SHARON GLESS 6 ~ 'm not an a c t o r - - I ' m a movie star...

...Those openings are, of course, crucial to the political point of Rosie O'Neill: as a Public Defender Rosie is frequently in the position of defending the indefensible, for the sake of the Law: the Law of nations or the Law of human self-consciousness, which demands that even the most monstrous within ourselves be allowed its voice, since to deny or repress that voice is to deny and repress our full humanity...

...The very bright Katrine Ames has already highlighted "Rosie O'Neill" in Newsweek (November 5), so the show is probably assured of survival for at least its first season...

...The faces with instant recognition-quotient, the faces by which we mark our fifty-year love affair with the Tube, are generally not the faces of actors at all, but the faces llJanuary1991:19 of clowns (Milton Berle through Lucy to Candice Bergen), prophets (John Cameron Swayze through Cronkite to Peter Jennings), "real people" (Joe McCarthy to the sad people on "America's Funniest Home Videos"), or caricatures (Howdy Doody through Big Bird to the Simpsons...

...But, like directors Huston, Lean, and Carroll Ballard, Costner never tosses action and special effects in the viewer's face but always searches for the excitement inherent in each scene...

...And as for all those spunky, naive but goodhearted gals (sure the word is sexist--so are the movies) portrayed by Field, come on: Sister Bertrille in jeans is still Sister Bertrille...

...It's even better news because watching Gless work at her craft week after week gives the same intense pleasure as watching anybody ieally good do what they do (Paula Abdul dancing, John Sununu prevaricating), and also because Gless--I'm serious about this--is virtually defining what TV acting, as high art, is all about...

...But he never makes the vaguely written Dunbar more than a well-meaning, somewhat shambling fellow with limp blond hair...

...And Sharon Gless...

...Don't be afraid," he told her...

...I think that the demonizations of both whites and Pawnees in this movie stem not from liberal guilttripping but from leading-actor egomania...

...The real Cagney--James-----once said to a nervous young Pamela Tiffin on the set of his last starring movie, One, Two, Three, something that is virtually a compendium of, and a blessing upon, the actor's art...

...What makes the line so funny is not just that it invokes the old--and by now largely pointless--snobbism of"the thaytah" about the movies, but that it does so in the context of TV: because if there is any dramatic medium that seems to render the concept of acting as an art almost completely irrelevant, surely it is the Tube...

...But it's a pain that has to be endured, if we are ever to be whole...

...Well: every episode of "Rosie O'Neill" begins with Rosie talking in her shrink's office about what has traumatized her that week: bitterness over the divorce, memories of her father, problems dating younger men, etc...

...And Costner's decision to use subtitles under the Sioux dialogue allows us to register inflections, stumblings, sarcasms that we otherwise would miss...

...Oh, yeah: she also comes from this very well-heeled family, and so is regarded as something of your white liberal twit by most of the other studiously ethnic lawyers in her office...

...Costner has cast good actors and elicited good work from them as well...

...That the Tube reduces the actor's craft to nothing more than a harmonic in the brainless carrier-wave of the cathode ray...

...Rosenzweig is a good and smart producer and hires good and smart screenwriters...

...In the opening scenes, with Dunbar a loyal soldier in the Union army, the other soldiers are portrayed as decent chaps (a fatherly general, lots of boys in blue cheering Dunbar's suicidal charge...

...Of the few who have made the crossover--Clint Eastwood, say, and Sally Field--it has to be said that the films they make are largely, and cleverly, tailored to the distinctive one-dimensionality they first carved out on the Tube...

...The premise is almost preemptively ho-hum: Rosie O'Neill (Gless) is a forty-three-year-old, recently divorced woman with a law degree trying to work out her sense of pain and loss by working the Public Defender side of the street in Los Angeles...

...However, as a film dramatist, he needs to stop playing favorites...

...Does this mean that TV is, as its detractors like to say, a mere commodity, inimical to the finer articulations of drama...

...But don't let any of my reservations keep you from seeing Dances with Wolves...

...Think about the last shot of Godfather H: A1 Pacino with the thousand-yard stare and no dialogue and no movement, and if that is not "great acting," then we might as well trash the concept altogether...

...Dirty Harry and all of Clint's other avatars are all first cousins of the tightlipped, whispering Rowdy Yates of"Rawhide...

...Costner is clearly infatuated with Dunbar and this bias disfigures aspects of his movie...

...If you check out any of the TV nostalgia or trivia-quiz books that seem to be always flooding the market, you notice something curious...

...FRANK McCONNELL 20: Commonweal...

...And Gless--who has a face and a tone of voice that are damn near a working definition of integrity--seems capable of making almost any line sound like human speech uttered by a human person...

...I'm not disputing the naturalness of Dunbar's decision to fight against the enemies of the people he has lived with, but Costner virtually dehumanizes the Pawnees...

...The Native American actors are superb---Rodney Grant, Graham Greene, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Tantoo Cardinal, Doris Leader Charge...

...But for Gless to mime it so brilliantly and so regularly is nothing less than an actor's tour de force...

...But they don't...

...This is good news because the show's producer, Barry Rosenzweig, who also guided "Cagney and Lacey" (Gless played Christine Cagney) is one of the few people out there who seems capable of dealing with "controversial" subjects and dealing with them from a stance of moral maturity: a Norman Lear with wit...

...Mary McDonnell as a white woman brought up by the Sioux is too conscious of the great bone structure in her lovely Irish face, and darts and drops her eyes to the point of coyness...

...Love me, love my sidekicks...

...On the stage you have to project: any emotion you convey has to be seen by the people in the back row, or otherwise you haven't earned your pay...

...But what about TV...

...They are seen neither as aboriginal devils nor as nature's nobility but simply as people...

...Wonderfully effective TV actors, like James Gamer, David Janssen, and Tom Selleck, have consistently failed to carry their special power over from the small to the large screen, and this cannotbe blamed on "bad scripts...

...John Nixon, Jr...

...All the elements I have praised help portray the panorama that forms around John Dunbar, but who is he...

...But later, after Dunbar aligns himself with the natives, the army men are portrayed (with one nebulous exception) as uniformly bigoted and bestial...

...One can almost hear, as if it were Fibber McGee's mythic closet, the clichrs about to start tumbling...

...Nothing of Dunbar's background is alluded to on screen, and Costner's performance--the weakest one in the movie~oesn't fill the lacunas in Michael Blake's script...

...I like to think that, somewhere, that great and gifted man is smiling and nodding at the work of the tough and witty woman who was once his namesake...

...That is no small accomplishment for any actor, but the fascinating thing is that Gless does it on and for TV...

...Again, no: it means that we all ought to celebrate Sharon Gless and her new series, "The Trials of Rosie O'Neill...

...But she captures perfectly the effort to speak English after thirty years of not hearing, speaking, or thinking it...

...After helping his Sioux comrades win a battle, Dunbar states that only the new tribal name they have honored him with, "Dances-with-Wolves," has any meaning for him, and that his white man's name is just a hollow sound, thereby telling us that his past life lacked substance...

...Given a simple, straight-arrow role like Eliot Ness, Costner can use the reserve and quizzicality in his personality to color and slightly deepen the part...

...It may not be a masterpiece but, playing in the same multiplex theaters with Rocky V and Predator H, it seems like a miracle...

...If you've ever been on the couch yourself, you know how common and how desperately important this kind of performance is to sustain...

...In TV, as Robert Frost earlier observed of walls, something there is that does not like an actor...

...True, the Pawnee battle garb and hairdress lend themselves to an impression of fierceness, but why does Costner photograph the warriors against blood-red skies and underscore their movements with ominous music...

...Why, when the Pawnees kill, do their victims die in agony (with the Pawnees scalping them before they expire), while the Sioux always kill quickly, cleanly, and in self-defense...

...It makes Dances with Wolves one of the finest adventure movies of recent years, not unworthy of Lawrence of Arabia, The Black Stallion, and The Man Who Would Be King...

...In this, his directorial debut, Costner establishes himself as a master of cinematic composition and movement and as a sympathetic director of actors...

...This is really the special quality Janssen and Selleck and, at her best, Mary Tyler Moore, brought to the business of TV acting: realizing that the great TV actor neither projects nor reflects, but--because of the almost erotic intimacy of the Tube--simply allows his/her vulnerability to emerge under the gaze of the smallscreen camera...

...That's the wonderful line croaked by Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year, when he discovers that the skit he is supposed to perform on an early fifties TV show is going to be done live, and instantly seen in millions of homes...

...Wit A spider, I, Lethal though little, Crouch at the middle Of my Silk pie...

...And as the camera circles around her--like a predator?--Rosie simultaneously reveals her neurotic pain and bravely, failingly, strives to maintain an ironic distance from it, as if she is, after all, in control...

...The pain we feel in defending the "obviously" guilty is like the pain we feel in gazing into our own most arid desert places...

...Damn few actors--who, whatever theory of drama you were force-fed in sophomore year--ought to be clowns and prophets and caricatures, all at the same time...

...Did the Sioux never show aggression or cruelty toward their neighbors...

...The veristic, restrained acting plus the subtitles bring us closer to these Sioux than we have ever been to movie Native Americans...

...Well, no...

...Just walk on to the set, plant your feet, and tell the truth...

...Let's admit it...

...Costner's effort suffers from problematic elements that the creators of Stallion and Man, with their more straightforward subjects, never had to deal with, and that David Lean, in Lawrence, nearly conquered...

...On the big screen you have to reflect: from an actor's perspective, the special quality of film is that it puts everybody in the front row, so that what might work on stage has to be carefully toned down to the gigantic intimacy of the close-up...

...So Dances with Wolves is a masterpiece, right...

...I grant that the Union cause was nobler than the removal of the native tribes, but Costner's bias toward whoever fights alongside Dunbar leads him to caricature Indians as well as white men, namely the Pawnee, enemies of the Sioux...

...I remember--I swear--as a kid seeing Lee J. Cobb perform the last soliloquy of King Lear on "The Dean Martin Show" right between a troupe of Russian acrobats and Dean's closing, sloshed medley at the piano...

...But what past life...