THEATER AND FILM : KOCE-TV Offers Up Marilyn, Humphrey, Spencer and Grace

This month, Orange County’s KOCE-TV/Channel 50 will be offering four star-spangled specials, and a nifty-sounding lineup it is:

-- First-run retrospectives this week on Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe.

-- A rerun, also this week, of a 1986 special on Hollywood’s longtime leading man, Spencer Tracy.

-- A new biography next week on dream princess Grace Kelly. (Los Angeles’ KCET/Channel 28 also will be airing the Kelly, Monroe and Bogart shows this month).

Don’t expect too much, though. There’s none of the candor or incisive probing of earlier public TV programs on Ingrid Bergman and the Marx Brothers, or the kind of revelations that characterized public TV’s backstage chronicles of Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

Sandee Harden, programming head of the Coast Community College District-operated channel in Huntington Beach, said KOCE hopes the current batch of shows will draw big crowds of viewers during its current 16-night annual pledge drive (last March, $186,819 was raised).

People “love these star specials,” Harden said. “It’s like revisiting old friends, like going through old family scrapbooks.” Sure enough, this month’s paeans (none of which were produced by KOCE) are just that--comfy, at times a bit gushy, and worth tuning in on just for the sheer pleasure of reliving familiar screen moments.

Still, “Hollywood Legends: Marilyn Monroe” (8 p.m. Thursday and 10:45 p.m. Friday on Channel 50; 9:15 p.m. March 16 on Channel 28) is a lackluster compilation. A look at Monroe as both film idol and press-conference target, it starts in the early ‘50s, when she was as a fresh-faced, extra-bosomy studio starlet, and ends with her body being wheeled from her home by coroner’s aides in 1962.

Ironically, despite the gallant claims of John Huston, Joshua Logan and others that she was indeed a gifted, luminous actress, this “tribute” only underscores Monroe’s rather meager acting abilities. The clips presented here indicate that from “The Asphalt Jungle” through her last completed film, “The Misfits,” she remained a caricature of the sweetly dim vixen-next-door, a breathless-voice, ready-for-action, life-size toy.

To make matters worse, this biography curiously skips over the deeper story of Marilyn Monroe, the martyred object of studio machinations, relentless cheesecake hype and male sexist wish-fulfillment (also omitted is any reference to the lurid, and politically intriguing, speculations that have popped up surrounding Monroe’s final days). One of Hollywood’s true lost waifs, Monroe deserves better than this quick sketch.

You won’t find much more in “Hollywood Legends: Grace Kelly” (8 p.m. March 16 on Channel 50; 8:05 p.m. March 17 on Channel 28). True, the brief ‘50s reign of this astonishingly good-looking actress might seem placid next to Monroe’s. But this program generates little excitement even on the story’s own terms.

It is not as though there is no dramatic potential, after all, in the tale of a rich man’s daughter who strikes out on her own to become an actress, encounters early career struggles, makes it as Alfred Hitchcock’s elegantly flirtatious leading lady (“To Catch a Thief,” “Rear Window”), wins an Oscar (as the wife of the alcoholic in “The Country Girl”) and ends up Princess of Monaco.

About all we get in the depth department is a remark by actress Katy Jurado, a “High Noon” co-star, that Kelly was a surprisingly “strong-willed” person.

So much for depth.

The Bogart and Tracy programs are somewhat more personalized, thanks to their narrators. Bogart’s story (8:45 p.m. Friday on Channel 50; 9:05 p.m. the same night on Channel 28) is told by his widow, Lauren Bacall, and--best of all--Tracy’s longtime companion Katharine Hepburn is the warmly affectionate guide to “The Spencer Tracy Legacy” (9 p.m. Saturday, on Channel 50 only).

Still, even these two specials do a disservice. There is little to suggest Tracy and Bogart’s backstage personas (especially Tracy’s demonic drinking bouts), or of how each was able to parlay his natural truculence into great star appeal.

There is a consolation prize, though. Both the Tracy and Bogart programs are excellent primers on old-pro craft. Their acting may have been narrowly confined, but these men gave us some of the screen’s most remembered images--Tracy as the Gibraltar-strong Father Flanagan or the befuddled “Father of the Bride,” Bogart as supreme cynics Spade and “Casablanca” Rick, or as the cowardly heroes of “The African Queen” and “The Caine Mutiny.”

On one level, at least, all these shows work just fine. Keep in mind that they are all about legends. Don’t ask questions. Put aside the annoying realities. Just sit back, watch--and worship. It won’t be hard to do.