TV MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Land of Little Rain’ Offers Pretty Portrait, but Perfunctory Drama

“Land of Little Rain,” tonight’s production on “American Playhouse” (Channels 28 and 15 at 9 p.m.), is most notable for its glimpse of the circle of literati who gathered at the home of Charles Lummis in turn-of-the-century Los Angeles. This is a chapter in the city’s cultural history that is seldom seen on national television.

The subject of Doris Baizley’s script is one member of that group: Mary Austin (Helen Hunt), who was to write well-regarded books about the Paiute Indians who lived near her in Independence, Calif. The teleplay shows how Austin declared her own independence, letting go of her marriage and her motherhood in order to pursue her writing.

It was quite an odyssey for a woman of that era, but Hunt’s Mary strides through it with self-confidence and equanimity--too much of it, in fact, for the sake of dramatic tension and period credibility. Baizley (who examined a later generation of California women in her play “Mrs. California”) and director Evelyn Purcell allow no shadows to fall on their portrait of a feminist role model.

The movie looks pretty. Hunt was photographed against wide, handsome mountains (in Colorado and New Mexico, standing in for the Sierra), wearing flowers in her hair. Bruce Odland contributed an evocative score. But the drama is pale and perfunctory.

It was produced in Denver, where it won the Great American Teleplay Contest, sponsored by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.