TV REVIEWS : Five Different Views of America in ‘P.O.V’ Series

There are five very different films left in the brisk “P.O.V.” series airing Tuesday nights on PBS, including a heavily awarded one, “Best Boy,” which may make you question the whole matter of a documentarian’s privilege.

Also in this batch is Errol Morris’ “Gates of Heaven,” (Aug. 30) which grew, actually, from a dare, spiraling outward from a newspaper clipping into one of the most telling and bizarre bits of Americana imaginable.

Film maker Werner Herzog, who has a pretty good ear for that sort of thing, listened to Morris spin his tales of the film he would make if a heartless world were only more accommodating, until Herzog could stand it no longer. You will talk forever, and never make a foot of this film, he exploded to Morris one day--or Germanic-tinged words to that effect. “If you ever do make it, I’ll eat my shoe!”

Stung to the quick, Morris took his clipping about an idealistic local pet cemetery that was going belly-up, requiring the reinternment of a goodly number of faithful friends, and turned it into “Gates of Heaven.” Months later, a group gathered in Berkeley to watch Herzog manfully eating one ceremonially cooked desert boot. (Being Berkeley, it was cooked by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, with herbs to spare.)

And the hypnotic “Gates of Heaven” is the result. Morris has a wicked sensibility but he must have an absolutely dulcet manner, since he has coaxed from any number of people the very stuff of their inner selves--and pretty jaw-dropping stuff it is. This is David Byrne’s America, simply not set to music.

A very different sort of America, the world of young men and women with a conscience-deep concern for the rights of others, is the focus of tonight’s stirring film, “The Good Fight,” by Noel Buckner, Mary Dore, Sam Sills (airing at 10 p.m. on Channels 28, 50, 24).

You don’t get history more vivid nor less self-conscious than this (nor more stirring songs, anywhere); there is a real sense of knowing the hearts of the “boys” and “girls” of the Lincoln Brigade, the 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who set off to fight the spread of Fascism in Spain.

Unsurprisingly, the survivors--longshoremen, magazine writers, cartoonists, ex-nurses and ambulance drivers--still carry the embers of that passion 50 years later, still reverberatingly committed, they form a bedrock of conscience for their country.

“Metropolitan Avenue”(next Tuesday) is Christine Noschese’s first film, a study of her back-fence neighbors in Brooklyn who unexpectedly found themselves dealing with that hydra-headed monster, politics, when all they wanted was not to let the neighborhood go down the tubes. What plain people, with no more experience than you or I, can do when pressed, makes this a pungent and renewing portrait, and these terrific women, frank, salty, unafraid, become its undeniable stars.

The subject of “Louie Bluie” by Terry Zwigoff (Aug. 23) is a self-created star, the irrepressible 76-year-old string band musician Harold (“Louie Bluie”) Armstrong, an artist in any field he puts his hand to: music, talk, cartooning or a vigorous contemplation of life and love. Funny, salacious, irrepressible and ultimately admirably tenacious, Louie Bluie’s life is the stuff they sing about--but if you listen closely, that song may just be Billy Ward and the Dominos doing “60 Minute Man.”

“Best Boy” which closes the series (Sept. 6), has won an Academy Award and the affection of nearly every one who’s ever written about it, but it still troubles me. It’s a portrait of film maker Ira Wohl’s 52-year-old retarded cousin, Philly, who during the course of the three years of filming, achieves a measure of independence, moving out from the loving, if constricting nest his parents Pearl and Max have created for him in Queens.

But never was a family more changed by the presence of a film making crew--except perhaps Santa Barbara’s Loud family. Granted that Philly was ultimately benefited by a wider range to his life, the scenes of Pearl, watching her “best boy” move away from her, are wringingly poignant.

And when it is Wohl who also “wins” in the bargain (prizes, international acclaim), a nagging question keeps surfacing: Where was it written that all this need have happened, except to make a film? It’s one of those almost unanswerable paradoxes, where good and gain may--or may not--balance out.