Television Reviews : Twisting Plot Scorches ‘Home Fires Burning’

The home fires are not just burning, they’re raging in “Home Fires Burning” (Sunday at 9 p.m., Channels 2 and 8). Plot developments pile up fast and furious, with a new crisis and would-be catharsis every few minutes.

The year is 1944. The protagonist, a 64-year-old small-town Alabama newspaper editor (Barnard Hughes), is said to have an overactive imagination, but he has nothing on Robert Inman, who wrote the original novel as well as this teleplay based on it.

In one scene, the editor hijacks his own son’s funeral at gunpoint and coerces the pallbearer to open the casket so he can make sure that it’s really his son. He doesn’t have much of a reason for such bizarre behavior; we’re just supposed to understand that it’s a symptom of his crotchety spirit.

Most of the other narrative twists are better explained, but there are so many of them that they begin to devalue each other. No matter how good the individual scenes are--and with this cast, some of the scenes are very good--the overall effect is one of overkill.

The editor has a wife (Sada Thompson) who almost cuts off his head, an estranged son (Bill Pullman) who’s fighting World War II as well as his own private demons, an alienated grandson (Neil Patrick Harris), a newly discovered daughter-in-law (Elizabeth Berridge) and accompanying infant granddaughter, and a friend (Robert J. Prosky) whose daughter was apparently killed in a car driven by the editor’s son. A couple of the Hughes-Prosky scenes are reminiscent of the telephone company commercials about lifelong chums.

Hughes, Thompson and Prosky are fun to watch, even when the film flails every which way, or even in the wash of platitudinous sentiment at the end. The final words are truly worthy of a greeting card--which shouldn’t be all that surprising; this is a “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” Glenn Jordan produced and directed.