Compelling Portrait of Wiesenthal

Docudrama: the good, the bad and the used, as television continues to be a history teacher with mixed results.

On Sunday night, for example, HBO presents a movie about famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal that’s highly worthy if somewhat lost in TV’s blur of Holocaust stories. Meanwhile, the accuracy of NBC’s recent account of the hunt for the infamous Hillside Stranglers has been bitterly attacked. And PBS is celebrating the 200th anniversary of America’s presidency by airing the undistinguished miniseries “George Washington: The Forging of a Nation.”

A CBS rerun.

Wiesenthal-like characters surface in drama from time to time, and his relentless shadowing of war criminals has inspired many a dramatist. But HBO’s story, airing at 8 p.m., is the first film biography of Wiesenthal himself, an unremarkable-appearing man who has done remarkable things.

Based on his memoirs, “Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story” is a well-made, vividly executed movie enhanced by Ben Kingsley’s quietly strong performance as the Holocaust survivor who emerged from Mauthausen, weak and barely able to walk, to become perhaps the most celebrated international detective of his time.

Directed by Brian Gibson, “Murderers Among Us” explores the German mind as it explores German-made horrors, examining the ambiguities and paradoxes of Nazi behavior with unusual insight. There is one especially intense moment, for example, when a dying SS man begs Wiesenthal the prisoner to forgive him on behalf of all Jews.

Writers Abby Mann, Robin Vote and Ron Hutchinson recall Wiesenthal’s dogged Nazi hunts here, intercutting flashbacks with the present. Looming above all else is the specter of the evil Adolf Eichmann, whose 1960 capture in Buenos Aires by Israelis is largely credited to information supplied them by Wiesenthal. (However, some now maintain that Wiesenthal had less to do with the seizure than he has claimed.)

Wiesenthal’s experience is always relevant, but especially now in light of recently resurging pro-Hitler feeling in Bavaria and reports of increased neo-Nazi activity in the United States.

Yet there is something about HBO’s story that falls short.

For one thing, Wiesenthal’s history, like the Holocaust itself, is almost too profound to be captured on the screen, even in this three-hour form. No matter the intent, a minimized impact is almost inevitable.

Perhaps the problem is also one of desensitization. There have been so many Holocaust stories on TV in recent years that the sheer weight of the whole tends to diminish the individual components. By and large, the good along with the bad, they all begin looking alike.

At least “Murderers Among Us” attempts to be factual. Not so, apparently, with a TV story about atrocities much closer to home. These were the serial slayings of 10 Los Angeles women and two in Bellingham, Wash., in the late 1970s, and the murderers among us then were Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, who are now serving prison terms.

Although “The Case of the Hillside Stranglers” aired April 2, anger about the movie lingers.

Written and directed by Steven Gethers and based on a controversial book by Darcy O’Brien, “The Case of the Hillside Stranglers” was essentially one man’s story, seeming to grossly exaggerate the role that then Los Angeles homicide detective Bob Grogan had in the investigation. Actually, Grogan was merely one member of the task force formed to investigate the case.

Grogan’s former wife has attacked the movie as being riddled with untruths, and so have others who were intimately acquainted with the investigation.

“It was like a class-B movie and it wasn’t accurate,” said Sgt. Frank Salerno of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who was a member of the task force.

“It was total bull,” said another task force member, Bill Williams, a retired homicide detective of the Los Angeles Police Department. “My phone rang all day the next day from people who said, ‘I thought you worked on that case.’ ” Viewers wouldn’t have known it from the movie.

“The people in the (state) attorney general’s office were the real heroes,” Williams added. “It sure wasn’t Grogan or the LAPD. We overlooked some things that could have saved those girls in Bellingham.”

“We drew a great deal from the book,” responded executive producer Mike Rosenfeld. “We did not have ample time. We would have liked three or four hours to do an in-depth approach to the subject. In an hour and 35 minutes (actual running time), every time you mention one name or open another area, you have to close it. We elected to try to tell as much of the story as we could through Grogan’s point of view. There were other people involved, but we just didn’t have time to explore them, and I’m sorry we didn’t.”

Perhaps angriest of all is veteran Los Angeles Police vice detective Fred Clapp, who claims the NBC movie unfairly smeared the reputations of him and his former partner by distorting an incident involving them. He said the NBC version was drawn from O’Brien’s book.

Clapp said he called O’Brien to object after the book was published and has now written to NBC, Gethers and O’Brien demanding a retraction and public apology. Clapp said that NBC’s legal department has responded, referring him to Fries Entertainment, one of the movie’s producers.

The movie showed Grogan’s future girlfriend, J. D. Jackson, being pulled over in her car by two men the same way that some of the victims were shown being stopped by Buono and Bianchi. The pair who stopped Jackson were later revealed in the movie to be not the stranglers, but vice officers who “got drunk after duty and were looking for a little action.” When confronted by Grogan, they shrugged guiltily like little kids caught stealing from the cookie jar.

Although not named in the movie, the vice cops were Clapp and his partner, Mike Thompson, now a lieutenant in the narcotics division.

Clapp said he and Thompson had not been drinking or looking for “action.” What really happened, he said, was that the two officers stopped Jackson for speeding, after which they suspected her of being under the influence of alcohol, although they ultimately let her go after failing to get a squad car to pick her up. Clapp said that Jackson later told the police that she may have encountered the serial slayers, but that he and Thompson were investigated and cleared of any wrongdoing.

“We didn’t identify the cops,” Rosenfeld said. “We were simply drawing on an actual incident that took place. We didn’t make a big deal of it; we tried to minimize it. And if anybody was hurt by that, I’m sorry about that.”

So what’s the harm if the movie didn’t identify them? “The two vice cops depicted in that film could not have been anyone else but us,” Clapp said. “Everybody knows it--my friends, everyone.”

From the forging of police reputations to the forging of the United States, meanwhile, it’s a long trip back into history.

Showing the deflated state of public television, PBS is making its own history by using a 1986 CBS miniseries to note “the 200th anniversary of the presidency.” This is surely the first time public TV has rerun a commercial network entertainment program that wasn’t part of a wider retrospective.

The second and concluding part of “George Washington: The Forging of a Nation” airs at 9 tonight on Channels 28, 15 and 24. It’s a sequel to the 1984 CBS miniseries “George Washington.” Both productions were based on--but didn’t live up to--James Thomas Flexner’s acclaimed biography of Washington, who is played here by Barry Bostwick.

Although accompanied by an interview of Flexner by Bill Moyers, “The Forging of a Nation” is historically shallow melodrama. It’s inoffensive entertainment, but hardly the high-level alternative programming expected of PBS.