TV REVIEW : ‘Turn Back the Clock’: Second Shot at Destiny

The week’s prize weeper is NBC’s “Turn Back the Clock” tonight at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39. Lovely Connie Sellecca turns on the waterworks nonstop in this maudlin remake of a ‘40s melodrama about a betrayed woman who shoots her husband on New Year’s Eve, then gets to relive the year and perhaps change fate.

Sellecca plays successful actress Sheila Powers, married to philandering director Barney (David Dukes), whose career is taking a nose dive. Overwrought, she kills him when he has an affair with scheming writer Tracy (Wendy Kilbourne of NBC’s “Midnight Caller”), then wishes she could undo the deed.

Magically, she’s given a chance.

It’s fascinating and daunting to think of living a year over again. Would you try to prevent tragedies? Cash in on foreknowledge? In the blinkered script by Lee Hutson and Lindsay Harrison, martyr Sheila wants only to keep Barney--a puzzling goal, because he’s such an obvious creep.

She does try to warn her best friend, a burntout young poet named William (Jere Burns, the smarmy playboy in “Dear John”), against getting tied up with Maureen (Dina Merrill). Maureen, another obvious nasty, will drive poor William to violence and a mental breakdown.

But alas, it seems fate won’t be denied, no matter how hard Sheila tries and tries, and cries and cries.

Or will it?

Burns’ performance as a sneering, yet vulnerable cynic almost makes watching worthwhile, and Emmy Award-winning director Larry Elikann makes it all quite stylish. But he and the cast, including Gene Barry and Franc Luz, are better than this.