TV REVIEW : Neo-Nazi Drama Defeated by a Weak Script

“So Proudly We Hail” is billed as a movie about the rise of neo-Nazism in the United States. However real that threat, this story lacks a script and characters credible enough to make it come alive on the screen. It airs at 9 tonight on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).

Writer-director-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd creates parallel stories--one involving anthropology professor James Wagner (Edward Herrmann) and another involving three young drifters (Chad Lowe, Billy Morrissette and Peter Dobson)--and then merges them as these characters become human chess pieces manipulated by white supremacist Alden Ernst (David Soul) and his smirking nephew (Raphael Sbarge).

Chetwynd has shaped these casualties to fit his apparent thesis that the new Nazi leadership is smooth and shrewd enough to victimize and exploit discontent in a broad cross section of Americans, ranging from the uneducated to liberal intellectuals like Wagner. It’s something to think about.

However, everything and everyone here--including the soft-headed media--are almost comically obvious. The victims are script-serving setups, the least believable of whom is Wagner, an incredibly naive boob who so easily falls prey to Ernst and his Nazi temptress cohort (Harley Jane Kozak) that he appears brain dead.

By trivializing Wagner, the story trivializes the danger. Equally injurious are such fanciful sidebars as Ernst’s girlfriend--whose Nazi sympathies seems obvious to everyone but Wagner--being able to plant the simpleton professor on a prestigious network show patterned after “Nightline.” As he is being interviewed, she is given the run of the control room like an insider.

The performances are perfunctory, the direction without dramatic edge and the story lacking in anything that hasn’t been said before--and said better.