TV REVIEW : ‘Where Pigeons Go’ Too Schmaltzy by Half

Art Carney turns up a few kernels of truth among the tears and schmaltz of tonight’s NBC movie, “Where Pigeons Go to Die” (at 9 on Channels 4, 36 and 39).

T Michael Landon directs, wrote the teleplay (based on the book by R. Wright Campbell) and stars. He plays 50-year-old Hugh, returning to his hometown after 40 years to sell his dead grandfather’s house. But memories of the time he spent there as a boy with his “Da” (Carney), who gave him lessons in pigeon training and in life, engulf him in mournful reminiscence.

Landon, the king of TV’s heart-warming genre (“Little House on the Prairie,” “Highway to Heaven”), narrates: “I’m 10 years old again, the cardinal year of my life, and it’s a day that marks the end of my childhood.”

The boy Hugh, played by Robert Hy Gorman, is the constant companion of his beloved “Da,” who mixes philosophy with pigeon lore. Da says birds should be held “firmly but gently, the way you should hold love or life,” and “a creature returns home for the good in it.”

When Da is hospitalized with a stroke, Hugh knows he must somehow help Da back to the home he loves before he dies. Meanwhile, Hugh’s prize pigeon is missing after an 800-mile race. Will he, like Da, make it home?

The script--and Landon’s tragedian narration--cloy, but less so when Carney’s on screen.

Gorman, a fragile, serious-faced boy, acquits himself creditably. Ronne Troup and Cliff De Young, as Hugh’s mom and dad, don’t have much to do, although De Young shares one moving moment of reality with Carney.

But it’s Carney, immobile and speechless in his hospital scenes, using only his eyes and the lift of his chin, who briefly gives the film the poignancy for which it strives.