TV Reviews : A Compelling Love Triangle on ‘American Playhouse’

“In a Shallow Grave,” the first James Purdy novel to be adapted into a feature film, is a moody, oddly compelling love triangle with a daring twist on “American Playhouse” tonight(9 p.m. on Channels 28 and 15).

The story, set in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains during World War II, is about a horribly scarred veteran home from the war and his unrequited love for his prewar princess. He hires a young drifter to write and deliver love letters to the woman, who lives in a shiny white farmhouse a couple of hills away.

But the worst-case scenario unfolds: The goddess in her tower falls in love with the messenger bearing the letters. The geometry of the love triangle makes a quantum leap and delivers an unvarnished moment of male bonding that’s powerfully felt and rare for television.

We’re not talking soap here. The story is about the power of redemption and healing. The production features a distinctive, wraith-like performance by Michael Biehn as the reclusive lover who numbingly shuffles around his tattered farmhouse like a man barely able to get out of his pajamas.

Producer-director-screenwriter Kenneth Bowser, in his feature debut, catches an original voice here (author Purdy’s). It is not bleached out. The tone and imagery mirror other voices too: from “Beauty and the Beast” to “Cyrano de Bergerac” to William Faulkner (especially when the obsessed protagonist, from a safe distance in a grove of woods, watches his old lover through her bedroom window, his face pulpy in the pale moonlight).

The show’s single failing is a casting matter. Patrick Dempsey as the letter-bearer seduced by our muse is unconvincing as a youth attractive enough to impale Cupid’s arrow into her fickle heart (a serene performance by Maureen Mueller).

Originally a theatrical film, “In a Shallow Grave” is much more faithful to the book as television because 24 minutes in the original movie, which were cut and never shown, have been restored for TV.