TV Reviews : ‘Fellow Traveller’ Recasts Golden Age of Television

Memories can be highly selective. The era that some historians mistakenly recall as the “golden age of television”--roughly the late 1940s to the late 1950s--was instead a low point for America’s entertainment industry in some ways.

In giving mutant life to the infamous inquisitors of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism, the Red scare that followed World War II not only squelched freedom of expression in the arts but also cruelly and unjustly victimized scores of producers, directors, writers and artists who were blacklisted and denied work for years. Some never recovered.

Those shrill, unpleasant echoes reverberate throughout “Fellow Traveller,” a highly interesting though ultimately meandering HBO movie (10 p.m. Sunday) that uses the political volatility and fearfulness of that period to frame its story about a leftist Hollywood screenwriter who flees to London in 1954 to avoid testifying before HUAC. While ghostwriting a BBC children’s television show about Robin Hood, Asa Kaufman (Ron Silver) learns of the suicide of handsome movie star Cliff Byrne (Hart Bochner), his best friend since childhood.

Cliff’s death becomes the underlying mystery of “Fellow Traveller,” in which flashbacks and surreal dream segments are interwoven with the present as a means of exploring Asa’s mind and the insidious nature of the political demon he and others face.

Silver brings a nervous intensity to a character whose Communist Party affiliation--not necessarily a black mark when the United States was allied with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany--comes back to haunt him in the Cold War years. An arresting aspect of Michael Eaton’s plot is the way the children’s show that Asa is writing begins reflecting his obsession about being betrayed at home.

The collaboration here between Eaton and director Philip Saville is especially effective as “Fellow Traveller” recalls the pain and paranoia of these dark days and how adept HUAC operatives could be at sizing up and exploiting the frailties of their targets. You admire Asa for resisting--at a price.

However, Asa’s affair with a British activist (Imogen Stubbs) is a static intrusion and, even more critically, the malevolence of Asa’s shadowy psychotherapist (Daniel J. Travanti) is such an awkward plot device that it taints “Fellow Traveller” with artificiality.

So it’s a flawed story that HBO delivers Sunday, but also an intriguing and worthwhile one.