TV REVIEW : Warren Seduces in ‘Seduction’

Lesley Ann Warren, fluttering like a moth, is a cold-blooded vixen in “A Seduction in Travis County” (at 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8).

Is Warren fun to watch? She sure is, those great eyes and nostrils flaring as she throws herself at her defense attorney (Peter Coyote) and murders his wife (Jean Smart) because she’s in the way of her romantic designs.

Inspired by actual events chronicled in the book “Murder in Little Rock” by Jan Meins, the story, once you peel away the sleaze, is not merely a murder yarn. It’s about the arrogance and hubris of Coyote’s cocky’s attorney. He had it all and in large measure brought destruction on himself.

The script by Christopher Canaan works because Coyote’s successful attorney is naive, a nice guy too full of himself and legal “due process” to see the Warren character for the crazed viper and manipulative spellbinder that she is. His private investigator buddy (Matt Clark) warns him, to no avail.

Director George Kaczender gives Warren lots of slack and she has a ripping good time as a tangy tart. Warren, whose career began 25 years ago as the ingenue daughter of Fred MacMurray in Disney’s “The Happiest Millionaire,” is a lucky woman--an ageless actress. She’ll be playing femmes fatales when she’s 70.

By the way, the murder of the wife (attractive second banana Smart) is particularly chilling: A hit man posing as a floral deliveryman wheedles his entry into the victim’s home. The chase up the stairs into the victim’s bedroom as she lunges for a pistol in her closet is action moviemaking at its scariest.

As the hit man later tells the court, “Women are suckers for a man at the door with flowers.”

Meanwhile, in “A Seduction in Travis County,” men are even bigger suckers.