TV REVIEW : A Bomb That Shook a Life : ‘Darrow’ Re-Creates L.A.’s Stormy Past

Tonight’s two-hour biographical drama “Darrow” turns on a bloody event that shaped the economic and political history of Los Angeles, consolidated the power of the Los Angeles Times and cost the brilliant Clarence Darrow a devastating setback at the height of his career.

As drama and history, “Darrow” illuminates, probes and races in episodic fashion through 30 years of its subject’s professional and personal life during a tumultuous period when the union movement was getting off the ground in this country.

With Kevin Spacey starring as the so-called “attorney for the damned,” the KCET production for “American Playhouse” airs at 9 tonight on Channel 28 and on Friday at 9 p.m. on KPBS Channel 15.

“Darrow” opens with the Pullman railroad workers strike of 1894 and, during its second hour, dramatizes Darrow’s defense of the infamous McNamara brothers. The two union organizers were convicted of blowing up the virulently anti-union L.A. Times, a dynamite blast at the Broadway and 1st Street site that sent an earthquake-sized jolt through the city at 1:07 a.m. on Oct. 1, 1910, and claimed the lives of 21 workers. Darrow subsequently became a casualty too when he had to defend himself against allegations of jury tampering in the case.

On the screen a tabloid headline from a paper called the Daily Mirror fills the screen: “BOMB ROCKS L.A. TIMES.” The Times itself, the day after the bombing, printed a special one-page edition (curiously unnoted by the show’s producers) with a banner blaring “UNIONIST BOMB WRECKS THE TIMES.” A front page editorial (also not used by the show) declared, “They can kill our men and can wreck our buildings but by the God above they cannot kill the Times.”

It is the tone and temper of those embattled days that writers William Schmidt and Stephen Stept and director John Coles capture with veracity. (Pittsburgh, Pa., nicely doubled for 80-year-old L.A. settings.)

When most of us think of the bristling defense attorney Clarence Darrow, we conjure up the Loeb-Leopold murder case (Orson Welles as Darrow in the movie “Compulsion”) and the Scopes Tennessee Monkey Trial (which challenged the right to teach evolution and was dramatized with Spencer Tracy as Darrow in “Inherit the Wind”). But this show rigorously dramatizes Darrow the part-time father and twice-married husband for whom work and occasional late nights at thepub were a narcotic.

By entwining his warts and heroism, the production brings to life Darrow’s comparatively unfamiliar earlier battles as a fiery labor lawyer.

“We will not be intimidated,” the young Darrow declares once he quits his job as a rich railroad lawyer and turns on his old corporate bosses. “Authority is nothing more than what the rich and powerful can put over on the rest of us.”

Turn-of-the-century America unspools with the hurly-burly fury of strikes, shantytowns and the mesmerizing depiction of labor leader Eugene Debs (vividly portrayed by Chris Cooper), who later turns his back on Darrow.

As an uncanny Darrow-lookalike, Spacey is in every scene, striking fear into big business and humanizing his character with brush strokes of vanity, cynicism and genuine love for the weak and oppressed. (Spacey, who played evangelist Jim Bakker in NBC’s “Fall From Grace,” was laureled with a Tony last Sunday as the best featured actor in a play for Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers.”)

Darrow’s reluctant decision to defend the McNamara brothers in L.A. is the drama’s peak, because of the impact it had on his career. Local armchair historians will have a field day picking through the ashes of the charred L.A. Times and the subsequent carnival of courtroom and political intrigue. It’s hard to imagine, but Los Angeles, as the script and California history make clear, was on the verge of electing a Socialist mayor in 1910 before the L.A. Times went up in smoke.

The owner of The Times, Harrison Gray Otis, who had purchased the paper in 1881, is portrayed by actor Alan North as pugnacious and vengeful. Otis demands that the McNamara brothers be hanged and personally warns a bemused Darrow: “Prepare for war.”

The McNamara trial and Darrow and Otis and their beleaguered cronies are shown as crucial players in L.A.’s salad days. The aftermath of the charged atmosphere was a citywide fear of unions, the death of pro-labor sentiment, the consolidation of business hegemony and a city newly galvanized as an open shop. What a history lesson.

The show drops a hint that the bombing may have been a set-up by the city’s big business interests to destroy labor, but to this day, despite the McNamaras’ confession, the truth about the explosion remains a mystery.

Darrow’s greatest personal fight was just beginning, however. He is seen spending two hellish years in Los Angeles after the trial defending himself on a trumped-up charge of bribing a McNamara juror. He’s acquitted in a passionate self-defense but is exhausted emotionally and financially. He leaves Los Angeles, which he despises, never to return.

Even labor rejects him and, as his son’s off-camera narration gently puts it, he sifts through the embers of his career to start all over again, well past middle age, taking up the burden of the poor and indigent in hometown Chicago. There, two of his his most famous clients--Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold (terrific performances by Barry Sherman and Jamie Harrold)--revive his career as a criminal lawyer in the notorious thrill murder case in 1924. Darrow died at the age of 80 in 1938.