TV Reviews : Bugliosi’s Suspenseful ‘Till Death Us Do Part’

Vincent Bugliosi has struck again. From “Helter Skelter” to last year’s desert island sex and murder yarn, “And the Sea Will Tell,” L.A.’s former district attorney has turned his courtroom career into a cottage TV industry.

The latest Bugliosi book-to-movie adaptation is “Till Death Us Do Part” (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39), which again is a fact-based, lurid case, this one from the mid-1960s and which the young Bugliosi won armed only with circumstantial evidence.

Along the way, Bugliosi is reaping an awful lot of movie time. In “And the Sea Will Tell” (aired a year ago this week), Richard Crenna played Bugliosi as a defense attorney. In “Till Death Us Do Part,” Arliss Howard portrays Bugliosi as a relentless L.A. prosecutor on the bloody trail of a suave, icy killer, strongly played by Treat Williams.

Howard is solid as the dogged Bugliosi in snarling, inner-office combat with his tough, skeptical boss (vividly played by John Schuck). But in a genre where the villain is normally the juiciest role, it’s Williams’ show.

Playing con man, ex-L.A. cop and convicted double-murderer Alan Palliko (now serving a life sentence in San Quentin), Williams has a rollicking good time as an arrogant ladies man who conspires with his lover (the sultry, lovesick Rebecca Jenkins) to knock off her oafish husband for the double indemnity insurance.

In fact, Phil Rosenberg’s teleplay skirts the shadows of the classic old movie “Double Indemnity.” Except here two spouses are murdered--the paramour’s husband and, later, the killer’s own wife, in a chilling point-blank shooting in a carport.

This production, directed by Yves Simoneau, isn’t as gripping as Bugliosi’s “Helter Skelter” Manson case nor is it in the class of “And the Sea Will Tell.” Still, “Till Death Us Do Part” is a well-crafted, suspenseful descent into human squalor.