TV Reviews : Disfigured Spitfire Ace Makes ‘A Perfect Hero’

The narrowly won Battle of Britain, in those early days of World War II, is still sharply felt by the British, even 50 years later. And it’s this sense of a shared national experience that permeates “A Perfect Hero,” a four-part series from “Masterpiece Theatre” that begins Sunday and continues on subsequent Sundays through May 24 (at 9 p.m. on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, 8 p.m. on KVCR Channel 24).

The production marks a radical and literally face-changing transformation for British star Nigel Havers (the supreme cad in “Masterpiece Theatre’s” “The Charmer”). We meet him as a dashing Cambridge golden boy in 1939. The air is full of the talk of war, and he and his three closest buddies make a pact to join the Royal Air Force together.

The textured screenplay by Allan Prior, from a book by Christopher Matthew, dramatizes what happens to these young flyers, but this is not an epic war movie. The action is mainly on the home front after Havers’ cocky flyer is shot down in a dogfight and his face and hands are hideously burned and disfigured.

Playing a character inspired by the real-life Spitfire ace Richard Hillary, Havers spends most of the first episode swathed in bandages in a wartime burn unit modeled after Britain’s pioneering World War II plastic surgery center, East Grinstead Hospital. As its leading doctor, James Fox plays a British character based on the real-life wartime burns specialist Sir Archibald McIndoe, who revolutionized the rehabilitation of flyers horribly burned in crashes.

As a movie that accumulates dramatic power in each succeeding hour, it’s a shame the episodes are spaced so far apart. A cautionary note: Sunday’s establishing material, largely confined to the hospital with some compensating flashbacks of the hero’s Cambridge life, is on the grueling side but hardly representative of the smashing three episodes that follow. The last two hours particularly develop into a heartfelt and socially observant odyssey vaguely suggestive of the love and hurt in “Beauty and the Beast.”