TV Films: A Fatal Attraction to Sleaze

Welcome to “Middle-Aged Men and the Psychopaths Who Love Them.”

An emotionally disturbed blond temptress in gray silk lingerie shoots a teasing glance at the camera while slowly, seductively rolling on her hose. It’s the Carolyn Warmus story.

Again.

A beautiful woman in her 20s turns an affair with an older man into a deadly fixation that imperils him and his daughter. It’s an obsessed female story.

Again.

The network television movie has undergone a lobotomy, a lamentable surgery on a genre that, while not consistently well-executed as drama, at least gave prime-time viewers something to chew on. TV movies were once a forum for the kind of issues that theatrical films refused to touch, from wartime military desertion in the 1974 drama “The Execution of Pvt. Slovik” to the 1984 incest film “Something About Amelia” to the 1985 AIDS story “An Early Frost.”

But television movies so far this season have largely been about nothing but sex and crime, relinquishing contemporary issues--from the Los Angeles riots to the simmering debate over the J.F.K. assassination--to weekly series.

There are exceptions, most notably on HBO, whose movie agenda this season has already included biographies of controversial attorney Roy Cohn and Teamster boss Jackie Presser. The pay-TV channel will tackle the amazing life and times of Soviet despot Josef Stalin in a Nov. 21 epic running just under three hours, and it has scheduled a movie on the Exxon Valdez catastrophe for December.

While HBO is playing world-class moviemaker, however, the networks are replaying “Misty” for you.

In a letter to entertainment industry leaders Wednesday urging attention to “human values” in theatrical movies and TV, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony posed this question about the industry’s portrayal of women: “Are they persons possessing the same intrinsic dignity as their male counterparts at the deepest level, facing the same soul-wrenching challenges to grow?”

In this fall’s network TV movies, hardly. It’s Jessica Walter’s homicidal fan in “Play Misty for Me” and Glenn Close’s deranged man chaser in “Fatal Attraction” who echo loudest.

There were mad shrieks galore in “Obsessed,” for example, last Sunday’s ABC movie about an unstable, raging, young woman (Shannen Doherty) who went berserk when kicked out of the house by her mid-50ish lover (William Devane), who could have saved himself a lot of misery by merely doing the logical thing and changing the locks.

“Are you just using me like some whore?” the wacko Lorie screamed. “Is that all I mean to you?”

Actually, he was merely trying to escape her smothering possessiveness (“I’m the only one for you”), and paid the price when she harassed him, blew up his yacht and tried to murder his daughter.

The same theme propelled last month’s “A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story” on ABC, a docudrama about a sexy, manipulative schoolteacher (Virginia Madsen) convicted of killing the wife of a fellow teacher (Chris Sarandon) with whom she was having an affair.

But is one Carolyn Warmus movie enough? Pu leeeeeeze !

At 9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 2 and 8 comes the CBS version, “Danger of Love,” with Jenny Robertson as pulsating, mini-skirted Warmus and Joe Penny as her former lover, Paul Solomon (given aa different name here), the man Warmus just has to possess. So she snaps, bumping off his wife, then repeatedly bugging him when he tells her to get lost. And oh yes, just so viewers won’t get bored, she parades in her underwear and gives him oral sex in his car.

To a lesser extent, last Sunday’s CBS movie “A House of Secrets and Lies” was also an extension of the obsessive-woman theme, casting Connie Selleca as a woman compulsively addicted to the very husband who has betrayed and victimized her.

Meanwhile, if the female protagonists of TV movies aren’t going to murderous extremes to get and hold their men, they are the ones being victimized.

“Women in jeopardy” are back like the scourge.

In September, NBC gave us former Miss America Carolyn Sapp in her own story of “abuse and betrayal at the hands of the man she loved.” The female body count mounted in the CBS movie “Terror on Track 9,” with Joan Van Ark playing a TV reporter who turned out to be somewhat obsessive herself. One Hollywood stripper was slain and another looked like a goner in ABC’s multiple-murder movie “Somebody’s Daughter.” And coming Oct. 27 is a CBS movie in which a TV journalist played by Donna Mills looks like a candidate for deep-sixing when her background becomes a threat to a ruthless politician.

It’s obviously a tough season for female newscasters, witness ABC’s 9 p.m. Sunday movie “Exclusive” (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), in which Suzanne Somers plays an anchor-investigative reporter who is in deep you-know-what when she gets in the way of a mass murderer.

It’s late at night and she’s alone in her house when she hears a noise outside. Instead of playing it safe, she grabs a flashlight and investigates. It’s that kind of movie.

Is the slayer her professor husband (Michael Nouri)? Her supportive news producer (Ed Begley Jr.)? Her cop ex-husband (Joe Cortise)? Her sleazy new boss (Scott Bryce)?

Big finish from Somers: “It was you!”

Not all of this season’s network movies have the same aroma. An abuse theme drove “Child of Rage,” Tuesday’s CBS movie about a violent child with a disturbing background. A teen-age girl needs a bone marrow transplant in Monday’s “Desperate Choices: To Save My Child” at 9 p.m. on NBC. And on Oct. 19, NBC airs “Jonathan: The Boy Nobody Wanted,” starring JoBeth Williams and Chris Burke in a children’s-rights story about the relationship between a caring volunteer and someone with Down’s syndrome.

But weigh these against September’s “Fergie and Andrew” and “Danger Island”--chronicling the “inhuman evils” faced by crash survivors on a deserted island--both on NBC. Or this month’s fare, which includes ABC and CBS dueling with rival Charles and Diana movies on Oct. 25; ABC’s “Overexposed” (Oct. 11), a steamer about a married woman seduced by a man who secretly tapes their sexual fun; NBC’s two-part “Jackie Collins’ Lady Boss” (Oct. 11-12) and two-part “Danielle Steel’s Jewels” (Oct. 18 and 20), and NBC’s “Love Can Be Murder” (Oct. 25), with Jaclyn Smith playing a woman who gives up her successful law practice to become a private eye. As a bonus, she falls in love with a ghost.

Well, as long as she doesn’t get obsessive. . . .