TV REVIEW : ‘Message From Nam’: Silly Soap Fluff

A passionate Southern beauty with a trust fund becomes a war correspondent in Vietnam and is adored by three perfect men in succession. That’s real life according to “Danielle Steel’s ‘Message From Nam,’ ” NBC’s ludicrous two-part soaper that airs Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39.

Both parts are intended as counterprogramming to the World Series. The first is enjoyable romance-novel bathos. Southern belle Paxton (Jenny Robertson) incurs familial wrath by choosing to study journalism in the 1960s at seething UC Berkeley. Mom (Rue McClanahan) is rigidly disapproving. Paxton’s only support comes from Queenie, the faithful family cook (Esther Rolle plays the cliche with good grace).

When Paxton’s handsome, rich, adoring boyfriend is drafted and killed in Vietnam, she persuades his father (Ed Flanders), who happens to own a big newspaper, to send her to Saigon as a war correspondent “to find out the truth for people.”

And that’s where this hitherto harmless bit of fluff, adapted by Suzanne Clauser and directed by Paul Wendkos, crosses the line into terminal stupidity.

Flanders, Billy Dee Williams as a bureau chief and Christopher Allport as a sympathetic photographer come out of it with some dignity. Not so Robertson, who gives Paxton a maddening little-girl whine for the last two-thirds of the film. Her journalistic gifts we must take on faith. Most jarring is that the tragedy of Vietnam is used solely as an excuse for a lightweight character’s grand romances, grand gestures and noble suffering.

“I want to get to know the real Vietnam,” Paxton proclaims. “The sounds, the smells, the whole sense of it.” This patronizing, exploitative silliness never comes close.