TV Reviews : ‘Grace’ a Romantic, War-Era Fantasy

Just as the plethora of documentaries about Normandy reaches high tide, and with TV assault waves primed to hit French beaches on D-day’s 50th birthday, CBS interrupts the truth and really carries us back to World War II--to the romance and heroism of bloated World War II movies, that is.

The four-hour “Fall From Grace” is a glossy, serpentine journey about a beautiful British female spy (Tara Fitzgerald) in deadly combat with a suave, venal Nazi intelligence officer (the perfectly cast Michael York) in the days leading up to June 6, 1944.

There are two ways to look at this movie: (1) Its timing is misguided and even comically inappropriate in the light of the comparative high road taken by most of the rest of TV’s Normandy coverage (including CBS’ own recent Dan Rather special) or (2) Following a week of watching the real thing, i.e., raw archival Normandy invasion footage buttressed by personal firsthand chronicles, a romantic interlude like “Fall From Grace” is almost a breather.

OK, not everything in the movie is exactly an adventure. The gorgeous female spy is tortured and hanged naked by her heels, but forget that. It’s the flavor of the movie’s steamy train stations, wet French villages and all that fornicating between our heroine and a French double (triple!) agent that takes you back to the floss if not the flesh of most old war movies. In these instances, war isn’t hell but a fantasy.

Adapted from a novel by Larry Collins, “Fall From Grace,” which also co-stars Gary Cole, James Fox and Patsy Kensit does, to its nominal credit, weave a deceptive, murky trail inspired by evidence that the Allies tricked the Germans into believing the invasion would come at Calais, at the narrowest point of the Channel, not the much wider crossing to Normandy.

* “Fall From Grace” airs 8-10 p.m. tonight and Friday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).