TV REVIEWS : Family Values and the Movies

Linda Schaffer’s “Homeward Bound,” another absorbing one-hour American Movie Classics documentary on the movies, uses home movies, newsreels and archival footage as well as Hollywood films to reveal how American family life has changed since the advent of sound. It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know but it has the virtue of calling attention to filmmakers who have tried to reflect real life and deal with human values.

Norman Lear, Paul Mazursky and Robert Benton, all of whom have dealt with family life--Lear on TV--are all old enough to have experienced the Great Depression as children, and they all attest to family solidarity in the face of substantial financial adversity, as exemplified on the screen in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

While TV in the ‘50s was idealizing the family, much in the manner of the earlier Andy Hardy pictures, the big screen was commencing to depict the disintegration of the family, most notably in the James Dean films “Rebel Without a Cause” and “East of Eden.”

More recent decades have been marked by films dealing with divorce and single parenting; even so, this pleasant special ends on an optimistic note, reaffirming the revival of the family--but in new configurations.

* “Homeward Bound” airs at 6 and 9 tonight on cable’s AMC channel.