TV Reviews : ‘Witch Hunt’ a Burning Hollywood Satire : HBO’s ‘Witch Hunt’ Is a Burning Satire on Hollywood

As a withering satire of the Red scare in Hollywood, “Witch Hunt” is a stinging comedy.

But this HBO movie, stylishly directed by Paul Schrader, is much more: a timeless parody, a film noir mystery, a wicked commentary on the star factory and a visual valentine to 1950’s architecture and pill box hats.

Featuring Dennis Hopper as a droll gumshoe, Penelope Ann Miller as a sexy starlet and Eric Bogosian as a Sen. Joe McCarthy-like zealot who rolls into Hollywood to sweep out the vermin and nail a scapegoat for the country’s ills, this TV movie is a consummate hoot.

Writer Joseph Dougherty’s spin on Hollywood is fresh because it dramatizes Hollywood magic as real, not merely a metaphor. Hollywood literally is the Magic Castle. Every sleight-of-hand character in town is a genuine witch or sorcerer. People can brew coffee with a wave of a hand.

Hopper’s private eye is billeted down the hall from a friendly coven. He’s hired by a stenographer-turned-actress (Miller) to find out whether her husband, a studio executive, is cheating on her. The husband turns up dead, and soon Hopper finds himself immersed in the senator’s full-blown witch hunt to stamp out sorcery and save American values.

The movie’s special visual effects are jaw-dropping by TV standards. Cigarettes turn into snakes, black crows fly out of human mouths, scissors whir around rooms, women’s bodies are artificially enhanced--all of it grist for Bogosian’s charismatic, larcenous Sen. Larson Crockett and his Congressional Committee on Unnatural Activities.

In a lighter departure for director Schrader (who wrote “Taxi Driver” and helmed “Cat People”), the shadow of the Hollywood blacklist is implicit, not intrusive. Heretofore too painful for comedic treatment, Hollywood’s nightmare years might be totally missed by viewers oblivious to history but otherwise caught up in a pop-art mystery. * “Witch Hunt” premieres at 8 tonight on HBO.

‘Reunion’s’ Potency Is Thomas’ Acting

Lee Grant may have cooled down her number of screen appearances the last few years, but she’s certainly kept active as a director.

In “Reunion,” airing on CBS Sunday, her direction of Marlo Thomas’ grieving mother is as crucial to that movie as her shaping of Ann-Margret’s liberated widow was in “Following Her Heart” on NBC two weeks ago.

In each instance, Grant salvaged a sudsy woman’s story by eliciting an affecting female performance that rises above the material. Thomas’ character, who communes with a ghost, is an especially tough role.

For that matter, so is Peter Strauss’ quietly dependable husband, a deceptively solid performance (much like his farmer in “The Yearling” last year). But, curiously, as a financially out-of-pocket farmer, his lovely farmhouse and lakeside spread is so Norman Rockwell-sublime it might adorn a Christmas calendar.

Thomas is credible under psychological circumstances that the production, with much murky, moody lighting, is hard put to sustain. She plays a New England farm wife and amateur painter whose cozy world is shattered when one of her 5-year-old twins accidentally chokes to death.

While others in the family (including Frances Sternhagen’s live-in mother-in-law) come to grips with the death, the mother’s grief turns obsessive and she begins to see the dead child in apparitions.

Based on the novel “Points of Light” by Linda Gray Sexton, the adaptation (by Ronald Bass and John Pielmeier) fully exploits the terrifying choice the mother must finally make between an invitation to death and the will to live.

* “Reunion” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).