TELEVISION : Break Out the Popcorn for PBS’ ‘Cinema’

Loosen your seat belts. You’re going to have some smooth nights.

A panoramic 10 hours in the round, the new PBS documentary series “American Cinema” is a sprawling cineplex of lip-smacking celluloid pleasures, a middle-brow homage to U.S. filmmaking that manages to celebrate without whitewashing, to entertain mostly without pandering and to instruct without lecturing like a dry academic.

In other words, it’s great fun.

For those who find such retrievals uniquely exhilarating, the clips alone will be worth the time spent on this series created by the New York Center for Visual Art, Los Angeles public station KCET and that key supplier of PBS programs, England’s good old BBC. Rewarding too are the words from scores of top directors, writers, producers, studio executives, craftpersons, scholars and others that form the narrative for executive producer Lawrence Pitkethly’s “American Cinema.”

A series for both the general moviegoer and the frothing film zealot, it mirrors cinema as cinema has mirrored (and sometimes distorted) U.S. society through wars, social revolutions and the arrival of insurgent television--that cosmic “postage stamp,” as big-screen director Sidney Lumet labels it, that redefined mass entertainment and for a time shook Hollywood right down to its Guccis.

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Each hour of “American Cinema” covers a different aspect of the industry; they are being presented in five groups of two, opening tonight with “Hollywood Style” and “The Star.” The concluding two hours on Feb. 27 are on film-school icons Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian DePalma (who doesn’t quite seem to fit in this bunch) and on young independent directors on the fringes of Hollywood who kick convention in the butt. Boasts Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”): “I’m a film outlaw.”

As history, the biggest failing of “American Cinema” is its near amnesia about the “silent” era--Chaplin is an invisible tramp and “The Sheik” is barely a hoofbeat--fostering the impression almost that American movies began with Al Jolson on his knees singing “My Mammy.”

You could also quibble about there being almost nothing here about the musical. How valid is any chronicle of U.S. moviedom that omits Busby Berkeley or Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? And, to extend the quibble, a separate category for horror films would have contributed too (even though we do hear from DePalma and others about the double-chinned suspensemeister himself, Alfred Hitchcock).

Yet in Pitkethly’s defense, even 10 hours may be too slender a slipcase for so thick a topic. Unlike so many movie retrospectives, moreover, this one is very far from being dumb and dumber--with one exception. Although some of these separately narrated components are stronger than others, the only anorexic one--so bony and cadaverous that you can’t locate a pulse with a Geiger counter--is tonight’s second hour on stars.

It’s a shallow, page-flipping, star-gazing Photoplay that dabbles in endless sound bites from Julia Roberts and director John Waters (“Everybody has to get in drag to be a movie star”) without clearly defining its subject.

This hour is preceded, happily, by one in which the poetry of filmmaking--the techniques reflected in such notable movies as “All About Eve” and “A Place in the Sun,” for example--are interestingly assessed by directors Scorsese, Lawrence Kasdan, Sydney Pollack and Billy Wilder, among others.

Next Monday’s installment opens engagingly with an hour that observes romantic comedies through the prism of sexuality, from Wilder’s classic “Some Like It Hot” and the screen pairing of Doris Day and Rock Hudson to Nora Ephron’s “Sleepless in Seattle.”

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The second hour next week traces the evolution of the Hollywood studio. “The trouble with movies as a business is that it’s an art,” Garson Kanin is quoted by Charlton Heston as saying. “And the trouble with movies as an art is that it’s a business.”

There’s no trouble with another hour due Feb. 20 about the love, murder and betrayal lurking in the shadows of those dark crime movies, so popular in the ‘40s and ‘50s, known as film noir . Or with “Film in the Television Age,” the companion hour that notes the incestuous links between cinema and TV and the two media’s historical bittersweet coexistence.

Especially seductive, however, are the two hours due Feb. 13 that, more than anything in “American Cinema,” pass in a moment. It’s a moment to seize.

What can you say about this Feb. 13 pair--”The Western” and “The Combat Film”--other than that both are just a big, roundhouse kick in your fun zone? Especially if you’re in a mature age group that virtually grew up with and spent its youth emersed in and influenced by these classic movie genres, blindly worshiping their values and imitating their heroes.

For much of their existence, both categories have epitomized the ultimate Hollywood mythology that romanticized violence and racism, with early Westerns, for example, fantasizing a nation of courageous whites moving forward against uncooperative Native Americans who were somehow alien intruders (and the savage bushwhackers and murderers of innocent and progressive settlers) in their own land.

“The Western” ultimately corrects this record after crossing a broad plateau concerning the evolution of a milieu whose classic protagonist is defined by Clint Eastwood as someone adrift in the West “who isn’t picking up the phone and dialing 911 . . . or any other aid. Through his own ingenuity, (he) will work out the situation.” The movies discussed here range from “Red River” to “Unforgiven,” offering enough insights and antique footage to clutter John Ford’s Monument Valley.

“The Combat Film,” meanwhile, streaks from battlefield to battlefield, ranging from the anti-World War I “All Quiet on the Western Front”--a pioneer in universalizing the miseries of combat--to the anti-Vietnam war “Platoon.” The hour also trafficks in metaphors, comparing the grunt’s-eye-view of Samuel Fuller’s “The Big Red One” with the eagle’s-eye-view of Darryl Zanuck’s “The Longest Day.”

What of the kid’s-eye-view? Reflecting on his boyhood, author Tim O’Brien speaks for an entire generation of males when he remembers how his heart pounded after seeing such emotional World War II movies as “Sands of Iwo Jima” with John Wayne.

“The peculiar thing,” he says, “was I wanted to play war.” Amen.

After watching “American Cinema,” will another generation want to play filmmaker or film outlaw? That would be an exciting postscript.

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“American Cinema” premieres at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28 and at 8 p.m. on KPBS-TV Channel 15 and KVCR-TV Channel 24. Each Monday’s installment will be repeated Sundays at 10 p.m. on KCET.