TV Reviews : Poitier Heads West in ‘Dust’ Potboiler

Why watch “Children of the Dust,” an 1880s-era, four-hour miniseries about doomed lovers and racism? Two words: Sidney Poitier.

Poitier’s commanding presence as Gypsy Smith, a half-black, half-Cherokee gunslinger, gives this roiling potboiler the only measure of epic status it strives for so mightily, with its earnest historical sweep and the visual grandeur of its pseudo-Oklahoma (actually Alberta, Canada) prairie locale.

Gypsy leads a wagon train of former slaves to the Oklahoma Territory, newly opened to settlers after the grim U.S. military containment of Indian populations. Staking its claim, the group founds a town and Gypsy agrees to be its marshal, due to his passion for a lovely schoolteacher (Regina Taylor) and to the town’s vulnerability to a growing Ku Klux Klan threat.

After a Klan atrocity, however, Gypsy rejects his new life and love to fulfill an oath of vengeance.

Taylor, an appealing mix of feistiness and feminine dignity, has the stature to hold her own with Poitier, something few others in the cast do, as Gypsy’s fate is clumsily interwoven with a sudsy forbidden romance between a white woman (Joanna Going) and a Cheyenne man (Billy Wirth).

The film, played with all the subtlety of a steamy romance novel, was written by Joyce Eliason and directed by David Greene, based on the novel by Clancy Carlile.

* “Children of the Dust” airs Sunday and Tuesday at 9 p.m. on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).