TV Reviews : Fawcett Returns to Roots in Steamy ‘Dalva’

If you want to see or remember what the fuss was about when “Charlie’s Angels’ ” Farrah Fawcett was the Pamela Anderson Lee of her time, just tune into ABC’s sexy Sunday movie, “Dalva.”

In a barely-there wardrobe where “tight,” “short,” “bra-less” and “revealing” are the operative words, the former pinup-turned-serious-actress (“The Burning Bed”) comes full circle in this steamy, romance-novel film masquerading as epic tragedy.

Looking fabulous, Fawcett, 49, plays Dalva, a passionate, promiscuous free spirit haunted for two decades by the tragic loss of her first lover and their child, whom she gave up for adoption. Determined to find her son, “so that my soul can find its peace and I can love again,” Dalva returns to her Nebraska roots and to her beloved, dying grandfather (Rod Steiger), guardian of the family’s secrets.

Adapted by Judith Paige Mitchell and directed by Ken Cameron, the film is based on threads of Jim Harrison’s novel by the same name. Fraught with sex and seduction--most of it outdoors--”Dalva” ostensibly legitimizes all the heavy breathing with lofty dialogue, personal tragedy and angst over the treatment of the Plains Indians.

Powers Boothe plays Dalva’s virile Native American lover, Sam (“not the kind of man you can own”) Creekmouth. He’s working to buy back his people’s lost land to give to “the ghosts of the buffalo” and assures Dalva that when he leaves her, she’ll “smile secretly” to herself and say, “I’m free again.”

Peter Coyote is Dalva’s city-slicker lover, a clownish, drunken history professor intent on writing a book based on her family’s journals. “When you make love to me, it moves me deeply, Dalva,” he intones. And, after being clouted unconscious with a shovel for trying to seduce a local Lolita, he awakens with, “I’ve been among people who talk to God.”

The themes of death and loss are so steeped in romance-novel lustiness that even the revelation of Gramp’s final shocking secret seems, er, anticlimactic.

* “Dalva” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. on ABC (Channels 7 and 3).