CBS Offers a Schmoozefest Followed by a Snoozefest

CBS squanders two hours tonight on a dreary movie about Princess Di and hanky-panky. But starting off its evening is an hour of movie royalty celebrated by TV’s best-known talking heads.

As for the latter, they deserve ranking up there with the likes of Martin and Lewis, Siegfried and Roy and Masters and Johnson. That’s because unmatched bookends Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have been partners 20 years now, through television becoming the nation’s first celebrity critics in any field.

To say nothing of being surely the most influential, a pair of unglamorous Chicago newspaper shlubs who, with the simplest of formulas--showing clips and talking plainly about the latest movies--have made “thumbs up” filmdom’s Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Or if you prefer the in-depth blurb, “thumbs way, way up.”

They can be almost as blabby as movie trailers, at times leaking plot points that moviegoers should be allowed to discover for themselves. Love them or leave them, though, these kids are remarkable, one reason being that, despite foaming over their own fame, they never let their TV chats eclipse the movies they’re reviewing. No wonder they’ve left their imitators in the dust, for what you get from their show are two guys who relish movies and take them seriously, communicating that in unsnooty ways to the masses.

Although Siskel is the smoothest, both he and Ebert remain mostly all thumbs in front of the camera, too stiff to ham it up, still colorless after all these years, two decades not adding up to two TV slickos.

In a weird way, then, their TV klutziness is a strength, their “Siskel & Ebert” show succeeding in part for the very reason that the latest point/counterpoint battlers on “60 Minutes,” for example, do not. Rarely do you sense in Siskel and Ebert a couple of glib Rex Reeds being cute with the camera or their own words for the purpose of making themselves the message.

Yet beyond their show--in the shilling fields of lucrative self-marketing--their message is indeed themselves.

These two are the Air Jordans of critics, ever on the fly to the extent that it wouldn’t be startling to see them cutting ribbons at supermarket openings. Siskel and Ebert are practically a brand name, one you’d half expect to see someday on cereal boxes.

Their weekly TV series remains the motor that drives their popularity. Yet catch Ebert’s reviews in the Chicago Sun Times and Siskel’s in the Chicago Tribune. Catch them on talk shows galore and hosting their own awards show. Catch Siskel’s movie segments on “CBS This Morning,” catch Ebert’s ungainly schmoozings with stars on KABC-TV Channel 7’s annual pre-Oscar and post-Oscar telecasts. Catch Siskel court-side on telecasts of the NBA, where he’s become as much a cheerleading celebrity appendage to the Chicago Bulls as Jack Nicholson is to the Los Angeles Lakers and Spike Lee to the New York Knicks.

And catch both of them tonight on “The Siskel & Ebert Interviews,” their latest career somersault, this time on Barbara Walters’ turf in prime time--the distinction being that none of their subjects bawls and that these mostly enjoyable 11-minute chats--with director Steven Spielberg and actors Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Brad Pitt--are nearly always about movies and acting.

For the most part, these are appealingly intimate--nothing epic, but charming nonetheless, with Streep mentioning, for example, the “secret” she kept from Dustin Hoffman in “Kramer vs. Kramer” and why she touched the back of her dress in “The Bridges of Madison County.”

In a sense, Siskel and Ebert are redefining the role of critic here by getting perilously cozy with artists, in effect blending with the industry they critique. If you like movies, though, you’ll probably like these interviews.

One exception is a self-serving section that smaller egos would have nixed, with Hanks recalling being “stung” by negative Siskel and Ebert comments, and then telling an obviously pleased Ebert, “You must understand that we know who Siskel and Ebert are.” Bank on it, Ebert understands.

The other exception is the Pitt interview, which often features less from him than from a pontificating Siskel: “I think the one thing about you . . . I see in your characters . . . Do you know the thing that you say? . . . I would also say . . . I think what you’re saying and what you admire is . . . I’ve had this theory. . . . “ Obviously, Pitt should have been interviewing Siskel.

Not that these guys have ever been timid about advertising themselves. Ebert ended their latest movie-review episode with a pitch for these interviews and Siskel earlier left a couple of phone messages to Calendar about tonight’s show, offering a review tape and in the process somehow letting it slip that a Siskel and Ebert appearance on “The Tonight Show” had inspired Pitt to become a movie actor.

Of course, what you’re thinking now is that these snide digs at Siskel and Ebert amount to sour grapes from an infinitely lesser-known critic who is madly jealous of their wealth and celebrity. Well . . . yes.

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ROYAL BORE. Decide for yourself which side of the Atlantic has a foreign trade deficit regarding lead characters in two lurid stories that refuse to disappear.

The Brits have O.J. Simpson, who flew in Saturday for a spot of golf, TV, Oxford debate and career fixing, activities so fab that KCBS-TV Channel 2 and KABC-TV Channel 7 dispatched reporters from Los Angeles to beam back live reports.

In exchange, the United States gets more of those cavorting royals via tonight’s masterpiece thud of a CBS movie titled “Princess in Love.” It’s trash air-brushed by aristocratic niceties, a Diana’s-eye-view of the affair she had with army officer James Hewitt while Charles was carrying on with Camilla Parker-Bowles.

Just as England remains ripe for Simpsonabilia, the movie may be just the ticket for Americans ravenous for more royal dirt, even a tiny spoonful. Based on a book by Anna Pasternak, however, “Princess in Love” hits the credibility skids with your first sight of Julie Cox, its porcelain wisp of a Diana who, at chin high to the movie’s Charles (Christopher Bowen), also appears a head shorter than the leggy actual princess. Even so, she stands taller than the rest of this tale of dignified nooky that David Greene directs like someone pouring tea from a sterling service.

If you’re going to wallow, then wallow, you know? Yet no passion surfaces here, from the time Diana and Hewitt (Christopher Villiers) initially lock glances and hearts at a party, to the moment when they first get down to business in bed, their lips meeting like a pair of glaciers. We later hear the infamous Charles/Camilla tapes, eavesdrop on Diana and Hewitt having sex, all of it tastefully muted, pastel and antiseptic.

Now negotiating a divorce, Charles and Diana have made headlines throughout their 15 years of marriage as the century’s greatest mismatch. Although neither is very endearing here, he’s clearly the least likable, a drab, intellectual snot who is warmer to his adored plants than to his wife. “Plants need encouragement,” he sniffs. “So do people,” she pouts.

Meanwhile, she is ill-suited to the role of centerpiece princess, feeling more like a “product” than a person, and ultimately becoming bulimic en route to her famous tell-all TV interview at Kensington Palace.

This is boring, uninvolving material. Rarely has lust been more tedious. The sights are old-world pretty, but insufficiently to overcome a story that never gets off its royal high horseness.

* “The Siskel & Ebert Interviews” airs tonight at 8, followed at 9 by “Princess in Love” on CBS (Channel 2). “Siskel & Ebert” airs Sundays at 6:30 p.m. on KABC-TV Channel 7.