Two Gripping Stories of Families Extended

Television is nothing if not America’s extended family, from the still-suffering Browns and Goldmans freeze-framed into history by a grisly homicide case to the characters viewers embrace in their favorite prime-time series or daytime soaps.

That familial tone spreads this weekend to a pair of worthy TV movies that are drawn from true stories whose protagonists at times touch you deeply even as you question some of their actions and motives.

Based on a play by David Feldshuh, HBO’s searing “Miss Evers’ Boys” exposes conflicts between science and human rights from the perspective of Eunice Evers (Alfre Woodard), a black public health nurse who reluctantly participates in a federal program that victimizes the very syphilitic African Americans it professes to medically treat. Some of these male patients, members of an informal dance group named after nurse Evers, are embraced by her as her extended family. Yet she’s somehow persuaded to deceive them.

The other movie is “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters,” a story from the Family Channel about an unschooled but enlightened black man whose dictums that his kids excel academically and become lawyers or doctors at once yield positive results and border on destructive mania. While obsessively pushing his girls to widen their dreams beyond “mammies, maids and mamas”--the primary options open to black women of his generation--Donald Thornton (Carl Lumbly) alienates and drives away one of his daughters. Some of your affection for him leaves with her.

Keyed to Black History Month, these are relatively contemporary stories (“Miss Evers’ Boys” spans the ‘30s to the ‘70s, and “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters” the ‘40s to the ‘80s) that show African Americans resisting restraints placed on them by whites, but with vastly different results. Both began somewhat rosily but end ambiguously, passing viewers the buck by not clearly saying whether their protagonists are truly heroic or merely delusionary in rationalizing their actions.

Lumbly and Woodard are both excellent. “Miss Evers’ Boys” is the more striking movie, though, given its fine direction by Joe Sargent, its higher-stakes scenario and the moral crossroads it imposes on the likable Eunice. Her appealing intelligence and good intentions do not stop her from helping perpetuate a syphilitic study whose human lab mice are led to believe they are being treated for their “bad blood,” when instead they are left unmedicated and subjected to research without their knowledge or consent.

Meandering through this scandal is Eunice’s gentle romance with an old classmate, Caleb (Laurence Fishburne here, but played by Lumbly on the stage), who is the story’s conscience even more than she.

Although modeled after an actual nurse, Eunice and her black mentor, Dr. Brodus (Joe Morton), are fictional. The outrageous situation that shapes this story is not.

Conducted in Macon County, Ala., the “Tuskegee Study of Syphilis in the Untreated Negro Male” engaged up to 400 poor African American males in 40 years of flawed research designed to monitor them all the way to the “end point,” their autopsies. They were denied penicillin even after that antibiotic had become common treatment for the disease.

Walter Bernstein’s teleplay has Brodus being persuaded by white Washington officialdom that the unmedicated research will last a year at most and lead to funding of actual treatment for the men, and he convinces Eunice. Brodus also believes that data showing blacks and whites responding identically to syphilis will dispel racist theories of blacks being biologically inferior.

Woodard’s acting has an effortless, lilting quality. Her Eunice is a big-hearted, wonderfully spirited but ultimately tormented woman whose worldliness in other areas belies the movie’s premise that for decades she would buy vague promises of funding and Brodus’ assurances that “you are doin’ good for the Negro people” as justification for extending this indefensible betrayal.

Despite her good qualities, she almost reminds you of a guilt-ridden death camp collaborator when wearing a benevolent face to deliver a $10 bill and a certificate of appreciation to one of her “boys” on his dying bed.

“Miss Evers’ Boys” and “The Ditchdigger’s Daughter” intersect on some themes. At one point, when Eunice briefly leaves medicine, her aged father (Ossie Davis) reminds her that he didn’t labor to put her through nursing school so she could clean someone else’s toilets, a rebuke that easily could come from the mouth of Donald Thornton.

*

“The Ditchdigger’s Daughter” refreshingly resists type by focusing on a largely sturdy black family instead of the more commonly depicted unit depleted by a weak father’s absence. And instead of the obligatory South, New York and New Jersey supply the racists who confront the Thorntons.

Inspired by a family biography by one of Thornton’s daughters, Yvonne, Paris Qualles’ teleplay juxtaposes lengthy flashbacks with a reunion of Donald’s daughters for his funeral in 1983. What initially appears to be a celebratory one-noter--a drill sergeant-minded patriarch tenaciously whipping his reluctant charges into shape, for which they will later thank him--gains complexity when he and his rebellious daughter, Jeanette (Kimberly Elise), bitterly clash over the career he charts for her.

The father merits admiration for his sacrifices and his goals, and for his ingenuity in reaching them while digging ditches 16 hours a day. That includes ensuring his girls a superior education by buying a residential lot in the district of the “white school” he wants them to attend, then later moving his family to a house there that he has had to build himself because of his bank’s policy denying construction loans to “coloreds.”

Lumbly is commanding as Donald. That he’s a rigid authoritarian who sets soaring academic standards for his girls seems entirely to the good (they’re all high achievers) until he begins exploding when some of his expectations aren’t met. And he angrily squelches two of his daughters’ plans to attend college out of town because “families stick together,” almost word for word echoing the repressive father in “Shine” who selfishly denies his protege son the opportunity to study piano abroad.

Meanwhile, Donald’s wife (Victoria Dillard) increasingly fades into the background.

“The Ditchdigger’s Daughter” seems unsure itself whether Donald is merely a headstrong hero or a seriously marred one. It concludes with a surge of softening emotion by his daughters on his behalf, too late to totally erase a grimmer flashback of his family values that immediately precedes it.

* “Miss Evers’ Boys” can be seen Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO. “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters” can be seen Sunday at 7 p.m. on the Family Channel.