GRIT versus GLITZ

Nothing swings quite like HBO’s “The Rat Pack” when it comes to generating publicity and anticipation. Compared to the glitter of Frank Sinatra and his guys, the Kennedys and Vegas, everything else this weekend seems like an obscure lounge act.

Yet the chairman of the board is not HBO but Showtime, whose aching story Sunday about adoption, “The Baby Dance,” is one of TV’s elite movies of the year.

Credit Jane Anderson (an Emmy winner for writing HBO’s “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom”) with transferring to TV in truly formidable fashion her play, which ran at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1990.

“The Baby Dance” is not only tender and explosive but also pregnant with stunning performances, thanks to Laura Dern, Richard Lineback, Stockard Channing and Peter Riegert as two couples from clashing universes driven by circumstances into a wary, adversarial, claustrophobic commingling that appears bound to fail. All four are piercingly on the mark.

We meet deeply Christian Wanda LeFauve (Dern) when she’s six months pregnant with her fifth child and living in a trailer in Shreveport, La., with her jobless husband, Al (Lineback, from the play). Their other children stay with Wanda’s mother, and Wanda concludes reluctantly that she and Al can’t afford to raise the child she’s now carrying. In Los Angeles, meanwhile, a childless Jewish couple with money, Rachel and Richard Luckman (Channing and Riegert), are seeking to adopt with the help of a lawyer, knowing that time may be running out for them as they advance further into middle age.

Thus do the interests of these two couples from vastly different cultures appear to intersect temporarily, as Anderson’s story, which she also directed, is played out with touches of humor, sadness and volatility in the sweltering heat of Louisiana, where tensions are high, tempers short and one of these pairs must ultimately make a wrenching decision that affects everyone.

Although the couples’ alliance is fragile and “The Baby Dance” seems constantly on the verge of angry upheaval, its signature scene is deeply moving, with Rachel putting her ear to the belly of a rueful, tearful Wanda to hear the child she expects to be hers.

“The Baby Dance” delivers some sullen truths, and its final sequence is simply devastating. Yet never is there a sense of being manipulated. What evolves does so naturally, with Anderson exploiting social and cultural differences--the LeFauves seem as permanently aligned to their underclass as the Luckmans are to an urban life of isolation and privilege--without pointing fingers. What a lovely piece of work by all involved.

Seemingly on another planet, meanwhile, HBO is running a promo that promises “five friends who lived life the only way they knew how. ‘The Rat Pack’--comin’ at ya!” And gone just as fast when it comes to leaving an impression.

The five are Sinatra (Ray Liotta), Dean Martin (Joe Mantegna), Sammy Davis Jr. (Don Cheadle), Peter Lawford (Angus Macfayden) and Joey Bishop (Bobby Slayton), who made movies and headlines together and were known collectively as the Rat Pack in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when this story by Kario Salem (HBO’s “Don King: Only in America”) takes place.

“The Rat Pack,” debuting Saturday, is certainly breezy. Salem and director Rob Cohen spin their characters on a fast wheel that has:

* Davis being stung by racism when he and Swedish May Britt (Megan Dodds) get serious.

* Lawford being simply a groveling errand boy.

* Bishop being nearly invisible.

* Sinatra courting the Kennedys when John F. Kennedy (William Peterson) runs for president, using his mob ties at the behest of patriarch Joseph Kennedy (Dan O’Herlihy) to swing votes for JFK, and later going berserk when he’s flung away by JFK when no longer useful.

*

Meanwhile, Sinatra, Lawford and JFK sleep around (yes, Marilyn Monroe and Judy Campbell pop in) while Martin spends the night in his hotel room with a glass of milk, the FBI eavesdrops and Liotta swaggers mightily and lip-syncs a few tunes.

That’s history, at least according to Salem, who has permeated his script with artistic license. You really start wondering when JFK tells brother Bobby (Zeljko Ivanek) during a wee-hours snack in the White House kitchen, “Ice cream always seems so naked without sprinkles.”

Moreover, Salem, who effectively deployed amusing fantasy sequences in his superb Don King script, tries that sprinkle again in “The Rat Pack” when he has Davis daydream about belting out “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in answer to screaming white supremacists. But unlike the King movie, this fantasy fails because it comes out of nowhere.

A president said to rub shoulders with the underworld is nothing to take lightly. Yet there are no major surprises here, and no insights. “The Rat Pack” is about as shallow and predictable as the HBO promo makes it sound, and its good cast is generally unpersuasive. Depicting living or recently deceased celebrities is always a challenge and, in this case, memories of the real Sinatra, Martin and Davis, for example, are still too fresh to be erased by what “The Rat Pack” offers.

Even more crucial, Liotta, Mantegna and Cheadle don’t appear to have a clue about their characters, in contrast with Gary Sinise, for example, whose scintillating portrayal of the still-living title figure in TNT’s Emmy-nominated “George Wallace” comes so deep from within that the physical gap swiftly disappears.

Instead, “The Rat Pack” is driven largely by caricatures, the most pronounced being Mantegna’s Martin, who croons lines instead of speaking. At least he’s a realist, telling Bishop: “The whole world is drunk, and we’re just the cocktail of the moment.” Which pretty much describes “The Rat Pack.”

* “The Rat Pack” can be seen Saturday at 9 p.m. and Tuesday at 8 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA-L (may not be suitable for children under the age of 17, with an advisory for coarse language).

* “The Baby Dance” can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. on Showtime. The network has rated it TV-14-VLD (may not be suitable for children under the age of 14, with advisories for violence, coarse language and suggestive dialogue).