Caution Signs on ‘Due East’ Road

“Due East” is part of Showtime’s “Original Pictures for All Ages” series of new movies, but take that designation with a large grain of salt if you tune in at 8 p.m. Sunday.

The messages in this bathos-and-sex combo are dubious even for ages 13 and older, despite the efforts of director Helen Shaver and stars Robert Forster, Kate Capshaw, Clara Bryant and Cybill Shepherd.

Written by Tricia Brock and based on books by Valerie Sayers, the film gives teen sex and unwed teen pregnancy a romantic, candlelit gloss. It also gets up close and personal--a tad too much so--in the sex lives of four middle-aged adults, with scene-stealer Capshaw as a wife who breaks out of an alcoholic haze to seduce back her straying husband.

At the heart of the story is Mary Faith (Bryant), a National Merit Scholar without a social life who has sex with a soulful loner. “Enough with all this schoolwork,” he tells her as they tenderly commune in a bubble bath. “That’s not the essence of life.”

But then he’s killed in a motorcycle accident and she learns she’s pregnant. She decides to keep his memory sacred by refusing to name him as the father.

Her lonely widower dad (the wonderfully craggy Forster) is soon in bed with the mother (Shepherd, in good-old-gal, beer-drinking, cigarette-smoking mode) of the man he thinks is responsible.

Mary Faith, meanwhile, is kicked out of school for setting a poor moral example. She resolves to fight back and, in one silly contrivance after another, winds up being cheered at graduation even as she clutches her abdomen in time-honored, movie-labor tradition.

But you knew it had to end happily. Why else would they be showing it on Mother’s Day?