Time’s waltz leaves beauty undiminished

Truman Capote once said that the world will never let a beautiful woman starve, and in Sunday’s 9 p.m. premiere of the made-for-CBS movie “Dancing at the Harvest Moon,” Jacqueline Bisset’s character proves that the planet’s weakness for a pretty face apparently hasn’t changed a whit.

Bisset, 58, hasn’t changed much either. Although her poster-girl days from movies such as “The Deep” are decades past, we don’t blink an eye when she’s introduced as a 40ish professor named Maggie, whose world is about to fall apart.

A chance trip home in the middle of the day results in Maggie’s finding her husband of nearly 25 years nuzzling a co-worker on the family’s front walk. Although Maggie is stunned, a friend later consoles her with the fact that the law-practicing Lothario has “dipped into the paralegal pool” with regularity over the years.

With her marriage finished, Maggie packs up and moves to the idyllic lakefront community where she spent summers as a youth, where she found first love while working at a charming dance hall called the Harvest Moon.

Alas, she learns that her old beau is dead, and the dance hall isn’t nearly as well preserved as Maggie. But she becomes determined to restore the Harvest Moon, and a banker throws all business practices out the window to help her fund the project. Soon the townspeople, who have ignored the dilapidated hall for years, are volunteering their time to the restoration. Valerie Harper, as Maggie’s long-ago best friend Claire, provides support in her best “Rhoda” mode.

But it’s when Maggie meets her ex-boyfriend’s son (Eric Mabius) that things really get interesting and, in a weird way, almost incestuous. Can a romance possibly work? Never underestimate the power of the Harvest Moon.