Television: Vintage Wine

ABC’s ambitious, costly (about $350,000 per hour) new dramatic series Stage 67 has been the mail-order bride of the current season—so lovely in anticipation, so disappointing in actuality. Last week the frump finally combed her hair and put on a touch of lipstick. In a spare, dust-dry dramatization of Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Noon Wine, Adapter-Director Sam Peckinpah in a single swoop revived much of the all-but-dead hope that serious drama can find a regular place in the TV schedule.

Noon Wine is close in feeling to Peckinpah’s prizewinning movie, Ride the High Country. A strange, withdrawn, harmonica-playing Swede (Per Oscarsson) arrives at the small Texas spread owned by an ignorant farmer named Thompson (Jason Robards Jr.). The Swede signs on as a handyman, and in the course of three years not only tunes up the farm operations to perfect pitch but slides, in his remote way, into the heart of the family.

Then, what seemed to be a quiet genre painting is suddenly ripped by violence. A stranger appears, announcing with grinning malevolence that the handyman has escaped from an insane asylum and must return. When the stranger pulls a knife, Thompson kills him. The rest of the play shows Thompson, acquitted by a jury, bleakly, desperately dragging his sickly wife (Olivia de Havilland) from one neighbor’s house to another to defend himself and his deed. Then he blows his brains out.

Somber as it is, Noon Wine induced a special glow, partly because of Director Peckinpah’s achievement in adhering to the bluntness of the tragedy, partly because of the ungirdled brilliance of his players. Robards, bedecked with a massive home-grown mustache, spread backwoods brio all over the crusty landscape, and Olivia de Havilland, all frailty and flutteriness, tottered after him without losing a step. Author Porter was astonished that show busi ness could be so kind. “After what they did to my poor Ship of Fools,” she said last week, “I was just crushed. I didn’t expect anything like Noon Wine.” Neither did anyone who had previously watched Stage 67; but expectations now are downright bullish.