Viewpoints

By RICHARD SCHICKEL, R.S.

2,251 DAYS. PBS. Thursday, 8 p.m. E.D.T. His wife Alice keeps saying that Dick Stratton is so much more tolerant since he came home from his long trip. It may be so--certainly he seems amiable in his exchanges with her and their three sons, as well as with neighbors and the TV crew that made 2,251 Days.

On the other hand, it is a good idea not to press him too hard about his opinion of the North Vietnamese, with whom he passed the time: more than six years. "Petty, vindictive, mean little people," he is likely to say, "an armed group of paranoid children." He has good reason to think so, for as Commander Richard A. Stratton, a naval aviator shot down over North Viet Nam, he became one of the most famous symbols of the American agony over the war. Photographs of Stratton, bowing deeply to his captors as he confessed to "war crimes," dramatized suspicions that the P.O.W.s were being brainwashed or drugged to assure their docile participation in these charades.

Though not correct, it was precisely the impression Stratton was trying to convey in the photos. Having endured the most brutal kind of physical torture as well as 18 months in solitary, he acted doped, hoping the world would understand that his statement was coerced even if it misunderstood the method of coercion. The seemingly pitiable spectacle he made of himself was thus actually an extraordinarily effective act of resistance by a brave man.

But 2,251 Days, produced by Joseph M. Russin and Scott Blakey of San Francisco's KQED, is a tribute to more than one strong human spirit. Alice Stratton, trying to keep her hopes up while raising her three children, is also revealed as a woman of admirable courage. She deliberately minimizes the difficulties she faced; yet there is an extraordinary patience, sweetness and faith in her talk about the empty years carved out of the middle of her life.

The documentary is not as sharply edited as it might be. It is at its best when it is showing the Strattons trying to pick up the pieces of their life. A Roman Catholic and a self-disciplined man who worked his way through college, the commander grouses good-naturedly, but with an undercurrent of emotion, about long hair, pop-music Masses at church and the pubic hair that has sprouted in Playboy's gatefold since he left. He is tender and tentative as he tries to get to know his kids again, tries to fit himself back into the world of backyard barbecues and small talk about Little Leagues. His wife, meantime, has tried to explain to the boys "that I was his girl friend as well as their mother" so they would not "feel left out at times." Increasingly, blessedly, she finds it difficult to recall the emotional tone of her own 2,251 days.

The Strattons are not complicated people. They live by simple, often easily satirized values. But they are good people, and the opportunity this program offers to know them intimately is, among other things, a good corrective to last year's PBS trip with the Louds, not to mention a decade of American self-contempt over the war. In the long process of "bringing us together again," 2,251 Days is a significant step in the right direction. qed Richard Schickel

LLOYD GEORGE. PBS. Sunday, July 7, 9 p.m. E.D.T. "Question: Who isn't afraid to be comical? Answer: Me." The rhetorical interrogator of himself is David Lloyd George, at the moment President of the Board of Trade, soon to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, and during World War I, Great Britain's Prime Minister. His situation at the moment of inquiry is, to say the least, compromising. His eldest son has just caught him in bed with a Polish countess who does not even speak English. But as this BBC biographical drama makes clear, Lloyd George was capable of overcoming about anything that threatened to impede his rise--no, race--to the top.

"I am like a climbing vine," he proclaims at one point. The simile is apt enough as far as it goes, suggesting the heartiness (Lloyd George lived to be 82), tenacity and opportunism of this poorborn Welshman wriggling his way into the waning sunlight of la Belle Epoque. It does not, however, suggest all the other qualities he combined under his thick skin--intelligence, slyness, cynicism, idealism, cheeky charm and even a dash of self-pity. ("Why won't life work?" he cries at one point. "Why do they hate you when you're clever?") But Keith Dewhurst manages to convey all that and more in a script that is a small masterpiece of compressed complexity. In Anthony Hopkins, Director John Davies has found an actor with the mercurial wit and devilish energy to animate this most human of political figures. "I like to juggle with them," Lloyd George says after a series of meetings in which he has headed off a railroad strike, "because I like the speed of the game." One gets the same sense of joy in the doing from Hopkins' work.

Still, we have come to expect this sort of elan from the English when they turn to biographical drama. They take a perverse joy in stripping mighty historical figures of accumulated pomp. That is a knack American television really ought to acquire lest the Bicentennial celebrations develop a case of the blahs. Would we have the courage, for example, to show a former President leaving his wife and family alone to cope with the death of a beloved daughter because he lacks the courage to face that reality? Could we show such a figure burying his head in his wife's lap and with sobs begging her to stand by him through a scandal? And when she agrees, have him pop up and say, "Well, then, things are rosier, aren't they?" Lloyd George (the first broadcast of a PBS miniseries called The Edwardians) provides both such amazing domestic spectacles. They serve our hopes for drama and our shrewdest historical sensibility extraordinarily well. qed R.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.