A Surpassing Pair of Pairs

By Richard Stengel

Two made-for-cable movies bet on double-barreled star power

The buddy system is not limited to swimming. In Hollywood, it means pairing off stars so that each is responsible for the safety of the film and sometimes of the other. Two new made-for-cable movies show that alone together against the world, such duos can survive only if they forge a bond that is purely chemical.

In one of the films, two aging men without wives mope about the past; in the other, two aging women without husbands mope about the future. The characters all need rescuing. But forget the stories, here is a pair of pairs! Larry and Jackie (Olivier and Gleason), Liz and Carol (Taylor and Burnett). And what is unusual, apart from seeing such faces in made-for-cable movies, is that the predictable casting is reversed.

Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson, which premiered on HBO Sunday and will be seen seven times through Sept. 13, presents Olivier as a cantankerous Jewish businessman inconsolable at the loss of Florence, his wife of 42 years. At the funeral, a prosperous-looking man in a chesterfield (Gleason) asks if he may drop a pink carnation in the grave. It seems that the stranger had met with Florence regularly but platonically during all those years. The remainder of the film is a conversation between the two in which their antipodal perceptions of the same woman--for Mr. Halpern she was a housewife, for Mr. Johnson an Amaryllis--are meant to be windows into their souls.

Unfortunately, the view is obscured by Olivier's peculiarly busy performance. As in The Jazz Singer, in which he played the cantor, he seems to have stepped right out of the "oy vay" school of acting. Although he is not helped by dialogue that circles repetitively over the same terrain, his shrieking and spluttering become dull and annoying; he turns a simple character into a simple-minded one. By contrast, Gleason, the king of comedic excess, is a model of restraint as the spiffy Mr. Johnson. The two men's budding fondness for each other feels forced.

In Between Friends, which will appear on HBO six times between Sept. 11 and Sept. 30, the affection between Taylor and Burnett rings true, at least initially. Burnett plays a real estate agent who has lost her spouse and her moral compass in a suburban landscape of manicured lawns and unfaithful husbands. She embraces promiscuity as a form of psychic masochism. Her new friend, Deborah Shapiro, is a wealthy divorcee with an enormous empty house that she calls "my Tara." Trained only "to walk down stairs with panache," she is no longer a Jewish American princess but a full-fledged dowager queen. With her raucous voice and laugh, Taylor brings this character to exuberant life. When she says, after Burnett saves her from a suicide attempt, "I'm the Titanic. She's the lifeboat," it is funny and poignant. The switch here is that Taylor gets the jokes, while Burnett broods.

Despite or perhaps because of the presence of such pairings, these two pay-cable productions fall somewhere between theatrical and made-for-TV movies in style and quality. The question is whether the stars are diminished by this hybrid form or raise the level of it. A little of both. --By Richard Stengel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.