Everything you need to know about every American miniseries!

I remember watching the 1989 Emmy Awards and when the winner for “Outstanding Miniseries” was announced, not only did I register shock, but it seemed so did everyone in the audience.  “War and Remembrance” was the winner, but who was expecting that?  It’s certainly one of the biggest and most expansive, but 1989 was the year of “Lonesome Dove.”  Everyone watched it.  Everyone talked about it.  Everyone loved it.  Okay, I can’t prove the middle statement, but the ratings show that everyone watched it and the reviews show that critics loved it.  Sure, “War and Remembrance” is literally almost five times the length of “Lonesome Dove,” but might does not make right in this situation.  However, time has taken care of the error: “Lonesome Dove” is regarded as a classic while “Wand Remembrance” is, well, almost five times the length of a classic.

The town is Lonesome Dove in Southern Texas, as dusty and sleepy a Western town as they come, if you can call the few ramshackle buildings a town.  The chow bell rings for dinner, bringing Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Timothy Scott and Ricky Schroder together.  Robert is serving and when Tommy Lee jokingly suggests he get a job as a waiter instead of a “loafer,” he says he once had a job on a riverboat.  “I was too pretty and the whores wouldn’t let me alone,” he says to make Ricky laugh.  In just a few minutes, we race through a discussion of slavery ending and the chase of the Native Americans into virtual extinction. 

It seems that craggy Robert and equally craggy Tommy Lee have a cantankerous relationship, full of jabs at each other.  Tommy Lee is the worker, while Robert is the old-timer with a piece of wisdom for every occasion.  Robert goes off to the saloon where D.B. Sweeney begs him for money, but Robert and the gang spend their time playing cards all night long.  After, Robert loans D.B. the two dollars, which D.B. wants to use for the one woman in town before sleeping on Robert’s porch.

Just as breakfast is starting the next morning, Danny Glover returns to town with Robert Urich in tow, the latter reuniting with the others after many years.  Robert Urich has returned to get his friends with some colorful stories and can’t believe how big Ricky has gotten.  Ricky’s mother was a whore, dead many years now, and one of the guys is the kid’s father, obviously Tommy Lee, who won’t admit it. 

Arkansas Sheriff Chris Cooper is told by a local woman to arrest Robert Urich, who is a known murderer on the run.  The lady means business, snapping the neck of a rooster she’s holding, scaring Chris into action, but Chris knows Robert Urich is living in Texas now with his friends Robert and Tommy Lee, who are ex-Texas Rangers and therefore not an easy man to arrest.  Chris tells his wife Glenne Headley that he probably should go after Robert Urich, but as a newlywed of five months, she’s not thrilled, and insists he take her young son. 

Robert Duvall asks Robert Urich about Clara, a woman he loved, who is apparently now married with children somewhere in Nebraska.  It’s obvious he still pines for her.  Tommy Lee wonders why they don’t take Robert Urich up on his offer to clear Montana of Native Americans and drive cattle into the area.  “I wanna see that country before bankers and lawyers,” he wistfully tells his old pal.  D.B. has spent all day working off the two dollars, only to show up at the saloon to find Robert Urich making the whole place rock with the whore upstairs.  D.B. gets drunk to forget.

Everything so far has been working up to what the men really do for a living, which is slip over the border to Mexico at night and steal horses.  With the most picturesque sunset to guide them, the seven men set off, easily crossing the river and making their way into Mexico.  When they find the herd, Danny hears “white folks” singing, doing some recon to find there are two men on guard, but they are drunk Irishmen (in the Old West, the two always go together) and no harm (Travis Swords and Bradley Gregg).  In fact, they don’t even know they are in Mexico and decide to join our posse as they all drive the horses back across the river.  They manage to steal over 100 horses.

Chris heads off with Glenne’s son to go after Robert Urich, but Glenne has also slipped away, much to the consternation of the town gossips, who insist that Deputy Barry Corbin go after Chris to tell him.  Glenne boards a “whiskey boat,” full of drunken toughs who lust after her since she’s the only woman around.  In fact, one of them kills another because he has it in his mind to marry her, despite the fact that she’s already married…to a man who is not Chris, and that’s where she’s heading.

The idea of going up North has really gotten to Tommy Lee, and it appeals to everyone else as well, though Robert Duvall has his doubts.  Biding his time, he goes to the local hooker (Diane Lane) and asks to “buy a poke,” but she says she’s with Robert Urich now, she’s his girl and he’s promised to take her to San Francisco.  But, after Robert pulls a higher card than her, she takes him upstairs.  Robert Urich, who’s idea the cattle drive was in the first place, but “he’s too leaky a vessel for anyone to put too much hope in,” Robert Duvall cracks, knowing Robert Urich has no intention of going.  Robert Urich goes over to Diane’s and when he finds out she’s been with Robert Duvall, he smacks her.  She insists on going wherever he goes, though she would prefer San Francisco.  She begs him to take her now, not wanting to go with the herd, and she has him buy her a horse with the $50 Robert Duvall paid her.  “Money well spent…both times,” he says.  Seeing Robert Urich and Diane Lane leaving, Robert Duvall decides it’s time to leave.  No use waiting for a few days. 

Robert Duvall says goodbye to Lonesome Dove, to the empty shacks, to the pigs even to the saloon keeper who is crying over shots at the loss of Diane.  The saloon piano player is the last to join the gang of misfit cowboys. 

The cattle drive starts.  The pigs refuse to be left alone and actually join.  Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, in their easygoing way, are actually excited to drive 2600 head of cattle and a whole lot of stolen horses up North.  Robert Urich gets a thorn in his thumb and it’s infected, but Danny helps get it out, also telling them to move their camp to the opposite side of the river before the storm comes.  The storm is a giant one and comes on fast, miles of dust moving at top speed.  Ricky is amazed when lightning comes and actually seems to hit the entire herd (with some particularly bad special effects).  Robert Urich and Diane are almost killed by a falling tree.

The next day is spent undoing the damage.  The wagon is stuck in a ditch, but no men are lost, and only about 20 cows.  The pigs are okay.  Bradley is afraid of rivers, though he’s “crossed an ocean” and doesn’t understand his fear.  Robert Duvall comes to make sure Robert Urich and Diane are okay, but Robert Urich is in a particularly surly mood.  Robert Urich decides he and Diane will go to San Antonio to make money gambling, but she refuses to go. 

What makes “Lonesome Dove” work so well is the writing, which makes sure to infuse the characters with subtle relationships.  These are not men of many words, but the words they do use, jokes mainly, are actually proof of their friendship, strong and unyielding.  Something as simple as Bradley being afraid to cross a river, which he confesses to Ricky, bonds them immediately.  Ricky says he’ll cross first to show him there’s no reason to worry.  Ricky makes it, but as Bradley crosses, he’s attacked by water moccasins as Ricky watches in horror. 

The second part of the series starts with the attack, but Bradley isn’t dead, at least not yet.  “Not much we can do, he’s been bitten too many times,” Robert Duvall says a minute before he finally expires.  The entire gang had gone into river to save him, nearly a complete stranger, and though Robert remains philosophical about the death, Ricky is sad to lose his new friend, who is buried with appropriate reverence.  Travis tries to sing an Irish song, but he breaks up, so Robert Duvall steps in with a few choice words and then urges the gang on.  “The best thing you can do about death is ride out from it,” Tommy Lee says.  It’s time to move on. 

In the other part of the plot, Barry Corbin is still trying to track down Chris Cooper and comes across a horrible old man who refuses to share his possum and strikes the woman he “bought and paid for.”  That girl, Nina Siemaszko, has seen Chris and the boy, but refuses to guide Barry unless he takes her with him.  So, she hobbles the old man and convinces Barry to let her come along.  “I’m gonna follow you anyway,” she says, adding that she can catch their food.  Glenne is on her way to Ogalalla, with Steve Buscemi along for the ride.  Chris writes Glenne a letter, not knowing she won’t be at the house to receive it. 

Since the cattle drive’s cook left, they need a new one, and find one in a small town, Jorge Martinez de Hoyos.  Jorge will not ride an animal, which he says “is not civilized,” so he will walk alongside everyone.  In the same town, Robert Duvall knocks the bartender into the bar when he’s disrespectful, not recognizing Tommy Lee and Robert from the picture on the wall, back in the day when they were famous Indian chasers.  They are somewhat upset that they have been forgotten, wondering if they won’t end up like Indians, extinct, in a few years. 

“When were you the happiest?” Robert asks Tommy Lee, who doesn’t think like that.  Robert remember exactly, sitting by the creek where he is with his one true love.  The thought of it even brings him to tears as he admits “letting her slip away like I did” was the biggest mistake he ever made.  To diffuse the emotion, Tommy Lee says, “you still have your whores,” but that only brings Robert to another issue: the fact that Ricky is Tommy Lee’s son and that he never treated his mother well.  Tommy Lee can’t even look at Robert as they discuss it.  This scene runs less than five minutes, but it shows exactly why “Lonesome Dove” is so appealing.  It’s certainly not the plot, which barely holds together.  It’s about the characters.  This is a true novel (a Pulitzer Prize winner by Larry McMurtry no less) filmed.  They creators have not abandoned the characters in favor of spectacle.  In fact, they have emphasized them so much that in two hours of running time so far, there has been barely any excitement, other than a brief dust storm that lasted moments and one death.  The story here is the bonds of friendship, not the actual cattle drive or the myths of the Old West. 

The comic relief plot, which is admittedly a bit goofy, churns on with Nina telling Barry that she’ll cook frogs for dinner, but that their feet jump around as they are being cooked.  She hears men approaching and runs off.  The two want tobacco from him, but he has none.  So, they want his gun and his horse…and his clothes!  Lucky for Barry Nina didn’t run far, because she throws rocks at them and Barry is able to run off.  Just as the bandits are about to shoot Barry, again, Chris rides over with a gun and between him and Nina, they get the bad guys to ride off scared.  When Chris is told of Glenne’s running away, little Adam tells him that his father isn’t dead, as Glenne told Chris and Barry chimes in that Glenne is pregnant.  It’s a whole lot of news to take in at once. 

Robert Duvall sees Diane alone again and goes to keep her company, much to the annoyance of Tommy Lee, who wants to get to Montana with the cattle.  Diane knows Robert Urich has left her and he’s not taking her anywhere, so Robert tries his best to cheer her up.  He gives her some good philosophy, to learn to like the “everyday things,” rather than dreaming big.  To get her laughing, he strips down to his long underwear and tosses her into the water.  But, her sights are set on California and he aims for Ogalalla and his true love.  He then spots an Indian approaching.  The Indian is Frederic Forrest, who recognizes Robert from his Indian killing days.  He would love to kill “two wore out Rangers,” but since Tommy Lee isn’t around, he’ll hunt for other white men to kill.  And off he goes.  Diane will not budge, so they send Ricky to protect her, though he gets knocked out by an unseen assailant.  His horse makes it back to camp without him. 

Robert Urich arrives soon after with Ricky, but Diane is gone, which means Frederic has taken her.  Robert is pissed at everyone for letting Diane be taken.  He rails at Ricky and almost fights with D.B., but Robert Duvall takes bullets and trails Frederic.  He’s the only one who can get him.  Indeed Frederic has Diane, whom he deal with rather abusively, but he’s less scary than a bunch of his friends, who are willing to trade horse and hides for her.  Or maybe he is, shooting a man just for holding up a game of dice. 

Robert Duvall rides in search of Diane, but encounters way too many Indians and they all have guns.  Knowing just what to do, he stops, kills his horse and uses it as a defensive wall, now able to shoot at the Indians and have then running scared.  He’s not completely safe, alone in the desert behind a dead horse.  The marauders stay where they are, with some scary looking guns and Robert throws them off the trail by shooting far from them, making them think he can’t shoot, of course picking the exact right moment to knock off the most annoying of them. 

Tommy Lee is worried about his best friend, and so are the other men.  Jose says that Robert will never catch Frederic and D.B. sings his familiar refrain about how it’s Robert Urich’s fault.  He’s so in love with Diane that he intends to marry her if she returns without Robert Urich.  This starts another fight, but Tommy Lee steps in to stop it quickly. 

Night is beginning to fall and Robert is still fairly defenseless, with just the rotting horse between him and the bad guys, but sensing they are gone, he takes his saddle and gear and walks until he finds a group of people: Barry, Nina, Chris and Adam.  Our plots have finally intersected.  Robert recognizes Chris as the Sheriff chasing Robert Urich, and also as the guys who started shooting to scare off the bad guys.  They are a motley band, no match for the gang, but Robert says he can do it alone. 

Diane is still being mistreated by Frederic, whose friends want her, but he decides she’s not worth it and leaves her for the coyotes to get.  The bad guys want her, but he warns them that if they stay with her and Robert comes, all will be lost.  They all get drink and Robert rides into their campsite, plucking them off one by one with single bullets.  He’s able to rescue the traumatized Diane.  Chris is amazed that Robert could kill all of those men so easily.  He didn’t have to do a thing!  However, Frederic had left the camp and the next we see of him, he’s stabbing Barry and then kills Nina and Adam too.  That’s fiendish!  Chris digs them graves with just a bowl and Robert helps him bury the three unfortunate souls.  Chris wants to help Robert track him down, but Robert says, “I guess we have to let him go this time.”  He advises Chris to search for Glenne, and promises to kill Frederic should he encounter him again.

Speaking of Glenne, noticeably pregnant (time seems to have gone faster for her), she’s somewhere in Kansas with Frederick Coffin and Steve Buscemi.  Steve tries to rape her, but Frederick, who has been killing men who wanted to touch her since the whiskey boat, pulls Steve off her and offers to kill him, throwing him against the wheel over and over, but Glenne wants him alive “in case the Indians come.”  He will not tolerate anyone trying to “marry” her as he thinks of sex. 

Robert Urich has been gambling for days and is convinced to help some local lowlifes rob banks in Kansas.

Having sent Chris off on his personal mission, Robert Duvall has to protect Diane, beaten and frightened.  He makes his way to Adobe Walls, in Northern Texas, a tiny little shelter from the rain.  Sweet man that he is, he tries to snap her back to life by playing cards with her, but she’s too traumatized and breaks down.  As she cries on his shoulder, the second part ends.

Part Three begins with Robert Duvall rejoining his men as the Canadian River is crossed.  “You have become this gal’s caretaker,” Tommy Lee says, somewhat annoyed at this increasing diversion from the work.  Diane still has not really recovered.  She still cries.  She asks Robert why he doesn’t ask “for a poke no more?”  He says he’s being respectful of her situation. 

Robert Urich is running with a really bad crowd.  They surprise him by wanting to rob horse wranglers instead of a bank.  During the gun battle, one is shot and the leader callously kills him because “it was just his unlucky day, huh,” as Robert puts it, now terrified of this bunch.

Only one of the horse wranglers lives and Danny finds him.  So, the leads have to go off and track down the guys who did this.  That means Robert Duvall has to leave Diane and she’s afraid.  The guys follow birds until finding the dead bodies, which they take the time to bury.  Danny follows the tracks and knows there are four of them, but that also Robert Urich is with them.  They suggest that it’s just Robert’s horse, but Danny knows the tracks “his horse makes with him on it.”  Geez, that’s some excellent skill!  They better find their wayward friend soon, because his crazy new pals are giving innocent farmers, or “sod busters” just to go through their house.  The leader finds only a watch.  Killed two men for a watch and then he hangs and burns the bodies!  Two more graves for the heroes to dig. 

Danny spots the bad posse only a little bit away and they surprise them.  Tommy Lee orders them tied up, and that means Robert Urich too, because he participated.  His longtime friends have to go with the credo that “you ride with an outlaw, you die with an outlaw.”  That means they all have to hang from trees.  They kill the bad guys and then it’s only Robert Urich left.  Robert Duvall tells him he has Diane safe and then says goodbye to his friends.  “I’d rather be hung by my friends than by strangers,” Robert Urich says.  He doesn’t wait for anyone to whip his horse from under him.  He digs his spurs in and does it himself.  They are all upset, but Tommy Lee reminds them they have the cattle, so a grave has to be dug.  They leave only the leader on the tree with a sign that says “Man Burner and Horse Thief.” 

At long last, we meet Robert Duvall’s long lost love, Anjelica Houston.  She’s caring for an injured husband kicked by a horse and unable to move, as well as two young daughters.  All of her other children have died.  It’s Glenne and her cohorts who arrive at Anjelica’s farm and are invited to stay.  “This woman’s going to have a baby,” Anjelica says and one is born.  That was mighty quick!  When she left Arkansas, no one could even tell she was pregnant!  Glenne has serious post-partum depression, but Anjelica is understanding and she and her daughters will help her.  Her gentleman friends push on to Ogalalla and take Glenne, but leave the baby.  Her beloved is in jail, about to be executed for the murder of a boy.  She passes out at the jail.

Coincidentally, Chris now shows up at Anjelica’s farm.  Anjelica is gently rocking the baby when he arrives.  Ever hospitable, Anjelica invites Chris in for a meal, just inches away from his son.  Anjelica figures out he’s Glenne’s husband (both being from Arkansas) and tells the baby is his, but that she left.  Chris breaks down and Anjelica tells her daughter, “men have tears in ’em, just like you” when they wonder why a man can cry.  Anjelica is honest with Chris: Glenne wants neither Chris nor the baby.  She never even looked at the baby before leaving.  To make it worse, Anjelica admits “loves new things” and is getting “attached” to the baby.  She asks him if he wants the baby, and if he does, take him now, because she can’t “go through the heartsick of losing another one.”  Chris asks for the chance to find Glenne first. 

The cattle drive nears Ogalalla and Anjelica too.  Diane is worried about how she’ll be introduced and she’s suddenly ashamed of who she is, which Robert tells her not to be.  Robert admits he would like to marry Anjelica.  He goes to Jose, who can tell fortunes, and asks if he’ll marry again.  “No more wife for you,” Jose says. 

With Frederick keeping watch over Glenne as always, Chris arrives to see her.  “The doctor said you are strong enough to talk.  You don’t have to talk, though, if you don’t want to,” he gently tells her.  He then has to break the news that her eldest son is dead, along with Barry and the girl too.  Glenne reacts to none of it, only that her love has been executed.  Chris is very upset by her reaction and when he returns for her in the morning, he finds that she and Frederick have left.  Anjelica offers him a job so he can stay with his son and then we see briefly that Glenne and Frederick have been killed by Indians.

In Ogalalla, Robert buys some new duds and some finery for Diane.  The rest of the boys want some whores for their free time and they go to D.B. for advice, but the discussion is interrupted by the US Army, requisitioning horses for their ongoing fight against Indians.  They beat D.B. when he refuses and then go after Ricky when he holds to the horse.  Tommy Lee finally comes to their rescue and beats the man who attacked Ricky with a branding iron until Robert pulls him away.  Robert tells Ricky that the reason Tommy Lee reacted so strongly was because he was protecting his son.  The boys then return to their question to get laid. 

Apparently more time has passed because Chris has become quite the horse trainer at Anjelica’s.  More strangers arrive at this farm, but this time it’s the ones we expected.  Robert and Anjelica run to each other’s arms with a big kiss, in front of her daughters, Tommy Lee, Ricky and Diane.  Robert is surprised to see Chris again.  Tommy Lee and Ricky go with Chris to look at the horses Anjelica has for sale and Tommy Lee tells Chris that Robert Urich is dead.  Robert and Anjelica talk over old times during a picnic for everyone.  “I was never so married I couldn’t have managed a friend,” Anjelica chides Robert when she tells him she needed him over the years.  She wrote him, but tore up the letters.  Anjelica is also not judgmental about Diane.  In fact, the only person she doesn’t like is Tommy Lee, and only because he has had more time with Robert than she has.  She takes quite a shine to Ricky too, hoping that he’ll return and maybe marry her daughter in a few years. 

The only thing about Diane that Anjelica doesn’t like is that she’s young and beautiful and she no longer is.  “It sure was nice pretending you loved only me,” Anjelica says, but Robert says he loves only her too.  He claims he would kill Anjelica’s husband and send Diane to hell just to stay with Anjelica, but Anjelica knows Diane is very much in love with Robert, so she tells Robert she would never marry again. 

Knowing that Anjelica is out of his reach now, Robert decides to leave and Anjelica asks Diane to stay.  The cow trail is “no place” for her.  Robert promises to return, so Diane agrees.  Anjelica has taken in a baby, a new hired hand and a young girl in a matter of weeks.  Diane asks if Robert still wants to marry Anjelica and he says no, that time has changed them too much.  As Robert leaves, Anjelica begs him one more time to stay, not to go to Montana and get killed by Indians, but Robert wants “to see one more place before I take up the rocking chair.”  Off he goes and rejoins the cattle push.

Tommy Lee is determined to keep going, despite being 80 miles from water.  Danny asks Robert why Tommy Lee is so insistent, and it’s simply because he wants to be the first man to raise cattle in the area.  But, going 80 miles without water is tough on the men, who don’t bear up well.  Even the cattle look miserable.  When the last of the water is doled out, none of the cowboys will take it.  Luckily, they do make it 80 miles to water and everyone is revived.  While they sleep, Indians steal their horses, so Tommy Lee insists they follow them.  Danny says the Indians stole the horses for meat because they are so desperate for food, mostly women and children anyway.  But, Tommy wants his horses back!  Tommy Lee scares everyone away so they can get to the horses, but a blind child is left wandering around.  Danny scoops him up, but an Indian kills him.  “I guess it’s our fault.  We should have shot sooner,” Tommy Lee says, cradling the baby. 

As the final portion of the story begins, Danny is buried, but the rest press on.  In Montana, even Robert has to admit it’s exciting to be in a new country, but he cautions Ricky not to mention to Tommy Lee they think so.  Robert then gives Ricky the psychological explanation of why Tommy Lee won’t acknowledge he’s Ricky’s father: it would be admitting he’s human.

Back in Nebraska, Anjelica’s husband finally dies. “Sometimes grave diggin’ is the only thing we do around here,” she tells her Mexican hired hand.  She then wonders about the afterlife. 

Robert and Timothy decide to chase buffalo, just for the heck of it, because, as Robert notes, soon there won’t be any of them left.  Before Timothy can think about it, Robert rushes off and does it, unfortunately bringing a whole pack of Indians back with him.  This is not good, especially since Robert has taken a few arrows to the leg and Timothy gets shot.  The Indians leave, but our boys know they will be back, in greater numbers.  They have to attend to the arrows in Robert’s leg, which do not come out so easily.  When the Indians return, Timothy wonders why the heck the ever left Texas. 

The men are still trapped in their tiny cave, surrounded by Indians and now a rainstorm.  They decide that Timothy should float down the creek, now swelled by rain water and head back to the camp to bring help.  Robert can’t move in his condition.  Timothy makes it through the storm, his shoulder aching a bit, no doubt from the gunshot that went right through it.  He has no idea which direction he’s going, so he falls to the ground and tries to sleep.  That’s when he sees the ghost of Danny Glover and says, “I’m coming, wait for me.” 

Ron Weyand, who looks like a hippy 100 years before they existed, comes to Robert’s rescue.  Robert’s leg is so badly infected that it looks like it needs amputation, but Ron let’s him ride his horse.  Timothy isn’t dead yet.  He’s sitting in the middle of a field when Tommy Lee and D.B. find him.  Tommy Lee decides to go after Robert alone.  Robert has somehow made it to a Montana town where he can finally have a doctor tend to his wounds.  Once Robert wakes up, he finds his leg has indeed been amputated, joking with the doctor that he hopes he saved the leg so he could use the bone as a crutch.  The doctor insists the other leg has to go too, or else he’ll die.  Robert puts him off by sending him out for whiskey and to tip the whore playing the piano so he can have pretty music. 

Tommy Lee arrives at the cave where Robert had been hiding out and follows Robert’s trail all the way to the Montana town and Robert’s bedside.  Robert has a gun cocked and ready for anyone who tries to take his other leg.  “I’m the one man you don’t boss,” Robert tells Tommy Lee.  In their bantering way, Tommy Lee wonders what Robert needs his legs for, since all he does is sit on the porch, but Robert says he “likes to kick a pig every now and then.”  Robert admits it’s vanity that is making him keep the leg, and they also discuss what kind of funeral Robert would want.  His ideal burial spot is “Clara’s Orchard,” the spot in Texas where he tearily told Tommy Lee of his love for Anjelica.  Tommy Lee has to haul him all the way back to Texas? Robert tells him, “I’m sending you on another adventure so you don’t get bored being a rancher.”  And one last request: Robert wants Tommy Lee to admit to Ricky that he’s his father.  Robert writes notes for Anjelica and Diane, but he’s “so lightheaded” he “forgets which is which.”  This scene bursts with tenderness, but in character.  The two don’t get sloppily emotional, but they do get to say their goodbyes in their own special way.

Because it’s winter, the doctor suggests they keep Robert’s body in Montana and take it back to Texas in the spring.  The doctor assumes Tommy Lee will forget to come back for the body, but he doesn’t know that Tommy Lee would never promise something he didn’t intend to do to the fullest.  He then has to gather the men and tell them that Robert is dead.  For the winter, however, they still have to man the cattle, even in snowy cold conditions.  Tommy Lee pretty much keeps to himself until they reach a spot by a river where he decides to build his ranch, bringing the cattle drive to a stop. 

D.B. wants his wages so he can go chase after Diane, who he refers to as a whole, much to Tommy Lee’s consternation.  The rest of the men stay to construct a ranch, though Tommy Lee sends a few of the boys, under the command of Ricky, to go sell some cattle to a nearby Army camp.  Not all are thrilled to be taking orders from the youngster, and a fight even breaks out, but his resolve is strong. 

The months tick by and a ranch takes shape.  Ricky is able to tame horses, “just like you,” Timothy notes to Tommy Lee, who says nothing, but looks on with pride.  When Tommy Lee leaves to fulfill his promise to Robert to take his body back to Texas, he almost tells Ricky he’s his father, but the words choke in his throat, though clear to everyone.  He does leave him in charge of the ranch, though. 

Because D.B. had brought the news, Diane and Anjelica know Robert is dead and that Tommy Lee is taking his body all the way back to Texas.  Even Anjelica tries to convince him to leave the body at her little cemetery, but Tommy Lee intends to keep his promise.  He also gives both women the letters Robert wrote on his death bed.  Poor D.B. has been working at Anjelica’s ranch, pining for Diane the whole time, even when she skips dinner to spend the whole night standing by Robert’s coffin.  Anjelica reads her letter, in which Robert asks her to take care of Diane, but Diane cannot read.  Anjelica offers to read Diane’s letter to her, but she doesn’t need to hear it.  That it has her name on it in his handwriting is enough for her.  Anjelica tries one more time to convince Tommy Lee to leave the body, full of hate for him.  He’s keeping that promise, but not the other one she knows Robert would have asked of him: give Ricky his name.  Anjelica says she “despises” him, but what she’s really angry at is that Robert and Tommy Lee had the closeness and tight bond she could never have with Robert.

Alone, Tommy Lee actually hauls the body back down, encountering small towns that have heard of his exploit, Indians who thankfully leave him a lone and even a bad wheel that needs fixing in New Mexico.  The local blacksmith even knows about Tommy Lee’s promise.  By coincidence, it’s in the New Mexico town that Frederic is awaiting execution for killing a family.  Naturally, Tommy Lee wants to see him.  Frederic is still unrepentant, not surprised that Tommy Lee brought Robert’s “stinking corpse” to see his funeral. 

Frederic avoids hanging by trying to escape and falling out the window with a guard to his death, the “flying” he told Tommy Lee he was taught to do.  The wagon carrying Robert’s body is destroyed in a river, along with the coffin, but Tommy Lee pushes on, dragging just the body behind his horse.  Birds of prey eat at the body and Tommy Lee looks like he ages 20 years by the time he reaches the promised spot, a man with a determined soul, but a broken body.  He finally buries the body.  “Well, there you are,” he says when it’s done, now unable to hold back the tears.  “I guess this will teach me to be more careful about what I promise in the future.” 

Actually, Tommy Lee makes it all the way back to Lonesome Dove, where the Mexican cook is ringing the dinner bell, though no one is around to eat.  Tommy Lee notes where all the dead men are buried, but the rest are safe in Montana building a ranch.  Not much is left of Lonesome Dove.  The saloon burnt down, with only the piano recognizable in the char, a suicide by the owner who missed Diane too much to go on.  A reporter from San Antonio wants to interview Tommy Lee, a taciturn man who does not rest on the laurels of his many accomplishments. 

In actuality, “Lonesome Dove” is just a collection of rather tame vignettes strung together by the personality of its characters.  It really shouldn’t work as well as it does.  It’s missing most of the elements of a typical miniseries: epic thrust, high emotion and even higher drama.  Hell, there’s not even a slumming movie star in sight!  But, due to exceptional writing and exquisite acting, “Lonesome Dove” is a shining example of American television at its best, no matter kind of genre label it is given. 

I admit it, I’ve been going through Jane Seymour withdrawal.  It’s been weeks since we last caught up with our Muse of the Miniseries.

This time, she’s once again ideally cast in a grand spectacle.  By 1982, we probably did not need yet another retelling of Baroness Orczy’s splendid “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” (with elements of her “Eldorado” added quite seamlessly) but with a cast like this, the material seems fresh and natural.  In the 1990s, it was tried as a Broadway musical and bombed.  It clearly did not need music.  This is a swashbuckling romantic tale and the miniseries setting is the perfect way to tell it.  Three outstanding lead performances launch what could have been merely dressy and rococo into something tense and delightful. 

Sink me, it’s the French Revolution and I don’t need to tell you that means it’s a bad time to have a title, money or fame (unless you are leading the Revolution, but the Revolution had so many Revolutions the leaders kept getting killed).  The movie opens with the guillotine doing its thing, much to the adoration of the crowd, made up of the dirtiest extras of 1982, poor things.  In the prison cell where everyone is being held, one family is lucky as they are being rescued by the infamous Scarlet Pimpernel, a man of many disguises who, with his minions spirits friends out of France to safety in England.  In this particular case, it’s in coffins, which are almost checked at on of Paris’ gates, but The Pimpernel is too smart to be caught that easily. 

The Scarlet Pimpernel is really Sir Percival Blakeney (an ideally cast Anthony Andrews, who did “Ivanhoe” almost simultaneously), who has to adopt the air of foppish English gentleman in order to keep everyone off his track.  In 2011, we might call his behavior “flaming” or “over the top,” but Baroness Orczy was too proper for that.  “Surely he must be an angel in disguise,” a friend in Paris, unaware of who he is, tells him.  “Amen,” Sir Percival says while taking two hits of snuff. 

Enter Marguerite St. Just (our beloved Jane Seymour), a grand actress who is willing to leave a the stage in the middle of a performance to meet her brother Armand (Malcolm Jamieson), who was in the middle of being severely beaten when Sir Percy rode to the rescue and dispensed with two ruffians with an epee and a few jokes.  Armand, a revolutionary, is in love with a nobleman’s daughter, and it was her father who had him beaten.  Sir Percy, immediately infatuated with Marguerite, snags an invitation to a soiree. 

Marguerite’s main man is Chauvelin (Ian McKellan), a top revolutionary who goes around arresting aristocrats and “making long noble speeches.”  He’s pompous, but he’s powerful.  Just as he’s telling Marguerite about how the Reign of Terror will assure they can get married, Sir Percy arrives, working Chauvelin’s outfit from “limp cravat” to cuffs, speaking of nothing but fashion to get him to leave the room.  He’s done it on purpose to be alone with Marguerite and tell him how much he adores her.  “I don’t know if you’re mad…” Marguerite tells him when he asks her to tell him “everything…very very slowly so it will take a very very long time” “or madly in love,” he finishes her sentence. 

The Scarlet Pimpernel is the topic of an angry denunciation by Robespierre (Richard Morant) himself, who tells Chauvelin the man needs to be rooted out in order to stop giving hope to the aristocrats that they can be rescued. 

At her soiree, an agent of the Pimpernel’s had received a note and Marguerite snatched it before Chauvelin could find it.  It speaks of the Marquis de St. Cyr, the man who had her brother beaten, who is supposedly making plans to smuggle the Dauphin from his Paris prison cell.  It’s as she’s trying to puzzle it the next day that Sir Percy arrives to take her on a picnic, once again avoiding having to show papers because he shames the guard by not immediately recognizing France’s most beautiful actress.  He does romance exceedingly well, bringing with him musicians, fruit, wine and even an aristocrat smuggled in a picnic hamper who escapes while Percy kisses a dazzled Marguerite. 

Chauvelin believes that the Pimpernel must be an Englishman brought up in the French way, so that he can pass between the two cities, on guard in Paris and at ease in London.  Robespierre assigns Chauvelin to be his man in London, and Chauvelin asks to have the former ambassador Count de Tournay (Denis Lil) accompany him.  The Count is a friend of Percy’s and very much an anti-revolutionary.  He is not happy about the assignment and is sent to prison for refusing, which Chauvelin hopes will flush out the Pimpernel since de Tournay is at the center of English society in Paris.

“We must maintain our anonymity and mask our identity, even if means suffering the mockery of others, being taken for fools, fops, nitwits, even cowards,” Percy tells his friends back in London who want to brag to their “lady friends” of their exploits.  He’s brought the news that Louis XVI has been killed and de Tournay has been arrested. 

Chauvelin has discovered all of Percy’s love notes and the one she rescued from the fire and he confronts her with it after a performance one night (where she’s dressed to kill and dripping in jewels).  He says she should have brought the note to his attention, but she claims to have been confused, not knowing what to do.  Oh, but Chauvelin says he loves her and would never let anything bad happen.  Plus, it’s the man who had her brother beaten.  “You can’t honestly believe I would have a man and his entire family sent to their deaths out of spite?” she asks.  The argument only gets more heated from there, as he promises to follow her conscience over the republic always.  “Some causes can become some warped, like some men!” she says dramatically.  But, Marguerite is not always the smart cookie and when Chauvelin says Percy is back in London, she reacts so happily that Chauvelin is undone.  He opens the door to leave and Percy is standing there.  “Bonjoor Monsoor,” he says and then compliments him on his cravat.  “You’ve been taking lessons,” he jabs.  “Forget Chauvelin, forget every man you’ve ever known, but me,” Percy tells Marguerite when she says Chauvelin scares her.  Then comes a rather unfortunate lapse in writing.  “You are so…elusive,” she wonders, asking him if he’s an actor too.  “Elusive” is part of the poem circulating about The Pimpernel (“They seek him here/They seek him there/Those Frenchies seek him everywhere/Is he in heaven or is he in hell/That damned elusive Pimpernel”).  The conversation about masks and hiding and such is all a bit cloying, but this is high romance.  It can’t be avoided.

Dressed to the nines more elaborately than Liberace, has a conversation with Armand where he tells the young revolutionary he must help in rescuing de Tournay.  He admits to Armand, who has never really been 100% given to the cause, that he is The Scarlet Pimpernel.  I bet Armand regrets that crack about Percy not ever having a serious thought in his head.  Armand gets de Tournay to say he’ll go to London and take Chauvelin so he can find his sworn enemy. 

The Pimpernel outwits the same idiot guard again by dressing up as a dirty (of course) female wine merchant, by having one of his men pretend he has the plague.  The French guards arrive moments later telling the guard to stop any female wine merchant they can find and a gaggle of soldiers chase after them.  Except the guards are actually members of the Pimpernel gang and two are actually de Tournay’s wife and daughter being spirited to safety.  It’s all delicious fun.

To say that Chauvelin is upset when he hears Marguerite is going to marry Percy is an understatement.  He thinks she’s doing it because Percy is rich.  He then asks her what she wants to do about St. Cyr.  He had promised to do nothing that would betray her confidence, but now he uses it against her.  Failure to turn in an enemy of the republic is considered treason.  Soldiers come to arrest St. Cyr, and the warrant mentions Marguerite St. Just as his accuser. 

Percy and Marguerite are married in a glittering small ceremony, he actually better dressed than she.  Never have two people looked so pretty together, but there are very few brides who would let her beloved outshine her.  Anthony and Jane stare into each other’s eyes during the whole ceremony, pulling out all the stops to make this scene as bountifully romantic as possible. 

Since Chauvelin has lost his bargaining chip when de Tournay’s family escapes, he now decides he’ll follow Marguerite to London where all of society will be at her feet, thus easily finding The Scarlet Pimpernel.  That’s one big issue at the wedding party.  The other is that Percy is told St. Cyr and his family have been beheaded, and his wife’s name was on the warrant.  “From this moment on, she must never be trusted.  We cannot risk a betrayal,” he says, in one of those creaky plot twists that thankfully did not survive the 19th Century.  If he had just asked her what happened, she would have told him the truth!  But, that would rob the story of tension.  Plus, when the truth inevitably comes out, it will be a moment of supreme love, no doubt. 

Percy and his followers have their biggest escapade yet, to rescue the Dauphin.  The poor kid is being kept in prison, taught to refer to his mother as a whore.  “I detect a hint of defiance behind those eyes.  Keep at him, Fouquet, he must be all ours,” Robespierre hisses. 

The whole gang is in England, with Armand fully in on the plans to rescue the Dauphin.  Their rescue plan depends on finding even the tiniest change in the boy’s routine.  Those matter will have to wait, because foppish Sir Percy has to take Marguerite to The Prince Regent’s (Julian Fellowes) garden party.  They are the butt of all gossip: that she married him for his money, that no one else would have him, that they aren’t at all happy together.  The Prince is every bit as dandy (gay) as Percy.  At the party, Marguerite is denounced as having had St. Cyr killed, and Percy does not defend her.  “It seems, my dear, you have finally found a way to repay St. Cyr,” he says coldly.  Marguerite believes he still loves her, despite the chill that has fallen over his attentions to her.  She confronts him about his behavior in another “behind the mask” speech.  “The man I fell in love with still exists somewhere,” she says after he refuses her invitation to share her bed because he has an important appointment in town the next day to have his buckles fixed. 

Letters to Armand are intercepted and given to Chauvelin as the cat and mouse game heats up.  Chauvelin summons him back from England.  Marguerite wants him to stay and begs Percy to help as Armand is to be married.  “What has poor Armand done to be condemned to matrimony,” Percy snaps.  Marguerite runs off and Armand confronts Percy.  Armand, who knows the whole situation, tells Percy he can trust Marguerite, that she is not spying, but Percy is too focused on rescuing the Dauphin.  He assures Armand he has not ceased to love her.  “I will love her until the day I die.  That is the tragedy,” he sighs before picking up the escape plans once again. 

Chauvelin arrives in England to taunt Marguerite and they verbally spar in some snappy dialogue and then Chauvelin asks her outright to spy for him (“for France,” he corrects her) and find The Scarlet Pimpernel.  She refuses, no matter what.  But, Chauvelin has a trump card: the letter to Armand.  He blackmails her by saying, “I will have your brother’s head or The Pimpernel’s.”  This puts Marguerite in rather a tight spot, just the kind of thrilling spot romance novels depend upon. 

Percy has seen Chauvelin talking to Marguerite and tries to find out what she knows, not even trying trickery, just asking her openly.  She lies and says she hasn’t seen Chauvelin, which disappoints Percy.  “If anyone will catch The Scarlet Pimpernel, it won’t be Chauvelin…he can’t even tie his cravat,” Percy jokes, but Marguerite is angry.  He tries to get her to confide in him, but she’s so burnt by his treatment of her that she can’t.  “What’s the point?  We don’t even speak the same language anymore,” she snaps. 

At a ball that evening, Chauvelin has paid off the waiters to spy for him and one of them sees one of the cohorts passing a Pimpernel letter to another cohort.  Percy launches into his Pimpernel poem again and Chauvelin asks Marguerite to dance so he can find out her decision.  She agrees to help, having no choice and he tells her to find out what is in the note.  “How?” she asks.  “I leave that to you ingenuity as a consummate actress,” he says snidely.  Percy leaves the room to play a game with the Prince and a giant dance number ensues.

Marguerite leads the gang in a second spirited number, trying to get the letter out of Sir Andrew’s cuff, much to the dismay of his fiancee.  Marguerite pretends to start fainting, and Andrew takes her out of the room.  “I only need to close my eyes for a moment,” she says and when she does, he pulls out the letter to read it.  As he starts to burn it, she races to grab it and pretends she loves the smell.  She knocks something off the table so she can read the note and then pretends she thinks it’s a love note.  Marguerite dutifully reports what she’s read of the letter to Chauvelin.  There is to be a meeting in the library at midnight. 

As midnight draws near, the tension escalates.  Chauvelin sweats nervously.  Marguerite is in the library and Percy arrives, telling her not to turn around.  She’s there to warn him that Chauvelin knows and tells The Scarlet Pimpernel she’s doing this to save her brother.  Percy tells her she’s already been responsible for St. Cyr and his family’s deaths, and explains how Chauvelin blackmailed her.  “If this is true, you are a very brave woman,” Percy tells her, absolutely throbbing with love for her now that he’s learned the truth.  “I don’t even know who you are,” she says, never bothering to even sneak a look.  Another creaky plot twist, I know, but the dialogue is gushing and romantic.  “Touch me, so that I may know you are real,” she begs of him as he stands behind her.  He puts his hand on her shoulder and she feels the ring that contains his pimpernel mark.  Does she know?

At midnight, every clock in the house chimes and Chauvelin rushes to the library anxiously, with Percy sending Marguerite out the window.  Andrew and the others know better than to enter the library and Percy pretends to be asleep on a couch.  Chauvelin certainly doesn’t suspect him, but he does find one of Marguerite’s earrings on the floor and a few lights go off in his nefarious head.  Percy flies off to do his duty, to his yacht at Dover, and when Andrew asks him what he should tell Marguerite, he says, “tell her I love her…more than ever!”  Marguerite catches Chauvelin on his way out the door on his way back to France and tells her he will let Armand live, but only if he catches The Scarlet Pimpernel. 

Jane Seymour has a terrific opportunity to play it up when she figures out her husband is The Pimpernel.  He leaves a note for her in under a picture of himself, some tripe about having to go to the country.  She looks up at the picture and sees the pimpernel crest on his ring, the one she felt on her shoulder.  She whirls around the room and sees pimpernels all over the place.  “The Scarlet Pimpernel…Percy…oh God, what have I done?” she whispers melodramatically. 

In Paris, everyone is bobbing around the plot regarding the Dauphin, everyone trying to get his hands on him.  There’s the Austrian Ambassador who wants to collect a ransom, but is also part of The Pimpernel’s gang.  There is Armand, not particularly bright and almost giving away the whole plot, and Chauvelin’s goons trying to arrest anyone they can.  Chauvelin sends orders to arrest Armand, who is in the arms of his fiancee.  She’s clever and pretends she’s with a different Monsieur St. Just, one who is more important than Armand.  The goon believes it, but Armand still has to escape via the roof so no one finds him.  When Chauvelin finds out about the St. Just mistake, he’s livid and decides to handle it himself, sending spies to Armand’s fiance’s house, though he’s long gone.

As for Percy and his comrades, they finally have their plan to get the Dauphin to safety.  The plot depends on exact timing and care, with any error absolutely fatal.  Armand is told he must stay in England and Percy reminds of his “oath to the league.”  “You must learn to trust me my friend,” Percy tells Armand, who is worried about his beloved Louise.  Percy promises Louise will be safe in England. 

Marguerite is the one who is going to spoil the whole affair by convincing one of his friends to take her back to France.  Or maybe Armand will do it (these St. Justs are not particularly bright) by slipping out of Percy’s chamber and returning to Louise, whose house is being watched.  Percy is awake and knows Armand has escaped, so he must have a plan. 

As for the Dauphin, the moment for escape comes exactly at noon when his servants are changed.  The old ones are sent packing and new ones replace them.  When the new ones go to look in at the boy, they see the back of his head under a blanket.  Percy, in disguise as a half-wit, fools the gate guard AGAIN (the joke is getting a bit stale) and leaves Paris with the Dauphin, only moments before Chauvelin discovers it’s a doll in the bed, with the calling card from The Scarlet Pimpernel.  Time is so important, and no one is there in the countryside to meet Percy and the Dauphin.  Percy kills time by revealing himself to the boy as soldiers race out of Paris.  Percy will have to make a dash for it himself.  He’s in a heavy cart and soon the soldiers are on his heels, firing a shot into his shoulder.  The cart is destroyed, but Percy and the boy are not with the remains.  They have escaped the hollow of a tree and finally come in contact with Andrew.  He then has to return to Paris to rescue Armand. 

Percy, in all his finery, goes to Louise’s house, but of course it’s a trap.  Chauvelin is there waiting for him, having already captured Armand.  Percy, slipping back into his fop act, stalls for time in trying to bargain Armand and his life for the Dauphin’s and then tries to escape, but is caught.  Marguerite arrives at Chauvelin’s office with a letter of clemency from the Prince of Wales.  She demands to see Percy and Chauvelin obliges.  Percy is in the dank horrible prison and Chauvelin gives them two minutes alone (well, not quite alone since he’s watching through the door).  There’s a giant embrace, swelling music and a big kiss.  “How I prayed you would come!” he says and they both forgive the other.  Chauvelin has agreed to let Percy go if he tells the revolutionaries where the Dauphin is, but Percy refuses.  He suddenly thinks of a plan, gives her the ring and there is a plan.

The details of the plan are complex, with Percy, Marguerite and Chauvelin all trying to outsmart each other on their way to the Dauphin.  Half of Paris seems to be chasing after him.  The other half are those grubby extras.  “Two birds with one stone, the Dauphin and The Scarlet Pimpernel. My seat on the committee is assured due to you primitive noblesse oblige,” Chauvelin brags to Percy, his prisoner in a carriage on the way to the fortress where the Dauphin is being held.  Chauvelin arrives to find everyone gone, with only a Friar left to tell Chauvelin that the boy has been taken already to Spain and thence to England (“just as I suspected,” sneers Chauvelin, not knowing the boy has been taken to Austria).  Chauvelin begs for Marguerite’s life, but she wants to die with him.  He begs her to trust him.  “I shall return to haunt you,” he tells Chauvelin and kisses Marguerite before being taken to the courtyard for execution.

Percy is stood before a firing squad and we hear “ready…aim…fire” as Chauvelin almost has an orgasm.  He orders Marguerite and Armand back to Paris for execution.  But, come on, you don’t believe Percy really died!  Of course the soldiers are Percy’s men and he introduces them to Chauvelin gladly, his own soldiers tied up in a closet.  Percy is confident, but Chauvelin says the only way off the island fortress is through his soldiers standing guard, but out another window, Percy shows Chauvelin his yacht waiting for the league.  Chauvelin grabs a sword and the two battle it out with swords, as expecting in this kind of 18th Century schmaltz-fest.  Marguerite worries over every clash of the blades as the two run around the entire set, cutting candles, jumping over stairs and, in Chauvelin’s case,  having that horrid cravat undone by Percy button by button.  Percy is a much better swordsman, of course, but he toys with Chauvelin. Percy wins and volunteers to go back to Paris to fetch Armand’s Louise.  Armand begs for the honor and Percy is happy to let him have it so he can go back to England with Marguerite. 

On the boat back across the channel, it’s Marguerite’s turn to recite the Pimpernel poem.  “Sink me, the lady’s a poet,” Percy says before they dissolve into the final kiss. 

Romance and chivalry reign supreme and the miniseries nailed every touch that Baroness Orczy so lovingly tucked into her work. 

No offense to the wars or the soldiers who fought in them, but thank goodness we have a war miniseries that is not about World War II or The Civil War.  “Masada” reaches back 2000 years to tell the story of the Jews fighting against Rome.  The outcome is as inevitable as the Confederates and the Japanese getting pulverized in their respective wars, but “Masada” is an inspirational tale.  Gone are the gooey trappings of modern war miniseries (in other words, the backstories that fill time between battles).  Instead, we return to the sword and sandal epics mid-20th Century Hollywood loved to produce.  This one is all about might versus right.  The Romans have the might and the Jews have the right.  To be fair, “Masada” does have two leading characters who are very flawed in the eyes of their own people.  The Roman General actually starts out lenient and trusting of the rebellious Jews, while the leader of said rebellious Jews can be awfully heavy-handed and pompous.  However, that cannot obscure the rah-rah inevitability of the few hundred Jews trying to overcome thousands of Roman soldiers, which makes this an action/war miniseries like all the rest, just with much smaller costumes.

Serious narration gives us bit of history before the action starts.  A camera comes from deep in the Israeli desert to swoop across the remains of the citadel that was once a live fortress.  In fact, modern Israeli soldiers are still sworn in at Masada, with the claim that they are “the most daring and defiant soldier in the world,” certainly not an untrue statement.  Part of the ceremony is to recall the 960 Israelis who fought to defend the mountain from at least 10,000 Roman soldiers.  A cascading Jerry Goldsmith score, replete with a Jewish influence and the brass of Broadway, follows the soldiers up to the peak.  “A soldier has to wonder…” the narrator says and that’s our cue to turn the clocks back to the year 70 AD.

Jerusalem is being destroyed by the Romans, it’s holy Temple burned and pillaged, it’s people slaughtered (including one woman pinned against a wall to have her arm chopped off in close-up), but some are fighting back.  Peter Strauss certainly is.  As he and his family formulate an escape plan, he and a Roman soldier, both showing a whole lot of leg, fight until Peter overcomes him.  Peter and his gang escape Jerusalem, going up in fake blue-screen flames that would made DeMille proud.  It’s certainly an exciting opening.

Skip ahead three years.  Peter has vowed not to give into the Romans and he’s set up camp atop Masada.  They have gotten good at picking off small bands of Roman soldiers, using clever ruses to intercept money and letters.  The latter reveal that the Roman government is going to tax the hell out of Palestine, but the General who has been in charge of the area is leaving, much to the dismay of his soldiers, who have been lagging in the hot desert for years. 

Said General would be Peter O’Toole, giving over his command to Dennis Quilley.  Peter is at his most regal here, playing miniseries dialogue like it’s Shakespeare, and not one of the comedies.  As he’s dictating a letter, a sad soldier somehow makes it through a legion of soldiers outside his tent door to assassinate him.  He gets him in the leg, but his his men ultimately get him.  Peter gives the troops a rousing speech.  “You stupid bastards.  It’s almost over,” he tells them to shame them, reminding them of their loyalty to the Emperor.  It’s quite a speech, delivered with aplomb, and he wins back the affection of his men by not putting his would-be assassin to death.  “Masada” aired only weeks after the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and was therefore filmed long before, but leaving in this scene had to resonate with people at the time.

Back up on Masada, Peter Strauss decrees that it’s time to go down to Hebron, but not everyone agrees.  The elders in the synagogue think eventually the Romans will go away and don’t agree, but Peter is pretty convincing.  Not only does he have a big noble speech as well, but he also promises death to those who don’t help, always so damn pushy.  The elders wonder why they bother.  “We can remind them that some Jews are free!” he roars dramatically.  He’s obviously a good leader, because General Peter dictates a letter to the Emperor on the eve of his leave to say for sure, “the Judean War is over,” noting that the band of Zealots of “melted into the population and the taxes have been collected for the first time in seven years.  He doesn’t realize Zealot Peter at that very moment is assaulting Hebron, the soldiers caught in a trap and the grain reserves set on fire.  Victory for the Zealots!

This is bad news for General Peter, who orders a cavalry readied so he can ride majestically into Hebron, his face glowing from pounds of eye shadow rather than the sun.  He’s not happy with the soldier in charge, who burned every third house without asking questions, thus having made the problem worth.  “Confess it, you just hated to see all that fire put to waste,” he clucks at the stupid soldier who has learned absolutely nothing from the whole ado.  He yells, the soldiers yells back, hoping to be relieved of duty.  The only man captured in the whole escapade is Richard Pierson, who laughs at the General even tied upside down for a whole evening. 

Richard is allowed to go free so he can report back to Zealot Peter and ask for a meeting between the two leaders (the Peter leaders, if you will).  “These aren’t Britons or Gauls we’re fighting…these are grainy bastards without ethics,” General Peter tells Dennis, with a world weary attitude that leads one to think he’s personally conquered the entire known world.  He’s just jealous and pissy, wise to the fact that Zealot Peter has waited until the dead of night to show up for the meeting, when the soldiers cannot see how many men he’s brought. 

The meeting between the two men is a lesson in acting styles.  Peter Strauss doesn’t really have one and Peter O’Toole invented his own, loud and bombastic, sounding full of grog and ham at all time.  General Peter makes a “statement of fact” that Zealot Peter’s band will be killed, no matter how long it takes.  “I’m sick of dead Jews, live Jews, men, women and children and of your miserable and unyielding country,” General Peter brays, and Zealot Peter tells him to go already!  No, no, General Peter isn’t going anywhere because his pride as an officer of Rome won’t let him leave while bandits still wander.  “Give us our due, man, we know how to kill,” General Peter says, but Zealot Peter replies with, “prune the orchards and the best trees survive.”  Geez, DeMille WOULD be proud: spectacle and atrocious dialogue, just what he always aimed for.  Zealot Peter says rebellions will rise forever and eventually overcome the Romans, an unlikely proposition, to General Peter marks him as “insane.”  “I’m not about to argue about insanity with a man who got his commission from Nero,” Zealot Peter snaps back.  Good point!  The loopy conversation ends with Zealot Peter spewing about how Masada is impenetrable and his people can hold off the Romans forever with “rocks and boiling water.”  He promises that the war will go on as long as his people remember the crushing power of Rome.  Having promised Zealot Peter no harm if he came to talk to him, General Peter of course imprisons him.  Zealot Peter reminds him that he promised on his family name and honor.  “Honor, like patience, has its limits,” General Peter says, getting in the last word of a conversation made up entirely of Biblical-sounding phrases that are really just gussied-up schoolyard bully-speak. 

Unfortunately, the two meet up again only moments later, but Zealot Peter is in a cage and General Peter taunts him from outside.  From inside the cage, Zealot Peter is awfully full of bravado, and General Peter keeps egging him on.  He tells the captured man that pretending to be unafraid of death is a Roman trick and he can “smell it a mile away.”  Zealot Peter only grumbles that the General is making it hard for him to sleep.  At Peter O’Toole’s vocal level, it’s making it hard to sleep as far as Damascus, no doubt.  They take a minute to discuss religion.  Apparently one of Zealot Peter’s cousins presented him as a Messiah, just like that Nazarene, and all of the confusing Messiah wanna-bes have created deep factions among the Jews.  He then gives the General a pearl of wisdom.  “You want to know how to destroy the Jews?  Leave them in peace. They’ll be at each other’s throats soon enough.  But, as long as we have an enemy, we are brothers,” he says.  Geez, that’s optimistic.  Kind of damned either way, eh?

After that conversation, General Peter returns to his hovel, starts drinking and worries that his shadow is getting too thin.  “I was fat when I came here,” he says.  So just go already!

What does he do?  He has the guards bring in Zealot Peter so they can go another round.  “What does it take to stop you?” General Peter asks?  He claims he wants peace, and Zealot Peter says he wants freedom and the country back.  The General reminds him for a thousand years, someone has always run it, why not the Romans?  He then offers to bargain.  Zealot Peter wants one tax-free years, the temple rebuilt, a Jewish governor through whom Rome rules (he reminds the General of Herod, but that’s actually a really bad example if anyone looks at history), an army of Jews instead of Romans who are “allies instead of enemies.”  The deal is that if General Peter pulls the troops to north of Jericho, Zealot Peter will retire to Masada and end all raids.  General Peter agrees.  “It does make perfect sense,” he admits. 

The two then sit down to a meal together, prolonging their time together.  Zealot Peter actually trusts General Peter, who thanks him with a drunken quip, “God above, the Oriental mind!”  Thankfully friends, that’s the end of the conversation.  Not a great end to the gab-fest, but at least it’s over.  They really are doing an imitation of “The Ten Commandments.”  Peter Strauss is Charlton Heston, completely unable to act, but good at saying the words to make you think he can.  Peter O’Toole is Yul Brynner, obviously annoyed that these conversations keep occurring, but making the most of them by overacting until someone stops him (not that Peter O’Toole can ever be stopped).

Dennis is not happy that General Peter has let Zealot Peter go, mainly because the tax cannot be paid, but the General says he’ll pay the taxes himself, assuming the Emperor will reimburse him.  He tells the soldiers they are pulling back to Jericho, no taxes are to be collected and even the huts of Hebron are to be rebuilt.  But, Dennis thinks this is madness and adds a note to the one General Peter has sent to the Emperor, one with the truth, apparently so juicy that the soldier he trusts with it actually hisses, “noooooooo!” as if he’s just discovered that pink ostrich plumes have been discontinued. 

Dennis represents the Roman faction that believes this is all madness and then Zealot Peter has to return to his people and tell them of the deal, where he faces the same raised eyebrows and disbelief.  Can you blame any of them?  Two guys meet in a tent and solve a political crisis together?  History doesn’t bear that one out well, now does it? 

Enough with the desert!  Let’s have some fun in Rome.  Emperor Vespasian (Timothy West) is watching “Oedipus” with a whole assortment of people, but once it ends, the virgins are dismissed (aka, all the women) for a bawdy pantomime that goes a bit too far in mocking the emperor.

General Peter is welcomed back to Rome by David Warner, who is the only one allowed to speak to him.  Dennis note has arrived first, of course.  David leads him an audience with Vespasian under murky circumstances.  Vespasian doesn’t know what Dennis has written, but Senator Nigel Davenport does, wondering aloud why Peter agreed to a truce and the troop pull-back.  Since Peter cannot speak in the room, not being a Senator, Vespasian has to defend him.  That goes well until Nigel tells the Emperor about the whole tax issue, Peter paying them himself.  Senator David Warner tries to help, by speaking like a banker and confusing all present, talking about coins and rates and percentages and such.  It quells that part of the argument.  Nigel is on a tear, and he has a lot of support. 

The Emperor knows he’s fed Nigel and his cohorts a load of bunk and Peter is forced to defend himself.  He says the concessions are a small price to pay for peace.  The Emperor agrees, but politically, he cannot agree to the demands.  He insists that the rebels be brought to Rome and threatens that if he is forced from power and if he has to kill himself like the past few Emperors, Peter is going with him.  Oh, and Peter should know that Dennis is a spy.  Oh, and Peter is now Consul General of Judea.  Oh, and…wait…did Timothy West just say what I thought he said?  Let me rewind, hold on.  YES!  He did.  Wait’ll you hear this corker! 

“It’s hard to recognize you without a drink in your hand,” he dryly notes to Peter O’Toole. 

Oh, now really!  That’s too easy a shot.  We’re talking about Peter O’Toole the actor and not his character, I assume.  The once-great actor has been reduced to a bad Roman wig and having to spend time shooting on location with Peter Strauss, does the picture really need to ground him any further into the dirt?  Then again, it’s hard not to laugh at that jab.  O’Toole probably would have if he weren’t too drunk.

Peter and Timothy wander around the room in circles while everyone else stands mute.  Timothy and Peter once had a dream of peace, but he’s powerless to do anything about it in Judea because of the politics in Rome.  His own position is perilous. 

Back in Judea, the soldiers are restless and Dennis isn’t doing a great job of  keeping them happy.  They are bored and unpaid, looking for land instead of money, which appeals to him because he’ll get to keep the money.  The wily villain has a whole scheme concocted to steal piles of money while blaming the Jews.  To him, it seems ideal, but his second-in-command does not agree, especially since they can’t give the soldiers land that doesn’t even belong to them.

So, they simply take it, killing everyone in sight except for Barbara Carrera, an Egyptian hussy who sets her sights on the tribune and seduces him.  The soldiers take everything in sight.  Some of the displaced Jews are saucy enough to fight back verbally, for they have seen it all before, but the end result is the same: they are forced off their land and livelihood.  The only place for them to go is up to Masada, where they inform Zealot Peter that the truce has been broken by the land seizure.  Peter is in no mood to receive the same holy men who have consistently resisted his attempts at banding together and tells them that though they think they cannot be separated from their holy books, they better be prepared to work and fight. 

“We have Vespasian’s answer, now let’s give him ours,” Zealot Peter tells his cohorts to bring the first part to a dramatic close (and to cue that twinkly music from the title credits again).

The rag-tag Jews are fighting back.  They are taking more Jews and all of the food and such up to Masada while poisoning the water, killing the Romans.  “Well, it seems to be localized,” and increasingly idiotic Dennis Quilley says.  Before he and his cohort can formulate a plan, Governor General Peter O’Toole returns, with Anthony Quayle in tow, one or Rome’s best soldiers.  Peter’s servants redecorate the tent as he chews out Dennis big time, but also ordering all legions to “move on Masada.”  While on the march, Peter notices “Jewish harlot” Barbara Carrera, mistress of the tribune, and finds her “rather stylish.”  She plays Jewish about as convincingly as she played Native American as the unforgettable Clay Basket in “Centennial,” which is not very convincingly, but she does make attractive window dressing in a story that really has no place for women. 

Incidentally, have you been asking how the Jews got all of their supplies up Masada, a rock with no easy way up?  It’s a mountain that literally pops out of the land, straight up.  When we see a cow on pulleys, we have our answer.  It’s not easy work, that’s for sure.  Atop the mountain, Zealot Peter Strauss is proud of the work his people are doing in a montage that has him helping the farmers, the knife carvers, the guy with the sheep, pretty much everyone because he’s that knowledgeable and talented. 

Work has to stop when the Roman army is spotted, so Zealot Peter orders the catapults brought and the stones readied.  As the two sides prepare, a bunch of nomads gather at the base of Masada, purely commercial agents who aim to supply the Romans with whatever bounty they can afford (prostitutes, don’t you know).  Zealot Peter says he wishes sometimes he had that life, no worries about having to ever fight.

Zealot Peter than gathers the people and gives the pre-war speech.  He says the Romans can’t survive the summer without supply lines of water, that the Roman catapults cannot reach up the steep mountain.  “Where they march is where we want them to be,” he says, touching each child’s head as he passes, all but sticking campaign buttons on everyone. 

The Romans do exactly what he predicted: they gather at the base of the mountain and look imposing with their horses and uniforms and masses of men on horses.  They are placed in positions of might.  “Impressive,” says Consul General Peter.  “Impossible,” notes Anthony Quayle.  “Exactly, that’s why I brought you,” Peter retorts.  The flags and trumpets are sent to the front of the line to dazzle the Jews, who react by tossing manure over the mountain.  Anthony says not to bother shooting rocks up the mountain because they can only be used as weapons back against them. 

Our two Peters argue by shouting up and down the mountain.  It’s that easy to hear each other?  Thousands of soldiers and horses, wind, rock and all, and they just have to shout to be heard?  “Formalities are over.  Let’s get to work,” General Peter says.  The Romans build their own fortresses surrounding the mountain.  They manage to get a few men up a neighboring mountain to report on what they see, which isn’t much, just a few children playing.  General Peter finally gets his revenge on Dennis and tribune Clive Francis by sending them on a suicide mission up the mountain for recon.  Before the tribune goes up the mountain, he wills Barbara to General Peter.  “Long live…” Clive starts to say, but Peter stops him.  “It’s not necessary,” he barks.  Zealot Peter orders the men to “test their marksmanship” and kill the two, who fall off the mountain in slow motion, from which Peter merely turns his head dramatically.

General Peter goes to look through the spoils of the two he’s just had killed, meaning Barbara.  She’s a sassy dame, asking to be let go, but knowing she’s more valuable staying with the powerful man.  “Then I can be expected to be sent for?” she coos?  “You can be expected to be alive tomorrow morning,” is all Peter will promise.  Sagacious Anthony tells Peter they have to build a ramp of rock up the mountain.  “It’s a terrifying amount of work,” they agree, as if they are putting lumps of sugar in their tea since the servants have the day off.  General Peter does ritual sacrifices to the Gods that involve blood, goat liver and shirtless boys. 

Completely bored extras dressed as Roman soldiers (they can’t even summon up the energy to hoot properly at the end of a Peter O’Toole speech) start to haul rocks and build that blasted ramp up Masada.  Anthony Quayle is also something of an engineer, with all sorts of tools to make it go better.  I bet he wishes they had some Hebrew slave labor about now.  They built all those grand Egyptian monuments and never had to be paid!  Then again, they didn’t have the opportunity to watch “The Ten Commandments.”  Up atop Masada, Zealot Peter chirps, “I like to watch them work,” rather than be frightened their ramp might actually work.  When General Peter allows the men to stop working and go buy goods from the nomads, the Jews pelt them with stones from above.  The rain of the stones does a lot of damage, to the men, to the horses and to the building operation, but General Peter has time to stop and ask Barbara how she feels about it all.  If she’s getting paid per scene, she needs a whole lot more to do.

The Jews celebrate, but General Peter has a good point: why did they attack so early in the process?  They wasted an awful lot of stones.  However, he insists that the ramp project continue.  He issues all sorts of commands and then retires to his chambers, tired and thirsty.

Then comes the second great dig at one of Hollywood’s most impressive drunks, but this time HE himself says it!  General Peter’s servant silently brings him a cup of wine.  “Is the need so obvious you can see it in my face?” he asks his servant.  I’ll answer that one: not exactly, rather what CAN be seen in his face is years devoted to the stuff.  This was before Peter O’Toole turned yellow, but after he started to look 20 years older than he was.

Back atop Masada, Zealot Peter is having a crisis of faith, for about the fifth time.  He claims to have stopped believing in God, and his poor wife only exists to play the foil in these conversations.  She asks him why he fights so hard if he doesn’t believe, since the whole purpose of fighting is to preserve their monotheism against the Romans.  What he does believe for sure is that “no man should be another man’s slave.”  Then he unexpectedly shows up to pray in the synagogue, a place he has consistently avoided except to force the elders to work.  He’s even invited to lead the congregation in a psalm.  He reads from the Torah, right to left appropriately, though in English.  Hey, the elders will take what they can get, I suppose.  Reading from the Torah, even in English.  Oh, DeMille would have a full erection watching this, especially when the voices become voiceovers to the Romans conscripting any humans they can find into forced labor.  I guess NOW they finally watched “The Ten Commandments.”  It does not please the Jews on Masada to see slave labor brought in, especially since most of it is Jewish slave labor, the people who refused to join them on Masada.  That’s a dirty trick, because now it means Jews will have to kill Jews if they attempt another rock raid. 

Anthony gives the Romans a speech about how to handle slave labor.  He believes in a strict eight-hour workday, followed by a day off, because after all, “these are soft, city types.”  Apparently he thinks he’s raided Paris and taken all the artists from the Left Bank.  Moreover, they are to be fed and watered on the job.  And, slaves to best when they see a reward in sight.  “Finally, whipping.  Now, we must expect to love five men a day from whipping…overwhipping is worse than no whipping because if the death rate is too high, we won’t have enough men left,” he says to the astonished crowed.  “Treat ’em decently and they’ll do very nicely,” he summarizes.  It’s a terrific speech that would have gone over so well in the Antebellum South (though they wouldn’t have bought a word of his bunk), but sounds utterly ridiculous and humane coming from a Roman general. 

A bath is brought to Barbara’s quarters and filled with water, a precious substance forbidden to the soldiers because of its high salt content.  “Compliments of the Governor General,” the pissy soldiers snap on their way out.  General Peter’s mute slave pulls out the master’s dead wife’s death mask and then comes ANOTHER line about his drinking (Peter’s, not the General’s I suspect).  “I didn’t drink this much even when I was in the field and knew I was coming back to her,” he groans.  As if Peter O’Toole remembers why he drank on most nights?  “And I cannot keep drinking this way now!” he says, actually refusing another cup of wine.  That is the character, not Peter.  Peter O’Toole never said no to a topping off.  His dead wife speaks to him and then Barbara shows up in his tent.  Gulping down his wine, he lays it out plainly: he wants her as his mistress.  He has human needs.  “I hope I can make it reasonably pleasant for you,” he says and she disrobes.  He explodes at that!  Apparently he wants more than just sex.  He wants “civility.”  It turns into an argument, but eventually, he apologizes.  “From time to time, it would be important for me to have someone to whom I could talk to freely,” he says, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because he’s just lambasted her for being Jewish, but she’s not THAT Jewish, I suppose.  Essentially, we’re giving her something to do and trying to humanize him a little.  What is their first civil conversation about?  His dead wife and her suicide when she found out she had throat cancer.  Talk about a scene in desperate need of editing. 

There’s trouble up on Masada.  The archers want to file a volley, but the elders will not let them because the slaves are fellow Jews.  Zealot Peter agrees with the elders.  He says they will only use two weapons: intelligence and the sun.  As they fill a water hole gleefully, the Romans on the next mountain can see, which doesn’t help morale since water for the Romans and their slaves has been rationed.  The Jews start swimming in their abundant water, which can be heard down below.  That one hurts! 

Back in the time killing part of the story, Babs and General Peter are in bed, with silk sheets, where Babs is bubbling over with the events of her life.  It’s not very interesting.  Was she a virgin on her wedding night?  Did she want to kill her arranged marriage husband? 

Another Roman animal sacrifice, more shirtless boys, more eyeliner on General Peter, and the soldiers ain’t buying it anymore.  This time, the extras are told to barely react, which we know they do particularly well.  The kids on the mountain just laugh at laugh at the sacrifices.  Anthony comes up with another engineering marvel, this one approaching the engineering know-how of a suspension bridge, and General Peter goes for it.  The Romans and the slaves are barely alive, but they build this thingamajig.  Unfortunately, as good as the work is going, Anthony admits to General Peter that there is envy among the men because Peter is keeping Barbara.  She certainly looks well fed and wined.  Hell, the men are playing dice games to win water rations, but up on the mountain, there’s a ton of water for laundry.  Zealot Peter decides right at noon to let the dirty laundry water cascade off the mountain.  To make it worse, Zealot Peter yells from the mountain that he wants to share it with their Roman “strangers,” who aren’t strangers anymore because they have all been watching so closely.  Okay, that would be fun, but then he has to go and ruin it by telling the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and then gets just plain long winded.  He uses the power of suggestion to try to turn the Romans against their commanders and on it goes.  Another DeMille moment, full of pomp, meaning absolutely zilch.  He compares General Peter to a monkey and asks if the soldiers will follow the “monkey up this hill on a pile of your rotting corpses?” 

Not only can the two Peters talk to each other, they can see each other easily, so once Zealot Peter is done, General Peter raises his fist to him and Zealot Peter bows his head mockingly.  General Peter goes into his tent and rails at Barbara that it’s all so wasteful, when all he wants is peace.  But, a plan is formulating in his head because he knows Zealot Peter knows the Jews cannot survive up on that mountain forever.  “Vespasian’s monkey!” he toasts to end the second portion.

Somehow, the Romans continue building Anthony’s contraption.  The wind is picking up and a soldier suggests perhaps it means rain.  “It could be cantaloupes from Egypt too, but it’s not,” wise Anthony reminds him.  The Jews know a storm is coming, but the Romans of some legions are sent off to the nomads for “recreation.”  That means a bunch of women wildly gyrating their hips.  Mutiny is on the lips of some men, while whores on on the lips of the others.  Peter and Barbara wander around and he buys her a necklace, which offends her because she’s made to feel like a hooker when truly they are in love, or getting there. 

Zealot Peter and his cohorts, dressed as ninjas, repel down the mountain to feed the goats something that strange that will affect the way the sacrifices of the Roman priests will occur.  They do it and make it back up the mountain, but whatever they did remains unexplained.  Instead, we have ANOTHER bed scene with the general and his harlot that brings the movie to a dead halt.  Stick to the damn battle.  That’s where the tension is.  A ridiculous love plot is completely without merit. 

So, what’s been tossed down the goats’ throats?  Live maggots.  The priests say that’s happened only once before, at the death of Pompey the Great.  General Peter decides to give everyone a morning’s rest so he can figure out how to fight the omen, which the priest tells him means the General has to run through the camp naked.  But, if he pays a huge amount of money, a priest will do it for him.  Peter doesn’t believe the omen; he knows the Jews managed it at night.  “Oh, don’t sulk like an underpaid streetwalker,” he tells a confused Anthony, “I need you too much.  Without you, I feel outnumbered.”  I’m not sure how the first part of that sentence has anything to do with the second part, but I’m going blame the heat and general frustration of the Romans on their inability to make any sense at this point (or the writers, who are clearly stretching a three-hour story into six and change).  The Jews watch in hilarity as priests run naked around the camp. 

As the Romans soldiers are planning mutiny, a gigantic wind storm of DeMille proportions tears apart their camp.  The buildings collapse.  The animals run wild and General Peter protects Barbara.  In the morning, the whole camp is in disarray.  However, the work must continue.  The mutiny is discovered and they must face trial.  Notably, one among the accused is the man who had earlier tried to kill the General Consul.  The punishment is to circumcise the men and send them into the desert with no rations.  That’s gonna hurt. 

Purim arrives and the sound of merriment on Masada is just another reason for the Romans to be miserable. And it gets worse!  Unctuous David Warner shows up from Rome.  He says he’s there to make sure that the schedule is still on time, but Anthony knows David has only self-interest motivating him.  However, General Peter is philosophical: what could be worse than this assignment?  David’s visit couldn’t come at a worse time.  Rations are being cut while work detail is increased and a series of mishaps get written down by his persnickety secretary. 

An easy solution for the gang on Masada would be to pick off the slaves with skilled archers, but Zealot Peter still refuses.  Now the men on Masada are beginning to doubt his leadership. 

As Romans are dying from thirst, Anthony is summoned to David’s tent.  They start by trading insults in the best dialogue yet, but David gets to the point: is the big contraption going to be ready on time?  Anthony guarantees the tower and ramp will be done on time, as promised, “if I have to carry the dirt on my own back,” Anthony says, though of course David has his doubts, toady that he is to an Emperor who needs all finished on time politically.  He sends a missive to the Emperor that the soldiers are no longer of any value to to the empire and gets in the FOURTH did at Peter O’Toole directly.  He’s not sure what to say about the General, fearing blaming him outright will be politically dangerous.  He tells his secretary to write, “something about the drinking, perhaps.”  Ah, the double entendre alcoholic lines never get old!

Anthony comes up with a way shave weeks off the project when he is hit in the neck by an arrow from Masada.  That’s a setback, and now David has to start his letter to the Emperor all over again!  Before Anthony dies, he tells of his brilliant new plan, down to the hour of the attack due to the angle of the sun.  General Peter says all will continue as per the plan, but David puts his foot down.  In his capacity of Legate, he has the power of the Emperor, he relieves Peter of his command.  Peter gives him his necklace of Consul General and David orders fresh attack orders for the next day.  He’s lacking the understanding General Peter had of his enemy and acts only for political expediency. 

Now it’s David’s turn to yell up to Masada (as General Peter makes plans to take Barbara home–“everyone should see Rome,” he tells her) and fills the catapults with old Jews instead of rocks!  Zealot Peter is in a very difficult position here.  “It means they’re losing and they know it,” he tells his friends, who are looking to him for a decision.  The Jews on the mountain are horrified when David follows through with his threat and catapults old men against the mountain to sure death.  The third victim is to be Richard’s father.  David just gets meaner and meaner!  He does it well, and that’s why he won an Emmy for this, no doubt. 

Zealot Peter storms into the synagogue to have a conversation with God.  “Is this what you want?  They’ve done nothing wrong.  They’re afraid of you and they love you…what more can you make them suffer?…If you are here, Jehovah of Sinai, TALK TO ME.  TALK TO ME or kill me,” he rails as he clutches the Torah and cries.  He tells his wife he has to surrender to stop the Jew catapult routine. 

General Peter can’t take it anymore and rushes from his tent to try to wrestle back control and it works.  The soldiers remain loyal to him and David only has his few German bodyguards, oh, and his fey fat secretary.  The worm leaves the white cylinder of Legate power for Peter.  Barbara is overwhelmed with joy. 

Now that the folks on the mountain have seen the catapults being pulled away, the elders change their tune.  They tell Zealot Peter they will fight, the first time they have done so.  Since he went into the synagogue and prayed himself, and since God has apparently listened, they feel “God has sanctioned your leadership” and everyone on Masada is behind him.  This makes for a hopeful end to the third part of the story. 

General Peter has an arrow shot up to Masada asking for a midnight rendezvous.  Those around him think he’s insane, but those of us who have been watching since the beginning know these conversations are inevitable, not to mention long.  It starts with General Peter apologizing for the human catapult business.  Then he has to apologize for the broken treaty.  Zealot Peter throws it all back in his face, but General Peter yells louder, and more honest, saying that there is no way for the Jews to win.  Zealot Peter invokes the name of God as often as General Peter invokes the name of Rome as the ultimate being and ally.  “The odds are not five to one, and the bazaar is closed,” Zealot Peter says, referring to their last meeting where they negotiated like marketplace buyer and seller. 

Barbara realizes that all hope is lost for he Jews once General Peter tells her Zealot Peter “has been favored with a religious conversion.”  When religion played no part in what he was doing, when it was simply politics, he had an understandably spark in him.  Religion turns the situation into one where spiritual belief replaces reality and that will ultimately give Rome the upper hand. 

General Peter has decided that work on the ramp must be doubled, working day and night, and he even does the drudge work himself.  He is an inspiration to his men, who find it in them to work harder and the ramp and tower are built at terrifying speed to those who watch.  Up on Masada, the Jews finally arm themselves with breastplates, swords and shields.  The Jewish leaders inform the population on Roman tactics and how to beat them. 

The name of the Lord is Zealot Peter’s explanation to his son as to why they will win.  They won’t win this battle against the Romans, but they will win in the long run because God has promised them the land and every enemy who has taken it from them is no better than the dust he lets slip through his finger.  But, in the long run, Rome will be vanquished too.  The Jews then turn their fear into anger the Jewish slaves and they scream at them to fight back, which of course they can’t do. 

It’s Barbara’s turn to let loose with a big loud speech.  It’s rather unimportant because her character is so silly, but basically she says she admires the Zealots and that since Peter has never asked her what she wanted, he’s assumed she’s happy being a slave to him.  “I hate him.  I hate them all,” she says of her fellow Jews, “because without them, I wouldn’t be here,” referring to the way they treated her when she first arrived in Judea.  “Then why hate me?” Peter asks.  “Because without you they wouldn’t be here,” believing in a hopeless cause.  The worst things the Romans have done is “force the rest of us to learn the truth about ourselves,” she says.  He’s assumed all along that she wants to return to Rome with him, but she replies that she’s never had a choice.

Mercifully, this conversation ends when it is announced that the ramp is finished.  Hopefully it also means an end to the goat slaughters, shirtless boys and braying priests.  The the ramp finished, the tower is wheeled to it.  DeMille would have loved this too.  It makes for an imposing set piece, even though up close it looks like it’s made of papier mache. 

The Jews all congregate outside to hear a sermon and pray together.  Service over, it’s time to get ready for battle.  The men are arranged in battle formations and the women fill huge pots with water to boil.  They are all very excited until they see the tower the Romans have built for the first time.  Zealot Peter is told to think of something fast to tell everyone and to make it sound like Moses or everyone will lose hope.  His idea is to build an “inner wall that will absorb the blows” from the battering ram, but he’s not so sure himself, because he mutters a bit old “damn you” under his breath. 

Everything is in place below the mountain.  The tower is moved into place and the soldiers are ready to climb it with ladders.  The music swirls and the tension mounts.  This is what we’ve been waiting for.  It’s taken a few hours too of rhetoric too long, but now we have our exciting battle scene.  The Jewish archers are powerless against the metal tower and right before the battering ram starts smashing against the wall, General Peter sends a mind-to-mind message to Zealot Peter to surrender.  Of course he doesn’t hear it and the battering ram does the trick, smashing through the wall, but only the first wall.  The second wall is impenetrable to the battering, so the Romans set fire to the wall, which means the water will have to be used to douse the fire.  But, the Romans are too close and can pick off Jews one by one with arrows. 

Both sides stop to see which way the wind will blow.  If it turns toward the tower, the tower will burn and be damaged, except for the iron plates.  So, General Peter sounds the retreat.  “We’ll take it in the morning,” he says.  The elders praise Zealot Peter for his faith, but he also knows the wind will shift back in their direction, destroying their walls. 

General Peter gives Barbara her freedom, hoping she’ll choose to accompany him to Rome because he loves her.  He’s hoping she’ll stay.  “Do you love me?”  “Yes, of course,” she says in a whisper and leaves his tent. 

The wind changes again after Zealot Peter and his wife tell their son the story of their meeting to waste some time.  He calls together his core people and asks each one, “what is possible?”  Everyone has an answer, but no matter what, “we will become Roman trinkets,” he says.  He says even the worst of the Jews don’t deserve the treatment the Romans will heap on them.  “I say we shouldn’t insult the Roman flesh by letting them touch it while we live,” he states gravely.  He’s talking of mass suicide, Jonestown style.  I don’t remember seeing vats of Kool-Aid, but I guess Zealot Peter has a plan.  Everyone agrees, but they worry about telling the whole Masada population.  So calm is Peter that he asks one of his men if he’s had time to make love to his gal.  The answer is yes.

In order to tell everyone else what has to be done, Zealot Peter asks the butcher to explain how to kill without pain.  It’s not making sense to anyone, and it gets worse because Peter works himself into a speechifying lather that sounds like random words sewn together, but delivered with enough gravitas that it sounds important.  Classic DeMille, yet again.  “There is only one way to stand before God and say ‘I am free.  I have always been free,'” he tells them, reminding them that the Romans have never made good on a promise to not turn Jews into slaves after winning a battle.  It’s a heavy bit of brainwashing, but apparently effective.  The women do their part for the cause by dressing in their finest and donning make-up.  “This is how I want them to find me,” Mrs. Zealot Peter says.  The soldiers remove their armor and everyone agrees to the plan.  Then there is a hugging montage as everyone says their silent goodbyes. 

The holy books are placed in a secret chamber and then the knives come out.  Zealot Peter approaches his wife and son with a knife, all resigned to their fate. 

In the morning, the Romans are rested and ready.  Barbara has fled, as was her choice, but left behind the necklace he gave her.  General Peter tells the soldiers he wants Zealot Peter taken alive (oops, too late) and remember, “do your best!”  If that were the motto of the Roman empire, they wouldn’t have gotten very far, now would they?  The Romans stream onto Masada, to “no sounds of any fighting.”  General Peter goes up to Masada himself and finds nothing but quiet and emptiness.  Oh, and nearly 1000 dead bodies.  Naturally, General Peter wants some time alone once he finds his arch-enemy/best friend’s body.  “I made a novice’s mistake.  I overestimated you,” he says.  “What in the name of common sense does something like this prove?” he wonders aloud.  “I would never have let this happen to you,” is part of his speech, but does he really believe it?  Does he really think he could have saved them from slavery? 

“We have won a rock in the middle of a wasteland on the shore of a poisoned sea,” General Peter expounds wearily as the Romans stake their claim. 

Back in the present, the Israeli flag flies over Masada as the army holds its induction ceremony there.  There is a sign promising that Masada will never be overtaken. 

Theoretically, the story of the Masada chapter in history is a fascinating one and the last section of this movie is quite thrilling, full of not only spectacle, but ethical and moral questions, characters with flaws and tough decisions to make.  Unfortunately, it takes over five hours of long speeches and lazy days to get there. 

“Which one of you bitches is my mother?”

With the exception of Kunte Kinte naming of himself in “Roots,” and I think that’s a distant second, the above line is THE most famous and well-known piece of dialogue to come from an American miniseries. 

Ah, “Lace.”  “Lace” itself seems to have burrowed into the collective minds of people who watched long-play format television in the 1980s as the one they seem to remember the most.  Based on Shirley Conran’s novel, it is easily the cheesiest, easily the most ridiculous, easily the looniest and easily the most fun that can be had.  “Lace” is a romance miniseries of the highest degree, thought it veers off into creating its own sub-genre of out-and-out miniseries camp.  Phoebe Cates gives a Hall of Fame performance of a lifetime so unique that it basically made her unusable again so as not to dare tarnish it, as a world-famous personality on the most insane quest to find one’s self in miniseries history.  There is glitz, melodrama, tears, marabou and sublime overacting enough in “Lace” that it can make one forget Jaclyn Smith in her Sidney Sheldon roles, all of the Kennedys and, yes, even Polly Bergen’s drunken antics in the Herman Wouk productions.

“You’ve got to climb Mount Everest to reach the Valley of the Dolls,” Anne Welles says in that movie, considered the ne plus ultra of camp cinema.  The same applies to “Lace.”  This is the pinnacle of miniseries glee.  It is the most preposterous of miniseries and that’s why it’s one of the favorites. 

The best way to start is just to start.  From the very beginning, the level of madness is so high, we can’t possibly lose. 

The melodrama is obvious from the credits.  A very expensive car drives through Alpine splendor with a full orchestra blaring with overzealous intent.  In the car, we see only pieces of a veiled woman smoking a cigarette.  The woman in the veil is Phoebe Cates.  The ruin she drives up to is a former school that has been closed, with scandal attached to the headmaster.  “And she was a student here?” she asks of her driver, who informs her that yes, it is thought her unknown mother was a student there.  “But we must get back to Paris.  The old woman has all the answers,” he says as Phoebe tosses her cigarette out the window. 

As she steps out of the car in Paris, in front of Notre Dame, no less, the gawking tourists all turn their focus to her.  We hear expected chatter like, “it’s Lili!  What’s she doing here” along less expected chatter like, “and with her clothes on!” 

If Phoebe Cates thinks she owns this movie, she has a serious problem immediately, because she faces Angela Lansbury, as Aunt Hortense, a veteran scene-stealer who could mop floors with dramatic actresses with one hand and hams with the other.  Angela adopts a ridiculously hysterical French accent and tries to fluff the conversation, but Phoebe is all business.  She wants to know where her mother is.  Where is Lucinda Lace?  Angela begins to unravel her maternal heritage for her.  “It happened at that school…”

The school is Gothic and parochial, run by stuffy Herbert Lom.  We meet our three leads, who have a difficult task at the onset: they are trying to sing a hymn to which none know the words (bubblegum watermelon isn’t working, trust me) and all are trying to look like teenagers.  Teenagers?  Bess Armstrong, Brooke Adams and Arielle Dombasle?  At least the other girls, including the requisite nasty fat girl, look more like girls.  Herbert is as irate as a 2-watt light bulb over violations in the rules (“I wish I were violated,” one of our heroines chirps) and our leads laughs.

Bess is an American, a would-be authoress who writes romance novels about Lucinda Lace, novels that sound exactly like the tripe we’re in for.  Just as Arielle comes in with a package of contraband goodies, the fat girl, named…what else…Piggy, is hot on the trail, hoping they are not breaking the rules.  “You three always stick together.”  “Though thick and thin,” Bess says, as their motto.  “Through sick and sin,” Arielle agrees, in her French accent.  “No, stupid,  you’re sin and she’s sick,” Brooke jokes looking first at Arielle and next at Piggy.

Okay, so in this one exchange, we’ve learned literally everything we need to know about the heroines.  Bess is strong but romantic, French Arielle dimly comic and British Brooke proudly bossy.  Arielle drags her friends to a hockey rink where she’s obsessed with a player she meet only clandestinely.  Another obsession of the girls is Simon Chandler, a banker’s son from snobbish Philadelphia.  The gals follow him to a restaurant where he seems to have eyes only for Kansas-born Bess.  Their lunch is interrupted by the arrival of a caravan of cars carrying Anthony Higgins, Prince Abdullah, who has Brooke interested.  “I love their bathrobes,” Bess notes, sounding less like a teenager than just and out-and-out moron.  “They call them bernoooooooze,” Arielle intones.  Prince Anthony comes in handy a scene later when he gallops on his white steer to stop a wayward carriage Bess and Arielle have accidentally started while Brooke was snapping photos.  Brooke is offended that he introduces himself as a prince, so she says she’s the “Queen of China.”  Yeah, that’ll teach him manners! 

All three girls are virgins, though they live through Bess’ Lucinda Lace character, who is always about to have sex in the next chapter.  “I think you two have sex on the brain,” Bess says during a midnight smoking session.  Let’s be fair, losing virginity is important to this trio, all looking like they are about to hit 40.  It’s decided that Arielle cannot wait any longer, so the girls rent a hotel room in town and her hockey player shows up as Arielle has put on a negligee.  The hockey player is not allowed to have “anything to do with women” because of a big upcoming game, and Arielle picks that moment to tell him she’s a virgin.  “Don’t worry, I’ve been in this situation hundreds of times,” he says, though she quickly deflates that boast.  The “do not disturb” sign goes on the door as Piggy stands outside the room glaring. 

Arielle isn’t sure she did “it” right, though it was “wonderful” and he was “wonderful” but Arielle says, strangely, “I’m not so sure I love him anymore.”  Who the hell cares?  It was about deflowering!  At another meal, the girls crack wise a few more times and then note that the headmaster is supposedly having an affair with his chauffeur. 

It’s the big Valentine’s Day dance.  “How do we look?” they ask themselves in the mirror.  Utterly ridiculous as teenagers, I wish the mirror would respond.  To the sleepy strains of “A Summer Place,” Bess dances with Simon as the other two chatter and turn down any man who isn’t up to their standards.  Prince Anthony arrives, dressed for an audience with the Pope, rather than a winter formal.  Now “Mack the Knife” is playing and Prince Anthony sends a servant over to ask Brooke to dance.  “Tell him to get stuffed,” Brooke says as they tell the poor guy either the Prince asks himself or no dice!  Before Anthony’s dark make-up starts to melt from his face, he better truck it on over to Brooke.  “She won!” Bess says as the Prince does approach her, suddenly informal enough to crack sexually wise. 

In rush the hockey players, who have won their big game.  Arielle finally has her partner too, but the song ends in time for Brooke and Arielle to wonder where Bess has gone.  “I’m going to have to rewrite Chapter 3 in my book,” she says while Simon smokes a cigarette.  Apparently losing ones virginity is better than Lucinda Lace got it.  “It’s like a winding country lane.  I always knew it was there, but I never wanted to walk down it before,” she tells Simon.  Pause for a moment to consider that.  Are we speaking anatomically?  Is Bess the possessor of some freaking insides?  Are we speaking horticulturally?  Is not a blooming rose but perhaps ten different kinds of trees?  Or is she speaking metaphorically?  Ah, that must be it!  But that doesn’t help because I have no idea what the hell that metaphor could mean, but Simon seems to understand, so the dialogue moves to Bess saying she loves Simon and Simon saying, “I’m very fond of you.” Oh, crap.  That’s never good.

Brooke goes to Prince Anthony’s royal suite, with has a painting of the sky and constellations on the ceiling and enough faux-Arab bric-a-brac to fill a DeMille movie. 

Simon explains himself.  He does love Bess, but his family has a “master plan” and a fiancee already picked out for him and it’s all to start the following week.  “You might have told me this before,” Bess chides, but he’s as horny as she is.

Prince Anthony had a private tutor, “two hours a day, three times a week” to teach him the art of making love.  “What was on the blackboard?  Did you have much homework?” Brooke jokes, as nervous as he is confident.  He finally shuts her up with a kiss, but Brooke pulls away.  Prince Anthony is incensed and calls her names, but Brooke stands firm.  “I’ve had lessons too!  From teachers like Deborah Kerr…and Doris Day and Jane Austen and all the Bronte sisters and your Hakim could learn a hell of a lot from them about how a woman should be treated,” she rails before hightailing it out of the royal suite.  “Deborah Kerr?  Doris Day?” the Prince wonders, no doubt wishing to send servants to find these teachers.

Let’s pause again.  What the hell was so bad about the way the Prince seduced Brooke?  Arielle got a quick tumble between hockey practice sessions, Bess just the same with a man who is engaged to be married, but yet Brooke had a Prince, in white gloves, take her to a fabulous suite, give her a rose and kiss her passionate.  That’s the stuff of bloody fairy tales!  How did the score become Fairy Tales-0, Lace-2?  Because of Deborah Kerr?  She got pounded…by waves…in from “Here to Eternity” and was clearly no virgin.  Better rethink your role models, Brooke, or you are going to fall far behind your pals.

Brooke needs a ride back to school since it’s the middle of the night and the only car to come to her rescue is the dastardly chauffeur.  He invites Brooke in and since it’s cold, she doesn’t have much choice.  He forces her to have a drink, or else he won’t take her back, and instantly something is wrong.  The chauffeur, offended by her gay jokes, is saying, “maybe you’re wrong about me” as she passes out from the spiked drink.  When she wakes up, he shows her pictures of himself with various girls from the school, as well as the headmaster.  “You’re very photogenic,” she snaps before he rips her dress.  But, she makes a dash for it and was able to run back to the Prince.  Ah, so his white gloves are goldfish aren’t so bad, are they?  He doesn’t even ask about the ripped dress before taking her in his arms.

All three have had sex just once and one is pregnant.  Sitting on an Alp, they need to decide what to do because “it’s too soon for motherhood.”  Here we get a bit of social commentary, the only “Lace” can manage.  An abortion is suggested and Brooke says it’s illegal.  Ah, but feisty Bess tells us that “soon, in another 10 years, abortions are going to be performed like appendectomies in proper hospitals.”  You tell ’em, Bess!  Of course, the part about 10 years speaks to the American Supreme Court ruling and these girls are in France, but let’s not mention that.  Let’s be proud that we have strong brave woman in 1960something (with a 1980something mindset).  The social commentary continues for a few more sentences before they vote on what to do.  They veto the abortion.  Bess things as three “intelligent women,” they should be able to figure it out.  Hold on!  Intelligent?  In “Lace?”

The trio trundles over to an Obstetrician, observed once again by Piggy!  “Lucinda Lace” shows up to see Dr. Anthony Quayle.  All three are Lucinda Lace, but they don’t intend to tell the confused doctor which one is pregnant.  They do actually tell him, but unfortunately, we get stuck seeing Piggy and her friend outside while it’s revealed. 

Here’s the decision on what to do: they want to give the baby up for adoption, but only until one is ready to handle a child, just a temporary adoption.  That makes perfect sense…to absolutely no one, let alone a doctor!  Do you see why this is so lovable? 

Herbert Lom hauls the girls into his office and demands to know who is pregnant.  Arielle says, “maybe it’s all of us,” and she’s asked to stay behind because Piggy has told Herbert about seeing her at the hotel.  So, unless Auntie gives money to the school, she’ll be labeled as a tramp and banished.  But, Bess and Brooke have a plan.  While Arielle distracts the chauffeur, they go inside his house and steal his dirty blackmail pictures. 

In turn, they use the blackmail pictures against the principal, so Herbert has no choice but to let them graduate.  With straights As.  And excused from gym class because of their “condition.”  The doctor drives them by the house where the baby will be deposited, which will take money, and Anthony Quayle has a fee too.  Where will they get that money?

Aunt Hortense.  Thank goodness, not a moment too soon does Angie Lansbury return.  She has the money and the snappy Chanel-ish suits.  She gives them a sterling argument in favor of never having children and then lowers the boom: she’s not rich.  “Which one of my favorite husbands and we, um, put the bite on?” she suggests, just when we think all is lost in terms of money and plot continuation. 

The doctor gets to know who is pregnant, though we don’t, because she goes cloaked by midnight and in shadows inside.  “Of the three of you, you are the one I least suspected,” he tells the mother.

Back in the present, drunken Aunt Hortense is still telling her story to Phoebe, but there’s a problem.  Angela tells Phoebe that’s the end of the story because the baby was killed, but Phoebe seems to be standing there.  It’s hard to tell, actually, because she’s wearing so many feathers on her costume it may be an ostrich dunked in motor oil.

“They made their schoolgirl pact and sent me to hell.  I show them what I learned there,” Phoebe rails at Angie before tearing out.  Unfortunately, this is all too much for the grande dame, and she has a heart attack, while still talking, knocking over her last glass of wine before expiring.  She milks the death scene for full value, as well she should.  It’s a hell of a scene! 

Phoebe shows up at the funeral, unnoticed.  Arielle is there, now a Countess with a 17-year old son.  Bess comes too, unmarried, a publisher of “Lace” magazine.  Brooke has fared the worst.  She’s Lady Swann, the wife of a cancer researcher, and currently an alcoholic.  The three do not speak now. 

“Now it’s time to make them suffer,” Phoebe tells her driver as the funeral scene comes to a dramatic conclusion.  Actually, every scene comes to a dramatic conclusion in “Lace.”

Bess is invited aboard a yacht by Phoebe, through her Greek intermediary friend who Ari Onassis in everything but name.  Finally, Bess gets to meet Phoebe, who is decked out in a ruffled outfit and a terrifying outfit.  Bess is trying to save her magazine and since Phoebe is the biggest star in the world (star of what, we’re not quite sure), so Bess wants to do an exclusive interview.  In this extremely weird scene, Bess acts the business-like dame and Phoebe, once again, is so explosive she threatens to sink the yacht.  Phoebe teases Bess with her affairs with movies stars and senators, and then hits her over the head with the fact that it will save the magazine.  Bess, looking and trying (but failing) to sound like Julie Andrews, is game to start the interview right there.  “You tell it, I’ll print it,” Bess says.

“I was pregnant when I was 16.  Were you pregnant when you were 16?” Phoebe starts, before ripping off on a torrent about her life, delivered at such a fever pitch, one wonders how she will sustain it for the rest of the movie (let alone the sequel).  Before she became the world-famous…whatever the hell she is…Phoebe was indeed a pregnant teen with not enough money “to have a tooth pulled,” the woman who recommends an abortionist tells her.  But, she doesn’t have enough money to pay for the full procedure.

But, there is a way to make that money.  Gross old photographer Pierre Olaf, a long way from his days as a Broadway juvenile.  He gets the tiger out of Phoebe, who tosses her top and snares enough cash for the abortion, though of the worst kind, the kind her mothers worried about years earlier, and she gets sick from the procedure.  Sick and booted from her rat trap.  She has just enough energy to return to Pierre’s and collapse. 

Phoebe stops there, though Bess is drooling for more.  Next up on Phoebe’s list is Arielle, who likes to have the rich and famous at her chateau.  “You are rich and I am famous,” she tells her Greek pal.  You can’t buy dialogue like that, though one wonders how Aunt Hortense raised a niece to accept this sort of rich trash into her house. 

Coincidentally, at the chateau that weekends is the Prince!  Just as the discussion gets juicy about Brooke’s tragic life, Arielle announces dinner.  Arielle’s table seating leaves something to be desired, because her son is infatuated with Phoebe, who feeds him.  “She likes to feed strays,” her Greek unhelpfully notes.  While flirting with Arielle’s son, she also baits the Prince about contributing to Brooke’s charity.  Arielle’s son wants to know what Phoebe’s new film is about.  “I never know what my new films are about.”  “That’s why her performances are so believable,” roars the Greek.  And we’ve hit another screeching halt!  What in the world is that supposed to mean?  And why be proud of it?  Sorry, we can un-pause now.

“How did you become a great great actress?” Prince Anthony asks.  “Luck,” just like the kind that made the Prince a royal.  Anthony and Arielle’s son Simon are both intrigued, so dinner conversation turns to her history, in the umpteenth flashback of the ever-confusing saga here.  “It was 1979,” she starts.  “Ah, a good year for Beaujolais,” the Greek interrupts.  “And a good year for Lili,” she says before diving in.  Nude photography leads to pornography for Pierre.  Her costar in the scene wants to know how motivation,  Pierre points to Phoebe.  “Try to look like you are enjoying every minute of it,” Pierre commands and that’s how Phoebe became a star.  The Prince is not as delighted, Arielle is uncomfortable, but Simon all but drills a hole in the table with his boner. 

Dinner over, the men go out to talk about oil tankers and Arielle can’t find her son.  Three guesses, friends.  No, he’s not behind the arras in the hallway.  Not in the fountain outside.  Yes, in Phoebe’s room, although nothing has happened.  We hope.  I mean, they could be half brother and sister.  “Why?  Why did you?” Arielle asks.  “Why not?” Phoebe chirps before the two roll around on the bed in a cat fight that was a must in all 80s trash.  Phoebe spits on Arielle, who has the class to wipe it off on a piece of Phoebe’s clothing.

Naturally, Phoebe is tossed out of the house.  “You threw her out like a common tramp,” Simon says, and Arielle agrees with that.  “I didn’t know she was so common,” Arielle says, thinking she’s done away with Phoebe.  What she has forgotten is that in “Lace,” every man is incredibly stupid.  Her son therefore announces he’s madly in love with Phoebe and is leaving to chase her. 

Back to Bess.  She doesn’t trust everything Phoebe has said and she’s worried about libel.  “Print it,” she finally says and “Lace” magazine is hopefully back on track.

Brooke’s husband Nickolas Grace is super duper excited because Prince Anthony, now King Anthony, has agreed to donate to the charity cancer and Nickolas is too busy, so Brooke has to go.  That’ll be uncomfortable since their affair of years ago, but Brooke has taken to the bottle and isn’t exactly looking her best.  Plus, no alcohol in a Muslim country, so she’ll be drying out while having to sparkle for business and worry about the past.  This will be fraught.  FRAUGHT, I TELL YOU!

The Kingdom of…whatever it’s called to avoid having any Arab potentate get angry at the United States, is an oil-rich gargantuan palace and not much else.  As the King and the former Queen of China get reunited, Phoebe turns up.  She’s also a guest at the palace, though neither Brooke nor the King’s head wife takes much of a liking to her.

Being with the King has made Brooke feel so much better that she doesn’t even take a swig from her hidden stash of liquor.  There’s a big dinner where Brooke confidently discusses her research.  “Cancer is being attacked on all sorts of fronts,” she says (a statement that goes unexplained for all its wackiness).  Phoebe and Brooke argue about whether there is enough being done for cancer in the King’s country.  “Different people suffer from different things in different ways,” Phoebe offers, and just when it looks like Brooke has lost all hope of getting any oil money, the head wife says it’s okay to make a donation.  “A small one, a token,” she notes.  Brooke is not happy, and once again Phoebe has bewitched another dimwitted man, though this runs an entire country. 

When the royal family takes off from the palace, Brooke has it out with Phoebe.  She wants to know why the hell Phoebe torpedoed her mission.  Phoebe’s explanation?  Being abandoned by her mother, and another flashback.  As Phoebe narrates the downfall of her self-respect (frankly, her self-respect seems very healthy, the strongest thing about her).  As confused as as anyone watching, Brooke asks, “what does any of this have to do with last night?”  Phoebe is honest: she wanted to see old lovers in action, because she intends to be the King’s new lover.  Brooke battles back a bit, by reminding her that “first loves die hard” and then Phoebe orders her out of the palace.  That sends Brooke back to the bottle, poor thing.

Phoebe returns returns to her latest set, where she plays a wench who ends up in a hay stack, which is mind-boggling.  Simon is there, but she will not let him go to New York with her.  Why not?  “I have to play a scene.  It is the biggest scene I have ever had to play,” she says dramatically.  Her maid sends telegrams to the mothers.  The one to Bess says the printed article is false, which would ruin the magazine.  “Some broad, some animal,” her co-publisher says.  Brooke and Arielle are ordered to New York, one regarding the charity, the other regarding a son, and both fall for the bait.

Naturally, being an international sensation, Phoebe turns it into a press opportunity.  “She has graced us with her presence and her silence,” a lady reporter says to the camera when Phoebe stomps through the press gathered at her insistence.  Even her agent has no idea what is about to happen.  At 4:30, all three possible mothers are due in her suite.  She better get out of those horrible white leather pants before they get there.  No respectable mother wants to see her kid tarted up like that.

It’s time.  Arielle arrives first.  Then Brooke, who checks her hair in a mirror, as if she’s about to meet her lover.  The two former friends are not excited to see each other, Arielle tart enough to suggest perhaps Brooke doesn’t need a drink.  Phoebe’s maid is no help, not offering any explanations, so Arielle and Brooke kill time wondering and speaking very slowly until Bess shows up.  “Somebody wants to make a big entrance,” Bess mutters as they wait below a staircase for Phoebe to emerge in a ravishing white gown, as pure as snow driven through a sewer. 

The tension is high, especially since the lines are repeated over and over again, just in different varieties, as if to kill time before the next commercial break.  Okay, okay, it’s supposed to be a tense scene, but a well-written one would be more helpful.  Phoebe reminds them, and any dozing viewers, what each woman is doing there, and how she can help them out of the predicaments into which she’s driven them.  Will she help them?  Hmmm.  Oh, but…

“Incidentally, which one of you bitches is my mother?”

Thus ends Part 1 of this glorious camp-fest.  If you are like me, you’ve hooted and howled yourself into speechless awe and can’t imagine how Part 2 will live up to what we’ve just seen, but there’s more to come.  Much more.  We’ve simply hit the greatest climax in miniseries history, now we just have to pick up the piece (though heaven above, it’s a long ride down that hill).

The answer to the question above?

Oh, not yet!

We return to “Lace” with a flashback to the girls graduating with full honors, with the help of Aunt Hortense’s money.  Bess’ parents are boring, we know Aunt Hortense is crazy fun but the biggest surprise comes from Brooke’s mum, jaw clenched in the best British fashion, because she’s got a lesbian in tow.  Whether mum knows it or not, Brooke does, because the dame hits on her.  The girls trundle off to the remotest part of the Alps where the baby can be delivered in private.  Eleven months go by so pregnancy weight disappears from whoever is the mother, and it’s time for the women to start their careers in the hopes of getting baby Elizabeth back in their six idiotic arms. 

Bess goes to work for a newspaper as a fashion editor, ignored by the men at the paper who handle the real news.  This infuriates the always socially-conscious Bess, rebuffs the attempts of a man at the paper because she just wants to get ahead.  She bores him on their first date with her idea for a feminist magazine.  “Do you know how many women can do the same things as men?” she asks, though the man is more interested in a park mime.  I can’t say I disagree.  Bess’ speeches get longer and more tiresome as the movie progresses.

Perky Arielle, in Pepto-pink suit wants to remodel mansions and hits a home run when she discovers a huge wreck and the handsome man who goes with it.  Arielle, pretending not to notice the man, holds her pencil in the air and does some quick figuring.  I’m not sure it all has to do with the house either.  Since Arielle is the worst actress of the three we’re forced to follow, all of her scenes without the others are awfully trying.

Brooke’s mum and doting friend have turned their ancestral home into a fat farm.  The lesbian has banished her to the gardener’s cottage, and Brooke knows just why.  “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” she says, to the confusion of her mother and the ire of her lesbian, who is now her legal partner.  “Either she goes or I do,” Brooke says.  “But I couldn’t run this place without Selma.  I couldn’t begin to,” mum says barely opening that clenched jaw and the lesbian smiles in triumph.  Mum tells her daughter to call her uncle and visit for Ascot, while the lesbian chides, “have you done the dinner menu?” 

Has anyone wondered what happened to the baby the mother had?  No, neither have I, but unfortunately, we don’t have a choice in finding out.  She’s become a delightful little lass brought up by two caring parents.  Moving on…

Brooke actually does go to Ascot, where she bumps into the Prince!  He has a “rather nice filly” in the race named…wait for it…the Queen of China.  His love for Brooke has never dimmed.  The horse wins, but so does Brooke, back in the arms of her beloved dashing Prince.  They go to leave a dance and Brooke insists on walking, which the Prince’s men don’t think is safe.  “An evening stroll is romantic.  Being driven to a man’s hotel is not,” Brooke insists and decides she’ll walk alone if the Prince wants the car.  She knows full well he’ll follow her.  As they kiss, there are sparks.  Actual sparks because the Prince’s car blows up.  Yup, a big kaboom and the Prince’s minions rush the Prince to safety, leaving Brooke alone on the street, burning car and all. 

Arielle is a bit luckier.  She gets to finally land her man down in the champagne mansion she’s redoing.  There’s a wacky non-sequiter when they come upon a statue of the man who started it all.  “I’ve never seen a statue that looks happy,” the vintner says.  He says something about the quality of the champagne at “our table” and Arielle gives in, up against the rows of wine.  How very French of her.  What’s more romantic than a drafty wine cellar?

The kid is in pigtails now.

Arielle is married and pregnant, and reunited with Bess and Brooke for the grand re-opening of the mansion (there is a comedy scene for Angie Lansbury that helps pick things up…temporarily).  It seems as if Arielle is the one who will get the child back because she’s the first one to have really made it.  She’s married and settled, though she doesn’t want the child because she thinks her husband will react poorly.  The girls agree to wait one more year, just one more year.  A musical montage carries us beyond that year as the women follow other dreams. 

It wouldn’t be a miniseries without a hint of war, so Bess is sent to Vietnam as a reporter.  She’s sassy and snide with the men in charge.  “I’m calling you a lousy bigot,” she says to one soldier who doesn’t want her to go to the front and “I’ll give you a Purple Heart the hard way,” she says to another in the trench who has grabbed her fanny.  “Why don’t you go home and have a couple of kids?” one asks just before being blown to bits.  The entire company is killed, but Bess manages to survive when their dead bodies fall on her. 

The kid is tormented in school by having no real mother or father.

Brooke goes to live in the Kingdom of…not a real Arab country.  Comedy tries to ensue when Brooke can race and beat the Prince riding horses but can’t manage a camel.  Ha ha ha!  Or not.  It gets worse.  The Prince brings her into an opulent tent.  “Aren’t you impressed?”  “You’ve seen one oasis, you’ve seen ’em all.”  Or, how about this one: “Sensitive to be a loser?”  “How about a SORE loser” as she rubs her aching back.  Ha ha ha! Or not.  The puns keep flying as sarcastic Brooke lobs them back and forth with the Prince in their three-hour tryst in the tent (“It’s like something out of a silent movie,” she says, which is the last time this dopey take-me-to-heaven Sheik fantasy was exciting). 

The kid wants to know who her real mother is.

The year has passed and no one has claimed the baby.  Brooke has her desert romance, Bess is writing her book and Arielle is keeping her husband’s business afloat. 

The kid waits by the road, hoping every passing car will be her mother coming to pick her up.

At a palace social function, the King summons Brooke to his side and to make sure she has not “misinterpreted any gestures of hospitality.”  In his way, he’s just told her there is no way she’s marrying into his family.  She treats him with the same contempt she treats everyone, which would probably have her boiled in oil if this were a true story.  “Don’t they make a charming couple?” he asks about his son and the lovely pair of eyes sitting next to him.  That’s all we see of her.  Brooke has the actual nerve to remind the King that in England a king gave up his throne for a woman, but that meets with a sneer.

The kid has lines.  Yup, she speaks.  Her foster father has a brother in some sort of trouble in some resistance movement in some Eastern European country and is coming to live with them.

Bess’ book “Rape in a Foxhole” is a big success.  Thing they’ll turn that one into a movie?  With a title like that, how can they resist?  She tells her lover that she needs a bigger apartment for a special guest, but doesn’t say any more.  Well, at least she’s given some thought to the girl.

Not a moment too soon, because the foster family is in serious trouble.  The go get the brother in his dank Eastern European country where it’s rainy and cold (remember, “Lace” was made in 1984, when bashing Commies was all the rage).  As they go back into a sunny Western European country, they are about to be stopped by a guard at the border and have to run for their lives.  The kid might as well be wearing a target on her head, sporting a red knit cap.  Off they go through the woods, quietly on their way to safety, trying to avoid the soldiers patrolling the area.  “We shouldn’t have brought the child,” the foster mother says.  You think?  Lady, you get no more foster kids! 

Unfortunately, the soldiers find them and foster mom, foster dad and foster uncle are mowed down.  A dozen or so soldiers with dogs surround her.  What will become of the child?

It remains a mystery, because when Aunt Hortense goes to make her monthly payment, she finds out that the last one has come back unopened.  Should the banker check up on them?  “By all means!  This is most peculiar,” Angela chimes, praying she doesn’t have to use this funky accent much longer. 

Bad news in the Kingdom of…not a real Arab country.  The King dies and her prince is now King.  He won’t see her, and his minions won’t let her near him either.  He has responsibilities now.  He can’t just kick around an affair with an Englishwoman now.  I guess they haven’t seen the 1986 miniseries “Harem,” which clearly allows Western women in the harem.  Brooke returns to Mum and the fat farm.  Mum sends for Arielle, who shows up to be told by the old woman, “She drinks.  She drinks ever since she returned from the Middle East.”  Arielle tells Brooke the good news!  She was going to call for the kid in a month, but since Brooke has nothing else to do, she’ll have the kid sent to Brooke.  Good idea.  Give the kid to an alcoholic. 

Enough with the child (two seconds is more than any of these women ever care to think about her anymore) because Arielle and Brooke have to dash to New York to celebrate the opening of Bess’ magazine.  The party takes place in a big room where the worst singer in television history ruins “Georgia On My Mind.”  “Through thick/sick and thin/sin,” they yell when coming down the stairs to find Bess.  Brooke is introduced to Nickolas, and her first line to him is, “I haven’t got a drink.  Maxine (Arielle) says if you share some one’s drink, you share their dreams.”  “Share my drink?” Nickolas asks?  That’s courtship for ya!

In the middle of the party, with the singer at full tilt, Aunt Hortense calls, full of hysterics and hysterical acting, to inform the women that the kid is dead.  “We killed her, all of us,” Arielle wails.  “I need a drink,” Brooke adds.  Bess is the voice of reason.  She reminds them that they have let six years pass without really lifting a finger to help the kid.  “Let’s be honest.  A six year old girl was killed and none of us really knew her,” Brooke notes.  “None of us really wanted to,” adds Bess.  The women decide they have nothing more to say to each other and Arielle and Brooke leave the party…with the crooner doing “George On My Mind” again!  Does he only know three songs?  Only I noticed this?  Okay, bad news has hit them, but Bess has a magazine, Arielle a wonderful life and Brooke even met a man that night!

Back in the present, Phoebe returns.  It’s been a long time since we’ve seen her harpy act.  Phoebe says the kid wasn’t dead, but lived in a camp for 10 years.  “You know what I expected?  Or hoped?  Stupid me.  I hoped one of you would hold out your arms to me and call me Elizabeth,” expecting a reaction from them.  Brooke stands up grandly, walks over to Phoebe…and keeps on walking over to the bar.  The three don’t believe Phoebe’s story, especially since she’s been so evil to them.  “I wanted to make each of you suffer,” Phoebe snarls at them  “Still no open arms?  Still so afraid?”  Geez, this dame doesn’t know when to quit.  More bees with honey?  Not our Phoebe!  She has to drive the nails in further.  “Who wants a porno queen for a daughter?” she yells, but the three are unmoved because they still think the story may be false and she’s after her own publicity.  She tries another tactic…why not pit them against each other?  “It would be so easy for two of you to save your fancy skins and point your fingers at the other,” she offers, but the three just look down at the carpet.  After railing and begging, she then throws them all out, deciding, “none of you is good enough to be my mother.”  Oh, and the cancer fund is saved, the magazine article is true and Simon can return to his mother.  As they trot out, Phoebe glides up her stairs recounting the details of her birth, the doctor, the foster family, all the details.

Now why didn’t she say that earlier?  Couldn’t we have lopped at least an hour of this scene alone?  No guarantees mom would have raised her hand, but it would have saved an awful lot of cheap dialogue for “Lace II.” 

The three possible mothers congregate in the hotel bar where a female singer is just as bad as the male singer we heard a few scenes ago.  “Through th…”  Yeah, we get it, as they clink glasses.  They start to laugh, thinking of the gossip that would swirl around them if this got out, but it’s not really funny.  “I guess we’re too ashamed to cry,” Arielle offers.  “Well, at least it brought us together again,” they note.  But, what are they going to do about Phoebe.  Should they take a vote, like old times?  “I think this time Elizabeth’s real mother is all on her own,” Bess says, and the others agree.  Christmas music rings out in the bar, with no two drunk people singing the same words to the song. 

Phoebe is lounging in her bed when the phone rings.  It’s the hotel manager.  One of his employees has let her mother up.  Phoebe rises from the bed in a full marabou gown, does a few bird flaps (for no reason) and waits for mom to arrive.  Back to the flaps.  Why?  It’s insane!  It’s truly the definition of this movie.  Does she flap when nervous?

Feet ascend the stairs to Phoebe’s room.  In her marabou, Phoebe answers the door to find…should I tell you?  I mean, wouldn’t it ruin the surprise? 

Don’t worry.  There is still “Lace II” to bring it all home for us.

Actually, you should worry, because “Lace II” is unbearably bad, where “Lace” is gleefully charming in its lunacy.  It thrives on it.  If it didn’t, someone would have stopped Phoebe Cates from working as hard as she does to fly so far over the top.  “Lace” is one of the best pieces of trash the US miniseries movement ever produced, the kind that was exported all over the world so everyone could chant, “which one of you bitches is my mother,” no matter what his or her mother tongue is.  It’s the Coca-Cola of miniseries.  Everyone knows it.  Everyone has seen it.  No one wants to admit it, but it’s a guilty pleasure in which to revel.

So, everyone, grab your marabou and flap away!  We’ll get to “Lace II” soon enough.

For Nancy.