A Tale Of The Sea, And A Psychopath

``And the Sea Will Tell,'' CBS miniseries, 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday, KIRO-TV.

The parade of psychopaths continues with CBS' ``And the Sea Will Tell,'' a four-hour adaptation of a book by Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi, in which he tells of his successful efforts to defend a young woman accused of murder several years earlier in the South Seas.

It's Bugliosi's story, but, as so often happens in TV movies about criminals, the actor playing the criminal walks away with the movie. In this case, the actor isn't even playing the central role, at least not theoretically. But Hart Bochner makes the character of Buck Walker, the young woman's lover, so compellingly scary and quixotic that he's the one you'll remember.

You need to play close attention, in the beginning, to James Henerson's screenplay, based on Bugliosi's book, because a lot of important things happen before the movie works up much of a head of steam. And, while the film makes liberal use of flashbacks, sometimes the flashbacks are at odds with versions of the same story we've seen earlier.

Bochner and Rachel Ward play Buck Walker and Jennifer Jenkins. When we first meet them, it quickly becomes apparent that they've commandeered an expensive yacht .When they sail into a port in the Hawaiian Islands, officials want to know what happened to the original owners, Mac and Muff Graham, played by James Brolin and Deidre Hall.

Buck and Jennifer claim they were lost on a fishing expedition from the remote Pacific island where the four happened to be living at the time. And without any bodies as evidence, officials can only charge Walker and Jenkins with the theft of the boat, for which both are given prison terms.

Several years later, a sea chest, dislodged from an undersea coral reef, floats to the surface and bones are found inside, which research shows are the bones of Muff Graham. Walker and Jenkins are charged with her murder.

It's at that point that Bugliosi, played by Richard Crenna, enters the story. Jenkins' relatives engage him to defend her, and the remainder of the movie focuses on Bugliosi's doubts - and ours - as to Jenkins' innocence.

Bugliosi is best known as the prosecutor who convicted such notorious criminals as Charles Manson. Now he's a defense attorney and the emphasis is upon his moral qualms about defending Jennifer Jenkins.

None of the central characters is particularly admirable, with the possible exception of Muff Graham, nicely portrayed by Hall. Brolin plays Mac Graham as a stuffy, self-centered egotist, who drags his wife off to live on a remote island because he wants to do that, when she'd much prefer living in an urban center.

Bochner's Buck Walker is an opportunist with a thoroughly shady past who starts out planning to merely take advantage of Jennifer, then falls in love with her, in his own quirky fashion. Rachel Ward makes Jennifer Jenkins a hedonistic, free spirit both fascinated and repelled by Buck. Together they make a memorable pair, as likely to have a slugfest or to make love at the drop of a hat, and sometimes combining the two.

Crenna, as always, gives a solid performance as Bugliosi. He provides the moral compass for this movie.

Susan Blakely portrays Bugliosi's wife. John Kapelos portrays Bugliosi's associate and Clyde Kusatsu does a fine job portraying the prosecuting attorney. The movie was filmed in Tahiti, Hawaii and Vancouver, B.C., the latter standing in for California. Tommy L. Wallace was the director.

Mark Harmon shines

``Long Road Home,'' NBC Monday Movie, 9 p.m. Monday, KING-TV

Mark Harmon gives one of his best performances in a long time as a former rodeo rider reduced to the life of a migrant farmer in NBC's ``Long Road Home,'' a sobering TV movie airing at 9 p.m. Monday on (Channel 5).

Scripter Jane-Howard Hammerstein evidently saw ``Long Road Home'' as a kind of TV version of ``The Grapes of Wrath'' and there are moments that are right on the mark - just as there are moments that fail to ring true at all.

The time is the late 1930s, the location is the Southwest and California. Harmon, who portrays Ertie Robertson, shepherds his brood, which includes his wife and their five children, the eldest of whom has a wife and infant daughter, from one crop harvest to the next, living in extreme poverty.

Ertie's wife's dream, of course, is to settle down with a home of their own, virtually an impossibility in the Great Depression. The Robertson family's trials and tribulations are contrasted with the circumstances of several wealthy growers, with a counterpoint to all of this provided by attempts to unionize the farm workers.

Hammerstein has tried to weave too many strands together with the result that nothing is explored as well as it might be. The landowners are reduced to evil stereotypes and the complications of establishing unions in the 1930s are reduced to physical confrontations. And while the Robertson family is the most interesting aspect of the movie, we never get to know them as well as we got to know the Joads in ``The Grapes of Wrath.'' Particularly annoying is a happy ending that is tacked on with absolutely no convincing basis to support it.

But through it all, what helps holds the movie together, as it moves from set piece to set piece, under John Korty's sympathetic direction, is Harmon's nicely underplayed dignity and presence. On the other hand, Pee Purcell is never completely believable as Harmon's wife.

As for the horrors of the migrant life in the 1930s, this movie never manages to capture them anywhere near as convincingly as did a PBS documentary of a couple of years ago that reported on what migrant workers face today.