This Is A `Queen' You'll Find Highly Entertaining

"Queen," CBS miniseries, 9 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday, Channel 7. --------------------------------------------------------------- Television finally gets a bona fide miniseries this season when Alex Haley's "Queen," the story of his paternal grandmother, comes to CBS Sunday night in a three-part, six-hour dramatization that often parallels the drama of Haley's magnum opus , "Roots," and is sometimes every bit as memorable.

"Roots" traced Haley's family on his mother's side, back to Kunta Kinte, born in freedom in Africa and brought to the United States as a slave. The trail is shorter in "Queen," beginning in Alabama in 1841, during the presidency of Andrew Jackson. Queen, who was Haley's grandmother, was born to Easter, a slave, the result of a liaison between Easter and James Jackson, Jr., the white son of the plantation owner.

The story progresses through the Civil War and Reconstruction and ends sometime early in the 20th century. (One of the weaknesses of David Stevens' generally fine script is its failure to establish much sense of time or place. About the only time frame of which one is sure is the Civil War and immediately after.)

Because Queen was a very light-skinned African American, she could often pass for white and a recurrent theme in "Queen" is not only the problems she faced but her mental turmoil over often feeling as if she didn't belong in either world, black or white.

Like "Roots," "Queen" has a richly-populated canvas and during the first two episodes - far superior to the third - it is TV storytelling at its best. The film has been well cast and John Erman's direction handles this large tapestry of story lines and characters effectively.

Jasmine Guy plays Easter while Tim Daly is James Jackson, Jr., handsome young Southerner who marries another plantation owner's daughter (Lizzie, well played by Patricia Clarkson) but is more in love with Easter. This aspect of plantation life is well handled and interestingly explored. While "Roots" focused on the cruelty white owners displayed toward their slaves, "Queen" examines subtler relationships that involved status and sex. The Jackson family, for instance, prided itself on being kind and paternal toward its slaves, not only on humanitarian grounds but because it made economic sense.

"Queen" hardly begins before the Civil War looms on the horizon and young Master James is off to fight for the South. The Civil War scenes are fairly brief but done with dramatic punch to emphasize the bloodshed, destruction and terror of that war. With the end of the war and the emancipation of the slaves, Queen, now a young girl, is almost the only one who remains loyal to her master's wife, Lizzie, and his mother (well played by Ann-Margret.) One of the more memorable scenes in the first episode is between Easter and Mrs. Jackson Sr., as she tries to explain to Easter the changing roles of both blacks and whites in the newly-conquered South.

In the second installment, Queen eventually leaves the plantation and faces new problems in the outside world, where some think she is white, some realize she's a mulatto and others comprehend she's passing as white, all of which lead to the expected confrontations resulting in reducing Queen to begging for food and shelter.

A member of a black church helps Queen find employment, working for two weird spinsters, beautifully played by Sada Thompson and Elizabeth Wilson. During this period Queen also meets Davis, an itinerant black man who becomes the gardener for the two women. Queen and Davis fall in love and she becomes pregnant, and after the baby is born she finds she must flee from the two sisters who take it into their heads to raise the baby themselves.

Part III is the least satisfying segment, partly because it doesn't seem rooted in any particularly time and place. There's plenty of action - including a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan - and eventually Queen meets Alec Haley in Tennessee where she goes to work for an abolitionist plantation owner, played by George Grizzard.

She and Haley marry but their union is anything but tranquil and includes a mental breakdown by Queen. When she recovers, the film simply stops, using end titles to tell us the rest of the Haley family history. Too bad - it would have been interesting if the film had simply continued the Haley saga up until Alex Haley had his big success with "Roots."

Another reason why the third segment is less satisfying is because while Halle Berry is excellent as the young Queen in the first two episodes, she's less than convincing as a mature Queen. By this time Stevens' script paints a Queen whose richness of character reflects the adventures of her life - but here Berry's performance is all on the surface, failing to convince us this woman has lived an incredible life, from slavery on a plantation to freedom and proudly sending her son to high school.

However, the first two episodes are so involving it's likely viewers will stick with Part III just because they've become attached to the characters.

A wicked mystery --------------------------------------------------------------- "The Blackheath Poisonings," "Masterpiece Theatre", 9 p.m. Sunday, Channel 9. ---------------------------------------------------------------

Here's another family saga - this one fictional and set in a London suburb in the Victorian era. It's rather like "Upstairs, Downstairs" as co-authored by Charles Addams and Jack the Ripper. (Actually talented Simon Raven based his script on a novel by Julian Symons.)

Judy Parfitt plays the matriarch of this wild collection of liars and adulterers and she is not a woman with whom to trifle. It takes a little while to sort everyone out in this first of three episodes, built around the untimely death of her son-in-law, but if you relish mysteries in which nearly everyone is despicable and has a motive for murder, you'll enjoy "The Blackheath Poisonings," a wicked tale that would have fit just as nicely into PBS' "Mystery!" series as into "Masterpiece Theatre."

Fun look back --------------------------------------------------------------- "Nelson & Jeanette: America's Singing Sweethearts," 11 a.m. Sunday, Channel 9. --------------------------------------------------------------- Here's a treasure trove of nostalgia for old movie buffs - a look at the film career of Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald who, in the 1930s, were to movie operetta what Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were to movie musicals.

The clips are great fun and serve to remind us MacDonald was not only an accomplished singer but a good actress with a real sense of comedy. Eddy, however, remains a stick - a likable stick, but a stick all the same. Still, there's a wonderful innocence about these films, the stars and the audiences that loved them that proves not everything about the Depression Era was glum.