TV REVIEWS : Plight of the Poor a Study in Contrast in Two Movies

It may seem as if made-for-television movies have covered every social problem under the sun. Yet most of these movies are set within the middle or upper classes, removed from the most intractable aches and pains of our society.

The network fiction-spinners (as opposed to the documentarians) generally overlook the underclass. Most of the homeless do not own TV sets. While the rest of the poor do watch TV, they don’t have much money to spend on the products they see advertised. When TV movies do venture into the land of endemic poverty, it’s usually treated as something that plucky individuals can rise above.

Two movies, on Sunday and Monday, try to remedy this imbalance. The one to watch, at least for adults, is ABC’s “God Bless the Child� ( 9 p.m. Monday, Channels 7, 3 10 and 42). Children who may not be ready for the bitter truth, or anyone who requires a marginally upbeat ending, should stick with the more sugarcoated “A Place at the Table� on NBC (Sunday, Channels 4, 36 and 39 at 7 p.m.).

“God Bless the Child� is one of the most unsparing movies ever made for commercial television. In its depiction of a young mother (the splendid Mare Winningham) and her 7-year-old daughter (Grace Johnston) as they descend through the lower depths of an unnamed American city, it recalls such Depression-era classics as “I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang� and “The Grapes of Wrath.�

As it begins, Theresa Johnson has been told that she and little Hillary will have to move; their building is being torn down. Theresa’s savings from her job in a hotel laundry won’t pay for the first month’s rent and security deposit on a new apartment. Her husband left long ago, and no relatives wait in the wings. So mother and daughter are forced into the shelters and then into the streets.

When a kind social worker (Dorian Harewood) finds a landlord who’s willing to wait for Theresa’s first welfare check, it looks as if we’re heading for a conventional TV-movie ending. But writer Dennis Nemec was given the freedom to head in the other direction.

Or directions. At this point, we temporarily leave Theresa and examine some of her neighbors, especially a black family who lives across the alley. It looks like an awkward departure, structurally speaking; a few of the seams between scenes show. But Nemec’s move pays off, for it broadens the scope of the film immensely.

Seldom do TV movies give us such a big sociological picture, especially without resorting to paint-by-numbers didacticism. Nemec avoids this trap. And he and director Larry Elikann delicately tie their two stories together with simple, eloquently staged scenes at the beginning and the end of the two families’ acquaintance.

Significantly, the movie’s one glimmer of hope shines on the black family, not the white one. No racial stereotyping allowed here. Nor does Nemec pander to anyone’s taste for stories about drugs, gangs or violent crime--the topics that dominate most televised treatments of this milieu. He is interested in the disease, not its most obvious symptoms.

Not that the movie whitewashes the symptoms. Rats, evictions and lead poisoning appear in the last part of the narrative.

Finally Theresa is forced to consider whether her child would be better off in someone else’s home. The bleakness might overwhelm if not for Winningham, who has an uncanny ability to enlist sympathy without begging for it.

Tears will fall across America at the end of “God Bless the Child.� But this is no TV-movie heartwarmer. It’s a heartbreaker.

In contrast with “God Bless the Child,� the one-hour “A Place at the Table� is child’s play. In fact, given its 7 p.m. time slot, it was probably intended for children. It’s the story of a jobless family’s breakup, seen primarily through the soulful eyes of Lukas Haas as the oldest of the three children.

Although E.H. Guest’s script makes clear the economic pressures that cause poverty, its final impression is that if we all just pitch in to feed the hungry, the sun will shine as scheduled.

Of course, children shouldn’t be expected to assume any deeper responsibility for solving such gnawing problems. So the show may work as a children’s primer--although an Agriculture Department statement pointed out that “the film does not acknowledge the existence of the National School Lunch Program, which provides free school lunches to children of low-income families.�

“Table� will strike adults as superficial, especially considering the well-scrubbed look of its poor people (most of them white) and their town. As the mother, Susan Dey looks hardly worse than she does on “L.A. Law.� David Morse, Jean Smart and Danny Glover are also in the cast, and Arthur Allan Seidelman directed.