THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, August 17, 1996 TAG: 9608160082
SECTION: TELEVISION WEEKLY PAGE: 17 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY BONKO, TELEVISION COLUMNIST
LENGTH: 82 lines
IT ISN'T ``The Godfather'' saga, but ``Gotti'' from Home Box Office is a well-acted, stylish study of The Mob at its worst. While watching it, I half expected John Gotti to make people an offer they couldn't refuse.
``Gotti,'' premiering Saturday night at 9, is another classy piece of business from HBO Pictures, which has a pretty good shot at winning the Emmy next month for outstanding made-for-television movie.
HBO saw ``The Late Shift,'' ``Truman'' and ``Tuskegee Airmen'' nominated in that category. The broadcast networks had zero nominations. Hard to believe, but the Emmy voters overlooked Tori Spelling in ``Co-ed Call Girl.''
Armand Assante has the title role in ``Gotti.''
Gotti, who ended up in a federal prison for life after his former underboss (Sammy Gravano) testified against him in a 1992 racketeering and murder trial, was a familiar figure in the 1980s. Assante said it would have been easy to paint the man in broad strokes, to play him as a caricature.
Assante took another path.
``My job was to play him as a human being,'' said Assante. The actor is compelling as the man in the $2,000 suits who thought nothing of ordering the execution of friends and enemies who crossed him when he was head of the Gambino crime family.
This film is based on a book (``Gotti: Rise and Fall''), tape transcripts and what HBO calls other sources. But the network stops short of calling it a biography or even a ``docudrama.''
``Gotti'' director Robert Harmon prefers the term ``interpretation.''
``We present an impression of Gotti drawn from various sources. No one can say what was really going on in his head.''
Can it be that this well-dressed brute who battered his enemies with baseball bats was and still is a hero to some Americans?
``Perhaps he served a purpose in society by disciplining other criminal elements,'' said Assante, who should be in the running for a 1997 Emmy after ``Gotti.''
On Wednesday night at 9, A&E makes it plain that the Mob enforcer depicted so artfully by HBO in ``Gotti'' is not always a piece of fiction. As part of its ``American Justice'' series, A&E has produced ``Mob Hit Men,'' which focuses on three murder-for-hire assassins who calmly plotted their killings after putting the kids to bed or ordering pizza.
To follow up on the subject, A&E on Thursday rolls back the calendar to the 1940s when Dutch Schultz was the Gotti of his time, a ruthless boss in organized crime. ``Target Mafia: Gangbusters'' starts at 10 p.m.
It's G-Men and Hit Men Week on cable.
The summer has been a darn lively season for cable programmers, and there is no letting up here in August. The Sci-Fi Channel continues the parade of original programming on Saturday night at 8 with ``Mr. Stitch,'' which is the Frankenstein story set in the 1990s.
This is quite a good sci-fi film with milk-white sets, sharp dialogue and Rutger Hauer in the starring role as the mad scientist who sews together the flesh and organs of 88 corpses to produce Stitch (Wil Wheaton). No monosyllabic babble from this monster. He quotes the Bible!
Elsewhere on cable, Lifetime dramatizes the story of the Irvine, Calif., doctor who allegedly did illegal and unethical things - ``outrageous wrongs,'' a former employee calls it - that included harvesting his patients' embryos and implanting them in other women who didn't suspect a thing. Marilu Henner as a patient who became a victim and Linda Lavin - she plays the woman who blew the whistle at the clinic - co-star in ``For the Future: The Irvine Fertility Scandal'' on Wednesday at 9 p.m. Lifetime puts on a documentary about fertility clinics at 11. . . . Life on Mars? Big deal. The Discovery Channel on Sunday at 9 p.m. shows viewers rare life forms on this planet in ``Galapagos: Beyond Darwin.'' There's a previously unseen universe 3,000 feet below the sea. . . . It's not yet Labor Day, but here's Jerry Lewis on the TV screen. A&E profiles Lewis (``The Last American Clown'') in its ``Biography'' series on Sunday night at 8. When Lewis was a kid, he played Norfolk with his dad in the good old days of vaudeville.
Don't blow out those 25 candles just yet. The August Public Broadcasting membership drive has begun, and WHRO responds with special programming this month including ``The Kennedy Center 25th Anniversary Celebration'' Sunday at 5 p.m. It has a cast of thousands. Actually, about a dozen big names including Barbara Walters take part. . . . The folks at VH-1 have decided that August 1996 is as good a time as any to bring back the spirit of the 1970s with films and old music videos. Included in ``Seven Days of the 70s'' is the 1977 classic, ``Saturday Night Fever,'' on Friday at 9 p.m. ``Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive.'' Love disco. ILLUSTRATION: B/W Photo
[Armand Assante, right, and Anthony Quinn star in "Gotti"] by CNB