This Week On Television

Cinematographer Boris Kaufman lived much of his life in flight. He fled the Soviet Union-where his filmmaking brothers Mikhail and David (better known as Dziga Vertov) became famous for their Man with a Movie Camera-for France, where he collaborated with the great Jean Vigo. Kaufman then fled France only weeks ahead of the Nazis in 1940, arriving in the United States a penniless unknown. After Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet discovered Kaufman's remarkable eye and gift for framing, Kaufman emerged from the fringes to work as director of photography on such classics as Kazan's On the Waterfront and Lumet's 12 Angry Men and The Pawnbroker. In these films, Kaufman smuggled a taste of the early Soviet filmmakers' belief in the camera's power into Hollywood.

Some of Kaufman's best work comes in the otherwise ludicrous 1961 film Splendor in the Grass (TCM, March 31, 3 a.m.), directed by Elia Kazan, from a script by William Inge. Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood play high school sweethearts desperate to consummate their love but prevented from doing so by their age and by society. Wood, nominated for best actress for her role, is her usual stiff self, lacking the slightest hint of genuineness or spontaneity. Beatty is solid, although his role is clearly meant to echo that earlier touchstone of teenage anomie, James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Inge's screenplay, with its bromides about teenage sexuality and its division of women into good girls and sluts, is astoundingly dated.

Ridiculous in a far more enjoyable fashion is Russ Meyer's legendary Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (Fox Movie Channel, April 2, 2 a.m.). (Disregarding its many charms, Beyond would be famous merely for being the one screenwriting credit of film critic Roger Ebert.) Dolls is Meyer's stupendously zany attempt to cash in on psychedelic youth culture, complete with sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and hatred of men in suits. Playboy Playmate Dolly Read plays the lead singer of the Carrie Nations (dig the clever name), an all-girl trio newly arrived in Los Angeles. Along the way, the band meets Hollywood's high and mighty and hires a Shakespeare-quoting cross-dressing psychopath as its manager.

What's amazing is that this over-the-top cocktail actually works. Its sheer strangeness makes it an eternally appealing candidate for midnight movie screenings everywhere, and as a time capsule of late-60s SoCal counterculture, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is a far better mirror of its time than pseudo-highbrow schlock like Splendor in the Grass.