Television Reviews : ‘Onassis’ Fails to Light Up the Life of Greek Tycoon

Raul Julia, 6-foot-2, plays Aristotle Onassis, 5-foot-5, in the two-part, four-hour “Onassis: The Richest Man in the World” (Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m., Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

In the zillion photos of Onassis, he always looked shorter than the women in his life. Not so here. But the height isn’t the only discrepancy. Julia’s face is soft and flat; Onassis’ was much stonier.

Except for his height, Anthony Quinn--who played a version of Onassis in “The Greek Tycoon”--more closely resembled him. Quinn shows up again in “Onassis,” this time as Ari’s father Socrates (and Quinn’s son Lorenzo appears as Ari’s son).

Quinn is allowed to reprise his Zorba the Greek dance just before Socrates keels over and dies--and Julia does a similar dance in the opening sequence. It’s as if the film makers are clinging to the popular Zorba’s coattails, irrelevant though they may be.

Yet though writers Jacqueline Feather and David Seidler (drawing from “Ari,” by Peter Evans) and director Waris Hussein found the time to revive the Zorba imagery, they skipped much of Onassis’ life, including such potentially juicy chapters as his years in New York and Hollywood during World War II. In one scene, Bobby Kennedy reels off an FBI list of allegations against Onassis; not one of them is mentioned again, so the truth of them is left hanging.

Nor are there any extended scenes that would have let Julia demonstrate the conversational skills that were ascribed to Onassis. We’re left wondering why women--and Sir Winston Churchill too--found this man so charming.

Instead, after a fairly interesting (though inevitably condensed) account of the young Ari’s turbulent late teens (in which Elias Koteas cuts a dashing figure as young Ari), “Onassis” dwells on the familiar romances with Maria Callas (Jane Seymour) and Jackie Kennedy (Francesca Annis). Even these scenes come off as perfunctory and occasionally misleading.

Readers of the biographies, not to mention readers of the tabloids, will find “Onassis” entirely too tame. It doesn’t work on the most basic level--as television trash.