TV REVIEW : Miller’s ‘American Clock’ Ticks on Screen

Arthur Miller’s nominally unsuccessful play “The American Clock” (1980) has been enlivened and literally rediscovered in its transition from the stage to the screen (premiering on TNT Screenworks today at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.).

In a rare instance of a major playwright’s work finding its more natural form on the TV screen, Miller’s mural of the Great Depression now packs the thematic and panoramic impact that never quite jelled on the stage.

Credit Miller for the unusual and astute idea to bring on a collaborator, theater veteran and playwright Frank Galati to write the TV adaptation. The result is not only a nostalgic pastiche of the glamour and squalor of 1929-1939 but an uncanny prophecy of the anxiety and social tremors that our country is enduring right now.

It’s these unspoken parallels between the homelessness, uncertainty and joblessness of the Great Depression and life in our ‘90s--the American clock ticking down and repeating itself--that is more keenly felt in this adaptation.

Also dramatized are Depression-era virtues so missing today: solidarity, a sense of purpose and a vast, nationwide belief in the President.

Inspired by Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times,” Miller’s partially autobiographical work tells much of its story through the eyes of an extended New York Jewish family (headed by John Rubinstein and Mary McDonnell) that is forced to leave its splendid Riverside Drive apartment for a lowly flat in Brooklyn after the devastation of Black Friday.

Spinning off the family’s travails are scores of other personal stories veering from shanty towns on the Hudson to prostitutes on the Queen Mary.

The director, Bob Clark (“A Christmas Story”), draws vivid portrayals from a vast ensemble cast that includes Eddie Bracken, Joanna Miles, Estelle Parsons, Loren Dean, Kelly Preston, David Strathairn and Arthur Miller’s daughter, Rebecca Miller.

Two moments take your breath away: a Fred Astaire-inspired soft-shoe number performed in Art Deco splendor by Jim Dale as a disaffected, retiring chairman of G.E. and a boisterous monologue featuring a mesmerizing Loretta Devine as a union activist demanding justice in a welfare office.

But the movie’s most artful and structurally inventive touch is a clever framing device in which two of the characters (John Randolph and Darren McGavin) narrate and reflect on events from the vantage point of older men looking back on their younger selves--not as mere talking heads but as figures superimposed alongside their youthful personas. It’s a charming, disarming ploy and anchors the movie.