Defoe is best known for having written the kid-friendly classic ““Robinson Crusoe.’’ But, as Russell Baker warns in his parental-discretion intro to this far more adult yarn: "” “Robinson Crusoe’ it’s not.’’ No, indeed. RC would never have found himself with his skirt up in the back of a carriage with a fat, red-faced magistrate high on snuff and the scent of a ripe woman. PBS, which will send out a tamer version to more conservative stations, is promoting ““Moll’’ as the tale of ““one woman against the world.’’ The author offers a more graphic accounting of his heroine: ““Twelve years a whore, five times a wife, once to her own brother, twelve years a thief and eight years a transported felon.''
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Moll (Alex Kingston) was born in Newgate prison, orphaned and taken up by Gypsies. A precocious child, she runs away and is adopted by a small-town mayor, whose sons soon fall hard for her fierce eyes and bursting bodice. They are but the first of many. A spendthrift widower. A rugged merchant with an American accent who takes her to live in Virginia. A rogue highwayman. A banker named Bland who lectures her on the virtues of venture capitalism. Defoe wrote his novel as a picaresque, which meant cramming more outlandish plot onto a page than you get in several episodes of ““Melrose Place.’’ Director David Attwood keeps up the pace and grungy atmosphere of life on the seamy side of the Restoration. And screenwriter Andrew Davies (““Pride and Prejudice’’) has a knack for adapting big period pieces. He gives Defoe’s amorphous narrative some arc and urgency by having Moll turn to the camera at crucial moments, fix her formidable gaze on the viewer and ask, ““What would you do?''
The cast is solid all around (especially Colin Buchanan and Daniel Craig as Moll’s two greatest loves). But Kingston owns the series. She’s an immensely satisfying Moll: smart, feisty and as willing to lay herself bare for her art as Moll was for hers. ““I am as fond of pleasure as any one of you, but I am determined to have it on my own terms,’’ Moll lectures one of her countless suitors. The script’s only corny note is having Moll saved from the gallows by one of her lovers. The book has a more modern ending: she saves herself.
If These Walls Could Talk (HBO, Oct. 13) is a more conventional feminist parable. The issue is abortion: three short stories about three generations of women. The common thread is that all the women inhabited the same house, in the ’50s, the ’70s and the ’90s. Oh, and one more thing. The stars of these modest little mini-movies are Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Cher.
The heavy-wattage cast tends to overpower the smallish stories. In Demi’s she’s a postwar widow desperate not to have her baby. A nurse, she makes fruitless inquiries at her hospital before resorting to a knitting needle and then an even more unfortunate solution. On to the progressive ’70s, where Sissy Spacek is an overburdened housewife with a bunch of screaming kids and one more on the way. Her hippie teenage daughter looks on condescendingly as her mom pores over ““Our Bodies, Ourselves.’’ All of which makes us think we know what her decision will be, but it turns out we don’t. Finally: Cher. No bad jokes about how she’d be more credible as a plastic surgeon than an abortionist, please. She directed and stars in her piece, which takes place now and focuses on a college kid (Anne Heche) knocked up by her professor and her reluctant decision to abort. Pro-lifers block the doors of the clinic and Cher’s doctor wears a bulletproof vest to work. Of the three parts to ““If These Walls,’’ Cher’s feels the least like something that could be shown in a high-school health class. The choice in her pro-choice playlet seems the hardest won.
