TV REVIEW : ‘North and South’ Rises Again on ABC

When we last encountered that epic miniseries “North and South,” the Civil War was just ending and Patrick Swayze and Lesley-Anne Down’s antebellum mansion Mont Royal was in ashes.

Now, eight years later, the inevitable has happened: a second sequel--ABC’s “John Jakes’ Heaven and Hell: North and South, Part III” (beginning Sunday and continuing Monday and Wednesday, at 9 each night on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).

The focus this time is on the nation’s painful rebirth, the westward movement and the bitter legacy of Reconstruction. But don’t expect serious history here, although a depiction of the sturdy 10th Negro Calvary does lend the story a measure of historic responsibility.

In essence, this is romance fiction in the tradition of a Harlequin paperback. Characters are either very good or very bad, and there’s one lovemaking scene exceptionally graphic for network TV in which Lesley-Anne Down rips the shirt off James Read (returning as the Northern hero George Hazard), digs her nails almost into his buttocks and claws up his back.

Yes, Down’s plantation widow Madeline Main and Read’s Yankee entrepreneur George Hazard do fall in love across old enemy lines. The fact that the beauteous Down, playing a woman of newfound strength and courage, is almost 10 years older this time out actually works in her role’s favor.

Patrick Swayze, a Southern general who played Down’s husband in Part II, is not back. He’s killed off in a patch of fog during the opening credit role by that twisted sicko and old West Point nemesis Elkanah Bent (the insidious Philip Casnoff, who sneeringly reprises his sociopathic figure).

Of all the characters, Bent is the most fun, with the possible exception of Rip Torn’s grinning Native American trader, who leaves the movie unfortunately early. Peter O’Toole, of all people, pops up as an alcoholic frontier Shakespearean actor in a touch of humorous folklore. But you kind of hate to see O’Toole’s talents almost self-mocked here.

The production, adapted from Jakes’ novel “Heaven and Hell” by Suzanne Clauser, is routinely directed by Larry Peerce and is very choppy, leaving story strands dangling all over the screen. Still, “Part III” of the saga of the tormented Main and Hazard families mercifully limits itself to six hours. The original two parts, which aired the same season (1985-86), stretched 12 hours apiece. By now the entire opus straddles 30 hours!