TV REVIEW : ‘3 WIVES’ REMAKE ACCENTS ROMANCE

The real star of tonight’s remake of “A Letter to Three Wives” (9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is Joseph L. Mankiewicz. He won an Academy Award in 1949 for writing the original movie (and one for directing it as well), and it’s still his novel story that makes the version on NBC so watchable.

The new production, updated to the present in the adaptation by Sally Robinson, lacks the snap and crackle of the original, stressing romance over wit, and Loni Anderson, Michelle Lee and Stephanie Zimbalist play the three wives rather broadly under the sluggish direction of Larry Elikann.

Yet the device of having the trio receive a letter from a mutual friend, announcing that she’s run off with one of their husbands and leaving them to wonder which one, is sufficiently compelling to overcome the shortcomings here.

As a sidelight, one of the wives has been made a television writer, allowing Robinson to inject some scathing criticism of the very medium for which she is laboring. Although her observations about the tube’s “mindless” entertainment have validity, they too seem to have been adapted from another superior source: Paddy Chayefsky’s film “Network.”