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True to form, commercial television tries to play it both ways in "Casanova," the three-hour movie that ABC is broadcasting Sunday about the famed 18th-Century Italian lover, played by Richard Chamberlain.
It starts with him being described as "a notorious rascal, a swindler, an adventurer"-assessments that are amply born out by what follows-but ends with him lamenting to the Woman Who Got Away: "God, what I've missed. If only I'd been different."
This is ABC's way of saying that despite the millions of dollars it has spent turning his dalliances and exploits into entertainment, the network isn't endorsing Casanova's promiscuous life style.
The film suffers for its identity crisis. Lacking a clear point of view about their subject, writer George MacDonald Fraser and director Simon Langton are unable to establish a...