TV REVIEW : ‘PRINCESS’ GIVES VIEWERS PEEPHOLE LOOK AT MAFIA

NBC’s “Mafia Princess”(9 p.m. Sunday on Channels 4, 36 and 39) falls midway between “Daddy, Dearest” and “Godfather Knows Best.”

This is a swell-looking but unfocused and occasionally confusing adaptation of Antoinette Giancana’s autobiography tracing her oppressed life as the daughter of the late Chicago crime boss, Sam Giancana.

In place of a sustaining theme, it offers only an episodic recording of events in the lives of the Giancanas, as if nothing more were needed to keep an audience’s interest.

Robert W. Lenski is the writer and Bob Collins the director of a drama that’s mildly interesting if bought as a realistic peephole view of Mafiadom. Even so, the story is told from the perspective of a daughter who was kept at a distance from her father’s violent “business,” thus undoubtedly creating a softer portrait of Sam as a criminal than he deserves.

As a father, though, he apparently was no bargain, even though the Giancanas at times seem to have had a reasonably ordinary family life when Antoinette was a child.

“You promised to help me with my homework,” she pouts as Sam prepares to leave the house after dinner. “No, tomorrow,” he replies, putting on his black fedora. “Don’t wait up for me tonight,” he tells his wife, Angelina. “I always do,” she says. Very sweet. Robert Young and Jane Wyatt couldn’t have done it better.

The family environment darkens as the movie continues, however, and most of the story’s violence occurs not on the crime front, but between father and daughter.

Susan Lucci is convincingly miserable as Antoinette, who regresses from a spirited young girl to a bleached-out floozy so sad and desperate that she attempts suicide. Tony Curtis is full of menace as Sam, who will bow out with a bullet in his back, and Kathleen Widdoes is yet another stoical Mafia matron as Angelina. Meanwhile, the Godfatherly music plays on.