TV REVIEWS : OLDER LORETTA YOUNG IN NBC’S ‘CHRISTMAS EVE’

No sweeping entrance here. Our initial glimpse of Loretta Young in her first film in 23 years is at a park bench, bird-watching. She’s wearing a thick overcoat, a fur hat and dark glasses.

It’s a smart move. Audience expectations--anxiety, perhaps?--are gently deflated; we can see the silver hair under the hat and gradually adjust to the notion that, yes, of course, she’s going to look older now.

She arrives home and sheds her winter garments. And then, with no fanfare, she is there before us--older, indeed, but still beautiful and animated at 73, her eyes positively radiant.

Young is the reason to watch “Christmas Eve,” the movie that NBC is broadcasting tonight from 9 to 11 (Channels 4, 36 and 39). It’s like a 1940s film made on the studio assembly line--hokey and melodramatic and wanting nothing more than to leave viewers sobbing into their hankies. With her, it works.

Young, who won an Academy Award in 1947 for “The Farmer’s Daughter” and then won three Emmys during the ‘50s for “The Loretta Young Show,” plays a feisty rich lady in Manhattan whose liberal notions of helping the homeless put her forever at odds with her conservative, coldhearted son (Arthur Hill), who runs the corporation her late husband left them.

When she finds out she’s got an inoperable aneurysm, she hires a private investigator (Ron Leibman) to track down her three estranged grandchildren and invite them home for Christmas, in hopes of reconciling them with their father before she dies. In the meantime, what should her son do but take her to court to have her declared mentally incompetent!

Christmas Eve arrives. Will the grandchildren? Will the son? Director Stuart Cooper milks it for all it’s worth. You know the answer and you don’t mind waiting for it. That’s what this kind of movie is all about.

If it’s spirituality you want, however--and, after the superficial sentimentality that’s been spewing out of the networks in recent weeks under the banner of Christmas programming, you ought to--look in on “Santeros,” a half-hour documentary on KCET Channel 28 at 9 tonight.

Although not pegged specifically to Christmas, this look at religious woodcarvers in New Mexico may be the most serene program you’ll see this holiday season.

Produced by Ray Telles and beautifully photographed by Mark Adler, “Santeros” won’t raise a lump in your throat; it reaches much deeper than that.