WEEKEND TV : HOLIDAY FARE HEAVY ON THE SCHMALTZ

It’s no secret that television’s Christmas stockings are mostly filled with schmaltz. As with perfume or wine, however, the quality gradations in sentiment can be sharp--as demonstrated Sunday by back-to-back yuletide movies on ABC.

“The Christmas Star,” airing at 7 p.m. (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42), is by no means top-of-the-line holiday dramatic fare. For that you can watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” Sunday (8 a.m. on Channel 7, 3 p.m. on Channel 5) or wait for the Dec. 23 repeat of “A Christmas Carol” with George C. Scott on CBS.

But it is a movie whose makers seemed to know exactly what they were going for and wisely fought the shortcomings of the script with a strong, appealing cast--a dramatic contrast to the film that follows it at 9 p.m., “A Smoky Mountain Christmas,” a ragged star-vehicle for Dolly Parton.

In “The Christmas Star,” you know from virtually the first line of dialogue where the story is heading, as a prison inmate regales his fellow convicts with the story of a Christmas star that lights up the sky when someone performs a selfless act. Ed Asner plays the one con who doesn’t believe it, but you know he will before the film is finished. His name, don’t you know, is McNickle, and when he escapes a few minutes later in a Santa Claus suit, the stage is set for the melting of his gruff exterior.

The story by Carol Dysinger and Alan Shapiro, who also directed, is derivative and stacked with stock characters: a couple of wide-eyed children, their loving parents, a Scrooge-like landlord, a weary cop, even a sickly dog.

Yet the film hangs together as better-than-average family entertainment. It moves briskly and has some funny moments, as when the fake Santa enlists the children’s help in recovering his stolen money by telling them that if he doesn’t get it, “all the kids in the world will be getting underwear for Christmas!”

Mostly, though, “The Christmas Star” can thank its own stars--especially Asner, Nicholas Van Burek and Vicki Wauchope as the children who believe Santa is in their basement, Rene Auberjonois as the uncaring landlord and Fred Gwynne as the policeman out to capture the escaped convict. They know how to finesse the schmaltz.

The people involved in “A Smoky Mountain Christmas,” on the other hand, can barely even find it. The film is billed as a musical fairy tale but it’s about as light as a Christmas-tree ornament made of lead.

Parton, who helped write the story with William Bleich, plays a stressed-out country singer who secretly heads off for the solitude of the Smoky Mountains for Christmas. When she gets to the cabin she’s borrowed, however, she finds it occupied by seven orphans. This fazes her not in the least and she immediately becomes their surrogate mother.

The exposition is equally muddled throughout. Characters change attitudes from one scene to the next without explanation, a subplot in which authorities believe Parton has been kidnaped simply evaporates and there is no sense of how much time is passing in the story. Toward the end, references to it being Christmas and Christmas Eve are used interchangeably.

Under the direction of Henry Winkler, Parton shows far more range in her singing than her acting, which consists in the main of smiling warmly. Equally one-dimensional are the performances of Lee Majors as a mountain man who befriends her, Dan Hedaya as a tabloid photographer who pursues her, Bo Hopkins as a sheriff who covets her and Anita Morris as a witch who entrances her.

Caution: “Smoky” may be harmful to the health of your Christmas spirit.