"A Message From Holly," the CBS Sunday Night Movie at 9 on Channel 9, is an almost diabolically proficient tear-jerker about a woman's dying wish that her best friend care for her 6-year-old daughter after she's gone.

The film covers the last six months of the woman's life as her inoperable liver cancer worsens and she tries to prepare others for the end. Lindsay Wagner casts a magnetic serenity over the film as Holly, and Shelley Long does a satisfactory job as Kate, her former college roommate and longtime friend. Although Long has a hard time playing characters of any appreciable depth or substance, part of the point here is that while Kate is an accomplished businesswoman, she is unschooled in the domestic arts.

Sudden motherhood frightens her. "If it's anything like animals or plants, I've had it," she tells Holly.

Writer Dalene Young seems to be raising a point of major conflict when she introduces Holly's wealthy parents, who disapproved when Holly decided six years earlier not to marry Jenny's father, and are upset now that their grandchild will not be theirs to raise. But this issue is raised only to be dropped.

As the parents, able veterans Macdonald Carey and Anne Jeffreys make themselves exceptionally welcome, however - especially a still-radiant Jeffreys, so long ago "the ghostess with the mostes' " on TV's "Topper." In the small role of Tomas, a friend of Holly's, Tony Colliti also proves an invaluable scene brightener.

Holly's intense political correctness certainly isn't the most endearing thing about her. She lives an artsy-craftsy life on a farm and makes a living as, heaven help us, a sculptor. Oh, and a sensitive sculptor, too. She isn't perfect, however; as the illness progresses, she becomes moody and difficult, making Kate's job that much harder.

Produced by Beth Polson and directed by Rod Holcomb, "Message From Holly" pushes not the hot buttons but the warm buttons, jerking its tears honorably and, compared with most TV movies that try the same thing, with an artful kind of dignity.