SATURDAY
Love in the Afternoon (1957)
TVO, 10 p.m. Two of the most handsome men ever, foiled by Audrey Hepburn, make this movie pretty easy to watch, even if the extreme May-December plotline brings on the odd squirm. Maurice Chevalier is a private detective whose client has a wife getting it on with Gary Cooper. When Hepburn, as Chevalier's daughter, discovers the client is about to kill the rogue, she rushes to warn him, and becomes smitten. But the silly schoolgirl is far too young to intrigue the 60ish Cooper, so she spins a story of a secret life that, she insinuates, includes a lot of other men. Thus hooked, Cooper turns to Chevalier to find out more about her. Directed by Billy Wilder in the same year he squeaked out Witness for the Prosecution.
SUNDAY
Journey to Shiloh (1968)
History, 9 p.m. This film begins with a scene of seven friends heading off from Texas to fight for the Confederates in the Civil War. Leading the pack is James Caan, his skin so flawless that in retrospect he is perfectly cast: the polar opposite of the craggy, wrinkled actor he would later become, he nicely personifies the men's trusting juvenescence. Along the way, they encounter saloon dust-ups and dancehall babes, as well as something they're not expecting: the nagging realization that slaves are human, and that some Confederates might not be. The result is a bang-up Western with an oddly deep message: While the innocence of youth may be wasted on the young, society has no scruples about playing on that innocence to lay waste its unsuspecting youth.
MONDAY
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Bravo!, 9 p.m. When I reviewed The Wizard of Oz a couple of years back, I said the most interesting thing about it were the subtexts it implied, subtexts of loneliness and dislocation, and maybe even darker things. (Why, I wondered, did those three farmhands look so relieved when Dorothy couldn't remember how she'd been knocked unconscious?) In reply, one reader wrote to suggest I "return to the barn and clean up urinals." Needless to say, this led to considerable soul-searching on my part. So I hereby revise my take: This, unlike any other movie ever made, is harmless fun, with no moral or maxim or deeper meaning than what you see on the screen. It is, in other words, a straightforward story about a girl whose house really does get picked up by a tornado and spun to a land where witches and tin men live alongside munchkins and talking scarecrows. I feel redeemed.
TUESDAY
Private Benjamin (1980)
Family, 9 p.m. Despite the hunky husband, the successful daughter and an otherwise charmed life, there's something tragic about Goldie Hawn. It is as if she'd been gassed with silly gas many years ago and has ever since been condemned to wander in a lonely fog, that crooked grin a sign more of confusion than dunderheaded contentment. Still, it's a persona that's worked undeniably well when projected onto the big screen. In Private Benjamin, Hawn plays a high-society widow who joins the army to prove her mettle. Of course she has no mettle to speak of, which makes for lots of laughs. Then she musters up her mettle, which makes for more laughs. All those laughs are broad, and the characters eliciting them blatant stereotypes. But for what is effectively one long dumb-blonde joke, Private Benjamin manages to be all it can be.
WEDNESDAY
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
Bravo!, 3 a.m. When a film about China is banned in both China and Taiwan, it must have something going for it. And it does. It's the sad and Cinderella-like tale of Songlian, married off by her stepmother to be the fourth wife of a creepy patriarch in the 1920s. In his luxurious but claustrophobic household, she must deal not only with her all-powerful master (who hangs a lantern outside the residence of the wife he wishes to hump each night) but with his other wives, who effectively play the part of evil stepsisters. Raise the Red Lantern is visually plush and emotionally taxing, an unsettling look inside the world of a poor little rich girl trapped in a very velvet coffin.
THURSDAY
Gia (1998)
Showcase, 10 p.m. This is the story of a supermodel named Gia (Angelina Jolie) and it's a sad story indeed. Growing up in a broken family, she stumbles into the cutthroat world of high fashion, where women are treated like objects. ("This is meat, it's sirloin, it's lusty," drools one agency chief when she first lays eyes on Gia.) There, she finds success, but it's surface success; Gia is empty deep inside. For solace, she turns to drugs, and before she knows it, Gia is a heroin addict. But wait, there's more: Men fawn over her, but she likes girls. The girl she likes, though, doesn't get off on that near-death heroin look, and so never really gets around to committing. One day Gia's on an onerous magazine shoot, and shoots up with a shared needle. Oh dear. Gia's story goes from bad to worse. The runway outfits, by the way, are fab.
FRIDAY
The Beguiled (1971)
CBC, 12:25 a.m. A while back I reviewed Deliverance, a broad swipe at the American South, its Appalachian yahoos drawn as deformed products of incest out to trample the civilized cityfolk who dared trespass into their world. The Beguiled, released just a year before Deliverance, delivers a variation on that theme. Clint Eastwood plays a Union soldier found wounded near a school for Southern girls and taken into its confines by one of them. There, his presence unleashes a maelstrom of sexual tension, as the women alternately vie for his affections, suggest he be handed over to the marauding Confederates, and recall their own incestuous pasts. As a headmistress, Geraldine Page gives us her usual combo of outsized and apt, her bug-eyed madness reaching its apex in a scene that involves a hacksaw and Eastwood's leg.