Although awesome in its fantasy splendor, Ridley...
Although awesome in its fantasy splendor, Ridley Scott’s 1985 Legend (KTLA Sunday at 6 p.m.) is pretty thin stuff, lacking in humor and invention. Tom Cruise stars as a young hermit who does battle with Tim Curry’s Lord of Darkness, who has imprisoned a beautiful princess (Mia Sara).
Alan Parker’s intense, fictionalized 1988 Mississippi Burning (ABC Sunday at 8:30 p.m.) emphasizes the clash between two very different FBI agents (Willem Dafoe, Gene Hackman), investigating the 1964 deaths of three civil rights workers, at the expense of the heroic struggle for justice and equality in the part of black people themselves.
The 1992 TV movie Cruel Doubt (NBC Sunday at 9 p.m., concluding Monday at 9 p.m.) takes four hours to tell a story that CBS told more interestingly in “Honor Thy Mother.” It’s the true story of a North Carolina couple who are savagely beaten in their bed, with their drug-addled son becoming the prime suspect.
Much better bet: Billy Wilder’s effervescent 1955 The Seven-Year Itch (KCAL Sunday at 9 p.m.) with Marilyn Monroe.
Melanie Griffith emerged as a star in Mike Nichols’ 1988 Working Girl (KTTV Monday at 7:30 p.m.), one of the key comedies of the ‘80s. She’s irresistible as the sexy, ambitious blue-collar secretary to the deliciously arrogant Sigourney Weaver, with Harrison Ford as the man in the middle.
The Return of the Pink Panther (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) stars Peter Sellers in his fifth appearance as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau running around Hong Kong.
It’s a rare and hopeful sign to see a movie about romantic love between older people, so it’s too bad that Betty White and Leslie Nielsen are saddled with the unimaginative love story in the 1991 TV film Chance of a Lifetime (NBC Tuesday at 8 p.m.).
Like all anthology comedies, the 1987 Amazon Women on the Moon (KTLA Thursday at 8:30 p.m.) is a hit-and-miss affair, made up of 20 vignettes of varying degrees of humor, most of them spoofs of commercials and old movies. When the film is funny, it’s often hilarious and lowdown, but when it isn’t, it’s embarrassingly grim.
The four-hour 1988 TV movie Internal Affairs (CBS Friday at 9 p.m., concluding Saturday at 8 p.m.) is one of those involving police mysteries that keeps you on edge with its good-cops, bad-cops puzzle. Richard Crenna stars.
Diabolique (KCET Saturday at 11:15 p.m.) is the 1955 H.G. Clouzot suspense-horror classic starring Simone Signoret.
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