Sky UK TV Guide

04:00 Love Me or Leave Me
Film This cracking biopic of 1920s chanteuse Ruth Etting was originally intended as a vehicle for Ava Gardner, but MGM wisely brought in Doris Day, giving her a sexy new image and pairing her again, after Starlift and The West Point Story, with tough guy James Cagney, and, boy, how those sparks fly! Though censorship has diluted this tawdry saga of a kept woman and her obsessive and sexually inadequate gangster sponsor, the truth is not glossed over, despite the exquisite CinemaScope framing and top-notch production values that make the tale less squalid than it obviously actually was. Doris is a knockout, performing the title number and Ten Cents a Dance with great understanding, but it's the Oscar-nominated Cagney, in a great later role, as "the Gimp", who walks away with the movie.

06:00 The Last Time I Saw Paris
Film In the hands of talented writer/director Richard Brooks, who made Elmer Gantry and The Blackboard Jungle, this version of F Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited is remarkably faithful to the original's style and tone. It's also beautifully cast, with Elizabeth Taylor in her sublime prime as the tragic love of alcoholic writer Van Johnson. MGM bought this property from Paramount as a vehicle for Taylor and lavished the best available talent on her (photography by Joseph Ruttenberg, gowns by Helen Rose, music by Conrad Salinger). Fitzgerald's vision of Paris's "lost generation" is well captured, and, although the second half reveals the weaknesses of the original, this is still an intelligent and glossy piece of film-making. Watch for a young Roger Moore, eight years before The Saint.

08:15 North and South
Drama Drama based on the novel by John Jakes, telling the story of the bond formed by two military cadets in 1842 through the events that led to the American Civil War.

09:15 Bonanza
Drama Western drama series, following the adventures of the Cartwright family.

10:20 Five Guns West
Film A piece of movie history was forged here with the directing debut of Roger Corman, who became the acknowledged master and exploiter of the B-movie and the sponsor of such talents as Bogdanovich, Coppola, Scorsese and Demme. It's a western, of course, a sort of Civil War spy story about a deserter, stolen gold, a list of Confederate agents and five convicted murderers who are let out of jail to catch the deserter. Shot in colour and widescreen by Floyd Crosby - the cameraman on High Noon - and starring wooden John Lund and Dorothy Malone, it's unmissable for students and historians of modern Hollywood, though unlikely to provide many surprises for everyday western fans.

11:50 East of Eden
Film John Steinbeck's sprawling, wordy novel about two brothers vying for their father's love here becomes a sprawling, wordy movie. We're in Cain and Abel territory, and the biblical parallels are rammed home by Elia Kazan's heavy-handed direction. The film has dated somewhat, but is still well worth seeing for James Dean's first starring role, in which he came to embody the frustrations of American teenagers. It was writer Paul Osborn who recommended Dean, though Kazan was set on casting Marlon Brando, but when Kazan met Dean - "a heap of twisted legs and denim rags, looking resentful for no particular reason" - he recognised the potential.

14:00 North and South
Drama Romantic drama based on the novel by John Jakes. Two military cadets form a bond in 1842 before the Civil War that threatened to tear the US in two.

15:10 Bonanza
Drama Western drama series, following the adventures of the Cartwright family.

16:15 Alias Jesse James
Film Bob Hope stars in yet another western spoof, this time playing an incompetent insurance salesman determined to retrieve the policy he unwittingly sold to outlaw Jesse James (Wendell Corey). Hope provides the jokes, while Rhonda Fleming supplies the pulchritude. The best moments are in the finale, though, when a host of cowboy stars (Roy Rogers, James Garner, Fess Parker) protect Bob from the killers.

18:05 The Last Hunt
Film Robert Taylor plays against his heroic, matinée idol image as a crazed, racist buffalo hunter who slaughters the animals, the tribesmen and anything else that comes close in an early "anti-western". Stewart Granger is another hunter, not quite in Taylor's league, who finally becomes disillusioned and steals pretty native American woman Debra Paget away from his partner. This remains a tough, unsentimental movie, with muscular direction from Richard Brooks who achieves much authenticity by staging the action in Custer State Park, South Dakota, during the annual cull of the buffalo herd.

20:00 Falling Down
Film Made from a script that was rejected by every major Hollywood studio, this is a storming portrait of urban alienation in America. Some stateside critics were quick to brand the film racist, as Michael Douglas's white-collar worker snaps one day, abandons his car in gridlock and engages in a violent spree that sees him destroy a Korean store and take on a Latino gang. But Douglas is no racist vigilante. In director Joel Schumacher's bold, believable and darkly funny film, he is a man consumed by rage at his own powerlessness, who reacts with violence to anyone who tries to prevent him from reaching "home" - now more of a concept than a place. The film loses momentum towards the end, but Douglas gives a superb performance and he's matched by the excellent Robert Duvall as an ageing, world-weary cop tackling his last case before retirement.

22:10 Private Benjamin
Film At a time when everyone was looking for a star vehicle for Goldie Hawn, she turned up in this high-octane tale about a Jewish princess who joins the US Army. It's basically a one-joke effort, but that joke has Hawn throwing herself with great gusto into the role of a bewildered spoilt brat who comes good and her Oscar-nominated performance has huge charm. If only director Howard Zieff had allowed someone else to get a look in - the members of the supporting cast are mere satellites around a perky sun - and the screenplay had been broadened to contain more than just gags about broken fingernails. Even so, Eileen Brennan (as best supporting actress) and the writers also received Oscar nominations.