Sky UK TV Guide

05:00 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Film Having already scored successes with Look Back in Anger and A Taste of Honey, director Tony Richardson completed his outstanding "kitchen sink" collection with this stirring tale of the borstal boy who dares to buck the system just as it offers him a lifeline. Tom Courtenay delivers a remarkable debut performance as the embittered delinquent whose talent for running gives governor Michael Redgrave the means to raise the profile of his rundown institution. Masterfully adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his own story and unobtrusively shot by Walter Lassally, this is as powerful and relevant today as it ever was.

07:00 Alice
No Genre

09:10 The Children's Hour
Film Retitled The Loudest Whisper in the UK, as the original title conjured up cosy images of BBC children's programmes, this screen remake of a notorious Lillian Hellman play about a pupil who falsely accuses two teachers of being lesbians is emphatically not for youngsters. Director William Wyler had filmed it before as These Three back in 1936 and, despite being shorn of its overt lesbian theme, the earlier version has considerably more power than this rather quiet and bloodless drama. Perhaps a few years on from 1961 the lesbian elements could have been properly dealt with, but here their muting harms the movie, and, surprisingly, both Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine fail to convince. James Garner, though, is very impressive, particularly in his weeping scene: many actors could not have done as well.

11:10 Vera Cruz
Film Gary Cooper headlines but co-star Burt Lancaster is the man to watch in this terrific Mexico-set western, in which a former Confederate soldier and an outlaw join forces to escort a shipment of gold. Produced by Lancaster's own company, it's directed by Robert Aldrich, who would collaborate out west once more with Lancaster in Ulzana's Raid. The movie has a rattling pace (thanks to editor Alan Crosland Jr) and a fine sense of style that's hard to top. The supporting cast includes Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson (still being billed here as Buchinsky), well before they teamed up with Aldrich again for The Dirty Dozen.

13:00 Gentlemen Marry Brunettes
Film Jeanne Crain and Jane Russell, showing a lot of leg and cleavage, play dual roles as brunette showgirl sisters in Paris, and their blonde mother and aunt, who were the toast of Paris in the 1920s. Despite the gorgeous costumes by Travilla and Christian Dior, the Technicolor and CinemaScope, the chic Parisian settings, and some good songs, this is a feeble farrago. The uninspired screenplay was by Richard Sale and Mary Loos - not to be confused with Anita Loos, the creator of the far better blonde version.

15:00 The Manchurian Candidate
Film Laurence Harvey is wonderfully creepy as the war hero brainwashed and programmed by Korean communists to eliminate a presidential candidate in this fearfully prophetic thriller. Frank Sinatra plays Harvey's old war buddy who tries to establish the truth, and Angela Lansbury is Harvey's doting and utterly terrifying mother. Co-written by George Axelrod and director John Frankenheimer from the novel by Richard Condon, this blackly comic and suspenseful film ranks with Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove as one of the toughest and most original movies of the 1960s. Following President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Sinatra had the film withdrawn for many years.

17:50 When Time Ran Out
Film Irwin Allen, the producer of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, rehashed the disaster formula yet again with this stinker about a volcano that threatens to trash a luxury holiday resort. Paul Newman leads his co-stars and their associated subplots to possible safety, while William Holden, as per Inferno, is the tycoon who owns the hotel. Both stars have a certain craggy appeal and a twinkle in their eyes that betrays a lofty fee. The eruption, when it finally comes, is a wonderfully cheesy amalgam of wobbly back projection, bathtub tidal wave and scared expressions from the cast. It's not as hilariously awful as Swarm or Meteor, though, which is a pity.

20:10 The Screening Room
Interests The latest news on international movie-making. This special edition focuses on 3D cinema.

21:00 The Falcon and the Snowman
Film This convoluted spy thriller stars Timothy Hutton as a college dropout who obtains US secrets and, with his drug-addicted buddy Sean Penn, passes them on to the Soviet embassy in Mexico. Purportedly based on fact, the movie is about the motives for treason and the loss of moral purpose in America, underlined by some heavy-handed flashbacks to Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and even John Lennon. Directed with customary visual flair by John Schlesinger, from a screenplay by Steven Zaillian, who later wrote the film script for Schindler's List, it's undeniably gripping, if a little long and unfocused.