LOVER COME BACK (1961)
Channel 4, 1.30pm
Rock Hudson and Doris Day had already demonstrated their screen chemistry in Pillow Talk before they were reunited on Lover Come Back two years later. This time they play rival New York advertising executives squabbling over an imaginary new product that Hudson’s smooth-talking Madison Avenue playboy has invented to get himself out of a romantic pickle. There are few surprises but plenty of charming moments in Delbert Mann’s satire on advertising and the battle of the sexes. Tony Randall and Edie Adams co-star. Hudson and Day collaborated again in 1964 on another romantic comedy, Send Me No Flowers. (107 min)
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TOO MANY CROOKS (1959, b/w)
BBC Two, 1.40pm
With its homegrown cast of character comedy legends, including Terry-Thomas, George Cole, Sid James and John Le Mesurier, Too Many Crooks is a whimsical treat from the days when gangsters were clownish screen rogues. The high-farce plot, reprised decades later in the Hollywood smash Ruthless People (1986), involves an incompetent gang of villains led by Cole and James who accidentally kidnap the wife (Brenda De Banzie) of a millionaire (Thomas). But this bounder is in no hurry to pay the ransom in Mario Zampi’s easygoing comedy. (83 min)
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PICKPOCKET (1959, b/w)
Artsworld, 10pm
The highly admired French director Robert Bresson moved on from literary adaptations with Pickpocket, a stark and stylish thriller about a petty thief who plies his trade on the streets, railway platforms and racetracks of Paris. Martin LaSalle plays Michel, the arrogant young pickpocket whose compulsive thieving masks a deeper search for meaning in his bleak, blank life. Shooting documentary style in real crowds, Bresson and his largely amateur cast deliver some brilliantly choreographed scenes of crime and punishment. (75min)