MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946, b/w)
Channel 4, 1.15pm
The legendary western director John Ford pays poetic homage to the taming of the Old West in My Darling Clementine, symbolised by Henry Fonda’s dignified and pensive performance as the reformed outlaw Wyatt Earp. Ford had actually met the real Earp on a previous film and discussed the OK Corral shoot-out with him. But Ford uses gunplay sparingly, lingering more on the back- porch romances and verbal showdowns of Tombstone. Earp’s former sidekick, Bat Masterson, gets the biopic treatment on Thursday in The Gunfight at Dodge City. (97 min)
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MANHATTAN (1979, b/w)
TCM, 9pm
In more innocent times, a romantic comedy starring Woody Allen as a middle aged divorce with a high-school girlfriend was seen as charming rather than suspect. Photographed in sumptuous monochrome by Gordon Willis, Manhattan boasts one of the greatest openings in cinema history. Playing a neurotic TV writer torn between his teenage girlfriend (an Oscar- nominated Mariel Hemingway) and his best friend’s partner (Diane Keaton), Allen initially disliked his performance so much that he offered to shoot another film for free if United Artists shelved this sublime career peak. Happily, the studio ignored him. (96 min)
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MAN ON THE MOON (1999)
BBC One, 11.35pm
A major cult figure in America, Andy Kaufman was a surrealist comic and media prankster who became a reluctant superstar on the back of his regular role in the sitcom Taxi, a show he despised. When he died of lung cancer in 1984, Kaufman was in career freefall, a victim of his own volatile nature and prickly talent. Milos Forman’s reverential but unrevealing biopic never quite persuades us that Kaufman was a genius, but it does feature an uncannily accurate central performance by Jim Carrey. Courtney Love and Kaufman’s fellow Taxi star Danny DeVito co-star. (118 min)