THE SPY IN BLACK
(1939, b/w) Channel 4, 1.15pm
Shot on the eve of the Second World War, the historic debut collaboration between the director Michael Powell and the writer Emeric Pressburger contains many of the duo’s stylistic signatures, notably the darkly amoral undercurrents and a striking use of composition. A Nazi submarine commander (Conrad Veidt) leads a clandestine scheme to land in the Orkney Islands and contact a cell of treacherous double agents. But British Intelligence agents are shadowing them, and the German attempts at sabotage backfire. Though clearly constrained by budget and politics, Powell and Pressburger find light and shade in this patriotic potboiler. (82 min)
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DOOR TO DOOR
(TVM, 2002) Sky Movies 1, 8pm
Four decades of American history form the backdrop to Door to Door, a funny and moving made-for-television feature starring William H. Macy as a salesman with cerebral palsy. Based on the true story of Bill Porter, Steven Schachter’s bittersweet drama feels like a cousin of Forrest Gump, with Macy’s unlikely hero charming and cajoling his customers while the Vietnam War and the Aids epidemic loom large. Helen Mirren co-stars as Porter’s mother, even though the British actress is barely four years older than her screen son in real life. (90 min)
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ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS (1995)
Sky One, 9pm
The second of Jim Carrey’s career-making turns as the hyperactive pet detective Ace Ventura is a far more shambolic affair than the orginal, juggling crude humour with inspired spoofs of mainstream thrillers, mostly at the expense of Sylvester Stallone. The slender plot, which revolves around Ventura’s mission to track down a missing African bat, is inevitably made secondary to slapstick clowning by the director Steve Oedekerk. All the same, the jokes come thick and fast, and Carrey’s explosive screen charisma remains a force to be reckoned with. Simon Callow reprises his role from the 1994 original. (90 min)
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BLOOM (2003)
BBC Four, 9pm
While previous attempts to film James Joyce’s literary milestone Ulysses have been diluted or heavily censored, Sean Walsh’s inventive adaptation makes a bold stab at capturing the novel’s experimental, sexual and scatalogical elements. Starring Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom, Angeline Ball as his adulterous wife and Hugh O’Conor as Stephen Dedalus, Bloom inevitably fillets Joyce’s freewheeling panorama of early 20th century Dublin, sacrificing some of its anarchic energy. But Walsh still wrings a fascinating narrative from the text, rich in salty humour and intoxicated by language. (113 min)
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WINTER KILLS (1979)
BBC Two, 12.20am
It is well worth staying up for William Richert’s rarely screened cult oddity, a comic thriller based on a thinly veiled version of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath. Adapted from a novel by Richard Condon, who also wrote the lone-gunman classic The Manchurian Candidate, Richert’s dark farce stars Jeff Bridges as the dysfunctional youngest son of a Kennedy-style political dynasty and John Huston as his lecherous, Machiavellian father. Anthony Perkins and Elizabeth Taylor co-star. (96 min)