FLAMING STAR (1960)
BBC Two, 1.30pm; Not Wales
Often cited as Elvis Presley’s best film, Flaming Star is a liberal-minded western directed by Clint Eastwood’s film-making mentor Don Siegel and based on the novel by Clair Huffaker. In a role originally written for Marlon Brando, Presley plays Pacer Burton, a cattle rancher’s son with Native American blood who is torn between warring white settlers and Kiowa braves. Fresh out of the Army, the young rocker gives an intense performance and keeps his singing to a minimum. Sadly, Siegel’s revisionist western was not a box office success and Presley spent the next decade making feeble bubblegum musicals. (101 min)
Advertisement
CHIHWASEON (2002)
BBC Four, 11pm
The veteran Korean director Im Kwon Taek re-creates the turbulent rise and fall of the 19th-century painter Jang Seung Up in this disjointed but passionate period piece. Jang (Choi Min Sik) lived a dissolute life of sex, booze and self-destructive behaviour, culminating in his fiery suicide in 1897. Behind its confusing flashbacks to Asian political history and overlong painting scenes, Chihwaseon is an engrossing variation on the evergreen theme of the tortured artist. (117 min)
WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968)
BBC One, 12.20am; Wales, 12.50am
Advertisement
When the 25-year-old British director Michael Reeves died of a drink and drugs overdose in 1969, he left behind just three films. His last, Witchfinder General, is now widely considered an unusually savage masterpiece of low-budget Gothic horror. Set during the English Civil War, it stars a deliciously sadistic Vincent Price as the notorious Matthew Hopkins, a murderous psychopath who abuses his witch-hunting powers for carnal pleasure and self-enrichment. Ian Ogilvy co-stars as a Roundhead captain who vows revenge on Hopkins for destroying his family. (86 min)