BORN TO BE BAD (1950, b/w)
BBC Two, 1.45pm
Another instalment in BBC Two’s short season by the director Nicholas Ray, Born to be Bad almost feels like a prophetic piece of high-gloss soap opera in its lurid celebration of Joan Fontaine’s venal, grasping, unrepentant femme fatale. Hiding her true nature in pursuit of a wealthy husband, Christabel (Fontaine) steals and marries her own cousin’s fiancé (Zachary Scott) despite being romantically involved with a cynical writer (Robert Ryan). Mel Ferrer smoulders in a stand-out support role as a flamboyant artist. (94 min)
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CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)
TCM, 9pm
Hollywood Production Code rules obliged the director Richard Brooks to tone down the homosexual subtext of the Tennessee Williams play that spawned this sultry Southern family saga. The pressure-cooker plot centres on the unspoken sexual friction between Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor) and her tormented former athlete husband Brick (Paul Newman). The arrival of the bullying family patriarch Big Daddy (Burl Ives) stokes up the tension further still. Taylor and Newman are riveting, but Williams hated this coy screen version of his play so much that he urged film- goers to boycott it. (128 min)
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REPO MAN (1984)
Sci-Fi, 10pm
The short but subversive Hollywood career of the British-born maverick director Alex Cox began with Repo Man. Produced by a former member of the Monkees, Michael Nesmith, this offbeat debut stars Emilio Estevez and Sy Richardson as car repossessors in a scuzzy, comic-book sci-fi vision of early 1980s Los Angeles. Much of the film anticipates Tarantino’s early career, including the glowing suitcase homage to Robert Aldrich’s 1955 thriller Kiss Me Deadly, later recycled in Pulp Fiction. Two decades later, this highly original punk comedy still stands up as a witty, energetic, cheerfully nihilistic commentary on life in Reagan’s America. (92 min)
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WOMAN OF THE DUNES (1964, b/w)
BBC Four, 11.30pm
Exquisitely shot in monochome, this striking Japanese parable earned an Oscar nomination for its director, Hiroshi Teshigahara. Stranded overnight in a remote desert, a scientist (Eiji Okada) is offered a bed in a house at the bottom of a giant sandpit. Finding that he is trapped there indefinitely, he begins helping the owner (Kyôko Kishida) to shovel away the sand that constantly threatens to engulf her home. Nodding to Beckett and Bergman, Teshigahara’s cryptic allegorical fable remains erotically charged four decades later. (123 min)
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THE SIXTH HAPPINESS (1997)
BBC Two, 12.20am
An unexpectedly uplifting coming-of-age drama, The Sixth Happiness was written by Firdaus Kanga, a Bombay-born British author who has grown up with the potentially lethal affliction of brittle bone disease. Starring Kanga himself in the lead role, this solidly made work of lightly fictionalised autobiography depicts Kanga’s tragi-comic struggles with disability, family and homosexuality. Though occasionally let down by its amateurish tone, Waris Hussein’s quirky drama is a compelling tribute to human resilience, especially in Kanga’s spirited re-creation of his troubled teenage years. (97 min)