Bronco Billy (KCOP Sunday at 5 p.m.)...
Bronco Billy (KCOP Sunday at 5 p.m.) may be the most blissfully sweet movie that Clint Eastwood will ever make. In this 1980 winner, he directs himself as a sharpshooting, trick-riding star of a tiny, struggling Wild West show. In the finest tradition of ‘30s screwball comedy, Sondra Locke plays an icy, uppity runaway heiress who oh-so-reluctantly signs on as his assistant. “Bronco Billy†appeals to the dreamer in all of us, suggesting that we’d all be better off being whatever and whoever we wanted to be.
Fabulous-looking but needlessly confusing, The Abyss (KTTV Monday at 7:30 p.m., XETV Monday at 8 p.m.) is a 1989 undersea adventure involving the rescue of a sunken nuclear sub; Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio star.
With its three primary characters--lifelong women friends who seem to be leading comfortable, rewarding lives but operating in a near constant state of emotional crisis--the 1993 TV movie Woman on the Ledge (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.) possesses all of the theatricality of a daytime soap opera. But then its stars, Deirdre Hall, Leslie Charleson and Colleen Zink Penter, are all soap regulars.
My Son Johnny (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.), a 1991 TV movie, taps into a powerful family issue: the guilt of the benign, idealistic mother who should have stepped into a destructive situation but didn’t. The impact is undercut, however, by Hollywood conventions of what a courtroom drama should be. Michele Lee struggles valiantly as the mother of battling brothers Rick Schroder and Corin Nemic.
Although by no means flawless, Longtime Companion (KCET Wednesday at 9 p.m.) became the first feature film with a number of well-established actors to deal with AIDS. The movie is an illuminating, heart-wrenching experience. Starting in the summer of 1981, writer Craig Lucas and director Norman Rene follow the lives of three gay couples and their friends over the next eight years. Theatrical in style, with moments of forgivable preachiness and sentimentality, the 1990 film is dominated by Bruce Davison’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of a rich man who becomes increasingly mature as he cares for his dying lover (Mark Lamos).
Glitz (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.), a routine 1988 TV movie based on Elmore Leonard’s best-selling detective novel, stars Jimmy Smits as a Miami police officer who tracks the killer of a call girl through the casinos of Atlantic City and Puerto Rico.
If you want to clear a crowded theater illegally, yell “Fire!†If you want to clear a crowded living room, turn on the 1991 Fire! Trapped on the 37th Floor (ABC Saturday at 8 p.m.). Based on the spectacular high-rise fire in Downtown Los Angeles in May, 1988, it’s as banal as TV docudrama gets, about as thrilling as two hours of unabated smoke inhalation. Caught in the blaze are Lisa Hartman, Peter Scolari and Lee Majors.
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