With the 1987 The Untouchables (KCOP Sunday...

With the 1987 The Untouchables (KCOP Sunday at 6 p.m.), director Brian De Palma and writer David Mamet restage the Chicago Prohibition-era liquor wars as a modern Western. This is a stripped-down battle between straight-arrow G-man (Kevin Costner as Eliot Ness) and flamboyant thug (Robert DeNiro as Al Capone). The film offers Sean Connery as the streetwise Chicago-Irish cop incensed at injustice (the role won Connery won best supporting actor that year).

Michael Mann’s 1993 The Last of the Mohicans (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.) comes at you like a tomahawk. Hard, fast and brutal, it slashes and leaves you for dead. Undeniably exciting, its impact comes at the expense of some of the gentler virtues that even top-drawer barn-burners really shouldn’t ignore. Unashamedly based more on the 1936 movie version than the James Fenimore Cooper novel, it takes place in 1757 during the French and Indian War, when those two sides united in an attempt to drive the British, who had tribal allies of their own, out of North America. A lean and steely-eyed Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Hawkeye, colonial-born but raised as the adopted son of the Mohicans’ chief.

Rainbow Drive (KCOP Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is a sleek, low-key 1990 police thriller starring Peter Weller as a hardheaded cop who inadvertently discovers a multiple murder in Laurel Canyon. This is one of those mysteries in which corruption proves to be rampant in the highest places, trickling down to intimidate the man on the beat. It’s strictly conventional genre material, but director Bobby Roth has managed visually to bring dimension to thin material. The 1990 made-for-cable movie belongs to Weller with his steely gaze.

Saturday evening offers Hitchcock suspense with the 1972 Frenzy (KCET at 11 p.m.), the best of the director’s later films.