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Perry Mason Returns--not as a series but...

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Perry Mason Returns--not as a series but as a new TV movie airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on NBC. Raymond Burr stars (of course) as Erle Stanley Gardner’s indomitable attorney, this time to defend his former secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale, as before) against murder charges. William Katt, Hale’s real-life son, Patrick O’Neal, Richard Anderson and Cassie Yates co-star.

Gold (Channel 9 Sunday at 6 p.m.), one of the most entertaining action-adventure pictures of the ‘70s, stars Roger Moore as an intrepid South African mining engineer coping with a disastrous flood triggered by Bradford Dillman, the nefarious son-in-law of the mine’s crusty old owner (played with panache by Ray Milland), whose lovely, bored daughter has become romantically entangled with Moore. As a disaster epic, it’s one of the best, spectacularly staged and great fun to watch.

Airing opposite Perry Mason Returns on Channel 11 Sunday at 9 p.m. is No Way to Treat a Lady, a stylish suspense yarn directed beautifully by Jack Smight and starring Rod Steiger as a crazed killer who’s also a master of disguise--much to the perplexity of police detective George Segal. The lady is Lee Remick, never more stunning.

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The Producers (Channel 5 Monday at 8 p.m.), Mel Brooks’ first and funniest film, stars Zero Mostel as a desperate Broadway producer struggling to launch a truly terrible Broadway musical, the unforgettable highlight of which is its “Springtime for Hitler” production number. Gene Wilder is Mostel’s zany associate, Dick Shawn is Hitler.

Also airing at 8 p.m. (on Channel 13) is Raggedy Man, which never quite reconciles its tender slice of life, which tells of Sissy Spacek’s capable single mother, raising two boys and working as a telephone operator in a small Texas town during World War II, and its melodramatic, out-of-left-field finish. Even so, it’s well worth a watch as a wonderfully wrought, beautifully acted period piece.

Barry Manilow makes his TV acting debut in the new Copacabana (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.), a musical comedy inspired by his hit song of the same name. Manilow plays a young pianist and composer of the ‘40s who gets a job at New York’s famous Copacabana nightclub and falls in love with struggling chorus girl Annette O’Toole. Joseph Bologna is the suave, sinister proprietor of a Havana nightclub who sweet-talks O’Toole into working for him. Waris Hussein directed.

The joyous Meredith Willson musical The Music Man, with Robert Preston re-creating his hit stage role, airs Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. on Channel 28.

Woody Allen made his directorial debut in the mischievous Take the Money and Run (Channel 5 Friday at 8 p.m.), in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, who’s got to be the world’s most inept criminal. He’s so appealingly hapless you don’t think of him as a criminal but as a kind of everyman in whom we can all recognize our sense of frustrated helplessness at being at the mercy of a toweringly indifferent universe. Not all of Allen’s gags hit the mark, but Take the Money and Run is still fun.

Directed by Martin Ritt and adapted by Julius Epstein from the Peter De Vries novella “Witch’s Milk,” Pete ‘n’ Tillie (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.) goes all the way from comedy to starkest tragedy and in doing so never quite regains its equilibrium. Even so, it boasts splendid performances from Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett as a pair of sardonic singles who meet and marry in San Francisco only to be confronted with cruel and unexpected grief.

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A wise, delicious musical sendup of all the absurdities and hypocrisies surrounding the issue of sexual orientation, Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria (CBS Saturday at 9 p.m.) stars Julie Andrews as a singer so down on her luck in Depression-era Paris that she accepts a job as a female impersonator, quickly becoming a star under the tutelage of a real female impersonator, the irrepressible Robert Preston. James Garner is the guy confused by his attraction to Andrews.

Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life (Channel 28 Saturday at 10:15 p.m.) ranges from whimsy to social comment to human comedy. James Stewart is the small-town banker diverted from suicide by his guardian angel (Henry Travers), who shows him what his home town would have been like had he never been born. A timeless tonic for holiday blues.

Selected evening cable fare: Night of the Comet (Z Sunday at 9, Movie Channel Monday at 10, Z Thursday at 9, HBO Friday at 8:30); Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (WTBS Monday at 10:30); Birdy (ON & SelecTV Tuesday at 7); Seven Beauties (Z Tuesday at 7); The Bostonians (Movie Channel Tuesday at 10); Saint Jack (Lifetime Wednesday at 8); Irreconcilable Differences (Cinemax Friday at 8, Movie Channel Saturday at 9).

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