The Last Precinct (NBC Sunday at 8...
The Last Precinct (NBC Sunday at 8 p.m.), a TV movie serving as a series pilot, introduces us to Jonathan Perpich, Eric Hudson, Adam West, Keenan Wynn and other members of Precinct 56, who the first time out are on a case involving a drug-sniffing dog.
If you haven’t ever caught up with Cinderella Liberty (Channel 9 Sunday at 2 and 6 p.m.), which has James Caan and Marsha Mason in a delightful romance between a sailor and a hooker.
Sunday at 9 p.m., ABC repeats the TV movie Single Bars, Single Women, a comedy-drama inspired by the Dolly Parton song and starring Shelley Hack, Tony Danza, Paul Michael Glaser, Christine Lahti, Mare Winningham and Keith Gordon.
Also airing Sunday at 9 p.m. (on CBS) is a rerun of Agatha Christie’s Murder With Mirrors, a Miss Marple mystery starring Helen Hayes and Bette Davis (rescheduled from Jan. 11).
Bob Hope makes his TV movie debut in A Masterpiece of Murder (NBC Monday at 8 p.m.), playing a down-on-his-luck ex-police detective who reluctantly teams with wealthy, retired master thief Don Ameche to solve a string of art thefts and killings (illustrated on the cover).
Papillon (Channel 5 Monday at 7:30 p.m.), one of the most relentlessly grueling screen epics ever made, is the first of a weeklong KTLA series of some of Steve McQueen’s best films. McQueen had the title role in this 1973 version of Henri Charriere’s best-selling expose of France’s brutal penal system on Devil’s Island in the ‘30s. Dustin Hoffman co-stars as a slight, myopic counterfeiter known to have sufficient funds to buy his freedom. Franklin Schaffner directed.
In Norman Jewison’s sleek, amusing Thomas Crown Affair (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), McQueen is a Boston millionaire who plots a perfect bank robbery for the fun of it--but has to reckon with glamorous insurance investigator Faye Dunaway. McQueen is splendid as a tough sailor in The Sand Pebbles (Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m.), Robert Wise’s massive, engaging if uneven film of the Richard McKenna novel about an American Navy gunboat on the Yangtze in 1926 involved in an incident which develops certain parallels to our involvement in Vietnam. Friday at 8 p.m. brings back Bullitt, one of the liveliest cop capers ever, filmed spectacularly in San Francisco and featuring McQueen as a hard-nosed policeman beleaguered by the Mafia on the one hand and a corrupt politician on the other.
Meanwhile it’s John Wayne week on Channel 11 at 9 p.m. The lineup consists entirely of Westerns, starting Monday with The Comancheros, a pleasant 1961 film most notable as the final film of its director Michael Curtiz, and concluding with Wayne’s ambitious if uneven attempt at directing, The Alamo (Thursday and Friday). Ironically, Part I of The Alamo airs opposite Part I of Michael Cimino’s stunning, provocative Vietnam saga The Deer Hunter (Channel 13 Thursday at 8 p.m.). Wayne made his last public appearance handing Cimino his Oscar for The Deer Hunter.
Renee Cho’s highly praised Jazz Is My Native Language, a documentary on musician Toshiko Akiyoshi, airs Friday at 10 p.m. on Channel 28.
Kung Fu: The Movie (CBS Saturday at 9 p.m.), a new TV picture, brings back David Carradine as martial arts master Kwai Chang Caine, a role he created in the “Kung Fu” TV series.
Hello, Dolly! (Channel 9 Saturday at 8 p.m.) is good fun even if Barbra Streisand was too young to play that determined Yonkers matchmaker who winds up with Walter Matthau.
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