Sunday’s movie best probably occurs well before...

Sunday’s movie best probably occurs well before sundown. There’s Mysterious Island (Channel 5 Sunday at 3 p.m.) a Jules Verne Civil War fantasy with Ray Harryhausen special effects and some of Bernard Herrmann’s spookiest music; The Hanging Tree (Channel 13 at 3 p.m.), a Gary Cooper Western, directed by Delmer Daves; and a Clark Gable-Sophia Loren comedy, It Started in Naples (Channel 2 at 3:30 p.m.).

Things begin to get dire around suppertime: the emergence of Sheena (Channel 5 at 6 p.m.), with Tanya Roberts as the Queen of the Jungle. This movie should probably be projected only on waterfalls in Kenyan game preserves at 4 in the morning. The rest are repeats of made-for-TV movies: Time Flyer (ABC at 7 p.m.), with Peter Coyote; Between Two Women (ABC at 9 p.m.), a Farrah Fawcett-Colleen Dewhurst drama; and Into Thin Air (CBS at 9:30 p.m.), a missing-person story starring Ellen Burstyn.

Also on Sunday, there’s Three on a Match (NBC at 9 p.m.), a new TV movie pilot about a trio of escaped prisoners (Patrick Cassidy, David Hemmings, Bruce A. Young) who team up and try to go straight.

For anyone who loved “Sheena,” and didn’t like our waterfall crack, Monday brings just what you were waiting for: The Lonely Lady (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.), in which, and we quote, “Pia Zadora stars as a naive but ambitious young screenwriter, who, with hopes of succeeding in the film industry, is manipulated by the worst of Hollywood . . . in a drama based on a best seller by Harold Robbins.” (We know this is just what you were waiting for; don’t try to lie.)

The rest of us will have to make do with High Noon (Channel 11 Monday at 9 p.m.), in which Gary Cooper--courtesy of Carl Foreman’s passionate script and Fred Zinnemann’s tight-lipped direction--counts the hours, the minutes, the seconds until Frank Miller arrives on the noon train . . . while not just his darling (Grace Kelly), but a whole town, gradually forsake him. No one had as spine-tingling a walk down a main street until The Wild Bunch 17 years later.

Tuesday, Coop reappears--as part of a week devoted to his movies--playing a rebellious air-war advocate in Otto Preminger’s 1955 courtroom melodrama, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (Channel 11 Tuesday at 9 p.m.). Next night, he plays iron man Yankee first-sacker Lou Gehrig in Pride of the Yankees (Channel 11 Wednesday at 9 p.m.). This movie--made in 1942, by Sam Wood and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz--sometimes has curious echoes, in structure and camera angles, of 1941’s “Citizen Kane.”

Quest for Fire (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is a tour de force by Jean-Jacques Annaud (“Name of the Rose”), about prehistoric man (Everett McGill), woman (Rae Dawn Chong, looking scrumptious) and their stunning, epic search across primitive landscapes, for civilization’s tools.

Where were you in ‘73? If you were a teen-ager, chances are you spent part of it watching American Graffiti (Channel 13 Wednesday at 8 p.m.), where you learned where everyone was back in ’62 on the last night of summer--before the new school year, the assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran- contras , the ‘70s, the ‘80s, all that awful stuff. Everyone identifies with this movie, and, sometimes everyone seems to be acting in it (R. Dreyfuss, H. Ford, C. Williams, C. Clark, etc., etc.). Our own favorite moment occurs when Kathy Quinlan, at the hop, tosses her head at Ronny Howard and smirks, “Joe College . . . strikes out!”

The Thursday Coop Show offers William Wyler’s elegant Western, The Westerner (Channel 11 Thursday at 9 p.m.) with Walter Brennan’s unforgettable performance as sadistic, wily, crawlingly romantic old Judge Roy Bean. Also, there’s a Thursday choice between science fiction at its most optimistic and childlike and science fiction at its most pessimistic and in-your-face nasty: either Jim Henson’s lavish sub-Tolkien fantasy The Dark Crystal (CBS at 9 p.m.) or director L. Q. Jones’ horrifically funny look at man, and man’s best friend, after the Bomb, A Boy and His Dog (Channel 13 at 8 p.m.). The latter comes from a Harlan Ellison story, which gives you fair warning on the differences: No one--except maybe Isaac Asimov--ever accused Harlan Ellison of being a Muppet.

Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.) takes place--like most of his movies--in trap rooms and dark corridors, where all your perspectives are distorted, where the sunniest innocence may conceal the most demonic evil. Based on Ira Levin’s thriller, it’s a horror story which doesn’t need gore, slashings or rampaging bogeymen because it knows where deeper horrors lurk: inside ourselves, waiting to tear their way to the light. Mia Farrow is Rosemary, John Cassavetes her Guy, and Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer and Ralph Bellamy are among the neighbors who try to make them--and baby--feel at home.

Later, there’s John Schlesinger’s fairly successful 1967 adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd (Channel 28 Friday at 11 p.m), with Julie Christie, at her prettiest and earthiest.

Saturday offers a mixed bag: a first-class, neurotic film noir , The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Channel 56 at 11 a.m.); Richard Dreyfuss as a hip private eye in The Big Fix (Channel 13 at 5 p.m.); another Ira Levin-derived thriller, The Stepford Wives (Channel 13 at 8 p.m.); Marlon Brando as an Oriental scamp in John Patrick’s comedy about Americanization in Okinawa, Teahouse of the August Moon (Channel 28 at 9 p.m.); and a great action epic, Anthony Mann’s El Cid (Channel 11 at 12:30 a.m.).