Weekend TV : A Time for Non-Football Heroes After a Diet of Bowl Games

After a New Year’s weekend packed with parades, parties and football games, television will ease viewers into the New Year with a Sunday night schedule of heroic movies.

John Wayne and Montgomery Clift get things rolling at 8 p.m. on Channel 13 in the 1948 classic, “Red River.” David Carradine also stars at 8 p.m. on Channel 9 in “Americana,” the 1981 fable about the battle between the impulse to create and the impulse to destroy, set amidst the Vietnam War.

Two networks offer their own romanticized heroics at 9 p.m. Willie Nelson and Richard Widmark star in “Once Upon a Texas Train,” a new television movie on CBS about a Texas Ranger and his posse chasing down an aging outlaw and his gang. NBC counters with the heart-tugging drama “An Officer and a Gentlemen,” set in a Naval officer training camp in the Pacific Northwest and starring Richard Gere, Debra Winger and Academy Award-winning Louis Gossett Jr.