MOVIES OF THE WEEK

Mel Brooks’ 1974 Western parody Blazing Saddles (Channel 13 Sunday at 6 p.m.) is a piece of cowboy camp that never fails to makes strangers “smile when they say that,” right from the full-throated Frankie Laine title song to Brooks’ deranged antics as Gov. Lepetomane. But you have to wonder at the judgment of whichever studio executives nixed Brooks’ first choice for the movie’s lead: “Saddles” co-scenarist Richard Pryor. Did they feel he and co-star Gene Wilder lacked chemistry?

Pryor pops up briefly in the amusing Car Wash (Channel 5 Sunday at 6 p.m.), a blue-collar “day-in-the-life” comedy written by Joel Carmichael and directed by Michael Schultz.

Other Sunday fare includes Charles Bronson scowling at Toshiro Mifune in the East-vs.-West saga, Red Sun (Channel 13 at 8 p.m.) and Sean Connery as the best Bond of them all, for most of us, in the top-heavy but exciting West-vs.-East thriller, You Only Live Twice (ABC at 8:30 p.m.), directed by Lewis Gilbert, shot in Japan, and featuring Donald Pleasence and feline friend.

Henry Hathaway’s brassy, brawny 1965 Western The Sons of Katie Elder (Channel 11 Monday at 8 p.m.) is notable for its on-screen vigor and two off-screen bits of drama: star John Wayne’s recovery from lung cancer and supporting player Dennis Hopper’s reunion with Hathaway after their legendary 78-take standoff in the 1958 “From Hell to Texas.” (Hathaway won.)

Curtis Hanson’s The Bedroom Window (Channel 13 Monday at 8 p.m.) is a pastiche Hitchcock thriller with clever new twists and an idiosyncratic cast: Steve Guttenberg, Isabelle Huppert and Elizabeth McGovern.

Although the dialogue is weak, Brian De Palma’s voluptuous camera style--caressing while it kills--makes Carrie (Channel 13 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), from the Stephen King novel, one of the most baroquely exciting of teen-page movie thrillers: a hideous portrayal of small-town sexual repression, bigotry and the worst that happens when hormones run amok. Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving and John Travolta play the omnipotent victim and her helpless high school bullies.

The Sand Pebbles (Channel 5 Wednesday and Thursday at 8 p.m.) shows Robert Wise in a high epic mood. The story, based on Richard McKenna’s novel of a U.S. Navy gunboat cruising the Yangtze River during the social turbulence of 1926 China, gives Steve McQueen one of his ultimate outsider roles: an intransigent engineer whose sense of honor and professionalism collide with the chaos of war and the conformism of his shipmates.

Surprise! Surprise! It’s Friday the 13th: Part VI, Jason Lives (Channel 13 Wednesday at 8 p.m.). You can’t keep a good maniac down. If you thought this hockey-masked homicidal nut had gotten hurt in Parts 2 or 3 or bitten the dust in Parts 4 or 5, you’re really gullible. He’s still around, thrashing, slashing and bashing. His film maker friends are still in there, trashing and cashing in. Obviously conventional weapons don’t work on this guy. Let’s try something really lethal. Let’s make him watch one of his own movies.

Compared to Jason, Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates was a relatively tame psychotic. He had feelings and moods; he spoke lines; he didn’t wear a hockey mask. Norman returns in Richard Franklin’s 1983 Psycho II (Channel 13 Thursday at 8 p.m.) to a town that doesn’t understand a poor, mixed-up guy who let a hobby--taxidermy--run away with him. This slickly pseudo-Hitchcockian but uncharmingly derivative sequel has a shower scene that may have been intended for Jamie Lee Curtis. (Meg Tilly fills in.)

Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, director Norman Jewison and cinematographer Haskell Wexler came up with a glassy, glossy, super-chic visual texture and mood in the romance-caper thriller, The Thomas Crown Affair (Channel 5 Friday at 8 p.m.) that today looks almost classic. And Gary Busey does a Buddy Holly impersonation in The Buddy Holly Story (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.) that’s uncanny. But they’re both pseudo-classics, pale copies of the genuine article.

Genuine classics are in evidence on Saturday: a classic big-scale adult Western in William Wyler’s 1958 The Big Country (Channel 13 at noon); classic Clouseau in Blake Edwards’ 1964 A Shot in the Dark (Channel 5 at 3 p.m.); and a classic Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant romantic comedy in George Cukor’s Holiday (Channel 28 at 10 p.m.).

The ratings checks on movies in the TV log are provided by the Tribune TV Log listings service.