MOVIES OF THE WEEK

Captains Courageous (Channel 5 Sunday at 3 p.m.), Victor Fleming’s 1937 Kipling sea saga, with Spencer Tracy teaching spoiled-rotten Freddie Bartholomew the ropes, is one of our favorites. It’s also a favorite of king colorizer Ted Turner, who’s set his computerized kadoodlers on it. A suggestion to movie lovers: Skip this showing and wait until Monday at 1:30 a.m., when Channel 5 will show “Captains” again, apparently without Turner’s visual aids. Instead, switch channels to The Far Country (Channel 13 at 3 p.m.), a first-class 1955 Anthony Mann-Jimmy Stewart Western, with honest color and marvelous landscapes.

Sunday evening offers inept Western villains Don Knotts and Tim Conway in The Apple Dumpling Gang (NBC at 7 p.m.); staunch marshal Burt Lancaster up against a hostile town in Michael Winner’s Lawman (Channel 13 at 8 p.m.); Denzel Washington as a gutsy Los Angeles high-school principal in The George McKenna Story (CBS at 9 p.m.), and Elizabeth Taylor and Van Johnson suffering glamorously in Richard Brooks’ adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s melancholy “Babylon Revisited,” The Last Time I Saw Paris (Channel 9 at 11 p.m.).

Half Moon Street (Channel 5 Monday and Saturday at 8 p.m.), by Bob Swaim, American director of the French “La Balance,” is a sleepy thriller with Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine behaving scandalously in London, while spies and murderers lurk around, mostly ineffectively.

Shoot the Moon (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a special favorite of critic Pauline Kael, is a fierce, no-holds-barred look at a disintegrating Marin County marriage--with writer Bo Goldman, director Alan Parker and leads Albert Finney and Diane Keaton sparing nothing to plumb the turmoil wrought by a writer’s infidelity and flight from his family. One highly charged moment: Keaton’s sad-nostalgic bathtub rendition of the Beatles’ “If I Fell.”

Meanwhile, Meteor (Channel 11 Tuesday at 8 p.m.), a special favorite of no one we’ve heard of, asks the question: What would Sean Connery, Natalie Wood and Henry Fonda do if gigantic meteors started hurtling toward New York? Director Ronald Neame ponders the dilemma, gingerly.

Sally Field’s first Oscar-winning turn as Norma Rae (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m.) is an idealistic portrait of a Southern textile worker who defies convention to help trigger a strike. In director Martin Ritt’s sympathetic hands, it’s a tribute to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances; if it doesn’t touch greatness, it does touch goodness.

Both greatness and goodness elude the normally excellent Meryl Streep in Mike Nichols’ itchy Heartburn (Channel 13 Wednesday at 8 p.m.), adapted from Nora Ephron’s tale of her woes with philandering hubby Carl Bernstein. Despite Streep, Nichols and co-star Jack Nicholson, it plays like a yuppie howl of self-pity, kvetches of the rich and famous, a cri de couer from a cold heart. Perhaps Ephron, who has scripted the wonderful “When Harry Met Sally,” should have sued herself for defamation of character.

The Hunter (Channel 13 Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a last sad, lackluster outing for Steve McQueen, playing a real-life modern bounty hunter in a movie that’s unwanted, dead or alive.

Yanks (Channel 13 Friday at 8 p.m.), directed by John Schlesinger from a script by Collin Welland and Walter Bernstein, derives surprisingly little interest from the romantic adventures of U.S. GIs stationed in Britain--despite Richard Gere, Vanessa Redgrave and acres of beautifully recreated World War II London.

A movie with a reputation--well deserved--is Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (Channel 13 Saturday at noon). A movie with no reputation that we like anyway is Silver Bears (Channel 5 Saturday at 6 p.m.), a piece of romantic tomfoolery about world silver market speculation to which writer Peter Stone, director Ivan Passer and stars Michael Caine, Cybill Shepherd and Louis Jourdan bring a gossamer twinkle.

The incandescent Robin Williams shines again in George Roy Hill’s sturdy adaptation of John Irving’s tragicomic family saga and feminist satire The World According to Garp (Channel 13 Saturday at 9 p.m.), also the movie in which Glenn Close made her first big impression as Garp’s free-spirited mother and John Lithgow stole scenes as a transsexual football player.