Prime-Time Flicks

Chinatown (KCOP tonight at 8) is one of the quintessential private-eye yarns and one of the finest films of the ‘70s, involving a story of love and murder provoked by an idealist posing as a cynic, whose curiosity uncovers the truth and thereby destroys that which he most wants to protect. Written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski and starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston.

Director Charles Shyer and co-writer-producer Nancy Meyers have lots of fun in their 1987 comedy Baby Boom (KTLA Monday at 8 p.m.), sticking an adorable infant with an avowedly single workaholic (Diane Keaton, in a dream part).

The unnerving, edge-of-your-seat 1985 thriller Jagged Edge (KTTV Monday at 8 p.m.) offers a roller coaster ride through San Francisco’s playgrounds of the privileged in which attorney Glenn Close defends Jeff Bridges, accused of murdering his newspaper heiress wife.

Recalling his life as a 1945 Army recruit in Mississippi in the winning, bittersweet 1988 Biloxi Blues (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.), Neil Simon has come up with some marvelous moments, and director Mike Nichols turns the sentimental story into something darker, richer, more underplayed: nostalgia with pinpricks of pain, in a mood of hard-edged reverie. With Matthew Broderick re-creating his Broadway role as Simon’s alter ego.

David Cronenberg’s dazzling, unsettling 1986 remake of The Fly (KTTV Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is as much a romantic tragedy as a black-humored horror film, but it unfolds with such eerie grandeur that it will leave you stoked with a creepy high hours after it’s over. Jeff Goldblum stars.

The Outlaw Josey Wales (KCOP Tuesday at 8 p.m.) remains one of the best and most ambitious films Clint Eastwood has ever directed, a handsome 1976 Western in which Eastwood plays a farmer turned avenging outlaw when his family is massacred by a band of Northern guerrillas during the Civil War.

Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake of Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster classic Scarface (KTLA Wednesday at 8 p.m.; concluding Thursday at 8 p.m.) moves the action from Chicago in the ‘20s to Miami of the present, but for all its operatic razzle-dazzle, it becomes a lurid exercise in wretched excess. Al Pacino has the title role as a doomed drug kingpin.

WarGames (KTLA Saturday at 6 p.m.) is a taut, ingenious 1983 winner in which high school computer whiz Matthew Broderick blunders into a game, Global Thermonuclear War, with the Defense Department’s computer, which keeps ticking away after Broderick calls it quits.

KCOP offers Sam Peckinpah’s controversial, influential 1969 Western The Wild Bunch (Saturday at 8 p.m.), and KDOC presents the gritty landmark 1975 TV movie Hustling (Saturday at 9 p.m.), which Fay Kanin adapted from Gail Sheehy’s book on Manhattan street prostitutes; Lee Remick and Jill Clayburgh star.