The possibility of three convicts getting outside...

The possibility of three convicts getting outside the walls of Alcatraz without drowning provides the basis for Escape From Alcatraz (KCAL Sunday at 8 p.m.), a handsome 1979 film of relentlessly building suspense. Clint Eastwood stars as Frank Morris, the ringleader. Although the film makes a firmly persuasive case against so resolutely non-rehabilitative a penitentiary as the The Rock was, it is scarcely a message movie. The warden (Patrick McGoohan) is a tight-lipped monster who delights in crushing the human spirit, which simply makes a tough guy like Eastwood’s Morris all the more determined to get out.

The Silence of the Lambs (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m.) is based on Thomas Harris’ mesmerizing book about an institutionalized psychopath who is used to identify a serial killer. In his fine 1991 adaptation, director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally have focused on a duel of wits and wills between Jodie Foster’s young FBI trainee and that paradigm of evil, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins). For audiences, the fascination is how much both actors are able to do with their literally or occupationally straitjacketed characters.

An obvious, stereotypical, overly melodramatic old-cop, young-cop baptism-by-fire story, Colors (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) is given a lot of scalding immediacy by director Dennis Hopper, and an excellect cast (Robert Duvall, Sean Penn, the late Trinidad Silva). Hopper shows us the low-rent side of Los Angeles--the barrios, back streets, and gang-infested alleys--as we’ve rarely seen it on screen.

Dense, satisfying, feverishly inventive and a technical marvel, the 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (KTLA Friday at 8 p.m.) has Robert Zemeckis as its director and Richard Williams, an Academy Award winner for “A Christmas Carol” (1972), as director of animation, under the joined banners of Disney’s Touchstone and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin companies. All hands and artists involved may have created a film that no one sees just once. But--animation aside--the treasure of the piece is Hoskins’ pungent, visceral comic performance.

Better than most of the Stephen King adaptations, Misery (KCOP Friday at 8 p.m.), this 1990 Rob Reiner-William Goldman collaboration has a creepy claustrophobia and a pair of expert performances by Kathy Bates (winner of a Best Actress Oscar) and James Caan. It’s about a pulp best-selling writer who is imprisoned by his “greatest fan” in the snowbound Colorado Sierra.