Movie Spotlight

That porker-of-destiny story line about a young pig that wants to be a sheep dog did not inspire confidence in the 1995 Babe (ABC Sunday at 7 p.m.), but its elaborate mixture of live action, animatronics and computer graphics proved delightfully effective. What all the effects have created is a curious sheep farm situated somewhere between enchantment and reality. Its nominal bosses are the taciturn Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) and his well-rounded wife (Magda Szubanski), but the creatures with the most engaging personalities are the farm animals, which, thanks to all that effects magic, move their lips and speak English when the Hoggetts are conveniently not around. Babe, the runt of a litter of Large White Yorkshire pigs, almost doesn’t get to the farm at all. But when Farmer Hoggett eyes him at a county fair, narrator Roscoe Lee Browne records “a faint sense of common destiny” passing between them.

The Wizard of Oz (CBS Friday at 8:30 p.m.), MGM’s unimprovable musical version of L. Frank Baum’s fairy tale, one of those movies that justifies the entire studio system. With Judy Garland as Dorothy, Scarecrow Ray Bolger, Tin Woodsman Jack Haley and Bert Lahr (a “dandy lion”) as her three comrades. Margaret Hamilton as everyone’s favorite Wicked Witch and Frank Morgan as the crafty, silver-tongued Wizard. The great score is by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, and the brisk, irresistible direction is by Victor Fleming.

Safe (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.) This elegantly unnerving 1995 film by Todd Haynes, is all about uncertainty. A strange illness descends on its protagonist (Julianne Moore) and the insecurity and unease she feels spills over into the audience. Insidious and provocative, “Safe” refuses to lend a hand, avoids taking sides or pointing the way. Everything that happens in this beautifully controlled enigma is open to multiple interpretations, and that extends finally to the title’s meaning as well. A measure of “Safe’s” subversiveness is that it mimics the forms of standard genres only to turn familiar conventions inside out. Its theme, for instance, is apparently the right-thinking one of the dangers of environmental pollution, but the deeper you get into the story, the more uncertain that becomes. And while its “healthy woman gets sick and fights back” structure has a shrewd and superficial resemblance to numerous movies of the week, “Safe” finally encourages you to view all the stages of Carol’s story as toxic in different ways, and even to think that perhaps her time of greatest illness is the closest she comes to a kind of life. Haynes has created not a simple cautionary tale about the air we breathe but a withering portrait of American society.