ITV CHRISTMAS EVE
Won Ton Ton —the Dog Who Saved Hollywood About 75 former Hollywood stars alone make a good reasonforwatching this affectionate satire on the film career of Rin Tin Tin, the Alsation star of the silent cinema. 1975
CHRISTMAS DAY Journey Back to Oz Nostalgia, nostalgia everywhere in this cartoon sequel to The Wizard of Oz. Based on L Frank Baum's own first sequel to his children's classic, it adds Dorothy to the plot and gives her the voice of Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy Garland, the original Dorothy. 1971
The Parent Trap 'Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills' boasted the posters for this Disney film, in which the Sixties' greatest child star plays twin sisters intent on reuniting their parents, a story filmed 10 years previously in Britain as Twice Upon a Time. 1961
CHRISTMAS SUNDAY
The Bugs Bunny — Road Runner Movie A side-splitting selection of cartoons, featuring five Bugs Bunnies complete, plus extracts from 16 of the animated sagas featuring that speedy desert bird, The Road Runner. 1979
Moonraker
A Night at the Opera
Each new James Bond film on TV is a bit like an annual outing to a pantomime: comforting old characters and familiar situations where credibility and logic play second fiddle to the wonders that delight the eye. The plot relies alternately on the inconceivable and the impossible and all the proven ingredients are here, with the customary quota of mechanical marvels, including a jet-propelled gondola that converts into a hovercraft, plus an impressive outer-space battle at the end. 1979
Marx Brothers lunacy at its best. The plot includes the shipboard chaos in which dozens of people cram into one tiny cabin, and the 'contract' scene between Groucho and Chico in which Chico, shown the 'sanity clause' declares, 'There ain't no Sanity Claus' and tears it up. 1935
California Suite An omnibus-type film of several stories. Written by Neil Simon, it is much in the Simon mould with a judicious blend of comedy and drama. Among the star cast are Maggie Smith as a British actress who has been nominated for an Academy Award, Michael Caine as her antique-dealer husband, Walter Matthau as a businessman from Philadelphia, Jane Fonda as a wisecracking divorcee and Alan Alda as her ex-husband. 1978
TUESDAY 28 DEC The Muppet Movie Make way for the Muppets! Jim Henson and his personable puppet performers hit the big screen with Kermit the Frog at his rightful place at the centre of things, seeking his fortune in Hollywood. 1978
Smokey and the Bandit Another smash-'em-up chase movie, set in America's Deep South. But this one shows enough humour in the dialogue to make one wish there had been a few more words and a little less crashing of cars. The action is Road Runnerstyle stuff. Bandit (Burt Reynolds), the hero, is brilliant, and the 'smokeys' (cops), led by Jackie Gleason, are all clods. Their cars are forever landing in streams, canals or on bridges or the backs of other vehicles, as they hurtle in fruitless pursuit of Bandit's car. 1977
CHRISTMAS EVE Cops The film in which Buster Keaton is chased by what seems to be half the policemen in America. Brilliantly inventive stuff. 1922
CHRISTMAS DAY Captain Warrick A new production from the recently-formed Children's Film Unit, which made the muchacclaimed The Custard Boys. This colourful musical offering is about the teenage leader of a rag-bag band of Victorian child pickpockets. 1982
Caesar and Cleopatra Stunning Technicolor photography by four of the best in the business — Freddie Young, Jack Cardiff, Robert Krasker and Jack Hildyard — and a moody performance by Flora Robson are the main bonuses in this adaptation of Shaw's play. Vivien Leigh is Cleopatra. 1945
The Navigator
WEDNESDAY 29 DEC
James Hill, has woven an appealing adventure story from Anna Sewell's novel about a black horse that undergoes hardships moving from owner to owner. 1971
The Missouri Breaks
CHRISTMAS SUNDAY
BOXING DAY
Hollywood — The Gill of Laughter This TV special brings together a priceless collection of gems from Hollywood's archives of comedy. Among those featured are Danny Kaye, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Martin and Lewis, Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, Lucille Ball and Gene Wilder. TVM, 1982
Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson add star power to this film about a bounty hunter after an obstinate rustler; but basically it's just another western. Arthur Penn decks the action up with a few new tricks, and Brando tries everything he knows to spark the role of the 'regulator', from a variety of accents to dressing up as a woman to shoot one of his victims. 1976
They Got Me Covered The second half of the Bob Hope double bill, this time with Dorothy Lamour, his co-star from the Road films, in tow, and tangling with a gang of spies headed by director Otto Preminger. The wisecracks flow thick and fast. 1942
BOXING DAY Hans Christian Andersen
Richard III
Black Beauty
The usual Alistair MacLean combination of exciting action, inane dialogue and formula performances. The Arctic settings give the film a boost and one 'snowboat' chase is guaranteed to warm the iciest blood. 1979
One of Bob Hope's early Technicolor outings, this one for Sam Goldwyn. Hope plays Sylvester the Great, a conceited actor with the familiar Hope yellow streak running down his back, trying to save a princess (Virginia Mayo) from being kidnapped. Guess which familiar guest star in Hope films walks off with the girl at the end of the movie.. 1944
The first full-length film in Channel As a biography of the famous Four's Buster Keaton season is one writer of children's stories, this is of his most famous and successful— pure Hollywood moonshine, but it made more than two million immensely bolstered by a delightdollars on its initial release. The ful score that includes The Ugly 'business' on board the good ship _ Duckling, The Emperor's New Navigator is often priceless. 1924 Clothes, No Two People, Inch W orm and Thumbelina. 1953 Excellent though all the performances in this brilliant Shakespeare film are, they are no match for Laurence Olivier's Richard. Despite sterling portrayals by John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson and Claire Bloom, Olivier rightly dominates the picture, delivering his speeches with precision and power, and creating a memorable figure out of the crookback king. Olivier is said to have used Disney's Big Bad Wolf as a model. 1956
Bear Island
The Princess and the Pirate
Sholay Also known as Flames of the Sun, this is something of a phenomenon in the Indian cinema. An epic action movie vaguely along Seven Samurai lines, it made Amitabh Bachchan — as one of two criminals hired to protect a village from bandits — the leading star of Hindi cinema. 1975
---, ( DAVID QUINLAN's preview of the season's film attractions on ITV and Channel Four n
TUESDAY 28 DEC
Seven Chances Buster Keaton has only a few hours to get married or forfeit his fortune. He has a misunderstanding with his girlfriend and, before he knows it, is being pursued by (literally) dozens of ferocious women. 1925
The Nightingale Delightful mixture of cartoon and live action, based on the story by Hans Christian Andersen. The film won an International Film Critics' Award at Lille in April. 1981
Equus Under Sidney Lumet's expert direction, Richard Burton has one of the most demanding roles of his later years as the psychiatrist who must find out why a strange youth has blinded six horses. Peter Firth, who starred in the stage version of the story, is excellent as the youth, by far the best portrayal in a distinguished cast, almost all of whom give fine performances. 1977
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