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SCMP Reporter

Call me romantic, but I enjoy watching famous acting couples working alongside each other in films.

  It's hard to beat Burton and Taylor, Newman and Woodward, but Jessica Tandy and her second husband, Hume Cronyn, frequently appeared together on stage and screen.

  London-born Tandy (who was previously married to Jack Hawkins) met Cronyn after moving to New York and starring with the slight, nervous-looking actor in her American film debut, The Seventh Cross in 1944.

  It was this Fred Zinnemann movie that won Cronyn, who was also born in London (Ontario, not England), his one and only Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of Paul Roeder, a German factory worker coming face to face with fascism.

  Two years later, despite being older than Cronyn, Tandy played his daughter in The Green Years.

  Her film career was quiet in the 1960s and 70s but was rekindled in the 80s with roles in The World According To Garp, Best Friends, Still Of The Night (all 1982), The Bostonians (1984) and the hugely popular Cocoon in 1985, in which she starred opposite Cronyn.

  They teamed up again for Batteries Not Included (Pearl, 9.30pm) and Foxfire (both 1987) and again in Cocoon: The Return in 1988.

  Tandy won Best Actress for Miss Daisy Werthan in Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 and a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Ninny Threadgoode in Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe in 1991.

  She died in 1994, having made a couple of further films with her long-time husband.

  Batteries Not Included is the sentimental story of a group of New Yorkers who are about to lose their homes to an unscrupulous real estate developer when alien visitors descend to help them in wondrous ways.

  Produced by Steven Spielberg and team, it's a well-worn story that has been told better in many and varied versions before and since.

  Tandy and Cronyn do the film far more justice than it does them. Alien Nation - Dark Horizon (World, 9.30pm) continues the alien theme.

  James Caan, Mandy Patinkin and Terence Stamp starred in the original Alien Nation, an interesting idea set in the near future about a group of aliens (who look remarkably human apart from egg-speckled bald heads) who are slowly (and in many cases grudgingly) being accepted into society. The film spawned an Emmy Award-winning television series and its stars appear in tonight's film.

  A racist human organisation, known as Purists, creates a deadly virus intended to wipe out all Newcomers, as the aliens are known.

  Originally targeted for George (Eric Pierpoint), the alien partner of LA detective Matthew Sikes (Gary Graham), the virus accidentally infects George's wife Susan (Michelle Scarabelli) and their daughter Emily (Lauren Woodland).

  It's not as entertaining as the original, but sci-fi fans will enjoy it.

     This film from the British documentary series Panorama (World, 8.30pm) looks at how the FBI captured the Unabomber, a hunt that took almost two decades across a continent.

  'It examines how a twisted form of politics can become pathological and uses man's own intellectual arguments to track him down.

   'The film culminates in the capture and arrest of the man believed to be responsible for three murders and 16 bombings,' says the publicity material.

  I haven't seen the programme but I hope it concentrates on the FBI's failings; the Unabomber was arrested after his estranged family suggested he was the wanted man.



Praying for the aliens