A real treat, viewers, tonight on World. The Hit (9.30pm), made 13 years ago gave the two more junior members of the team, director Stephen Frears and actor Tim Roth their first chance to really shine on the big screen.
Frears made My Beautiful Laundrette a year later, and from then to Hollywood to do Dangerous Liaisons and The Grifters, to name but two. Roth of course has been snarling in grubby crime movies and hamming it up in several others ever since.
Willie Parker (Terence Stamp) is a small-time London villain who grasses on his mates in return for a new identity and a home in Spain. He leaves Britain, a nervous wreck in a naff suit with the voices of his former associates singing 'We'll Meet Again' as they are sentenced, ringing in his ears. By the time two hitmen Braddock (John Hurt) and Myron (Tim Roth) catch up with him 10 years later, he is transformed into an almost spiritual man, who has used the time to grow wise.
Instead of just putting a gun to his head then and there, Braddock and Myron have to take Parker to Paris to deliver the final coup de grace, and of course in the time it takes to get him there, things begin to go wrong. Willie is not afraid to die, and this disconcerts his would-be assassins. The more he talks to them the more uncertain they become. He even manages to be rather funny about the situation they have all found themselves in. Despite all this, things end in a bloody mess. My husband says I am pathetic about shoot-out movies. (He is right. I always go and hide during really gory bits, or in extreme cases, turn the television off altogether, much to his fury.) But with this one I did sit through right to the end because for once, the violence was part of the drama, rather than being instead of the drama, and I can't give it a higher rating than that.
Stamp's old mate Michael Caine (they shared a flat before they became famous) is on our screens tonight as well, but in a rather less successful movie which I almost certainly won't be able to watch through to the end, because of the boredom factor. I just don't get the central premise of this film.
The plot of Escape to Victory (Pearl, 9.30pm) is simple. A group of Allied PoWs during World War II are asked by their captors to take part in a match against the best players the Wehrmacht can provide. Caine plays Colby the lieutenant (and former footballer) put in charge of it all.