George Clooney has all the qualities to become a major star - rather than simply a highly popular TV actor - but one. That is, the luck to pick a truly memorable film project. Not that his choices so far - Batman, One Fine Day, The Peacemaker - have been utterly awful, but neither have they been outstanding. From Dusk Till Dawn (World, 9.30pm) is a good example. When it was made, co-star and writer Quentin Tarantino was still feted as the most exciting new talent to hit Hollywood in years, and the chance to work with him must have seemed God-sent. Unfortunately, this strange blend of thriller and horror is one of the weakest movies Tarantino has ever worked on. A bad Tarantino script, it still contains the trademark gore and violence. He and Clooney play the Gecko brothers (a surname not a nickname) Richard and Seth, who specialise in minor bank heists and killing people. Then they decide to branch out with a bit of kidnapping and pick on Juliette Lewis as Victim No 1, along with her preacher father (Harvey Keitel) and her little brother. And things start to get really messy. Tarantino gets a lot of flak for his acting efforts, but he holds his own against Clooney, and is certainly a lot more watchable than Lewis, who seems scarcely awake, and Keitel, who looks plain lost. When the man most of us credit with dragging the United States into Vietnam, Robert McNamara, announced not too long ago that, on reflection, he thought the whole thing had been a complete disaster, there were many who snorted with cynical disgust. Not only did McNamara want the credit amongst his contemporaries at the time, he seemed to want posterity's blessing too. In tonight's film, Wheeler On America: Lyndon B Johnson's War (BBC, 10.05pm), veteran BBC American correspondent, Charles Wheeler, unveils some surprising evidence that LBJ had doubts about the whole thing too. Wheeler presents his case very thoroughly and convincingly, including a recording of a phonecall between McNamara and the president in which both seemed to say they were afraid the military was dragging them into an unwinnable war way back in 1965. And yet neither did anything to stop it. Wheeler seems to have a great deal of compassion for LBJ, and for the way in which, with hindsight, decisions made then seem foolish, even unforgivable. He acknowledges that his reporting at the time was based on the assumption that Johnson was as hawkish as he sounded. Was that an unfair assumption? How could he have guessed that even Johnson, commander-in-chief of the American forces, was unsure it was right for US troops to fight in Southeast Asia? In some ways, Wheeler's discoveries only make the horror of that war even more unbearable.
