WORLD is in the unenviable position of flogging a dead horse tonight because anyone who watched the opening episode of To Play The King (Pearl, 9.30pm) will also be watching tonight's concluding episode. That means Gardens Of Stone (World, 9.30pm) will beplaying to almost empty houses throughout the territory, which is a shame for James Caan, Angelica Huston and the rest because any other night it would have made highly recommended viewing.
Instead it makes recommended video-taping. It was given a lukewarm reception on its release and has weaknesses - it is too ponderous - but it also has its strong points. Stash it away for the typhoon season.
Gardens Of Stone is different from most films in the Vietnam War genre, and God knows there have been enough of them, because it does not have any war in it. None of it is filmed in Vietnam. After more than a decade of films that explored the war from many angles, director Francis Ford Coppola turned his back on the violence, the heroics, the battle and the camaraderie of war and focused simply and with great effect on the burial of the dead.
From the vantage point of Arlington National Cemetery, with its sombre landscape of hundreds of identical white crosses, the war appears as senseless as it ever did in the more ostentatious, but no less successful, hands of Oliver Stone.
James Caan turns in a memorable performance as Sergeant Clell Hazard, a military man through and through who, when the film is set in 1968, has come to despise the Vietnam War, but is still in love with the Marines.
His job is to oversee the Old Guard at Arlington, that elite corps which stands watch over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, escort bodies to their final resting place and perform various drill exercises as a public relations exercise for gawping tourists.
Gung-ho Private Jackie Willow (D.B. Sweeney) is assigned to the unit and grows close to a number of people at Arlington, including Hazard's girlfriend (Huston) but wants desperately to get a piece of the action on Vietnam.