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. Gardens Of Stone is a muted and respectful film, but perhaps with reason. Coppola's son died in a boating accident during production. THE most notable thing about Lady In A Corner (World, 1.45am) is that it stars Loretta Young, a name that might ring a few bells. As long ago as 1947 she starred alongside Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson in The Stranger. She plays the editor and chief of a prestigious magazine who returns from vacation to discover her boss has begun to pull the rug out from underneath her feet by appointing an ambitious, and young, associate. Loretta smells a hostile takeover and so begins her fight to save her job, and the magazine. ON Eye On Hong Kong (Pearl, 7.20pm) Gloria Wu talks to another blast from the past, Ian Anderson, who sprang to fame with Jethro Tull and made playing the flute fashionable way back in the 60s. John Dykes finds out how many elbows and shoulders Steven Seagal has dislocated (his own, or other peoples?) and Willy Ng has the answer to another question that may have been niggling you for weeks: what happens when you cross Tom & Jerry with Monty Python? STING, a musician who has with some justification been pilloried in the British press for taking himself much too seriously (he once told a bemused reporter that when The Police were on tour he preferred to sit alone at the back of the band's bus and meditate or read Faust) appears on Unplugged (MTV, 2.00am). The concert is not a new one. It was taped in New York in March 1991 and covers music from those early Faustian days with The Police to songs from solo albums such as The Soul Cages.
