NOT only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on a bank holiday weekend. And try finding a pigeon-hole for Woody Allen. In Crimes and Misdemeanours (World, 9.40pm) he shows how funny he is, how serious he is and how erratic he is. This is perhaps his most ambitious film and he comes within a whisker of pulling it off. It is an exploration of right and wrong, good and bad, morality and immorality, with some brilliant humour added as counterpoint. It is funnier, dare I say it, than the World Cup.
Yet even Allen has his moments of madness. In Crimes and Misdemeanours one such moment comes in the form of a dubious homage to Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Allen recreates a scene from that film almost shot-for-shot. So what, you might ask. Many did.
Martin Landau is Judah Rosenthal, a successful opthalmologist with a problem. His mistress, Angelica Huston, is threatening to spill the beans to his loving wife (Claire Bloom). The other story, the humorous one, features Allen as Cliff Stern, a politically committed film-maker, his egotistical brother-in-law (Alan Alda) and a TV producer (Mia Farrow), with whom Allen falls in love. The two strands mesh at the end, when Stern and Rosenthal meet.
Allen's expertise is evident throughout Crimes And Misdemeanours. He chose his cast with care and wrote an intelligent script.
MEHMET Ali Agca was a nobody from a small town in eastern Turkey until he shot the Pope and became a somebody from a small town in eastern Turkey. The BBC's The Most Dangerous Man in the World (World, 2.00am) tells his story, with Martin Shaw in the lead role.
The Mountain Men (Pearl, 1.30am) is a tiresome and bloody good guys vs nasty Indians saga with Charlton Heston as a fur-trapper. The screenplay, small world that is is, was by Heston's son.
THE good guys in The Green Hornet (World, 9pm) are the ones in the masks, played by Val Kilmer and Bruce Lee. Tonight the Hornet is forced to use his Hornet Sting when a racketeer is killed by a poison dart.
