FREE TO AIR
Arthur Phillip: Sailor, Governor, Spy, ABC, 8.30pm
This feature-length account of the life of Arthur Phillip maintains that most Australians know little about the First Fleet commander and founding governor of what would become New South Wales. But never fear, ABC journalist Scott Bevan is here to puts things right with a meticulous account of a colourful life. It occasionally veers into the hagiographic but finds room for the Indigenous perspective, while professional pot stirrer Geoffrey Robertson finishes on a cheeky note about Phillip’s rightful restingplace.
Houdini, Seven, 9.15pm
Part two of this beautifully filmed, cliche-filled mini-series about the great escapologist opens with Harry Houdini in a darkened cinema watching his new rival forthe public’s affection, Charlie Chaplin. The movie era is nigh, and our death-defying hero has to up the ante to keep his stocks up – hence his subsequent chain-bound jump into the icy Mississippi, amove guaranteed to win the affection of the crowd and the opprobrium of his wife. Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody makes a decent Houdini, all nervous energy and naked ambition, and the wrap-up of this rather soggy biopic follows two main strands: his life-defining devotion to his mother – perhaps the reason his wife has developed a mighty pot habit — and his flirtation with the spiritualist movement, first as a curious bystander and later on a mission to expose its charlatans. While Houdini is somewhat lacking in psychological coherence, compensation is found in the brilliant recreations of his most famous feats of escape.
Prospectors, 7Mate, 10.30pm
It is exciting to watch someone unearth a seam of gemstones in the Rocky Mountains. Unlike the specific charms of, say, Outback Truckers, almost everyone can get a thrill watching a redneck with a pickaxe make a cool half a million in a day’s work. Prospectors isn’t all instant riches, however. Down-on-his-luck Steve is still scrabbling around for the equivalent of loose change. Another bloke who looks like Grizzly Adams has to launch a search and rescue operation when a party member goes missing, but it all pales in comparison with the aquamarine haul of the Dorris family, who hit the mother lode.
Larissa Dubecki
PAY TV
Chicago PD, Universal, 8.30pm
So is detective Hank Voight (Jason Beghe) dirty or not? This season he’s going around telling his team he was only pretending to be dirty as part of an internal affairs operation. But he does still have that safe full of cash in his basement. And everybody hates him for working for IA any way, so at this point he might as well be bent. He certainly has some old friends and acquaintances on the wrong side of the law, and tonight he has to find out who’s going around killing them all. The series, created by Dick Wolf and NYPD Blue veteran Matt Olmstead, isn’t always the most believable, but we can get around such things. These days it’s fashionable in certain circles to mentally remould works of fiction into what is known as a personal ‘‘headcanon’’. In real life Flueger is 31, so in your headcanon Ruzek might have been a cop for 10 years, he might have been dux of his class at detective training school, and he might only be pretending to be an annoying hothead. Sorted.
Brad Newsome
MOVIES
Fargo, (1996) Masterpiece Movies (pay TV), 8.30pm
A snow-bound crime film – it’s in very cold blood – set in rural Minnesota, Fargo uses black humour and the most unassuming setting to ponder the moral inadequacy of the world. With Frances McDormand as their inquiring pilgrim, the seven-months-pregnant sheriff of Brainerd, Marge Gunderson, Joel and Ethan Coen paint a picture of scheming plots, perverted domesticity and matter-of-fact murder that feels tied together in ways that make the crimes both horrifying and understandable.
William H. Macy is the harried husband, whose scheme to have his wife kidnapped and then keep the ransom provided by his wealthy father-in-law sets the wheels in motion, with Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare and a wood chipper as the instruments of his own eventual downfall. Carter Burwell’s score and Marge’s stoic concern carry the weight of the movie’s belief that we’re as likely to do wrong as do right, especially when we’re able to convince ourselves for selfish reasons that one is the other. The Coens are entertaining pessimists, and this is one of their great verdicts. As much as there was icy violence and malevolent comeuppance in the recent television series, the film is masterful in ways that the extension cannot approach.
The Godfather: Part III, (1990) ABC, 11.20pm
There are, of course, many things wrong with Francis Ford Coppola’s belated sequel to two of the finest films in the history of United States cinema, and history will record that replacing Robert Duvall, as the consigliere Tom Hagen, who advises mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), with the remarkable tan of George Hamilton was one of them. However, after everything that transpires, which includes much murder in the name of organised crime and Vatican finances and the setting up of Vincent Corleone (Andy Garcia) as a possible lead character for a fourth instalment, the heated confusion and ripe Sicilian imagery gives way to a genuine moment of equanimity, as the many ages of Michael Corleone, the war hero who was drawn into the family business and discovered that it gave sustenance to his very soul, dissolved into his final moments. Frail and elderly, sitting alone on a chair, he slumps to the ground and dies. It’s a bleak and fitting end, given what has transpired (poor Fredo), but it’s not where Coppola had positioned the rest of the film, and it plays like his own apology for the place he has brought his masterpiece to.
Craig Mathieson
