Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s Hammer horror-style Sleepy Hollow

Sleepy Hollow truly frightens and a pair of classic swashbuckling movies air back-to-back this week.

Actor Johnny Depp in scene from the film Sleepy Hollow.

Avast me hearties, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has nothing on a pair of classic swashbuckling movies airing back-to-back this week.

The great English actor Robert Newton gives the quintessential rogue’s performance as British bandit Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard the Pirate (Monday, 1.25am, ABC). This 1952 technicolor RKO production is a model of the genre, and actually fell between two other great Newton performances, as Long John Silver in 1950’s Treasure Island and 1954’s Long John Silver — the latter filmed at Sydney’s former National Studios in the suburb of Pagewood.

Immediately following Blackbeard the Pirate is the 1945 adventure The Spanish Main (Monday, 3am, ABC). This earlier RKO technicolor extravaganza stars Paul (Casablanca) Heinreid as a Dutch sea captain turned pirate known as the Barracuda. There’s a great climactic swordfight between Heinreid and nemesis Walter Slezak, with love interest Maureen O’Hara looking on.

Speaking of Depp, one of his more intriguing performances for long-time directorial collaborator Tim Burton is as author Washington Irving’s immortal Ichabod Crane in the 1999 horror film Sleepy Hollow (Sunday, 11.15pm, 7mate). Inspired by the old Hammer horror films he loved, Burton largely eschews computer-generated effects in favour of intricate, gothic sets and stylised lighting. The results are formidable and truly frightening, with production designer Rick Heinrichs and set decorator Peter Young winning that year’s Academy Award for best art direction.

Another pair of memorable performances, as the same unnamed 1960s British underworld boss, are given by Paul Bettany and the great Malcolm McDowell in director Paul McGuigan’s energetic, colourful and inevitably violent 2000 crime film Gangster No 1 (Monday, 10.45pm, SBS2). McDowell bookends the film as the ageing gangster, narrating his rise as the younger Bettany chafes at being a henchman for kingpin David Thewlis. Visually frenetic, as that subgenre of crim sagas is, the film benefits enormously from the dead-eyed stares of the two leads, cleverly chosen period songs and spot-on production design.

Quick, who’s the youngest actor to date to have won a competitive Oscar?

That would be the now 51-year-old Tatum O’Neal, who won at the ripe old age of 10 in 1974 for a distinctly precocious performance opposite her father Ryan as a pair of Depression-era con artists in director Peter Bogdanovich’s fine 1973 black-and-white Hollywood studio homage Paper Moon (Saturday, 2.01pm, ABC). Inevitably, the rapport between the two leads is great, and Bogdanovich does a superb job of marrying the studio aesthetic to contemporary concerns.

Paper Moon (PG) 4 stars

Saturday, 2pm, ABC

Gangster No 1 (MA15+) 3.5 stars

Monday, 10.45pm, SBS2

Sleepy Hollow (AV15+) 3.5 stars

Sunday, 11.15pm, 7mate