Pan’s Labyrinth, Steve Martin’s The Jerk and noir gems on TV

A pair of film noir gems lead off this week’s recommendations.

Doug Jones and Ivana Baquero in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

A pair of film noir gems lead off this week’s recommendations, and for those genre fans who worship at the altar of the 1947 Robert Mitchum classic Out of the Past, they will be of particular interest.

The first is director Irving Reis’s atmospheric 1946 wrong-man mystery Crack-Up (Tuesday, 2.30am, ABC), in which Pat O’Brien (once hailed by the press as “Hollywood’s Irishman in residence”) plays a prominent art critic and expert who is either losing his mind or uncovering an insidious forgery scheme (maybe both). Though the credited composer is Leigh Harline, Roy Webb’s distinctive theme from Out of the Past is heard a number of times. Both films are RKO productions, so that probably explains it.

The second is set designer-turned-director William Cameron Menzies’ 1951 Red Scare melodrama The Whip Hand (Sunday, 1am, ABC). A magazine writer on a fishing trip stumbles across an isolated town harbouring a madman planning biological warfare. Given the times, producer Howard Hughes (yes, this is another RKO picture) insisted the Nazi villain be modified to embrace communism. The chiaroscuro noir lighting is courtesy of the great cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, who brought the same sinister small-town feel to Out of the Past.

Comedian, actor and banjo player Steve Martin once said it is possible for entertainment to become art, but “If you set out to make art you are an idiot”. Wise, then, were the heads behind Martin’s first starring role, the radically silly The Jerk (Tuesday, 12.55am, ABC). Under the workmanlike direction of TV veteran Carl Reiner, Martin plays the title imbecile, a white man raised by a black southern sharecropping family who sets out to make his mark in the big city. This is among the weirder American comedies of the 1970s, yet it holds up surprisingly well if taken on its own absurdist terms.

Among the most intellectual of contemporary fantasy films is Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 Spanish-Mexican co-production Pan’s Labyrinth (Monday, 8.30pm, SBS Two). In the mid-1940s, after the Spanish Civil War, a young girl escapes the turmoil of the early Francoist period by consorting with strange and magical creatures. Few films mix politics and fantasy as deftly as this, and young Ivana Baquero’s beguiling performance is memorable.

Even the lesser work of great directors can offer fleeting pleasures. Alas, just about the best that can be said of John Carpenter’s contractually titled Ghosts of Mars (Friday, 11pm, 7Mate) is that he combines some of the more arresting elements of his earlier genre triumphs in this intriguingly structured yet otherwise by-the-book story of a group of interstellar police trying to protect a prisoner from an airborne virus loose on the Red Planet. Some of the gorier special effects work comes courtesy of Greg Nicotero, who has hit his stride with The Walking Dead.

Pan’s Labyrinth (MA15+) 4 ½ stars

Monday, 8:30pm, SBS 2

The Whip Hand (PG) 4 stars

Sunday, 1:00am, ABC

Crack-Up (PG) 3 stars

Tuesday, 2:30am, ABC