Pay-TV films: Unforgiven, Virginia Woolf, African Queen

The last western film to win the Oscar for best picture was Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, a must see this week.

Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, Sunday, 8.30pm, Fox Classics.

Only two films have ever been Oscar-nominated in every category for which they were eligible, and the second of those was director Mike Nichols’s masterful visualisation of playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Saturday, 6.20pm, TCM).

North by Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman, hot off The Sound of Music, produced and adapted the film, which stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as the married, bickering academics, and George Segal and Sandy Dennis as their unwitting verbal prey. Easily Taylor and Burton’s best film work, the movie feels remarkably fresh today — particularly since it was made in 1966. It received 13 nominations and won for Taylor and Dennis; the only other film to have as many nominations was the 1931 Western Cimarron.

As long as the subject is Oscar trivia and westerns, what was the last film of the noble genre to date to win best picture? That would be Clint Eastwood’s masterful, career-summing 1992 film Unforgiven (Sunday, 8.30pm, Fox Classics). Clint plays a former killer lured out of farming retirement to murder a pair of cowboys who have disfigured a prostitute.

As much of a meditation on the passage of time and the complexity of myths as a traditional shoot-‘em-up, Eastwood’s elegiac pacing and dedication of the film to influences Don Siegel and Sergio Leone strongly suggest where his allegiances lay. Gene Hackman won the best supporting actor Oscar as a ruthless sheriff.

Humphrey Bogart won his only Academy Award for best actor as the irascible tramp steamer captain Charlie Allnut opposite virtuous missionary Katharine Hepburn in director John Huston’s rousing 1951 Technicolor adventure The African Queen (Saturday, 10.20pm, Fox Classics). The location filming was fraught with sickness and peril, yet the finished product is a seamless, last gasp of traditional Hollywood stardom and storytelling. It’s a pity cinematographer Jack Cardiff wasn’t even nominated for his glorious camerawork.

Though now a director as well (Jack Reacher), screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie made his name — and won an Oscar — for the exhilaratingly byzantine script of director Bryan Singer’s immensely popular 1995 crime thriller The Usual Suspects (Sunday, 6.40pm, Thriller). Kevin Spacey won his first Academy Award as now legendary movie bad guy Roger “Verbal” Kint. The title was inspired by Claude Rains’s classic line at the climax of Casablanca.

The real-life feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford made a hit out of director Robert Aldrich’s 1962 gothic thriller about two warring sisters, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Monday, 8.30pm, TCM). It won the best costume design Oscar, yet endures as but a strange curio.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (PG)

4 stars

Saturday, 6.20pm, TCM (428)

The African Queen (PG)

4 stars

Saturday, 10.20pm, Fox Classics (113)

Unforgiven (M)

4 stars

Sunday, 8.30pm, Fox Classics (113)