Remake of a classic

THE French have always been fascinated by American gangster films and many a French thriller has owed something to Hollywood conventions.

THE French have always been fascinated by American gangster films and many a French thriller has owed something to Hollywood conventions.

Assault on Precinct 13 (Friday, 9.40pm, 7Mate) is a remake by French director Jean-Francois Richet of John Carpenter's classic 1976 film set in a dilapidated police station in Detroit. The action takes place on New Year's Eve. Good cop Sergeant Jake Roenick (Ethan Hawke) is unexpectedly given custody of a charismatic gang lord and cop-killer (Laurence Fishburne) when a police convoy is blocked by a snowstorm.

When Jake's precinct is besieged by the gang lord's underworld buddies, cops and prisoners join forces against a more sinister enemy - a corrupt police squad headed by Marcus Duvall (Gabriel Byrne), who knows that only by killing everyone in the station will they be able to protect their guilty secrets.

Richet's film is faithful to the mood of the original and in some ways surpasses it for the surreal brilliance of its action scenes and the claustrophobic spookiness of its settings. Carpenter's film supposedly was inspired by Howard Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959), about an evil cattle baron who lays siege to the jailhouse in a Texas border town. The story goes that Hawks intended Rio Bravo to be a healthy corrective to the weak-kneed liberalism of High Noon, in which sheriff Gary Cooper (in Hawks's opinion) spent too much time pleading for help from the townsfolk instead of taking on the bad guys.

High Noon appeared in 1952, followed a year later by Shane (Saturday, 8.30pm, ABC2), another great western, though there's something a little ponderous and self-important in George Stevens's direction. Alan Ladd gives a notable performance as the gunslinger who becomes a young boy's idol when he helps protect his family from another villainous cattle baron such as the one in Rio Bravo.

While the film is tough and sometimes brutal, it radiates a powerful aura of morality. Western fans do well this week. Shane is followed by The Magnificent Seven (Saturday, 10.25pm, ABC2), and there's another showing of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Saturday, 2pm, ABC1), a late work from director John Ford, often credited as the father of the western.

Shall We Dance (Sunday, 1.15am, ABC1) was Fred Astaire's and Ginger Rogers's seventh pairing in four years as a song and dance team, and the old formula - frolicsome romp with endless romantic complications - may have been wearing a bit thin.

But there's still that sensational Gershwin brothers score, including the haunting standard They Can't Take That Away from Me, and Fred and Ginger's duet, Let's Call the Whole Thing Off ("You say ee-ther and I say eye-ther . . . you say potatoes and I say potartoes . . .") But has anyone ever pronounced it potartoes? Lyricist's licence, I suppose.

BEST ON SHOW

Shane (M)
4 stars
Saturday, 8.30pm, ABC2

Assault on Precinct 13 (MA15+)
3.5 stars
Friday, 9.40pm, 7Mate

Shall We Dance (G)
3.5 stars
Sunday, 1.15am, ABC1