Those were the days, clear and simple

THE excellent Bill Collins is presenting Easter Parade, one of my favourite musicals, at 7.30pm this Saturday on Fox Classics.

Warren Beatty in Bulworth

THE excellent Bill Collins is presenting Easter Parade, one of my favourite musicals, at 7.30pm this Saturday on Fox Classics, and in case Bill forgets to mention it, let me remind Liza Minnelli fans they can catch a glimpse of her in the final scene.

It's true she's only two, and the cameras are more interested in her mum, Judy Garland, but sharp eyes might just spot her.

Irving Berlin wrote 17 wonderful songs for Easter Parade, including the standout number A Couple of Swells, and Fred Astaire is his usual impeccable self as Don Hewes, dumped by his dancing partner and bent on revenge by grooming the unknown Garland for stardom. Astaire had announced his retirement from dance films after Blue Skies (1946) but was persuaded to make a comeback three years later. His last film was Ghost Story, which I had the sad task of reviewing in these pages in 1981.

MGM's other great dancing star, Gene Kelly, can be seen in An American in Paris (Friday, 8.30pm, TCM), directed by Liza's dad, Vincente, in 1951. Many rate it the best musical of all. Kelly is Jerry Mulligan, an ex-GI and would-be artist struggling to make a living in post-war Paris (most of which was constructed on Hollywood sets). He falls for a beautiful 18-year-old dancer (Leslie Caron) who has been rescued by her lover from the Nazis during World War II.

Apart from a 17-minute central ballet -- the kind that gave more than one Hollywood musical a touch of artistic pretension -- the show-stopping number is I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, one of a gorgeous line-up of Gershwin standards. Altogether an improvement on Anchors Aweigh (Friday, 10.25pm, TCM), an earlier Kelly vehicle with Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson, in which Kelly dances with the animated mouse from the Tom and Jerry cartoons. It was the first film to combine animation and live action in the same shot. If only the songs were as good.

Looking back on old Hollywood musicals is to be painfully reminded of how innocent, how confident, the US was in those years. Compared with all the fear and loathing around today, even a film as richly cynical and fundamentally pessimistic as Bulworth (Monday, 8.30pm, Showtime Comedy) seems like the product of a golden age.

Directed by Warren Beatty, this was a spirited political satire with some wonderfully funny scenes. Is it possible Americans had nothing more to worry about in 1998 than unresolved issues of race relations, incestuous media-corporate monopolies and glaring inequalities of wealth? (This was the Clinton era, when the US actually ran a budget surplus.)

Beatty plays Senator Jay Billington Bulworth, who has long since sold out his principles and has just enough integrity to know that he's a moral hypocrite. He decides it's time to speak his mind in public, however outrageous, incorrect or politically damaging his opinions may be. The result is one of the smartest and wittiest films of its day.

In 1975, when Americans were still bothered by minor distractions such as Watergate and the loss of the Vietnam War, the Brits came up with The Man Who Would be King (Thursday, 8.30pm, TCM), based on Rudyard Kipling's classic adventure story about a couple of go-getters who plan to set themselves up as potentates in some fictional corner of Afghanistan. The director, John Huston, wanted Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart for the main roles, then thought of Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole before settling on Sean Connery and Michael Caine, who turned in two of their best performances as dashing British army sergeants.

The last masterwork from Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut (Sunday, 9.55am, Movie Greats), looks better and more mysterious on repeated viewings. The story is from Viennese playwright and physician Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle, and Kubrick generates a hypnotic mood of unease charting the erotic yearnings and obsessions of a well-to-do New York couple (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman).

But it's hard to go past Quiz Show (Monday, 8.30pm, Starpics), a sombre, moving and beautifully acted account, directed by Robert Redford, of the 1950s quiz show scandals in the US. Ralph Fiennes plays Charles Van Doren, the well-connected WASP intellectual who became an admired national celebrity until Americans learned his TV quiz show answers were being fed to him by network executives. In the 1950s, it looked like a terminal moral crisis for America, even the end of television as we knew it. How comforting it all seems now.

CRITIC'C CHOICE
An American in Paris (G) 5 stars Friday, 8.30pm, TCM
Bulworth (M) 4 stars Monday, 8.30pm, Showtime Comedy
The Man Who Would Be King (PG) 3-1/2 stars Thursday, 8.30pm, TCM
Quiz Show (M) 4 stars Monday, 8.30pm, Starpics