Film of the night Death in Venice (1971)

BBC Two, 12.05am

The Italian director Luschino Visconti’s symphonic study in lust and loss is languidly paced but visually ravishing. Burt Lancaster, who had worked with Visconti a decade before on The Leopard, was keen to star. Instead, in a near-silent performance, Dirk Bogarde cuts a pathetic figure as Gustav von Aschenbach, a German composer whose holiday in a plague-ridden Venice awakens latent homosexual feelings for a cherubic teenage boy played Bjorn Andresen.

Death in Venice is based on the novella by Thomas Mann, who is said to have encountered a weeping Gustav Mahler on a train from Venice to Munich. True or not, this anecdote was influential in shaping Visconti’s vision of Von Aschenbach. The use of Mahler’s achingly beautiful music on the soundtrack adds an extra symmetry between form and content.

While the film’s tackling of thwarted paedophile urges court controversy, in fairness Visconti is more interested in universal themes like lost innocence and looming mortality. Andresen later found sporadic acting work, mostly on Swedish television. “My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then worked its way down,” he said recently. (130min)

Best of the rest The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

TCM, 6.55pm

A fresh-faced Mel Gibson embarks on an uneasy affair with Sigourney Weaver in wartorn Indonesia. (115 min)

Cool Hand Luke (1967)

TCM, 9pm

When Telly Savalas refused to fly back from a European film shoot, Paul Newman took over his iconic role in this quasi-religious fable as a noble chain-gang prisoner who refuses to have his spirit broken. (126 min)

Cape Fear (1991)

ITV4, 11pm Martin Scorsese’s lurid but effective remake of the 1962 classic has vengeful ex-con Robert De Niro on amusingly quotable form. (128 min)

Ravenous (1999)

BBC One, 12.35am

Robert Carlyle and Guy Pearce lock horns in Antonia Bird’s pulpy misfire about killer cannibals in the Old West. Michael Nyman and Damon Albarn provide the score. (100 min)

Dogville (2003)

Film4, 11.50pm

An all-star cast, led by Nicole Kidman, rise to the bold challenge of this experimental Brechtian drama from Danish maverick Lars von Trier. (178 min)

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