In the new TV movie The Comeback...

In the new TV movie The Comeback (CBS Sunday at 9 p.m.) Robert Urich plays a football star who returns home after 20 years and falls in love with his son’s girlfriend (Chynna Phillips).

Twist of Fate (NBC Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m.) is a new four-hour, two-part TV movie about an SS officer who tries to avoid prosecution as a war criminal by faking his own death and undergoing plastic surgery. Ben Cross and Veronica Hamel star.

The 1983 Sudden Impact (ABC Sunday at 9 p.m.), the fourth of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, is assuredly the worst, a nakedly manipulative exploitation picture that’s an unabashed call for everyone who believes he or she has been wronged to take the law into his or her own hands. What’s more, it exploits not only sex and violence but also audience prejudices against minorities. Sondra Locke co-stars as a woman determined to eliminate systematically the men who raped her a decade before.

Prince of Bel Air (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.) is a pleasant if slight 1986 TV movie starring Mark Harmon as a Southern California pool cleaner who begins to wonder if it isn’t time he started growing up.

Off the Minnesota Strip (Channel 13 Monday at 8 p.m.) is a notable 1980 TV movie directed by Lamont Johnson that stars Mare Winningham as a teen-age runaway who tries to return home after a stint as a Manhattan prostitute.

Adapted by its author Joseph Wambaugh, The Onion Field (Channel 5 Tuesday at 8 p.m.) tells of the actual murder of a policeman some 20 years ago and centers on its devastating impact upon the dead man’s partner. The 1979 film is uneven but powerful anyway. James Woods stars.

The 1984 Starman (CBS Tuesday at 9 p.m.) came as an utterly charming surprise from gore specialist John Carpenter. It’s a gentle, irresistible and deeply poignant romantic fable about a woman (Karen Allen) on the lam with an endangered alien (Jeff Bridges, in a high-water mark performance) cloned from one hair from her dead husband’s head.

Blood Ties (Channel 5 Wednesday at 8 p.m., again on Saturday at 8 p.m.) is a strong 1986 action film starring Brad Davis as an innocent American maneuvered by the Mafia into assassinating his Sicilian cousin (Tony Lo Bianco).

John Carpenter directed Assault on Precinct 13 (Channel 11 Wednesday at 8 p.m.), a knockout action picture in which a street gang lays siege to a nearly deserted L.A. police station; it’s said to be a reworking of Hawks’ “Rio Bravo.”

Loni Ding’s remarkable The Color of Honor (Channel 28 Wednesday at 9 p.m.) is the most comprehensive study to date of the Japanese-American experience during World War II. Ding focuses on the crucial, little-known role that 6,000 Japanese-Americans played in the Pacific-Asia theater as interrogators and translators in the U.S. Military Intelligence Service. Ding also goes right to the heart of the complex Japanese-American predicament, contrasting those men who thought that by serving in combat they could best demonstrate their patriotism with that smaller group of men who resisted the draft on the grounds that the relocation orders were unconstitutional.

Probably the least-aired of Thursday’s 8 p.m. offerings is the 1979 Hardcore (on Channel 11), Paul Schrader’s fascinating--but have-it-both-ways--study of a puritanical Midwestern father (George C. Scott) searching for his daughter on the seamier side of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the often-steamy film tends to become the object of its own scorn.

The best thing about the soap opera-ish 1983 Australian film Careful, He Might Hear You (Channel 11 Friday at 8 p.m.) is little Nicholas Gledhill, cast as a thoughtful child shuttled between three jarringly and improbably different aunts.

Ross McElwee’s original and sneakily endearing 1986 Sherman’s March (Channel 28 Friday at 11 p.m.) tells of how Harvard-based documentarian McElwee plans for a film on the lingering effects of William Tecumseh Sherman’s calamitous march through the South turn into his own doggedly optimistic pursuit of love once his girlfriend abandons him.

Blake Edwards’ 1986 A Fine Mess (CBS Saturday at 8 p.m.) is an erratic and extended slapstick chase movie about a horse-doping scandal, two hapless Hollywood hangers-on and the two bumbling torpedoes pursuing them. Starring Ted Danson and Howie Mandel, the film lacks the flair of Edwards as his best.

Black Moon Rising (Channel 9 Saturday at 8 p.m.) is a hard-driving 1986 thriller starring Tommy Lee Jones as a thief hired by the Justice Department to steal incriminating tapes from an indicted corporation.

The ratings checks on movies in the TV log are provided by the Tribune TV Log listings service.