Confessions of a Habitual Movies-on-Cable Watcher

Rarely do I watch a commercial TV showing of a movie made for theaters. The “editing” for time slot and family tastes is maddening, the ads intrusive. So it was a real occasion recently when I got sucked into a movie on cable’s Arts & Entertainment Network.

Whoa! Big mistake!

If you think there’s gore galore in “The Killing Fields”--director Roland Joffe’s superb account of the massacre after Pol Pot’s rise to power in Cambodia--you should have seen what A&E; did to the movie. Butchery describes it nicely.

While claiming to appreciate culture and the arts, A&E; rams commercials into programs without conscience. Although its agenda doesn’t run to Shakespeare, you can imagine the deference it might show Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: “To Be.” Three minutes of commercials . “Or not to be. . . .”

Beyond its lethally thoughtless deployment of commercials, what A&E; does, also, is abridge and shrilly shout promos of its programs over ending credits even for haunting films like “The Killing Fields.” So Dith Pran survives the Khmer Rouge, emerges from his incredible odyssey in the jungle almost right into the arms of Sidney Schanberg. They embrace emotionally and the credits start to roll with that great pipe music that chokes you all up. Then right on cue an A&E; announcer with a voice like a tuba abruptly starts blowing out the promos.

I wouldn’t have minded so much about “The Killing Fields” had it not been one of my favorite movies. I’ve nearly committed it to memory after seeing it about a dozen times, initially in a theater when it was released in 1984 and the other times on TV via cable’s commercial-free premium channels that you pay extra for so they can show you the same movies again and again. And I watch, again and again.

If not for these channels, I would not have been able to see “Dances With Wolves,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “In the Line of Fire” and “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” too many times to count. Need a fact check? Call me.

Television has also made me an expert on “The Killing Fields.” Well, an expert on about three-fifths of “The Killing Fields.” For some reason, I can never discipline myself to plan ahead for these movies on commercial-free cable, which I always bump into while channel-hopping. Inevitably I discover “The Killing Fields” during that pulsating scene when the music is loudly bong-bonging as U.S. choppers suddenly appear on the horizon, then set down in Phnom Penh to hurriedly evacuate the Americans and their friends as the capital is about to be overrun by the brutal Khmer Rouge. What comes before that is a blur.

I’ve seen “Malcolm X” about a dozen times too, but never its beginning. Ditto those World War I epics “Paths of Glory” and “The Dawn Patrol,” which is camp elevated to high art. Moreover, I’m betting no one on Earth has seen 90% of “Khartoum” more than I. Great action, great costumes. But will somebody please tell me how Charlton Heston wound up in the Sudan so that he could finish the movie by taking a spear in the chest from someone who apparently thought he was overacting?

Another puzzler for me is Robert Altman’s “A Wedding,” which I’ve encountered about six times, but never early enough to catch the opening scene that seems to set up the entire movie.

I can’t get enough of “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the 1949 British black comedy that affixed Alec Guinness as one of the funniest actors on the planet--with “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Man in the White Suit” to follow--and urbane Dennis Price as supreme at playing a charming scoundrel. I’ve seen it four or five times on television, always arriving in time to see Price’s murder binge but not in time to discover the source of his bitterness toward those eight Guinnesses whom he deliciously bumps off.

Meanwhile, I’ve had half a dozen cable encounters with about half of “Coma,” not enough to fathom it. I’ve watched “Six Degrees of Separation” probably three times. Liked it a lot. But I suspect I’d like it even more, and understand why Will Smith is setting out a gourmet spread for Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing in their swanky Manhattan apartment, if I’d seen it from the start.

The biggest cable movie Angst for me these days is “Orlando,” an intriguing 1993 adaptation of a Virginia Woolf novel about a young English noble who changes to male from female and doesn’t age while living 400 years. I’ve no idea what it means, or what that singing angel is doing floating in the air prior to the ending credits. Its mixed reviews notwithstanding, I can’t resist this film, whose wit, style, gorgeous look and acting by Tilda Swinton remain utterly seductive each time I watch 95% of it.

That would be four times now, not once with the opening chunk featuring Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I. On A&E; I wouldn’t have to worry about the queen. She’d be replaced by commercials.

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DUELING DERSHES. “Controversy is about to get a lot more COLORFUL,” vows a trade magazine ad for a new radio show.

And whose face does the ad feature in a photograph? The kinky hair, the steel-frame glasses, the mustache and the strained smile are familiar to anyone who watches CNN’s “Larry King Live,” the network morning shows or any other TV program where O.J. Simpson is regularly discussed.

Why, it’s none other than lawyerdom’s one-man cottage industry himself, Alan Dershowitz, who now has himself a new syndicated radio call-in show that the ad promises is “Controversial. Confrontational. Candid.”

Most of all, candid, right? That’s what you’d expect of Dershowitz, who practices his distinctive brand of candor so aggressively in front of the media that he makes his fellow radio talk-show host, Gloria Allred, who is legal racket’s No. 2 camera hound, look timid in comparison.

How candid is Dershowitz? Brutally candid. Colorfully candid. This candid. The ad quotes Dershowitz as saying, “The American system of justice is built on the foundation of not telling the ‘whole truth.’ ” And even more significant, he says in the ad: “I never believe what the prosecutor or the police say, I never believe what the media say and I never believe what my client says.”

In the Simpson courtroom, those last seven words, if spoken by Dershowitz, would make spectators gasp and send reporters dashing to phones. And if attorney Dershowitz were cross-examining witness Dershowitz, he’d accuse himself of contradicting himself.

Let’s see, now. Isn’t Simpson Dershowitz’s client? And hasn’t Simpson pleaded innocent to murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Lyle Goldman? And as a defense team member, hasn’t Dershowitz publicly associated himself with Simpson’s claim of innocence?

Does that mean Dershowitz was lying when saying, in effect, that he believed Simpson? Or is he lying in the ad? Or regardless, is he just a big bag of bull who will say anything that he believes will serve his own interests?

Perhaps he doesn’t recall what he has said in the ad. Perhaps reading it, as they say in court, would refresh his memory.

“The Alan Dershowitz Show.” They don’t call him colorful for nothing.