Although Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage seem...

Although Shirley MacLaine and Nicolas Cage seem disparate performers, they find common ground in Guarding Tess (NBC Monday at 9 p.m.), a delicately funny 1994 chamber comedy about the war of nerves between a formidable former First Lady and the dissatisfied Secret Service agent assigned to her. Aside from demonstrating how far a pleasing acting mixture can take you, “Guarding Tess” also shows its limitations.

Firewalker (FOX Thursday at 8 p.m.) is a breezy, big-scale 1986 comedy-adventure that takes scruffy soldiers-of-fortune Chuck Norris and Lou Gossett on a lively pursuit of Aztec treasure. It also takes Norris out of his usual ultra-violent martial-arts fare and into “Raiders of the Lost Ark” territory.

Above the Law (KCOP Saturday at 6 p.m.) is the 1986 cop thriller that launched martial arts star Steven Seagal, is something of a standoff: good in excitingly grimy Chicago atmosphere and terse, hard-bitten energy but veering off into action-movie cuckoo land--the paranoid one-against-a-hundred cliches of the standard Schwarzenegger-Stallone heavy-pectoral snow job. Seagal plays an ex-Green Beret and CIA trouble-shooter turned Chicago cop taking on all manner of drug-related corruption.

With the 1994 The Hudsucker Proxy (KCOP Saturday at 8 p.m.) those pristine perfectionists, the Coen brothers, do it again with a technically dazzling tribute to the films of the ‘40s that is more than a little cold around the heart. However, Tim Robbins is terrific as a country boy who inadvertently gets caught up in a scheme to destroy a major corporation (and who invents the Hula-Hoop in the process). Paul Newman co-stars as the villain of the plot, and fans of Jennifer Jason Leigh will love her as the leading lady.

Shane (KCET Saturday at 9 p.m.) is George Stevens’ 1953 lyrical vision of the Western as it might have been imagined by Malory or the balladeers of courtly love, seen through the eyes of a young, idealistic child: a place of bewitching landscapes, glowing ideals and horrible evils, of sagebrush knights and bloody, sneering villains pulling on their deadly gloves. A powerful, poetic, hugely popular film.