Aaron Spelling

An ambitious television soap actress connives with her producer to scuttle the career of the show's long-time star, but nothing works as they plan. Celeste Talbert has been the queen of the soaps for over two decades. Montana Moorehead needs to get her out of her way before she can move on and begins her program to get her to leave. She hires an old boyfriend of Celeste to be on the show and has Celeste become a murderer in the script, but each attempt has unforseen consequences. —John Vogel <jlvogel@comcast.net> Celebrated soap star Celeste Talbert gets support from her niece and from Rose, the script-writer, but is otherwise pretty unpopular at work. In particular, the producer is trying increasingly desperately to write her out of the script on the promise of favours from venomous co-star Montana Moorehead. So Celeste's life is not greatly improved by the re-appearance of an old flame she had insisted was fired from the show twenty years before. —Jeremy Perkins {J-26}

Mother and daughter Thelma and Jessie Cates spend a night together after Jessie reveals that she will kill herself by the end of it in this cinema adaptation of Marsha Norman's Pulitzer prize-winning Broadway play. What would you do if someone you loved sat down with you one night and calmly told you that they were going to end their life before morning? This is Thelma Cates' dilemma. Her daughter Jessie has had it. A middle-aged epileptic unable to drive or hold a job, with a failed marriage and a drug-addicted runaway son on the wrong side of the law, Jessie can find no reason to keep living. Adapted from the play by Marsha Norman, "'night, Mother" is the story of a parent's worst nightmare. How can Thelma convince her daughter that life is worth living if she can't feel her pain? How can she end her daughter's embrace of death before morning? —Mark Fleetwood <mfleetwo@mail.coin.missouri.edu>/Reid Taylor

Brady Sutton, ex-convict and former Butch Cassidy gang member, gets wrongly accused of bank robbery. Escaping mob, he rejoins Cassidy's gang to prove innocence and bring them to justice. Brady Sutton returns from three years in prison and tries to go straight. Once a member of the Butch Cassidy gang, he is still suspected of being cahoots with them. After Cassidy and his men rob the bank, he is blamed. Escaping from the townspeople, he once again joins up with Cassidy to wait for a chance to help bring him in.