WORLD has turned itself into a recruitment advertisement for The Mob, with Great Crimes And Trials Of The 20th Century (7.30pm) and Billy Bathgate (9.30pm). The first is about Lucky Luciano, a man who boasted ''I buried hundreds of guys'' and the second is about gangster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman) and the young acolyte who decides his brightest career opportunity lies in providing turncoats like Bruce Willis with cement overshoes and dumping them over the side of a tugboat.
Despite an impressive array of talent, Billy Bathgate is as dour as a gangster movie could be. Hoffman turns in the kind of technically flawless performance that brings to mind his exchange with Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man. Hoffman arrived for filming looking terrible and when Olivier asked why he said he had deprived himself of sleep to prepare for the role. Olivier then said: ''But can't you act?'' Hoffman knows what he is doing, no one would deny it, but in Billy Bathgate there isn't any fire in his belly.
Much of the plot revolves around Schultz's decline and his preoccupation fighting a tax suit on one hand and rising mafioso Lucky Luciano on the other.
Is it coincidence then that Great Crimes And Trials Of The 20th Century is about Mr Luciano? Surely World could not have intended to be so inventive.
THE undisputed highlight of the night is Runaway Train (Pearl, 9.30pm) a rollicking adventure which does not wear cement overshoes.
Manny (Jon Voight) is a hard-as-nails prisoner who has escaped from a nasty Alaskan jail with punkish and cretinous sidekick Eric Roberts. They emerge into a blizzard and grope their way towards the train tracks, clambering aboard a passing train.
From which point on you will barely have time to blink. The duo are unaware that the engineer has had a fatal heart attack and run into frantic passenger Rebecca De Mornay who begs them to stop the train. The cons make it to the engineer's cab where their battle to save the day, and the passengers, begins.