Working Girl
7.10am & 1.55am, Sky Movies Comedy
(Mike Nichols, 1988) This deft and witty romantic comedy has its heart firmly in the screwball 30s. Melanie Griffith is the secretary looking for promotion but cynically exploited by boss Sigourney Weaver; Harrison Ford is the other point in the triangle - but the women are very much in charge. Kevin Wade's script sparkles and there's hilarious comic support from PA Joan Cusack.

Ocean's Thirteen
8pm & 4.20am, Sky Movies Action Thriller
(Steven Soderbergh, 2007) An unlucky 13 at that. Like Ocean's Twelve, this threequel reunites the charismatic con-team - George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and all - to swindle the really bad guys; but again the stellar cast seems to have forgotten to add the fun and fizz of the original. Even Al Pacino, as their nasty target, Las Vegas tycoon Willy Bank, is strangely subdued.

If...
1.30am, Film4
(Lindsay Anderson, 1968) Anderson's brilliant allegorical attack on the establishment, social values and everything, is set appropriately in an English public school. Malcolm McDowell plays a sixth former who expresses his dislike of the school authorities by bayoneting the chaplain and wreaking havoc on speech day. A mad, very funny fantasy.

A Hollywood celebrity, a teenage death in a bathroom and the Church of Scientology is a toxic brew for global gossipmongers and, sure enough, the death of John Travolta's 16-year-old son, Jett, has triggered an orgy of internet chatter. Some of the speculation is being driven in an organised way by critics of the Church of Scientology ("Co$" in internet parlance).

According to the Travolta family, Jett suffered from regular seizures (around one a week) and had been diagnosed with Kawasaki syndrome, a rare childhood condition with some life-threatening symptoms but rarely fatal. Details of Jett's death, in the bathroom of Travolta's holiday home in Barbados after a reported seizure, are sketchy. The postmortem results will almost certainly be kept private by Travolta and his wife, Kelly Preston.

For members of Anonymous, an online group of anti-Scientology activists, Jett's death is an opportunity to repeat old allegations against Travolta and Scientology: that Jett suffered a form of autism but Travolta and Preston, who are Scientologists, were in denial about it because it is claimed that Scientology argues that autism is psychosomatic and must not be managed with mainstream medication or psychiatry.

It is alleged online that Travolta and Scientology may have somehow prevented the treatment of Jett's condition and put him through "detox programmes" created by Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard. But in interviews Preston has described the "detox" only as being "90% organic" apart from "a little bit of junk food".

Travolta's lawyers, Michael Ossi and Michael McDermott, told the celebrity website TMZ.com that Jett took an anti-seizure drug called Depakote and it was only stopped on medical advice. The British branch of Scientology did not respond to questions about its position on autism.

"Scientologists use medical drugs when physically ill and also rely on the advice and treatment of medical doctors," said a spokesman.

The online speculation comes at a convenient moment for the anti-Scientology campaign, with worldwide protests planned this Saturday, but there may be a backlash if it is seen to be exploiting a private tragedy.

'I turned around to look at her. She was facing straight ahead, so I couldn't see her eyes. She was young - not more than 24. Man, she looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world! Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty, not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about with your wife, but a natural beauty, a beauty that's almost homely, because it's so real." This is the description of Vera when first seen by the luckless anti-hero (Tom Neal) of Edgar G Ulmer's Detour (1945). Vera, one of the most hellish femmes fatales in the history of the cinema, was the benchmark role of Ann Savage, who has died aged 87.

Unlike the usual manipulative, glamorous heroines of noir, Savage, as the bitter, blackmailing hitchhiker, does not use her sex appeal. She makes her first appearance a full 32 minutes into Detour, a manic cinematic night ride, a fatalistic drama of sex and money, and one of the bleakest of films noirs. "I wasn't aware of the term 'film noir' until the 70s," Savage commented later in life. "I read up on it. It was a revelation to me when I learned Detour was a film noir ... I was very young and ignorant of the facts. I only worked three-and-a-half days on the movie, though that was more than half the time it took to shoot."

Born Bernice Maxine Lyon in Columbia, South Carolina, she was taken to Los Angeles by her widowed mother, a jewellery buyer, while still a child. In her teens, she trained at Max Reinhardt's acting school. The school's manager was Bert D'Armand, who later became her agent and subsequently her second husband in 1945. (She had been married briefly when she was 18.)

She changed her name to Ann Savage for a workshop production of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy that led to a contract at Columbia Pictures. Despite resisting the studio boss Harry Cohn's sexual advances, she was put to work on 11 films in 1943, many of which were part of the entertaining B-films being run by the studio - in series such as Lone Wolf (One Dangerous Night, Passport to Suez), Boston Blackie (After Midnight With Boston Blackie) and Blondie (Footlight Glamour). Also in the same year, she appeared in Two Señoritas from Chicago, Saddles and Sagebrush, Dangerous Blondes and Klondike Kate, the latter being the first of four films in which she co-starred with Neal, her partner in crime in Detour. Their off-screen relationship, however, was said to be chilly. Except for Passport to Suez, opposite the unjustly forgotten Warren William, where she played a femme fatale, she was all sweetness and light. She had little respect for such roles, however: "They were mindless," she said in 1985. "The actresses were just scenery. The stories all revolved around the male actors; they really had the choice roles. All the actresses had to do was to look lovely, since the dialogue was ridiculous."

She gradually began to get feistier roles in 1944, such as Two-Man Submarine and The Unwritten Code, in which she and Neal fought the Nazis, though nothing prepared audiences for Detour the following year. "My first scene was in the car," she recalled. "I read the lines and Edgar Ulmer corrected the tempo, and that was the last bit of coaching he gave me. He had given me the key, which was the tempo. It was difficult to speak that quickly, but it helped give the character her craziness - it was just right. I didn't see the rushes, so I had no idea I was coming over as hard as I was." She had been startled, she said, by how unkempt they wanted her to look: "I had just come off a lot that kept me looking absolutely perfect. But Vera was not a pretty woman. She was maniacal. Edgar objected to my hair looking so neat and had the hairdresser run cold cream through it to make it streaky and stringy. "

Detour was made by Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), the most notorious Poverty Row film company, as was Apology for Murder (1945), which Savage called "an out-and-out cloning of Double Indemnity". Certainly the plot of this cheap 67-minute B-movie bore a striking resemblance to Billy Wilder's 1944 classic. As Savage herself admitted, "I'm certainly no Barbara Stanwyck," but it was reasonably gripping and, as usual, she was a hypnotic presence on screen. However, Paramount, the producers of Double Indemnity, got it pulled after two days, and the film languished unseen for some years.

For the next eight years, Savage appeared in several negligible productions, in which she sparkled in shoddy settings. Apart from a few parts on television, she retired following The Woman They Almost Lynched in 1953, when she had moved down the casting list. Following her husband's death in 1969, she taught herself law by working as an attorney's clerk and also learned to fly a plane. Savage returned to the big screen after a 33-year absence, playing a nun in Fire With Fire (1986). Then, when she was 86, the Canadian director Guy Maddin cast her in My Winnipeg (2007). According to Maddin: "We finished the script for My Winnipeg, a plunge back into the mythically inchoate days of my own - and my city's - childhood. These were days lived completely under the dominion of a fearsome maternal titan, years trembled out beneath the scented fist of my mother's gorgeous and glamorous dictatorship, and I knew there was only one person alive, who had ever lived, who could play her role: Ann Savage."

• Ann Savage (Bernice Maxine Lyon), actor, born 19 February 1921; died 25 December 2008

Tintin may be Belgium's best-known export, but Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg's forthcoming adaptation of the Hergé comic strip is taking on a distinctly British flavour. As reported earlier, Andy Serkis is to play the fresh-faced reporter's curmudgeonly sidekick Captain Haddock; now comes a report from Ain't It Cool News that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have been cast as bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson.

It will be the Shaun of the Dead and Spaced duo's first onscreen pairing since Hot Fuzz (2007). The site also says the $135m (£92.6m) project will start shooting in just a month, so we can expect more casting news soon. Top of Jackson and Spielberg's list will no doubt be a replacement for their original Tintin, 17-year-old Thomas Sangster, who was forced to drop out when the project was delayed due to funding issues.

Thomson and Thompson, known as Dupond and Dupont in the original books, are a pair of clumsy, thoroughly incompetent detectives who appear pretty much identical, bar the shape of their moustaches (Thomson's is slightly wider). Their familial relationship is somewhat unclear, although they are occasionally referred to as twins or brothers.

Jackson and Spielberg's Tintin was originally conceived as a trilogy, but Universal's refusal to countenance their demand for a percentage of the gross seems to have consigned the two sequels in limbo. Paramount and Sony are now co-financing the first film, which Spielberg will direct, with Jackson in the role of producer. The Kiwi director of the Lord of the Rings films had always intended to take charge of the second film, but even that seems to be up in the air in credit-crunched Hollywood.

Tintin will be shot in digital 3-D using performance-capture technology, a technique Serkis is well accustomed to – he blazed the trail for it with his performance as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and developed it further when he portrayed King Kong in Jackson's 2005 remake. Tintin is due in cinemas in 2010.