2 SATURDAY MOVIE: PRISONER OF HONOR (HBO, 9-11 p.m.) Dreyfuss on Dreyfus: A TV movie about a French army colonel (Richard Drey-fuss) caught up in the notorious 19th-century treason trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (Kenneth Colley). Directed by Ken Russell.
3 SUNDAY
THE GAMBLER RETURNS: THE LUCK OF THE DRAW (NBC, Nov. 3-4, 9-11 p.m.) Kenny Rogers seems pretty much over the hill as a country-music star, and you wouldn't expect the third sequel to his mediocre 1980 TV movie The Gambler to yield much pleasure. But for baby-boomers tuning in on a whim, The Gambler Returns might yield a surprising amount of enjoyably junky, nostalgic charm. Rogers once again portrays Brady Hawkes, a legendary gambler with a self- deprecating streak. This four-hour mini-series has an extremely vague, loosely struc-tured plot about Hawkes journeying to enter a high-stakes poker game, bankrolled by a group of brothel owners led by Burgundy Jones, who is played with furrowed-brow earnestness by Reba McEntire, a much hotter country- music star than Rogers. But plot is irrelevant here. The fun in watching The Gambler Returns is in seeing the cameo appearances of characters from a slew of '50s and '60s TV Westerns, including Gene Barry as Bat Masterson, Clint Walker's Cheyenne Bodie, Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain (The Rifleman), and Hugh O'Brien's Wyatt - Earp. It's as if NBC is offering a homage to some of the cheerfully cheesy Warner Bros.-produced Westerns that ABC ran three decades ago. All that's missing is squinty-eyed Jack Elam,who seemed to be a villain on every one of those shows at one time or another. Even though it's much too long-when it comes to making an expansive Western, director Dick Lowry, who also oversaw the previous three Gambler movies, sure ain't no John Ford-The Gambler is easygoing amusement. And the second night's installment, with Mickey Rooney going wild as a Western-movie director at the dawn of the film industry, is pretty darn funny. B
FALSE ARREST (ABC, Nov. 3 and 6, 9-11 p.m.) At first, it looks as if this four-hour, fact-based miniseries will fully justify its length. Knots Landing's Donna Mills stars as Joyce Lukezic, a Scottsdale, Ariz., woman accused in 1980 of murdering her husband's business partner. Director William Norton Jr. does a good job of introducing a large number of characters efficiently. Among them are Robert Wagner as Ron Lukezic, Joyce's husband, and Steven Bauer (Wiseguy, Scarface) as a hotshot cop so determined to solve the murder case quickly that he coerces an informer to name Joyce as the murderer. By the second night, however, False Arrest has succumbed to campy women-in- prison scenes. Joyce is convicted and sent to jail, and one prisoner (Mimi Kuzyk) lays down the classic prison-movie law, noting that Joyce's new roommates are ''thieves, junkies, murderers-this is their world, and you've got to live by their rules. Never show fear.'' Forced to defend herself against inmates who want to rape her, Mills brandishes a broomstick as her dialogue turns ever more purple: ''I'm in here for two murders-another one isn't gonna make a damn bit of difference!'' Mills is such an inherently steely actress that her sobbing indignation at being accused, arrested, and convicted rarely rings true, but she comes into her own as a tough con; Bauer is convincingly sleazy as a cop without morals. Wagner's part is comparatively small, but he's terrific: Dead-eyed and sullen, he plays Ron Lukezic as a vulgar enigma. For much of the movie, you can't tell whether he was involved with the crime and feels de-fensive, or if he's just peeved that, with Joyce in the slammer, he has to take care of his spoiled- brat stepchildren all by himself. C
