‘Lunch Date’: A Delightful Morsel

About 38 minutes into “Arts & Entertainment Revue Goes to the Movies” (A&E; Sunday at 7 p.m. and again at 11), up pops Adam Davidson’s 10-minute “The Lunch Date,” a funny, inspired vignette that is an absolute, delightful perfection.

A fastidious, middle-aged white suburban matron (Scotty Bloch) misses her train at Grand Central Station, orders a salad in a station restaurant, gets up for a moment and comes back to find a bulky black man (Clebert Ford) eating it. The payoff is hilarious and ironic; no wonder Davidson took first place at Cannes for best short film, in addition to winning the outstanding new director award from the Directors Guild of America and the national student film prize from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

What happens before this piece de resistance can easily be skipped, for it is but a dull, superficial promotion for “Havana,” “The Sheltering Sky” and “Hamlet” in which their respective directors--Sydney Pollack, Bernardo Bertolucci and Franco Zeffirelli-- chat briefly about their work past and present, which in turn is represented by clips old and new.