ARAB CINEMA FESTIVAL CONTINUES AT UCLA

The Arab Cinema Festival continues at Melnitz Theater, UCLA, with outstanding Tunisian films. “The Ambassadors” (1979), which screens Sunday at 2 p.m., and “Aziza” (1984), which screened Monday, deserve far more exposure than a single showing.

Al-Nasir Al-Ktari’s “The Ambassadors” (“Les Ambassadeurs”) is red-hot, yet its anger is carefully controlled. Paradoxically, it’s as beautifully wrought as the subject it depicts is abysmally ugly--the rampant racism of the French toward Arabs emigrating to Paris in search of work and settling in a ghetto in the shadow of the Sacre Coeur, hard by a very seedy-looking Montmartre. As they leave Tunisia, an immigration official reminds the workers that each one is an ambassador, yet their survival in France requires more the skills of a soldier than of diplomacy.

“The Ambassadors” follows the lives of a half dozen Arab men and women of various ages, all eventually caught up in what borders on a guerrilla war declared upon them by their French neighbors. That all this chaos and suffering takes place in quaintly shabby settings made familiar by Utrillo (and so many other painters) only adds to the film’s bitter irony.

Abdelatif Ben Ammar’s “Aziza,” which takes its title from the name of its beautiful, quietly determined heroine (Yasmine Khlat), is a handsomely made, well-acted film of feminist sympathies, surely something of a rarity in the Arab world.

The first offering in UCLA’s monumental Archives Preservation series is the delightful 1932 David O. Selznick production for RKO of the Philip Barry play “The Animal Kingdom,” the very film that will be shown next Tuesday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ tribute to Myrna Loy at Carnegie Hall. Long thought lost, it was discovered by County Museum of Art Film Programs Director Ronald Haver in his search for missing portions of “A Star Is Born.”

No wonder the film is a personal favorite of Loy’s and that Selznick regarded it as crucial to her career, putting behind her all those Oriental vamps of her silent days. Loy also may like it because it’s such a piquant contrast to the movies’ “perfect wife” she was so soon to become. It screens Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the Melnitz Theater in a dazzlingly fresh print.

No sooner has Loy swept debonair Leslie Howard off his feet than Ann Harding, his longtime amour, returns from a long sojourn abroad to declare that absence has in fact made her heart grow much fonder of him. This is no “Micki & Maude,” however, and Howard manfully owns up to his engagement to Loy.

Gradually--and with great subtlety--we realize that the ravishingly beautiful Loy is an opportunist, a social butterfly whose materialistic values are only destructive to Howard (in one of his best weakling intellectual portrayals). Loy’s luminous performance--Harding’s is no less so--culminates in a seduction scene played with what proves to be totally misplaced confidence.

As a screen adaptation of a play, “The Animal Kingdom” is much more graceful than writer Horace Jackson and director Edward H. Griffith’s 1930 film of Barry’s “Holiday,” which also starred Harding. Mention must be made of William Gargan’s sweetly comic butler, an ex-prizefighter; of Van Nest Polglase’s elegantly appointed sets and, above all, Howard Greer’s timeless gowns (uncredited, incredibly).

Playing with “The Animal Kingdom” is a fresh print of “The Royal Family of Broadway” (1930), co-directed by George Cukor and Cyril Gardner. On Saturday: “The Scarlet Empress” (1934) and “Death Takes a Holiday” (1934). On Sunday: “Weekends Only” (1932) and “Liliom” (1930).

In case you missed Shohei Ima mura’s awesome “The Ballad of Narayama” when it played last fall, it is back Wednesday and Thursday only at the New Beverly Cinema along with Masahiro Shinoda’s stunning 1980 fantasy, “Demon Pond.”

Imamura brings to bear his characteristic respect for nature with its immutable laws and capacity to ennoble and degrade in “Ballad,” his retelling of a legend about a remote village people who abandon their elderly on a sacred mountain.