FRENCH FILM QUARTET AT THE MELNITZ

“Contemporary French Cinema,” composed of four recent double features, gets under way at UCLA Melnitz Friday at 8 p.m. with Colline Serreau’s “Qu’est qu’on attend pour etre heureux!” (“What Are We Waiting for to Be Happy?”), preceded by Caroline Roboh’s “Clementine Tango.”

We can skip over “Clementine Tango,” a precious fable set in a kinky Paris nightclub and so tedious as to give decadence a bad name. The other film, fortunately, is a darkly hilarious and savage satire, skewering the pretensions and absurdities of the filming of a ridiculously elaborate car commercial that involves the director’s and client’s increasingly cruel exploitation of their performers and extras. But as a fellow hired to impersonate Valentino (only to be told he’s “over the hill” and “a piece of furniture”) reminds his bedraggled and similarly browbeaten Harlow: “All biz is like show biz.”

Sublime is the word for Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” (1939)--as it is for his “Ugetsu,” “The Life of Oharu” and “Sansho the Bailiff.” The nobility of women in the face of cruel oppression and injustice was ever the preoccupation of this great director of actresses, and “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums” (at the Nuart Wednesday only) tells of the self-sacrificing love of a servant girl (Kakayo Mori) for a young Kabuki actor (Shotaro Hanoyagi). Mizoguchi’s evocation of the past--the film’s Meiji era setting was his favorite--is not only remarkably detailed but also so loving that it gives scope to his heroine’s tragic fate. Its effect suggests an acceptance of life in all its inequities. Playing with it is another masterpiece, Yasujiro Ozu’s serene, contemplative “Late Spring” (1949) in which a widower (Chishu Ryu) comes to realize that he must launch his dowdy, overly girlish daughter (Setsuko Hara) on a life of her own if she is to have a chance at lasting happiness.

Surely, surely director James Whale must have been deliberately putting us on, not only in “The Old Dark House,” but also in his classic 1933 film of H. G. Wells’ “The Invisible Man” (at UCLA Melnitz Thursday at 8 p.m.). Despite the sure-fire pathos of its finish, it is very funny indeed. Claude Rains has the title role as a scientist whose development of a self-administered disappearing drug turns him into a megalomaniacal villain worthy of a being a Bond adversary. “The Invisible Man” also provided work in the depths of the Depression for virtually the entire British colony in Hollywood. Playing with it is “The Unknown” (1927), yet another bizarre Tod Browning/Lon Chaney film of repressed passion and reminiscent of such other deadly love triangles with circus backgrounds as “Variety.” Chaney plays an armless wonder who is a knife thrower and sharpshooter. His human target is Joan Crawford, who responds warmly to him as the one man who can’t molest her. But strong man Norman Kerry is as smitten with her as Chaney is. . . . As dated as it is as melodrama, “The Unknown,” which has a truly grotesque plot twist, is timeless in its impact because of Browning’s extraordinary compassion.

“The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” (1953), playing Friday at the County Museum of Art with “The Caine Mutiny” (1954) at 1 p.m. and again at 8 in the Stanley Kramer series, is surely the most venturesome and atypical film ever produced by Kramer (Roy Rowland directed). This Dr. Seuss musical fantasy, too far-out in style for its day, should appeal to anyone who was ever forced to take piano lessons. In a dream little Tommy Rettig imagines his strict piano teacher (Hans Conreid, a delicious villain) has created a kind of pastel “Metropolis” in which he will be able to command 500 little boys to play at his mile-long piano. “Think of it!,” says Conreid, “Five thousand fingers! And they’re all mine!”

A Monday evening Satyajit Ray series commences tonight at the Nuart with “Pather Panchali” (1955), the first film in his great Apu Trilogy, and the starkly beautiful, conscious-raising “A Distant Thunder” (1973), set against the largely man-made famine that swept Bengal in 1943.