‘THE BIG TRAIL’: GO WEST, JOHN WAYNE

In 1930, Raoul Walsh directed “The Big Trail,” a classic trek Western notable for providing former USC football player and Fox prop man Marion Morrison with his first starring role as John Wayne--and for having been shot in a 70-millimeter process called “Grandeur.” The onset of the Depression curtailed wide-screen presentations of the film to Grauman’s Chinese and the Roxy inNew York, and it didn’t do well in standard format despite good notices. As a result, Wayne was to toil another nine years in B Westerns until John Ford, who had recommended him to Walsh in the first place, cast him in the star-making “Stagecoach.”

Preserved in a conversion to CinemaScope, “The Big Trail” screens tonight at 8 at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., as part of the citywide “50 Years of Films From the Museum of Modern Art” tribute. It’s a splendid entertainment in which Walsh and cameraman Arthur Edeson take full advantage of the wide screen and deep focus to tell Hal G. Evarts’ story of a wagon train’s adventure-filled journey from Missouri to Oregon, led by buckskin-clad Wayne. The result is an epic film with a visual texture so rich and black-and-white graphic as to look like a series of authentically detailed etchings of the Old West. The acting is sometimes dated in its theatricality, but the film’s look and feel seem way ahead of its time. Wayne’s a bit callow himself but was never so handsome, and already in place is his image as a man of strength and integrity, courage and humor. Phone: (213) 278-8990, ext. 215.

“Oriane,” which launches a New French Directors series at UCLA Melnitz tonight at 8, couldn’t be previewed because it’s committed to Filmex, and the other prize winner in the package, “Louise the Rebel” (screening Friday at 8) arrived for preview sans subtitles, but they’re probably worth a gamble, judging from others in the offering. Bahloul Bahloul’s “Mint Tea” (already shown at Filmex and screening Wednesday at 9:45 p.m.) is a winner, a bittersweet comedy about a young Algerian (Abdel Kechiche) with a million-dollar smile surviving in a hostile Paris as a petty crook but descended upon by his formidably naive mother (Chaffia Boudra). “Mint Tea” is preceded at 8 by Jean Marboeuf’s “Vaudeville,” a film of admirable rigor--until its soft finish--but one that also submits us to the company of two spoiled, unsympathetic male chauvinists (expertly played by Guy Marchand and Jean-Marc Thibault) in the throes of middle-age malaise. No amount of deliberate drabness, however, can hide the innate radiance of Marie-Christine Barrault as Marchand’s unappreciated wife. For full series information: (213) 825-2581, 825-2345.

Film pioneer Pare Lorentz will be among the recipients at this year’s International Documentary Assn.’s awards luncheon Wednesday at the Sheraton Premiere, and on Thursday at 8 p.m. Lorentz’s famous New Deal documentaries, “The Plow That Broke the Plains” (1936) and “The River” (1937), will be screened at the Directors Guild Theater, 7950 Sunset Blvd. The first, which relates the history of the Great Plains, stretching from Texas to Canada, and the second, which focuses on the Mississippi (and all the rivers that flow into it), outline our exploitation of our natural resources and its dire consequences. “The Plow That Broke the Plains” culminates with the ‘20s boom in wheat turning into the Dust Bowl tragedy of the ‘30s; “The River” shows the disastrous floods following in the wake of the systematic rape of lands bordering upon the Mississippi and its tributaries. There’s a vitality and poetry in these films rarely seen in documentaries; they’re the filmic equivalents of the photographs of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Phone: (213) 655-7089.

Reminders: the Indian retrospective continues at UCLA Melnitz as does “50 Years of Films” at the County Museum of Art, highlighted by a reconstructed “All Quiet on the Western Front” Saturday at 8 p.m. Phone: (213) 857-6201. “Best of Fox International” which continues through Dec. 25., commences Friday with Sergei Paradjanov’s “The Color of Pomegranates.” Phone: (213) 396-9808.