EAST MEETS WEST IN ‘THE HERDSMAN’

In case you missed “The Herdsman” when it was shown as part of UCLA’s Xie Jin retrospective, you have another chance to see this outstanding film by China’s greatest director when it screens tonight at the Nuart as part of its Monday evening Chinese Film Series.

Once again Xie displays his special gift at bringing intimacy and grace to the epic form. It’s 1980 and a well-born Chinese (Liu Qiong), who fled both a bad marriage and an incipient revolution, has now flown to Peking for a reunion with the son (Zhu Shimao) he hasn’t seen in more than 30 years.

Now a San Francisco-based chemical industry tycoon, Liu thinks he might like to take his son back to America with him, but he is unprepared for the 41-year-old herdsman in peasant uniform who stands awkwardly before him. (The father is much more at home in the luxury Peking hotel’s discotheque than his son.) The men agree to let bygones be bygones, but Zhu cannot but help express bitterness at his plight as the son of a well-known capitalist who fled to the United States.

“The Herdsman” unfolds in flashback as Zhu tells of the hardships he suffered during the Cultural Revolution (and even earlier), and also of the happiness he eventually found in marriage and in the simple, rugged outdoor life of raising horses in the splendid mountains of Inner Mongolia. “The Herdsman” is unabashedly a brief for the New China and its future, but Xie and writer Li Zhun are honest enough to allow Zhu, who’s just been reinstated as a teacher after years of being politically out of favor, to admit that had his father come five years earlier he would have been tempted to take him up on his offer.

Zhu and Cong Shan as the herdsman’s sturdy, devoted young wife are most likable, but the film’s special pleasure is the elegant Li Qiong, a veteran star who now mainly directs and who was a recent and gracious visitor to Los Angeles in connection with the Four Star’s extraordinary pre-revolutionary Chinese cinema retrospective. Playing with “The Herdsman” is a revival of “The Rickshaw Boy,” an awkward but appealing period film based on a famous novel by Lao She (1899-1966).

The County Museum of Art’s “Fifty Years of Film From the Museum of Modern Art” continues Friday at 8 p.m. with “The Third Man” (1949). Would that all famous movies stood the test of time as well as this witty, stylish, vastly entertaining Carol Reed-Graham Greene film noir set in war-ravaged postwar Vienna and accompanied by Anton Karas’ memorable zither theme; it’s even better than one remembered it.

Joseph Cotten is the brash, naive writer of Western novels who’s come to Vienna on the promise of a job from an old pal--only to arrive in time for his purported funeral.

The intrigue and danger which quickly ensnare the perplexed but dogged Cotten yields an unsentimentally observed conflict between the loyalty friendship demands and the reality that Cotten’s pal was--or is--an especially evil and heartless man. Cotten is charming as the innocent abroad, and there are equally terrific performances from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard--and, of course, Orson Welles. “The Third Man” will be followed by Max Ophuls’ compelling psychological drama “Caught” (1949), with James Mason, Robert Ryan and Barbara Bel Geddes. Saturday’s offering is David O. Selznick’s durable World War II home front saga, “Since You Went Away” (1944), starring Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten and Shirley Temple. Phone: (213) 857-6201.

Among the films in the concluding weekend of the first half of UCLA’s mammoth Indian cinema retrospective is G.I. Iyer’s two-hour, 40-minute “Adi Shankaracharya,” a celebration of the life and teachings of a great philosopher-saint so imaginative and compelling that its spiritual impact can be felt even by one unfamiliar with the teachings of Shankara (S.D. Banerjee), who lived a thousand years ago and sought a oneness with nature and god.

Shankara’s quest unfolds with much symbolism--and accompanied by mesmeric chants and hymns--in richly beautiful southern India. Said to be the first film ever made in Sanskrit, it is a demanding, sometimes wearying and elusive experience but one well worth the effort. For complete weekend schedule: (213) 825-2681, 2953.