GHATAK’S LAMENT AT UCLA

Ritwak Ghatak’s “Jukti Takko ar Gappo” (“Reason, Argument and Story”) is one of the great farewells to the cinema, right up there with Cocteau’s “Testament of Orpheus” and the Ray-Wenders’ “Lightning Over Water.” In this highly personal allegory, Ghatak plays his own alter ego, an alcoholic, disillusioned intellectual who begins wandering once he’s lost wife, child and home.

The film was completed in 1974, the year that Ghatak, a tall, wraith-like man with a gentle yet penetrating gaze, died at 49.

In his journey in the movie, he’s accompanied by a young unemployed engineer (Uptal Dutt) and eventually a beautiful young refugee from Bangladesh (Shaonli Mitra), these two symbolizing, perhaps, the hope of the future and the anguish of the present.

“Reason, Argument and Story,” which screens at 5 p.m. Sunday (and Feb. 22) at UCLA Melnitz, is a highly idiosyncratic odyssey. It is the Dacca-born Ghatak’s lament for the 1947 partitioning of Bengal and a longing for Bangladesh-Bengal reunification, which on one level is expressed as a longing for a mother figure.

Ghatak, who also composed the film’s score and sings a sad, beautiful song, celebrates Bengali folk culture, philosophizes, quotes Yeats and Romain Rolland, and repeatedly decries his own sense of failure.

But that is a paradox: No one who made this provocative and distinctive film--and completed seven mostly extraordinary features before it--could be considered a failure.

Another Ghatak picture screening this weekend in UCLA’s Classic Films From India series is “Ajantrik” (“Pathetic Fallacy”), which was released in 1958 just when Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali” became the first internationally renowned Indian film.

Considered highly innovative in the Indian cinema, “Pathetic Fallacy” is a warm comedy of much charm about a man (Kali Banerjee) in love with his taxi, an ancient roadster. Before the taxi’s inevitable demise, and all the attendant misery, the film rambles amiably--all Ghatak films ramble--from one humorous vignette of rural life to another.

For complete schedule of Ghatak films: (213) 825-9261, 825-2581.

“The Directors Guild Golden Jubilee Retrospective” continues Friday at the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater with the screening of Andre de Toth’s “Ramrod” (1947) and “Pitfall” (1948) at 1 and again at 8 p.m..

What a way De Toth has with a genre. This Western and film noir are cult B films that live up to advance notice and then some. De Toth had terrific casts--what Veronica Lake lacks as an actress she makes up for in star quality--and a pair of strong scripts.

The first film is an adaptation by several hands of a Luke Short novel, the second is Jay Dratler’s adaptation of his own novel, and De Toth made the absolute most of them. Both are crisp, high-style and of intense psychological complexity, and both have endings more realistic than most ‘40s movies.

“Ramrod” tells of a lethal range war that breaks out when the proud, willful daughter (Veronica Lake) of a cattle rancher (Charles Ruggles) refuses to marry the man he has chosen for her (Preston Foster). Caught in the middle is Lake’s decent, capable foreman (Joel McCrea)--or “ramrod”--and his laid-back sidekick (Don DeFore), a classic good-bad guy who is really the most intriguing character in the film.

Even more crackling is “Pitfall,” in which Dick Powell’s bored insurance man’s attraction to sultry lady-in-distress Lizabeth Scott makes him vulnerable to blackmail by sleazy private eye Raymond Burr, who’s obsessed with Scott.

The tension builds and builds and so does our sympathy for Powell, Scott and Powell’s no-nonsense wife, Jane Wyatt. There’s a powerful aura of postwar disillusionment in “Pitfall,” and it offers authentic glimpses of L.A. in the late ‘40s. Information: (213) 857-6201.

The recently restored 1939 “Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex,” shown last September at the Nuart, screens again Thursday at UCLA Melnitz along with “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) in the “Technicolor: The Glory Years” series. An example of Technicolor at its richest, this swift, vigorous adaptation of the Maxwell Anderson play stars Bette Davis and Errol Flynn.