‘COMEDY, ITALIAN STYLE’ SERIES CONTINUES AT UCLA

Alberto Lattuada’s scintillating dark comedy “I Did It” (1973), which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA Melnitz in the “Comedy, Italian Style” series, opens with wide vistas of Milan as throngs of people, made to look like ants, pour into its center to begin their work day. One of these millions is a skyscraper window cleaner (Giancarlo Giannini, in one of his most winning portrayals) who amusingly insists he has his feet on the ground. Nothing could be further from the truth, physically or mentally. Fueled by constant glimpses of life in the suites of the rich and powerful, Giannini daydreams mightily of becoming a somebody, driven even to fantasizing assassinating the Pope. Giannini plays a type more familiar today than when the film was made, the ordinary individual who finds himself driven mad by anonymity and tempted sorely by the instant celebrity made possible by the media. Although a bit long-winded, “I Did It” is very funny and therefore all the more effective in making its disturbing underlying points. Phones: (213) 825-2345, 825-2581.

“Comedy, Italian Style” continues at LACMA on Thursday in Bing Theater at 8 p.m. with two films directed by Pietro Germi, “Seduced and Abandoned” (1964) and “The Birds, the Bees and the Italians” (1966) and Friday with Mario Monicelli’s “The Girl With the Gun” (1968) and Dino Risi’s “I See Naked” (1969). The second pair are lesser-known, but what winners they are! Monica Vitti has the title role in the Monicelli comedy as a Sicilian beauty rushing all over Scotland and England pursuing the man who wronged her. The result is a zesty send-up of the rigid Sicilian concept of honor, a last-reel romance and a delightful tale of Vitti’s learning to adjust to a new world (but one in which everyone seems to speak Italian!). The film is stunningly photographed by Carlo di Palma in largely unfamiliar locales. (How often have you seen the rather grand city of Sheffield on the screen?)

“I See Naked” showcases Nino Manfredi’s remarkable range, control and subtlety as a comedian in seven episodes of varying length--two are but blackouts. The film is an impressive test of taste and judgment on the part of Manfredi and his colleagues, considering that they touch upon bestiality, transvestism and voyeurism, among other things. The film’s set-piece finds Manfredi playing a postal worker and secret transvestite who entertains a nice, middle-aged widower who’s answered the ad Manfredi has written in his female identity. How’s he to tell the guy he’s actually his own mysteriously absent “sister” and not lose him? This sequence represents a beautiful piece of writing, acting and directing on the subject of loneliness and need for simple companionship. The film closes with the title sequence in which Manfredi’s suave advertising executive is such a believer that sex sells that he starts being driven nuts by seeing all women as naked. Phone: (213) 857-6201.

LACMA’s Michael Powell series, also at Bing Theater, continues Friday at 1 and again at 8 with “Stairway to Heaven” (1946), one of his most famous collaborations with Emeric Pressburger. The war era inspired a number of fantasies about last-minute reprieves from heaven’s doorstep, and this is one of the most durable and persuasive, a work of visual elegance as well as sentiment. David Niven is a RAF squadron leader, trapped in a burning plane over the English Channel, who bids farewell to American WAC wireless operator Kim Hunter and bales out--only to wash ashore moments later as she’s passing by on her bike. But has Niven truly survived, or is he just on a brief reprieve? Can he appeal his death sentence? Or is he merely hallucinating his subsequent experiences?

“Stairway to Heaven” is a particular triumph of production designer Alfred Junge’s imagination, and his Other World is vast, starkly simple and not all that different from the underworld in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” (It’s Heaven, for example, that’s in black and white, and Earth in gorgeous Technicolor.) It is a wonderfully romantic work, a celebration of the preciousness of life made in the immediate wake of World War II. With Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Marius Goring and Abraham Sofaer. Second feature: “One of Our Aircraft Is Missing” (1942).