PREMINGER, POWELL RETROSPECTIVES

Otto Preminger, and the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, share more than that same last initial in their names.

Prestige and prestidigitation, for starters. They’re “cult” moviemakers.

All three (or at least Powell and Preminger) have fond and fervent flocks of fans, feverishly foraging through their entire filmographies.

And Preminger and Powell (with Pressburger along for the ride) are currently the subjects of local retrospectives: The UCLA Film Archives is screening 28 Preminger films--from his first American effort to his last movie--at Melnitz Theater, on Thursdays. On weekends, at the Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art--guided by their suavely sonorous and sardonic host, curator Ronald Haver--the museum is partially through 19 of Powell’s.

The Preminger cult holds much more sway overseas. There, the maven of Paris’ McMahon Theatre, critic Michel Mourlet was once moved to exclaim “Walsh, Lang, Losey, Preminger and Cottafavi are the greatest of the great!”

But, here in America, Preminger was too familiar a figure. As an actor, he was the quintessential sub-Von Stroheim Nazi Commandant of the ‘40s: impeccable, insolent, bald, and bullet-headed, with a great gravelly sneer. As a director, he was famous for sabotaging the censors and breaking the black list on one hand, and big-time best-seller adaptations and “stunt” casting on the other (Lawyer Joseph Welch in “Anatomy of a Murder”). He was too overexposed, too tall a target; Dwight MacDonald once wondered: “What’s art to Preminger, or Preminger to art?” And Mort Sahl’s greatest line may have been at the premiere of “Exodus,” Preminger’s Israeli saga: “Otto!” screamed Sahl, “Let my people go!”

Powell, by contrast, has sometimes been a great American favorite. His 1948 “The Red Shoes” was the archetypal art-house hit of its day--and throughout the ‘40s, his brand of wit and whimsy, music and morality plays--with Technicolor terpsichores and fantasy in the flossiest backgrounds and fieriest hues--regularly ravished audiences. (Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola both acknowledge a debt to him.)

This week, the parade of Preminger, Powell and Pressburger marches on. On Thursday, at Melnitz, (213) 825-2581, starting at 5:30 p.m., there’s three of Preminger’s ‘50s films: “River of No Return” (a sinfully colorful Cinemascope Western with Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe); “The Man With the Golden Arm,” (Nelson Algren’s grim, nervy heroin horror story--with Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak), and “Carmen Jones” (Bizet in black, with Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge and Pearl Bailey).

On the weekend, Bing Theater, (213) 857-6201, will bring four more from Powell and Pressburger. On Friday: “The Battle of the River Plate,” a sometimes weird World War II sea saga, with Peter Finch, Anthony Quayle and a madcap Montevideo climax; and the pre-”Psycho” slasher classic, “Peeping Tom.” And, on Saturday, two of Powell’s oddball operettas and baroque ballet films: “Tales of Hoffman” (from Offenbachh) and “Oh, Rosalinda!” (from Johann Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus”).

Alliteration aside, they’re all worth a watch.

One of this week’s movies on the ongoing joint Museum-Melnitz series of Italian comedies--is especially notable: Ettore Scola’s 1974 “We All Loved Each Other So Much” (Thursday, at the museum) is both a poignantly humorous portrait of Scola’s generation and an homage to the Italian cinema itself.

We don’t usually recommend movies we haven’t seen, but a very rarely shown Soviet film--scheduled for Friday at the New World Society (1251 S. St. Andrews Place. 213-731-1296)--may be the right exception: 1972’s “Uncle Vanya.” The reasons: It’s adapted from a great play, Anton Chekhov’s quietly shattering study of provincial despair. It has two of Russia’s finest actors in the principal parts. As Astrov: Sergei Bondarchuk, the director-star of 1968’s “War and Peace.” And, as Vanya, Innokentki Smoktunovsky, the superb lead of Grigori Kozintsev’s 1964 “Hamlet.” And the director is that brilliant local expatriate--and maker of last year’s “Maria’s Lovers” and “Runaway Train”--Andrei Konchalovsky.