BING TO SCREEN ‘BEST OF IRENE DUNNE’

It’s a bit ironic that the County Museum of Art is calling its tribute (which starts Friday at the Bing Theater) to one of Hollywood’s enduringly lovely ladies “The Best of Irene Dunne.”

It’s unimaginable that Dunne ever gave anything less than her considerable best.

Beyond her beauty and talent, Dunne’s character and innate dignity allowed her a range remarkable at the height of Hollywood’s golden era, in which most major stars more or less played themselves.

Dunne triumphed as a singing star, dramatic actress and screwball comedienne. Later on she was the ideal matriarch, both domestic (“I Remember Mama”) and royal (as Queen Victoria in “The Mudlark”).

She retired from acting in 1952--”but not from the film industry,” as she has said--and no amount of persuasion has managed to sway her from her decision. Happily, her work has withstood the test of time.

“The Best of Irene Dunne” begins with “Back Street” (1932), screening at 1 and 8 p.m., a classic women’s picture based on a novel by Fannie Hurst. A story about the sad lot of a woman who settles for being the mistress of the man she loves sounds like a maudlin four-hankie tear-jerker.

But thanks to the exceedingly sensitive direction of John M. Stahl, “Back Street” is unexpectedly a jolter in its raw emotional honesty. For both Dunne’s good-hearted Rae Schmidt and John Boles’ caddish, selfish banker come to know exactly who they are and why they’ve made the choices they have. What they’ve settled for is a great and enduring love they chose not to deny.

Playing with “Back Street” is another potent Stahl-Dunne collaboration, “The Magnificent Obsession” (1935), co-starring Robert Taylor.

“Roberta” (1935), which screens Saturday at 8 p.m., is the Jerome Kern-Otto Harbach musical that finds Dunne cast as a White Russian princess turned Paris fashion designer. She and Randolph Scott (whose redoubtable Aunt Helen Westley is Dunne’s employer) supply the romance while Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire provide the wisecracks and some of the greatest dancing ever filmed.

The trifling plot is overly talky, but all is forgiven when Dunne sings “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Lovely to Look At” and Astaire and Rogers go into action. “Roberta” is about as high ‘30s as you can get, with Van Nest Polglase’s white-on-white Deco sets and Barnett Newman’s sumptuous gowns, as timeless as the Kern-Harbach tunes. William Seiter directed.

Playing with it is “Sweet Adeline” (1935), another musical in which Kern collaborated with Oscar Hammerstein II and others. Mervyn LeRoy directed. For full schedule: (213) 857-6201.

Among the films screening this weekend in UCLA’s “Salute to the Soviet Republics” are Olev Neuland’s “The Bullfight”/”Corrida” (Estonia, 1982) and Arunas Zhebrunas’ “Nut Bread” (Lithuania, 1977).

The first is a heady, impassioned tale about a middle-age writer (Rein Aren), who strikes us as Hemingwayesque long before his sexy, tarty young bride (Rita Paawe) comments on it herself.

He has settled on a remote island soon invaded by a sallow, skinny intellectual (Sulev Luik) determined to cause trouble, and a wild herd of heavily symbolic bulls. The water proves as shallow as this tedious, obvious film that not even Aren’s vital, larger-than-life presence can redeem. Roman Polanski told much the same story far better in “Knife in the Water.”

“Nut Bread” is another matter, a recollection of a now-vanishing ancient rural way of life that is as charming and tasty as its title sounds. A rueful, romantic pastoral comedy much in the vein of the Czech classics of the ‘60s, it looks back on childhood sweethearts (Leonid Obolensky, Saulus Sipaitis), who both had at least one singularly wayward parent.

“The Bullfight” screens Saturday at 5 p.m. and “Nut Bread” follows the 7:30 p.m. Saturday screening of the 97-minute Georgian comedy “Blue Mountains” (which was unavailable for preview). “Nut Bread” screens again Sunday at 5 p.m. Information: (213) 825-2581.