CONVERSATIONS WITH POET CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Barbet Schroeder’s “Charles Bukowski” (screening at EZTV, 8547 Santa Monica Blvd., at 8 p.m. Friday through Sunday and the same times the following weekend) is a thoroughly entertaining two-hour conversation with the poet laureate of L.A. lowlife, made in 1985 for French television. This month, Schroeder, the distinguished French writer-producer-director-documentarian, is at long last to start shooting Bukowski’s “Barfly,” starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

Composed of 26 “chapters,” “Charles Bukowski” finds its subject holding forth often outrageously but always provocatively on everything from women, liquor and style to work and life. There are forays to Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue, a seedy area once favored by Bukowski but now too cleaned up to please him, and to the writer’s childhood home, a well-kept Spanish bungalow in which he recalls the regular beatings administered by his father. But mainly it’s just Bukowski talking inside and outside his home.

Approaching 60, Bukowski has a tanned, mottled drinker’s complexion and a raspy voice. The hard but vital life that he’s lived on the edge shows on the man as it does in his writing. Bukowski often seems to be putting us on with his bleak humor, which makes him a splendid raconteur of the scabrous, but what makes him so valuable, beyond his potent poetic and literary gifts, is his outsider’s perspective, his lifelong determination to escape the entrapments of the Establishment. The years Bukowski spent wandering the country, working at menial jobs to preserve his freedom to write (and raise hell) have served him well as protection against becoming a celebrity now that he’s an internationally acclaimed literary figure. To spend two hours with Bukowski is to discover that Bukowski, as a wary, detached loner, uniquely embodies what is at heart the true spirit of Los Angeles. Phone: (213) 657-1532.

Jean Renoir’s “La Bete Humaine” (“The Human Beast”) and “The Lower Depths” (1936), which screen Friday at 1 p.m. and again at 8 at the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater, are both modern-day adaptations of literary works, both star Jean Gabin and both explore the dark side of human nature with the director’s usual subtlety and compassion. It’s hard to imagine that “La Bete Humaine” (1938), based on one of Emile Zola’s 20 Rougon-Macquart novels, could have had more impact when it was made that it does right now. Gabin plays a railroad engineer determined to escape his family’s sordid alcoholic past but who is plagued with dangerous black rages whenever he tries to transfer his love for his locomotive, whom he calls Lison, to an actual woman. In this tale of doom, a twist of fate hopelessly entangles him with the Le Havre station-master’s chic, sexy young wife (Simone Simon), a femme fatale if ever there was one. There’s a sense of inevitable disaster to this couple, so profoundly attracted to each other, that brings to mind the similarly lethal pairing in “The Honeymoon Killers.” The train sequences give to “La Bete Humaine” a gritty documentary flavor, and the entire picture has a bleak yet captivating film noir aura to it.

Adapted from the 1912 Gorky play (which Akira Kurosawa also filmed with great effectiveness in 1957), “The Lower Depths” tends to be a bit talky at times but is by and large a crackling evocation of bitter, despairing tenement life. Gabin this time is a petty career criminal, again cursing his heredity but perceiving that a beautiful but disillusioned young woman (Junie Astor) could inspire him to change. As fine as Gabin and Astor are, they are upstaged by the sheer presence of Suzy Prim as Astor’s brassy, greedy sister; she and her elderly husband (Vladimir Sokoloff) manage the tenement and act as Gabin’s fence. Prim bears an uncanny resemblance to Stephane Audran both in appearance and intensity. There’s also the delightful presence of Louis Jouvet as an aristocrat who blithely gambles away his fortune. Two more important Renoirs, “Le Crime de Monsieur Lange” (1934) and “Madame Bovary” (1934), screen Saturday at 1 p.m. and again at 8. Information: (213) 857-6201.