DeMILLE’S ‘SQUAW MAN’ IN PARAMOUNT SERIES

The UCLA Film and Television Archive joins with the County Museum of Art in a massive retrospective honoring Paramount’s 75th birthday by presenting, along with many other offerings this week, “The Squaw Man” (1914), Hollywood’s first full-length feature film.

Late in 1913, Jesse L. Lasky, vice president in charge of production of Paramount’s forerunner, Famous Players-Lasky, received from Cecil B. DeMille this historic telegram: “FLAGSTAFF NO GOOD FOR OUR PURPOSE, HAVE PROCEEDED TO CALIFORNIA. WANT AUTHORITY TO RENT BARN IN PLACE CALLED HOLLYWOOD FOR SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLARS A MONTH. CECIL.”

That barn, which stood at the northeastern corner of Selma Avenue and Vine Street, is now preserved as a museum across from the Hollywood Bowl. Luckily, the film for which it served as a studio has also been preserved.

Seen today, “The Squaw Man,” which DeMille co-directed with Oscar Apfel, seems terribly dated in its material and primitive in its technique. Yet from the beginning, DeMille had an instinct for entertaining melodrama that was to stay with him through 70 pictures over the next 46 years.

Big, beefy, pleasant-looking Dustin Farnum plays an English aristocrat who sacrifices his honor to protect the woman he loves and ends up doing much the same for an Indian maiden of the Old West.

Although rambling and choppy, “The Squaw Man” has an epic scope quite rare for the time, and although there are many elaborate interiors, it is essentially a Western shot on location--and does not seem the stage adaptation that it actually is.

In contrast to “The Squaw Man,” DeMille’s “The Cheat” (1915), which precedes “The Squaw Man” at 8 tonight in Melnitz Theater, is taut and expressive, fully realized as cinema. This is the best known of DeMille’s earliest society melodramas, the one in which wicked Sessue Hayakawa brands poor Fannie Ward on her left shoulder.

Ward, a pretty and vivacious stage star who was one of the first women to have her face lifted, plays a Long Island socialite whose spendthrift ways propel her into the clutches of Hayakawa, a handsome, insinuating ivory merchant. Hayakawa is best remembered as the concentration camp commandant in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

For complete UCLA schedule: (213) 825-2581.

One of DeMille’s most successful collaborations was with Gloria Swanson, who became a clotheshorse superstar in a series of sophisticated dramas under his direction, but by 1924 she was almost about to be done in by those elaborate costumes. In the rambunctious and poignant “Manhandled,” which follows the County Museum of Art’s 8 p.m. screening Friday of “Blood and Sand” (one of Valentino’s best), director Allan Dwan turned her into a gum-chewing, subway-riding salesgirl in a Manhattan department store basement.

This is a typical tale of a youthful, innocent urban dreamer, but Dwan makes it a showcase for the diminutive Swanson’s extraordinary beauty and brilliance as a comedienne. Swanson is teamed perfectly with Owen Moore, as her Irish-handsome, hard-working boyfriend whose time-consuming ambitiousness makes her vulnerable to a series of cynical men about town.

For the complete schedule: (213) 857-6010.

Jean-Luc Godard’s dazzling and complex “Grandeur et Decadence” (at EZTV Friday through Sunday at 8 p.m.) is similar to his “Contempt” and “Passion” in its depiction of the grinding difficulties of getting a film off the ground, but in this instance he focuses on the casting and raising of funds to shoot a James Hadley Chase thriller rather than on the actual shooting of a film.

Highly elliptical and shot very tightly, “Grandeur et Decadence” verges on the surreal and is thick with Godard’s trademark references, quotes from other people’s films, chapter headings and dark humor. There’s an overlaying of the Orpheus-Eurydice legend as a director (Jean-Pierre Leaud) tests the beautiful but troubled wife of his producer. Casting calls, in which the auditioners utter a word or two of a sentence, become the film’s key motif; Godard’s best words of wisdom are these: “What is essential is not our feelings or past experiences but our silent tenacity in confronting them.”

As challenging as “Grandeur et Decadence” is, it attests to the enduring beauty and meaning of Godard’s powerful images. Information: (213) 657-1532.