Lombard Films in Romantic Comedy Series

For many people, Carole Lombard epitomizes the sexiness and savoir-faire of screwball romance. So, it’s appropriate that she keeps popping up in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s romantic comedy series (at Bing Auditorium)--including twice this weekend.

Lombard has the right look. A face that seems to have been peeled right off a Vogue cover: high cheekbones, frosty blond hair (dark at the roots) and flashing, hauteur-filled eyes. An athletic body always ripe to be dipped into an evening gown: something satiny, thinly strapped and clingy. And a manner belied the look: the salty edge, the vernacular and unbuttoned badinage. She was one blond goddess who could mix it verbally with the stevedores, and she could play either a dizzy society girl, a madcap hedonistic flake--or someone from the lower classes, a “Jane Peters” (her real name) who could use what she had to get what she wanted. Either way, Lombard always looked as if she were born to shoot off erotic sparks over champagne, under moonlight.

This weekend, LACMA gives us both Lombards. There’s the cunning working-class Jane in Mitchell Leisen’s sparkly “Hands Across the Table” (Saturday): a manicurist who everybody wants to give their cuticles to. And--one of her classic performances--the flighty socialite Carole of Gregory La Cava’s 1937 “My Man Godfrey” (Friday).

This is actually a comedy about a “dizzy” rich girl having a fling with her lower-class butler. But though master-servant affairs were certainly not unknown back then, “Godfrey’s” has been heavily disguised. There’s no sex, since the butler (William Powell) staunchly defends his virtue. And besides, he’s not really a butler, or even lower-class. He’s a rich man who’s lost everything in the Crash--but who gets it back in time to save Carole’s family, when they lose everything.

“Godfrey” is great whenever La Cava--famous for improvising--and the actors get cooking. Lombard’s introduction is sensational: breathless, bothered and bewitching, words leaping madly ahead of logic, torso shimmering, dragging in the bemused Powell, as “a Forgotten Man” (Remember him?) on a scavenger hunt. Would you really want to defend your virtue from this woman?

Paired with them is another more mediocre, La Cava screwballer, with Ginger Rogers, “Fifth Avenue Girl” (Friday). And, on Saturday: “The Good Fairy” a superb, Lubitschian romance about a wondrous movie-house usher and her many suitors, adapted by Preston Sturges from a Ferenc Molnar play, directed by William Wyler, and starring peach-voiced Margaret Sullavan--of whose performance the director so approved that he married her by movie’s end.

Information: (213) 857-6010.

UCLA’s continuing Spanish and Argentine film series, at Melnitz Theater, feature a number of interesting, rarely screened, films this week. Perhaps the most provocative are Part 2 of “The Lost Republic”--Miguel Perez’s outstanding, exhaustively detailed documentary on Argentina’s political history (Sunday); and “El Pisito” (“The Little Apartment”) on Wednesday.

“El Pisito” is a 1958 black comedy which, oddly enough, marked the feature debut of Italian writer-director, Marco Ferreri (“La Grande Bouffe”), who began as a film critic and assistant director in Italy, but had to travel to Spain to begin directing. (Later, he returned after another of his Spanish films, “El Cochecito,” shared the International Critics Prize, with Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers,” at the 1960 Venice Film Festival.) “El Pisito” is a landmark Spanish film, bringing back a corrosiveness and social bite missing in its cinema since Bunuel’s departure. It’s the irreverent tale of a young couple trying to circumvent Madrid’s famous housing shortage by a desperate ruse: The young man’s marriage to an elderly woman, supposedly near death, with a fine apartment.

Also at UCLA this week: director Francisco (“Padre Nuestro”) Regueiro’s charming 1963 directorial debut, “El Buen Amor” (Wednesday); Basilio Martin Patino’s highly praised 1965 “Nine Letters to Berta,” which mixes long-distance romance in Salamanca with the dilemma of political exiles (Friday); Angelino Fons’ 1966 “La Busca” (“The Search”), a lustrously polished adaptation of a classic Spanish trilogy by novelist Pio Baroja (Friday); Jeanine Meerapfel’s “Malou,” about a Berlin woman’s psychological quest (Thursday); Adolfo Aristain’s tense Argentine political thriller, “A Time for Revenge”; and Denis O’Rourke’s scathing documentary on tourism in New Guinea, “Cannibal Tours” (today).

Information: (213) 206-FILM.