NYU Students Take Film Spotlight With Their Creations

If the cinema schools at USC and UCLA are often unfairly typed as industry mills, then NYU, third member of the reigning triumvirate, is often pigeonholed as the breeding ground for movie makers with an edge. Spike Lee (“Do the Right Thing”) is the latest maverick in a list that includes Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Jim Jarmusch.

But, if the samples available from the New York University film school screenings Tuesday and Wednesday (Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills) are any clue, both stereotypes are dubious. Genres dominated--despite one movie so extraordinary it tends to shatter all categories.

That short film, one of the more remarkable student works in years, is John Michael DiJiacomo’s “The Lost Treasure of Captain Cornelius ‘Deadeye’ Tuckett.” DiJiacomo is a rarity: a student film maker who shows a fully developed visual and literary sensibility and a unique, offbeat point of view. The word genius might not be inappropriate here.

“Lost Treasure” is a hallucinatory mix of two seemingly contradictory styles. Part of it is a brilliantly mocked-up pseudo-documentary, a la “Zelig,” about the inhabitants of a fading Nevada mining town in 1937. The rest is a pretty but austerely shot color fantasy about three town kids who find (or dream) a green forest, lake and island, site of a supposed cache of buried pirate treasure. The visual keynote for the “documentary” seems to be Depression photographer Walker Evans. But other comparisons--Alain Resnais? Bill Forsyth?--are futile. DiJiacomo is a real original. His film is a macabre poem, bitterly funny, poignantly lyrical, of childhood and age, desert and fertility, the American dream of riches and adventure colliding helplessly with played-out realities and dead-end roads.

Of the other films, Amy Goldstein’s “Because the Dawn” is a biting little feminist vampire musical about a fashion photographer dressed as Joan of Arc, stalked by a toothsome French vampiress in Marlene Dietrich drag. In this camp- film noir musical, Goldstein has a strong feel for Billie Holiday early morning Manhattan romanticism, though arch dialogue slows her down.

Danniel Barron’s “Hang ‘Em Really High” puts “High Noon” and Eastwood-Leone parodies against New York settings with mixed, sometimes funny, results. Bill Judkins’ “Lux Interiors,” which has one terrific tracking shot, informs us once again that Catholic schools encourage lust and anxiety. And Doron Tadmor’s “Hazardous Affairs” is a taciturn suburban soap opera with a bizarre avenger-on-skateboard twist. They all have their moments, but “The Lost Treasure of Captain Cornelius ‘Deadeye’ Tuckett” has the edge. Information: (213) 854-0628.

How many of us today remember Wally Cox’s “Mr. Peepers”? From this TV show, an island of sweet comic reason in a raging sea of ‘50s conformity and rebellion, four episodes will be screened Friday at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall in the preservation retrospective.

It was a gentle show, built around Cox’s bemused, shyly apologetic personality, as Robinson Peepers, general science teacher at Jefferson Junior High--a character who, oddly enough, suggests what Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi might have been like as a Midwestern stand-up comedian. Besides Cox’s Peepers, it offered a feast of genuinely observed comedy creations. The virtuoso comic-neurotic Tony Randall was Wes Weskit, a brittle macho braggart who called Peppers “Ace” and was always crumbling under pressure. And the unforgettable Marion Lorne was Mrs. Gurney, one of the greatest comic ditherers in movie-television history. (Edward Everett Horton was the other; imagining a conversation between them boggles the mind.)

David Swift was the show’s creator, Fred Coe its supervisor. (Swift and Coe’s widow, Joyce, donated the “Peepers” kinescopes to UCLA.) Two more unsung TV heroes also were responsible for its eccentric charm: writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum, masters of a dry, knowing heartland humor that caught on more strongly, later, in “The Andy Griffith Show”--for which they were perhaps the best writers.

The four shows tonight demonstrate, sadly, why the memory of “Peepers” vanished. It was never picked up for syndication because the style quickly became too old-fashioned: shot live in black and white, with typical early ‘50s bloopers. At one point, Cox seems to blow the punch line to a an elaborate one-minute joke, and the multiple shifting scenes were indicated with the most minimal sets.

Yet the shows retain a genuinely sweet spirit, carried over, oddly enough, into Rex Marshall’s folksy commercials for Reynolds Aluminum, preserved here too. The best of them are “Mrs. Gurney Learns to Drive”--which showcases Lorne’s matchless skewed timing, befuddled takes and trumpeting hysterical laugh--and the moving “The Wedding,” where Peepers married his fiancee, school nurse Nancy Remington (Patricia Benoit), with jumpy Wes as best man. Randall later became one of America’s foremost comic actors. So did series semi-regular Jack Warden (Coach Chute), whom we don’t see here. But it’s nice to savor again the lost comic delights of Wally Cox and Marion Lorne, two superb comedians with an unerring sense of life’s quirkier byways and oddball charm.

Also at Melnitz this week is another film by the neglected contemporary Indian film maker Buddhabed Dasgupta--whose Vittorio De Sica-Satyajit Ray roots show even more strongly in “Bitter Morsel,” a tragic 1979 portrayal of Calcutta poverty. (Perhaps too strongly; it’s not as distinctive or compelling as last week’s “The Return.”) And Frank Borzage, one of the great Hollywood movie romantics, is represented on the preservation series by the little-seen 1932 Depression romance “After Tomorrow.” Information: (213) 206-8013.