‘Blackmail’ and ‘Gone to Earth’ in UCLA Preservation Festival

If in the bad old days, film people used to discard and tear up old movies as if they were yesterday’s garbage--the complete “Greed” was melted down for silver nitrate, Murnau’s “Four Devils” tossed into the ocean after a wild party--nowadays, the UCLA Film Archives valiantly tries to reverse the process, retrieving “lost” films, shining up old ones.

This week, as the Third Annual Festival of Preservation continues at Melnitz Theater, the major revelations are “Blackmail” (tonight) and “Gone to Earth” (on Saturday). (Information: (213) 206-FILM.)

“Blackmail,” of course, is famous as Hitchcock’s first sound film. This, however, is the original version, the silent from which Hitchcock hastily reassembled a partial talkie. As you’d expect, it’s smoother, more polished, scarier--in every respect the superior work.

“Gone to Earth,” a 1950 Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger adaptation of Mary Webb’s feminist romance, has long been available only as the critically panned “The Wild Heart,” from which co-producer David Selznick--often pathologically protective of his wife-star, Jennifer Jones--cut half an hour. I haven’t seen “The Wild Heart,” but it’s hard to imagine where this integral version could comfortably lose 30 minutes.

It’s a packed, dense, vibrant film, shot in the Welsh countryside by cinematographer Christopher Challis in a riot of forest colors--russets, emeralds, ruby-reds--that accent the story’s theme of sexuality violently breaking up social boundaries. Jones, ravishing, is a superstitious lower-class Shropshire lass whose cherished companion is a pet fox. Cyril Cusack, brilliant and subtle as ever, is the repressed but decent mother’s boy parson who marries her; David Farrar is the brutal squire who pursues her as cavalierly as the foxes he hunts.

That strange, tart, eccentric wit of Powell’s keeps “Earth” from being deeply moving--but it’s as impassioned and flamboyant as any of the best Powell-Pressburger work, a definitive implosion of the cliches of the Gothic romance.

A third British film, “Brief Ecstasy” (also Saturday) is a fascinating rediscovery: a 1937 romantic triangle melodrama shot by the French director, Edmond Greville. Greville, who also made “Princess Tam Tam,” the outrageous Josephine Baker musical revived last year, seems to specialize in gorgeously swank surfaces covering nerves of repressed or unspoken sexuality. Here--through wayward glances, shadows, staircases, cannily arranged decor and the silvery sheen on the lovers’ bodies--an atmosphere of near hysterical eroticism seeps through the brittle veneer of polished conversation.

This week’s American lineup is more familiar. The four Harold Lloyd features, “Girl Shy” (1924), “Why Worry?” (1923) (both Friday), “Doctor Jack” (1922) and “Hot Water” (1924) (both Sunday) are all “thrill comedies” in Lloyd’s usual mode. They demonstrate again that, of the great silent comedy triumvirate, Lloyd was most firmly tied to place and era. Chaplin and Keaton are timeless; Lloyd, with his small-towner’s spectacles and go-getter’s pluck, is inextricably tied to the Roaring ‘20’s--through which he races furiously in a buttery sunshine that suggests the decade’s giddy daydreams will never end.

Josef Von Sternberg’s sensuous “Morocco” (1930), shown Sunday, is arguably one of the great American sound films--with Marlene Dietrich staggering across the sand in her heels, and Legionnaire Gary Cooper oozing smoky-eyed impudence.

A Library of Congress pre-World War I “paper print” program (Wednesday) is notable for rare shorts by two masters, D. W. Griffith and Chaplin--plus Edwin S. Porter’s flabbergasting spinoff of “The Great Train Robbery”: the 1905 “Little Train Robbery,” in which a gang of boys hold up crinolined little girls on a kiddie train and are pursued by mustachioed cops--on foot!

Transplanted Chilean director Raul Ruiz is yet another highly regarded international filmmaker whose work remains a mystery in America. The current Ruiz Retrospective at Melnitz rectifies the situation: “The Suspended Vocation” (1977)--shown Tuesday, along with 1982’s “The Top of the Whale”--is the first Ruiz movie, of his more than 60, I’ve seen. It’s fearsomely austere and complex, an adaptation of Pierre Klossowski’s novel about doctrinal dispute, on the cult of the Virgin, in a seminary.

Ruiz, in a direct line with Godard and Fassbinder, is subversive working in classical forms. Here, he imagines two film versions of the same story edited together, one shot in 1942 in monochrome, the other, in color, in 1962. For my tastes, his conceit is underdeveloped: the lighting too flat and the movement too random on the 1942 “film.” But “The Suspended Vocation” though cryptic emotionally, is still refreshingly ambitious, intellectually and artistically.

Three Vincente Minnelli musicals--and a 1954 hit romantic comedy starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (“The Long, Long Trailer”)--are this weekend’s installment of the Minnelli retrospective at LACMA.

The 1955 “Kismet,” with Howard Keel, Ann Blyth and a Borodin-derived score, has many detractors, including Minnelli himself. But “The Bandwagon” (1952), a delicious Comden-Green backstage musical with Fred Astaire as a rejuvenated hoofer battling balletic pretensions, is one of his official masterpieces. The soundstage-bound 1954 version of Lerner & Loewe’s “Brigadoon”--Minnelli’s last go-round with Gene Kelly--is often considered a disappointment, but it popped up, surprisingly, on a recent French critics’ poll as one of the 100 greatest sound films. Perhaps all that Technicolor Gloccamorra lore and heather on the hill proved retrospectively irresistible.

Information: (213) 857-6010.