‘Feel My Pulse’ a ‘20s Opener to Comedies of the ‘30s

Gregory La Cava’s frothy “Feel My Pulse” (1928) tops the bill Friday and Saturday at the recently reopened Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave.

Screwball comedy, to which La Cava contributed such classics as “She Married Her Boss” (1935) and “My Man Godfrey” (1936), is thought of as a phenomenon of ‘30s talkies, but this obscure Paramount release is clearly a precursor.

An effervescent Bebe Daniels, best remembered as the temperamental star who breaks her leg in “42nd Street” and is replaced by Ruby Keeler, plays an overprotected, naive heiress who decides to check out a small island that is an almost forgotten part of her inheritance. It is the site of a sanitarium (in actuality the Phineas Banning mansion in Wilmington) that is currently serving as the headquarters of rum-runner William Powell and his gang (which has been infiltrated by handsome reporter Richard Arlen).

There’s much merriment as Powell and his thugs pretend to be doctor and patients, respectively, and the film is as much a tonic for the audience as adventure and romance is for Daniels. The second feature is Harold Lloyd’s seldom-seen “Little Jack” (1922).

Information: (213) 653-2389.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “From Caligari to Hitler” series continues Friday at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. with Max Ophuls’ poignant love story “Liebelei” (1932), one of his characteristic evocations of La Belle Epoque (and also a direct attack on the established order) and one of the most famous of all German films, Leontine Sagan’s “Madchen in Uniform” (1931), which told of a young girl’s love for her teacher in a harsh Potsdam girls’ school.

Saturday brings a Luis Trenker double feature, “The Rebel” (1932) and “The Emperor of California” (1936), two richly pictorial, action-filled productions suffused with a kind of Wagnerian mysticism.

Trenker, who died at 97 last April, was a rugged, virile actor of much presence but of a narrow range, exuberant and open in the manner of Douglas Fairbanks Sr.. He was also a dynamic director.

The English-language version of “The Rebel,” which was co-directed by Edwin Knopf, is the stirring saga of the resistance to Napoleon’s occupation of Tyrol led by a medical student (Trenker, a Tyrolean native). His leading lady is Vilma Banky, cast as the daughter of a Bavarian magistrate who is pursued both by Trenker and Victor Varconi’s French officer. (Varconi and Banky were Hungarian-born Hollywood silent stars who looked to Europe to revive their careers with the advent of sound.)

The film’s love story is stiff and inconsequential but an ambush by avalanche of the French by the Tyroleans is a breathtaking action sequence (subsequently lifted by Universal for other films).

Of greater interest and impact is Trenker’s free adaptation of the life of John Sutter (played by Trenker with greater depth than he brought to the student), the German-born Swiss immigrant who established a vast domain in Northern California only to be undone by the discovery of gold on his American River land in 1848. Much of the film was shot in the United States.

Information: (213) 857-6010.

Before the 1960s, the only Czech film that most Americans had ever heard of was “Ecstasy” (1933), notorious for its erotic love scenes and a skinny-dip followed by a naked gambol through the woods by its 19-year-old Austrian star, Hedy Kiesler, soon to become Hollywood’s Hedy Lamarr.

“Ecstasy” would probably get no more than an R today, especially in the version screening in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater Saturday at 7:30 p.m. as part of the UCLA Film Archive’s “Czech Modernism” retrospective. Regardless of whether this version is tamer than others, the film seems the culmination of director Gustave Machaty’s discreet and beautiful celebration of sex as part of nature. Visually stunning--and virtually a silent film--it is the timeless story of the sexual awakening of a young woman after a brief, disastrous marriage to a much older man. Even the Czech Film Archive’s mediocre print cannot dim the grandeur of “Ecstasy’s” poetic expression of physical passion.

Information: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.

Note: “Critics Choice” continues tonight at Melnitz Theater at 8 with Richard Brooks” lusty 1966 Western “The Professional” (1966), hosted by Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin with Brooks present.