SPECIAL SCREENINGS : ‘Love ‘Em, Leave ‘Em’ at Silent Movie

Playing with Charles Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” (1925), with its famous shoe-eating sequence, on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie is one of the most rarely seen Louise Brooks films, the 1926 “Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em.”

Based on a novel in verse by John V. A. Weaver, who collaborated on a stage version with none other than George Abbott, who turned 104 on June 25, the film was directed with both zest and sensitivity by Frank Tuttle, best known today as the director of Alan Ladd’s star-making 1942 “This Gun for Hire.” The star is Evelyn Brent, but the picture is stolen by Brooks as Brent’s amoral and selfish younger sister; both work at a Manhattan department store, the film’s key setting along with the sisters’ brownstone rooming house, where another store employee, the handsome Lawrence Gray, also resides, as does the no-good gambler Osgood Perkins.

Brooks is very much the same type of ravishing, reckless creature she is in “Pandora’s Box,” the film that made her a legend, but in that picture G. W. Pabst brought out in her a quality of sublime innocence.

On Wednesday at 8 p.m. the Silent Movie will present Chaplin in “One A.M.,” Buster Keaton in “The Blacksmith” and Lon Chaney in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

Information: (213) 653-2389.

Unwelcome Home: “Pax Americana,” a provocative, unsettling 25-minute documentary on Hollywood’s recent Welcome Home Desert Storm Parade, contrasts the largely thoughtful and informed remarks of anti-war demonstrators with the mindless taunts of cheering onlookers.

This gutsy piece of in-your-face reportage premieres at 8 p.m. on July 4 at EZTV, the alternative video showcase at 8547 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood.

Information: (213) 657-1532.

War of Words: As fun as the Kevin Costner “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” is at its best, it can’t hold a candle to the most famous and beloved screen version of the oft-told tale, the 1938 “Adventures of Robin Hood,” which opens a nine-day run at the Los Feliz today.

“Steal only from the rich and give to the poor” became the Bandit of Sherwood Forest’s motto after the evil, insinuating Prince John (Claude Rains), backed by the dastardly Normans, seized power while his brother, King Richard the Lion-Hearted (Ian Hunter) is off to the Crusades.

How could there be a more perfect Robin Hood than Errol Flynn--blithe, dashing, impossibly handsome and with always a mischievous twinkle in his eye? (Flynn and his Robin Hood are deftly spoofed by Timothy Dalton in the current “Rocketeer.”) This Warner Bros. classic, in glorious Technicolor, has the look of those vintage boys’ adventure stories illustrated by N. C. Wyeth and others.

This “Robin Hood” features Olivia de Havilland as a Maid Marian as bright and spunky as she is beautiful, plus such stalwarts as Basil Rathbone, Eugene Pallette and Alan Hale--and a tempestuous score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It was directed by William Keighley and Michael Curtiz.

Show times: (213) 664-2169.

For Adults Only: Susie Bright, who once sold popcorn at the Nuart, returns to the theater Friday and Saturday only to present her witty, illuminating “All-Girl Action,” a lecture-film clip survey of the evolving depiction of lesbian love in Hollywood movies, pornography and in alternative cinema. Bright credits Russ Meyer with staging the first lesbian love scene in an American film in his 1968 “Vixen.”

Bright’s presentation is thoughtful, comprehensive and serious, but it’s not for those offended by graphic scenes of love-making.

Information: (213) 478-6379.