Two Films Display the Serious Side of Percy Adlon

“The Films of Percy Adlon” continues Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with the 44-minute documentary “The Dancer Heinz Bosl” (1975) and the 1982 feature “Five Last Days.” Together, they reveal a deeply serious side to the director best known for the delightful comedies “Sugar Baby” and “Bagdad Cafe.”

When Adlon filmed Bosl for one of the series of 15-minute interview-portraits the director made for Bavarian television in the early ‘70s, he had no idea that the dancer was only eight months from his death at 28 from bone cancer; quite possibly, Bosl did not know either, for his mother decided that he should not be told he was fatally ill. To commemorate the first anniversary of the dancer’s death, Adlon augmented his original portrait with more footage of the dancer in performance and with interviews of those closest to him.

You do not have to be a balletomane to realize that the tall, gentle-looking Bosl was a dancer of extraordinary grace, a man who combined a formidable, seemingly effortless technique with great strength. His youth, dedication, unpretentiousness, sense of humor and dazzling talent make him a poignant, heart-breaking figure. His partners, including Margot Fonteyn, adored and admired him; his fiancee, the vibrant Margot Werner, a character dancer, who tries to console herself by saying “He was spared growing old in a career for young people.”

It hardly seems possible to tell a story, a true one in this instance, of Nazi Germany that seems fresh but Adlon succeeds. Although there have been several films dealing with the resistance against Nazism within Germany, none is quite like “Five Last Days.” “Docudrama” perhaps best describes this picture, a rigorously understated account of the fate of a young student, played by “The Nasty Girl’s” Lena Stolze, who is arrested and detained by the Gestapo. Stolze also played the same young woman in “The White Rose.”

What is striking, in Adlon’s film, is the kindness with which Stolze is treated, both by her captors and especially by a fellow prisoner, a brave and caring middle-aged woman (Irm Hermann, a Fassbinder favorite in a rare major role).

Quite demanding on account of its appropriately unvarying low-key tone, it is disquieting on a couple of counts; first, as a depiction of the bureaucratic mentality as a source of evil. Also, the decent treatment Stolze’s student receives while awaiting whatever fate holds in store for her reminds us inescapably of how differently concentration camp prisoners were being treated at that very same time, which was early 1943.

For more information about the Adlon series, which is co-sponsored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Goethe Institute: (213) 206-FILM, (213) 854-0993.

The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s fourth annual Festival of Preservation presents Thursday at 7 p.m. in Melnitz Theater two landmark Swedish films: Victor Sjostrom’s “The Phantom Chariot” (1921) and Mauritz Stiller’s “Erotikon” (1920).

Based on a novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Selma Lagerlof, the first is a preachy fable about the evils of drink redeemed by complex flashbacks and stunning visuals in which Death’s coachman appears, making his interminable rounds in collecting the souls of the dead. (Ingmar Bergman paid homage to this motif in a dream sequence in “Wild Strawberries,” in which Sjostrom starred.)

No wonder Ernst Lubitsch acknowledged his debt to Stiller for his famous “Lubitsch touch.” The lavish, large-scale “Erotikon” boasts one of the first aerial sequences in films and a ballet, created specially for the picture, performed at the Swedish Opera House before an audience of 800.

More important, it is an exceedingly sly and witty high-society comedy involving an absent-minded professor (Anders de Wahl), his bored, elegant wife (Tora Teje) and her very serious young suitor (Lars Hanson, who was to appear with Lillian Gish in Sjostrom’s “The Scarlet Letter” and “The Wind”).

The versatile Stiller brought his protegee Greta Garbo along with him to Hollywood, where he met defeat almost as quickly as she became a star. For more series information: (213) 206-FILM.