Bow at Her Most Captivating

“The Plastic Age,” which screens at 8 p.m. Wednesday only at the Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., is fascinating not only as a terrific showcase for “It” Girl Clara Bow but also as a social documentary of the Flapper Era. It stars clean-cut Donald Keith as a champion prep school athlete from a prominent small-town family in a state of near-innocence who is quickly vamped by bouncy, fast-living Clara--saucy-eyed, Dutch-bobbed and utterly irresistible. Immediately, he is on the road to ruin both on the track and in the classroom. What makes the film, which reverberates with desperate Roaring ‘20s gaiety, so timeless is its obsession with winning; Wesley Ruggles directed from Eve Unsell and Frederica Sagor’s adaptation of Percy Marks’ story. Rivaling Keith for Bow’s affections is Gilbert Roland in his first major role. Even then he exudes the dashing masculinity he has maintained to this day. (Be on the lookout for Clark Gable in a bit part.) The second feature is another Bow picture, “Capital Punishment” (1925). Information: (213) 653-2389.

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Young Japanese Cinema” continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater with a remarkable and challenging double feature, Shion Sono’s “Bicycle Sighs” (1989) and Naoto Yamakawa’s “Another Side” (1980), which together constitute a portrait of youthful experience of exceptional depth and insight. As has been the case with several other films in this venturesome series, “Bicycle Sighs” is too complex and elliptical to be understood via subtitles alone; a synopsis is required. In essence, Sono is turning nostalgia back on itself in his depiction of what it is like to grow up in a picturesque but dying small community. He suggests persuasively that beneath a beguiling surface--all that lush greenery and pleasant vistas--this is a stifling place from which two high school friends, Keita and Shiro, are eager to escape. One of their means is their Super-8 movie, “The First Base,” in which there are so few boys left in town that the teams in their baseball game story must be filled with invisible players. Also crucial is Shiro’s young sister, Katako, a symbolic inspiration in her single-minded determination to overcome a bout of polio. In his graceful, flowing film, with its beautiful, occasionally surreal, imagery Sion seems to suggest that art is at heart paradoxical, fulfilling but also releasing unexpected emotions and challenges.

“Another Side” is one of the best films made about what it is like to be in college for those students who actually allow themselves to be caught up in learning how to think as well as acquiring knowledge, not just from books, but from interaction with each other. In adapting a novel by Yoshiteru Aoki, Yamakawa centers on a group of young men on the university rugby team who are also members of student theatrical company. The story is set in motion when a young man, Yabe (Takeshi Naito) and a young woman, Ryo (Shigeru Muroi), join the company. They are far more emphatic personalities than the two young men in the company with whom they form a quartet. The rangy Naito has a James Dean moodiness while Muroi has the enigmatic beauty and presence of French actress Nathalie Baye.

These four sit around and talk about everything, questioning everything imaginable about art and politics. In the midst of the camaraderie a shocking event occurs that shakes them out of their self-concern and introspection. The influence of Godard, one of Yamakawa’s heroes, is clear, yet “Another Side” is thoroughly distinctive, a beautiful-looking film that opens and closes, ironically, in a grammar school playground sequence all but identical to scenes in “Bicycle Sighs.”

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