Preservation Print of Oscar-Winning ‘Cimarron’

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., tonight at 7:30 screens a preservation print of the 1931 version of Edna Ferber’s “Cimarron,” the only Western to win a best-picture Oscar until “Dances With Wolves.” One of Ferber’s typical romantic American epics, it is set against the settling of the Oklahoma Territory, opening with a spectacular re-staging of the land rush of April 22, 1889.

Irene Dunne, at the start of her illustrious screen career, is extraordinary as a proper, aristocratic Victorian woman who over the years learns to outgrow the bigotry and puritanism of her generation, whereas Richard Dix, who had been a silent star, seems dated in the declamatory style of his acting as the husband who deserts her. Also screening is the academy’s original nitrate print of “In Old Arizona,” the first sound feature to be filmed in outdoor locations, which brought Warner Baxter a 1928-29 best actor Oscar.

Information: (213) 247-3000, Ext. 148.

Japanese Film Series: The UCLA Film Archive’s remarkable “Young Japanese Cinema” series continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with Toshio Matsumoto’s “Funeral Parade of Roses” (1968) and his “Shura--The 48th Ronin” (1971) and on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with a repeat of “The Enchantment,” plus Hitoshi Yazaki’s “Afternoon Breezes” (1980).

A standout at the second annual Los Angeles International Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival, “Funeral Parade of Roses” anticipates R.W. Fassbinder’s use of melodrama both for social comment and for eliciting genuine emotion. At the core of the film is a heady tale so familiar to audiences of Japanese films as to seem parody: Beautiful young Tokyo bar girl gets involved with drug-dealing boss, thus becoming a threat to the bar’s aging hostess. The only difference is that the rivals are both transvestites. Bordering on the surreal, the film is far-ranging and rich in implications, involving the young bar girl Eddie, played by an actor known only as Peter, in an “Oedipus Rex” subplot and also documenting the student unrest that gripped Japan in the late ‘60s. “Funeral Parade of Roses” is at once preoccupied with the timeless, eliciting a sense of the tragic in regard to Eddie’s fate, and with the inevitability of change in the clash between the old and the new.

“Shura,” a bravura adaptation of an old Kabuki play, is the kind of period picture that’s become a rarity in the Japanese cinema. Boldly playing up the intense theatricality of the piece, Matsumoto tells of the one samurai (played by Kazuo Nakamura) who did not commit suicide when his master was killed (as did the 47 others in one of Japan’s most famous, oft-filmed legends).

Instead of saving his money to join a campaign to avenge the honor of his master, he spends it buying the freedom of a beautiful geisha (Yasuko Sanjo), transparently a phony to all but the samurai who loves her so blindly. There are more plot machinations than in a soap opera, and Matsumoto brings a pitch-dark absurdist sense of humor to the antique material.

“Afternoon Breezes,” an astonishly assured and vibrant first feature, also concerns a totally consumed lover, but the time is the present, which is evoked with the same kind of vitality with which “Shura” brings the past alive. Natsuko (Setsuko Aya), a pretty Tokyo nursery school worker, shares an apartment with her friend Mitsu (Naomi Ito), a tall, stunningly beautiful hairdresser. Natsuko is in the grip of a love for Mitsu as intense as that of Truffaut’s Adele H., whom Natsuko increasingly resembles in her overpoweringly single-minded obsession for her roommate, who is having an affair with a handsome young man (Hiroshi Sugita). Yet for all her possessiveness and the dire actions it precipitates, Natsuko cannot bring herself to articulate her lesbian feelings.

This is a compassionate, comprehensive study of an individual consumed by love, but it is also, inevitably or otherwise, a comment on a individual experiencing a sense of total alienation because of the homosexual nature of her longings. Fresh and dynamic, “Afternoon Breezes” eschews almost all music in place of natural sounds, which are evocative of Natsuko’s emotional chaos.

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