‘Salmonberries’ to End UCLA’s Percy Adlon Series

The UCLA Film Archive’s “The Films of Percy Adlon” concludes Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Melnitz Theater with a sneak preview of “Salmonberries,” Adlon’s most venturesome film to date, taking us both geographically and emotionally into fresh territory.

A remarkable companion film to “Bagdad Cafe,” it also has a remote setting and centers on a relationship between two strong, distinctive women from different worlds; this time, however, the tone is more serious than comic.

Rosel Zech, who had the title role in Fassbinder’s memorable “Veronika Voss,” plays an elegant, very formal East German emigre working as a librarian at an Eskimo trading post in Northwest Alaska.

A volatile but inarticulate young Eskimo zeroes in on her with awkward, unwelcome attentions but gradually wears the librarian down; Zech is as astonished as we are to discover that the Eskimo is in fact a young woman (singer k.d. lang).

In the course of this seemingly unlikely friendship, Adlon raises with the utmost sensitivity and perception questions of identity both cultural and sexual.

Japanese Cinema: Also concluding this weekend at Melnitz Theater is another notable UCLA Film Archive series, “Young Japanese Cinema.”

As disturbing as it is mesmerizing, Kazuo Hara’s 1987 documentary “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) focuses on Kenzo Okuzaki, a Japanese World War II veteran who survived the horrors of New Guinea and has become fanatical in his attempt to force Emperor Hirohito to acknowledge his responsibility for the war.

The wiry Okuzaki may be in the right, but it seems wrong for Hara to exploit the rage of a man so clearly and dangerously unstable in his single-minded, eternally frustrated dedication to seeing justice done.

Tezuka Yoshiharu and Christine Lloyd-Fitt are a husband-and-wife documentary filmmaking team who, in effect, turned their cameras on themselves to explore what an interracial marriage means in Japan.

In their deft and delightful 1989 “Over the Threshold” (which screens after “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On”), we discover Yoshiharu’s relatively sophisticated family extending a warm welcome to Lloyd-Fitt, who in turn clearly makes a real effort to fit in.

Other people in interracial marriages are not so encouraging: one Caucasian woman, for example, says she never has felt--or expects to feel--truly accepted by the extremely homogenous Japanese society at large.

For more information: (213) 206-FILM, (213) 206-8013.

Golden Year: “Honky Tonk” and “Manpower,” which screen Friday at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m. at LACMA’s Bing Theater as part of the “1941: Hollywood’s Extraordinary Year,” offer a telling contrast between Metro gloss and Warner Bros. snap.

The first is a sort of “Gone With the Wind” without the Civil War in which Clark Gable plays a seasoned con man in a Western frontier village maneuvered into marriage by a demure but resourceful Lana Turner.

Gable is great with his wonderful, unpretentious ability to be a man’s man and catnip to the ladies simultaneously, and the point that just because a crook is ready to settle down doesn’t mean he’s about to go straight is well made.

But Jack Conway’s direction is slow and ponderous, which is characteristic of so many of MGM’s painstakingly crafted melodramas of the 1940s.

Far more lively and adult is Raoul Walsh’s “Manpower” in which Marlene Dietrich’s world-weary lady with a past comes between two pals, a naive Edward G. Robinson and a knowing George Raft, who work together as power linemen.

Screening Saturday at 8 p.m.: “The Great Lie,” featuring a well-matched Bette Davis and Mary Astor (in an Oscar-winning supporting performance) and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion,” with Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine, winner of the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a wife who believes her husband is trying to murder her.

For more information: (213) 857-6010.