UCLA Archives Winds Up Swiss Series

The UCLA Film Archives’ “Swiss Classics” (1923-1945) concludes at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with Hans Trommer and Valerian Schmidely’s “Romeo and Juliet of the Village” (1941) and Leopold Lindtberg’s “The Last Chance” (1945).

The first film owes little to Shakespeare beyond its star-crossed lovers and plays like a picture made by filmmakers more at home in the silent cinema; this is to say that the imagery, which is often poetic, and the acting style are of an expressiveness that tends to render dialogue redundant and therefore melodramatic, an effect that is further heightened by an overpoweringly portentous score. But the film, which centers on a young rural couple (Margret Winter, Erwin Kohlund) who have known each other since childhood and whose fathers have long been locked into a bitter land squabble, has an accumulative power that enables it to become quite moving by its final third. In the sheer peasant nastiness of the fathers’ enmity, the film recalls “Jean de Florette.”

You can believe that Alfred Hitchcock could have exclaimed, as reported, of “The Last Chance,” “Talk about suspense! This has it!” Actually, the film has remarkable parallels to last year’s best foreign- film Oscar-winner, “Journey of Hope,” in that it deals with a group of refugees struggling to get to the Swiss border in the midst of a snowstorm--and offers a wryly critical commentary on Swiss hospitality.

The film opens in the final treacherous days of World War II in Northern Italy, where two Allied soldiers, one British (E.G. Morrison) and one American (Ray Reagan), escapees from a prison camp, are trying to make their way to Switzerland, and eventually risk their lives to help a group of refugees of assorted nationalities.

There is a bit of heavy-handed propaganda for brotherhood, but on the whole, the beautifully photographed black-and-white film is still remarkably suspenseful and poignant. The wonderful character actress Theresa Giehse plays a stalwart Jewish refugee; today, she is best remembered for her final film appearance as a bizarre old woman in Louis Malle’s surreal 1977 “Black Moon.”

Also continuing at UCLA: “Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams: Pioneer African-American Filmmakers,” which screens Micheaux’s “Underworld” (1936) and Richard Kahn’s “Bronze Buckaroo” (1938) Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater.

“Underworld,” an expose of the Chicago Mob involving a recent college graduate gone bad, was unavailable for preview, but “Bronze Buckaroo,” an all-black Western with some musical numbers proves to be pretty awful yet no more so than many of its contemporaneous low-budget Hollywood counterparts. It’s hero is played by Herb Jeffries (billed as Herbert E. Jeffrey), who went on to an enduring singing career, and the villain is played by the burly Williams.

Cinema in Its Infancy: “Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the-Century Films From American Archives” commences Saturday at Melnitz Theater at 7:30 p.m. and surveys the first 20 years (1895-1915) of the American cinema in six programs screening Saturdays through Feb. 2.

They range from such self-descriptive offerings as “First Mail Delivery by Aeroplane” (1911) and “Ancient Temples of Egypt” (1912) to some early D.W. Griffith films that reveal clearly that the screen’s first master of the medium towered over his contemporaries from the very first.

Griffith’s 1912 “The Informer” is a complex work of considerable scope and pictorial beauty, a Civil War tale of a man (Henry B. Walthall) who betrays his Confederate soldier brother (Walter Miller) in an attempt to win for himself a beautiful Southern belle (Mary Pickford).

Pickford also stars in Thomas Ince’s mischievous “The Dream” (1911), which she also wrote. Quite probably Pickford never before or after seemed so sexy and uninhibited; she and her leading man (and first husband) Owen Moore are touching in their youthful vitality and good looks.

Information on UCLA Film Archive screenings: (310) 206-FILM, 206-8013.