Portraits of Ellis Island, Lindbergh

The Academy Documentary Series, co-sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the UCLA Film Archive, continues tonight at 8 at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with a program of three films celebrating the American experience.

Charles Guggenheim’s beautiful and poignant 28-minute “Island of Hope, Island of Tears” (1990), a remarkable feat of research, evokes what it was like to pass through Ellis Island via amazing archival footage and stills. The soundtrack features reminiscences of actual immigrants, starting with their leaving the Old Country, traveling the Atlantic in steerage and being processed at Ellis Island. Similarly impressive is Stephen Ives’ 56-minute “Lindbergh,” which illuminates the complex and controversial Charles A. Lindbergh, immortalized as the first man to fly solo over the Atlantic in 1927. The tall, boyish-looking figure endured the fanfare of becoming an international hero and the equally sensational kidnaping and murder of his baby son and went on to become a leader in the pre-World War II isolationist movement, revealing in the process anti-Semitic attitudes and pro-fascist sentiments. Ives was fortunate in gaining the cooperation of his widow, writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, his son John and daughter Reeve.

Not remotely on the same level of these two films is Terry Sanders’ 20-minute “Rose Kennedy: A Life to Remember,” a warm, charming but superficial account of the elegant Mrs. Kennedy’s life commissioned by the Joseph A. Kennedy Foundation on the occasion of her 100th birthday and devoted largely to her long dedication to the cause of the mentally retarded.

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

Valentino Rides Again: “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1921) screens Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie along with some Chaplin shorts. This sprawling epic, adapted by June Mathis from the Blasco Ibanez novel, demonstrates director Rex Ingraham’s considerable visual flair, but there is no question that its main attraction has always been Rudolph Valentino.

We meet him in a gloriously seedy Buenos Aires cabaret, which he frequents with his lusty old grandfather (Pomeroy Cannon), a peasant who became a cattle king and Argentina’s richest man. Dressed as a gaucho, Valentino boldly interrupts a couple on the dance floor and claims the woman (Helena Domingues) for a tango that became one of the most famous, epoch-making moments in film history. Nobody had ever done the tango on the screen with such smoldering sensuality, and the darkly handsome Valentino became the movies’ greatest Latin lover.

The film evolves into preachy, moralistic World War I drama in which cousin is pitted against cousin, but before this Valentino has a mighty fling as a Parisian playboy whose big romance is with a rich and beautiful married woman (Alice Terry, Ingram’s wife).

Information: (213) 653-2389.