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De Mille’s ‘Road’ Returns to Silent Era

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Cecil B. De Mille’s 1925 “The Road to Yesterday” (at the Silent Movie Wednesday only) reveals the silent era’s passion for movies that magically cut between past and present, an expression of the pioneer filmmakers’ eagerness to explore the resources of the medium as well as to draw a moral lesson. Nobody loved to moralize more than De Mille did, sweetening the message with sensation and spectacle.

This superbly designed, extravagant melodrama gave him ample opportunity, with its calamitous train wreck propelling honeymooners Jetta Goudal and Joseph Schildkraut into the Merrie Olde England of some 300 years ago where Goudal’s suspicions that Schildkraut betrayed her in a past life are confirmed. Scarcely subtle but fast-paced and still fun. Information: (213) 653-2389.

“The Films of Marcel Pagnol” continues Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex with “The Well-Digger’s Daughter” (1940), yet another of the French master’s takes on the human comedy featuring three great actors, Raimu, Fernandel and Charpin. Like Eric Rohmer, Pagnol is able to get away with lots of talk because of his bemused grasp of human nature. Pagnol demands that we slow down and listen--and then makes it worth the effort.

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The portly, deep-voiced Raimu plays an honest peasant, a widowed well-digger whose emotions and sense of propriety conflict with each other when he learns that his beautiful daughter (Josette Day), eldest of his six daughters, has become pregnant by a dashing aviator (Georges Grey), who’s received his orders to head for the African front. (The time is the early part of World War II, and in fact this film is the first made in France’s Unoccupied Zone to be permitted nationwide distribution.)

The first of the film’s many major scenes occurs when Raimu and Day have it out with Grey’s parents, ultra-bourgeois shopkeepers (Charpin, Line Noro), who are quick to label their visitors as blackmailers. Yet Pagnol is as patient as he is wise, demonstrating a profound faith in the ability of people to change their hearts. For Fernandel, playing Raimu’s good-hearted, gentle, often-comical assistant, as well as Raimu and Charpin, Pagnol has provided incredibly rich and varied roles.

Information: (310) 478-1041.

Screening Saturday at 8 p.m. in Bing Theater as part of LACMA’s Jennifer Jones series, “Carrie” is William Wyler’s 1952 film of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie.” Unjustly neglected among Wyler’s fine literary adaptations, it emerges as a sweeping, period-perfect, ill-fated romance in which Laurence Olivier’s successful, middle-aged Chicago restaurateur throws his life away for Jones’ naive but ambitious country girl. Daringly for the time--1900--Dreiser suggested that life in a sweatshop could be a worse fate for an unskilled young girl than life as a “fallen woman.” “Carrie” will be followed at 10:10 p.m. by Ernst Lubitsch’s 1946 “Cluny Brown,” in which Jones stars with Charles Boyer.

Information: (213) 857-6010.

At the Nuart on Sunday at 3 p.m. and again at 7, gay film historian Daniel Mangin, who teaches “Homosexuality on Film” at City College of San Francisco, will present his “Psycho Killers and Twisted Sisters,” a two-hour survey, via clips from 36 films and a running commentary, of how gays and lesbians have been depicted on the screen over the years. Any gay person or anyone who has read the late Vito Russo’s “The Celluloid Closet” will not be surprised at Mangin’s concluding assertion that “the sum total” of such representations is that “gay is evil.”

Occasionally hilarious, always illuminating and engaging, Mangin’s presentation makes his case and then some: that characterization of gays and lesbians has been so overwhelmingly negative right down to “The Silence of Lambs” and “Basic Instinct” that even the work of such major directors as Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Clint Eastwood, Richard Brooks, Robert Aldrich and William Wyler--all of whom are represented in the clips--has reinforced the stereotypes of gays as sick, predatory, silly, etc. The cumulative effect of “Psycho Killers and Twisted Sisters” is to drive home just how deep-rooted are ignorance and fear in regard to homosexuality. Both shows will benefit the Los Angeles chapter of Gays & Lesbians Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Information: (310) 478-6379.

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