Women Cartoonists Do Talking in ‘Ladies’

Pamela Beere Briggs’ engaging 46-minute “Funny Ladies” (at the Nuart tonight through Wednesday) surveys comic strips created by women since the early 20th Century to the present. It spotlights “Brenda Starr’s” creator Dale Messick, glamorous and acerbic at 83; Cathy Guisewite, creator of “Cathy”; Nicole Hollander, creator of “Sylvia,” and Lynda Barry, creator of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek.” All tell us about themselves and their work in wry, entertaining fashion; Messick’s remarks about what it was like to break into what was considered a man’s game are especially tart and revealing.

Playing with “Funny Ladies” is Amy Harrison’s “Guerrillas in Our Midst,” a 35-minute documentary on the infamous “Guerrilla Girls,” an anonymous group protesting the under-representation of women artists and artists of color in New York’s galleries. For showtimes and information: (310) 478-6379.

John Ford’s 1924 silent classic “The Iron Horse” (at the Silent Movie Wednesday) gathers steam slowly, but then its stated purpose is to attempt no less than to present “an accurate and faithful . . . pictorial history of the building of the first American transcontinental railroad.” In the telling of this monumental feat of construction, which took seven years to complete, Ford never lets his film’s conventional foreground story, involving a romance--Madge Bellamy is the demure heroine--and rooting out the bad guys, overwhelm his celebration of the men of many nationalities and races who labored mightily in the landmark task. Significantly, Ford’s hero (brawny George O’Brien, star of the often-revived “Sunrise”) is not a boss but a workman himself who drives the last spoke linking the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific railroads, which thus spanned the continent. (The driving of the ceremonial gold spike came later and is re-created at the film’s climax.)

In presenting this “pictorial history” Ford gives us, of course, infinitely more: a vision of the American West and its conquest that was to echo throughout his career in many more memorable Westerns. “The Iron Horse” is a film filled with the awesome limitless vistas that were to become a Ford trademark, plus such other characteristic Ford elements as his eloquently staged spectacular battles with the Cheyenne, his donnybrook of a barroom brawl, his streak of sentimental and boisterous Irish camaraderie, his overall concern with authenticity and his deeply personal expressiveness. It’s worth noting that the Cheyenne are not the film’s bad guys. Late in life Ford rightly felt the need to make amends to all the American Indians he killed off in his movies with his elegiac “Cheyenne Autumn” (1966).

“The Films of Marcel Pagnol” continues at the Monica 4-Plex Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. with “Harvest” (1938), yet another of the filmmaker’s celebrations of the pastoral life. Slow getting under way, which is typical of Pagnol, the film catches fire as a lonely poacher (Gabriel Gabrio), a stocky, sweet-natured man of the soil, succeeds in winning away a woman of the city (Orane Demazis) from an itinerant knife sharpener (Fernandel).

Adapted from a novel by Jean Giono, “Harvest” draws its power from its persuasive evocation of the flowering of the relationship between the man and the woman, which in turn, is reflected in their cultivating of the land on a beautiful mountain slope in Provence. Leisurely and digressive, the film acquires sudden tension when Fernandel, in a remarkably subtle and ambiguous portrayal, reappears in the happy couple’s life. Information: (310) 394-9741.