Third Chinese Film Series to Open Tour in Alhambra : The program offers a look at what kinds of films merit official blessing in this post-Tian An Men Square massacre era.

The Third Chinese Film Series commences a tour of eight American cities today at the Garfield Theater, 7 East Valley Blvd., Alhambra. An eight-film presentation from China Film Import & Export, the series will offer a unique look at what kinds of films merit official blessing in this post-Tian An Men Square massacre era. Unfortunately, the films that sound the most interesting are the very ones unavailable for preview.

One is “The Bell of Purity Temple,” about a Japanese baby, abandoned in the Japanese retreat in 1945 and raised as a Chinese, who meets his real mother in Japan 30 years later. It was directed by Xie Jin, China’s greatly gifted leading veteran director perhaps best known in the West for “Two Stage Sisters.” The other is Teng Wenji’s “Ballad of Yellow River,” a story of love thwarted and dreams postponed that brought the prolific Teng the best director award in Montreal’s international film festival in 1990.

The three films available for preview are of interest but are not encouraging in light of the exciting work that was beginning to emerge from China just before the 1989 crackdown. The three-hour “After the Final Battle” (screening Friday at 8:30 p.m., Saturday at 2:30 and 7:20 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 and 7 p.m.), directed by the husband-and-wife team of Li Qiankuan and Xiao Guiyun from a script by Zheng Zhong, offers a grueling yet often fascinating dramatization of the fates of Chiang Kai-shek’s top officers in the aftermath of the Communist takeover in 1949. In essence, it’s a study of how this group of men is rehabilitated--at least most of them are--and turned into builders of the new communist society.

Beijing’s Gongdelin Prison may not seem exactly a country club, but it is depicted as a place where the officers are treated with reasonable kindness and with much concern for their physical health. Their re-education is presented as a kind of group therapy in which they confront their war crimes; nothing we see remotely resembles brainwashing but rather a reasonably gentle pressure to conform to a new ideology. From time to time the wise and avuncular Mao Zedong and Zhou En Lai check on the progress.

Although “After the Final Battle’s” version of these actual events becomes increasingly hard to swallow, the film nevertheless attains a certain persuasiveness on a more personal level through its careful delineation of the officers’ widely varying reactions to the defeat, to being in prison, to their captors, some of whom were once under their command, and to the rehabilitation process itself. “After the Final Battle” is a hard film to connect with because it’s as difficult to identify with oppressive Communist Party ideology as it is to sympathize today with Chiang Kai-shek’s cause, long tarnished with corruption. Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the picture, so doctrinaire and so conservative in style, is that it was produced by the Xian Film Studio, so recently one of the most progressive in the world.

Hu Xueyang’s sleek, long-winded “Those Left Behind” (screening Saturday at 12:30 p.m., 5:30 and 10 p.m.; Tuesday at 6:30 and 10:20 p.m.; Wednesday, Oct. 7, at 10:20 p.m.) resembles nothing so much as a Japanese women’s picture, offering a glamorous travelogue view of Shanghai as it tells of the protracted anguish of a beautiful young laboratory technician (Xiu Jingzhuang) and a handsome taxi driver (Sun Chun) who drift into an affair while pining for their overseas spouses. The film seems a clear criticism of those Chinese leaving the country; it also suggests, intentionally or otherwise, that Western-style consumerism and luxuries are available right at home.

“Girl Fortune Teller” (Sunday at 12:30, 5:10 and 9:50 p.m.; Wednesday, Oct. 7 at 6:30 and 10:15 p.m.), a lively and romantic “Chinese Western,” is set in Western China’s Far West in 1937. Written by Wang Shouyi and directed by Zhang Jinglong, it stars Zhao Xiaorui as a husky camel driver charged with transporting 5,000 ounces of gold in support of the resistance movement against the Japanese. Soon the camel driver finds himself leading a virtual caravan, including a family with a pretty fortune-telling daughter (Dili Nu’er) across the desert, where the travelers meet no end of adventure and intrigue.

The Third Chinese Film Festival, which includes a five-person delegation of film industry officials and artists, opens with “Zhou En Lai,” directed by Ding Yinnan, responsible for the ponderous, propagandistic “Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.”

Information: Garfield Theater: (818) 576-2547 or China Film Import & Export: (213) 380-7520.