C.B. DeMille Epic Encores at Silent

Cecil B. DeMille’s “The King of Kings,” which reopened the Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., two years ago after 11 years of closure, returns there for a Wednesday 8 p.m. screening with organ accompaniment by Bob Mitchell. Stately--and remarkably restrained for DeMille--it remains one of the screen’s most straightforward and moving portrayals of the story of Christ, who is played with an unshakable dignity and gentleness by H. B. Warner.

More religious pageant than profound spiritual experience, “The King of Kings” is a timelessly potent and uplifting entertainment. The Silent Movie’s proprietor, Laurence W. Austin, has restored the film’s two-strip Technicolor opening and closing sequences.

On Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m., the Silent Movie effectively contrasts Elmer Clifton’s “Down to the Sea in Ships” (1922), in which Clara Bow made her first screen appearance, and “Hula” (1927), which she made at the height of her career. Aside from authentic New Bedford, Mass., settings, some documentary-like whaling scenes and a climactic storm sequence, all that the stodgy and dated sea story has going for it is the effervescent presence of the fourth billed, teen-aged Bow. It’s tedious business about how a young man (Raymond McKee), shanghaied aboard a sailing ship, proves himself and then some while the demure love of his life (Marguerite Courtot) and her stern Quaker shipowner father (William Walcott) are wooed by a dastardly villain. As Walcott’s vivacious stowaway granddaughter, Bow is on screen only occasionally, but the film comes alive whenever she’s in camera range.

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It is prophetic that Bow proves to be such a vivid presence in a Victorian melodrama because she came to epitomize the rebellion against that era and its mores. By the time of “Hula,” Bow had become a Roaring ‘20s archetype, irresistibly sexy, spontaneous yet ever vulnerable. In “Hula,” a definitive Bow film, she’s an innocent rather than naive imp, the daughter of a rowdy, fun-loving rancher, who’s instantly attracted to the debonair Clive Brook as a British engineer who has staked his future on the construction of an irrigation dam on the rancher’s vast Hawaiian holdings. Bow’s Hula Calhoun has never taken men seriously until she lays eyes on Brook, unhesitatingly telling him that he’s beautiful. Brook is in turn captivated by this mischievous, disarmingly direct madcap, but there’s a hitch, to be sure.

“Hula” is one of the films in which the line blurs between Bow and the woman she is portraying. This effect is heightened when one is aware that the film’s director, Victor Fleming, was one of the major loves of her life, which makes Brook seem like an alter ego. Interestingly, Fleming, who went on to direct “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone With the Wind,” directs Brook like his great pal Clark Gable, and the durable English actor of impeccable manners never seemed so breezy yet forceful with women. Information: (213) 653-2389.

A Fresh ‘Nashville’: The Monica 4-Plex’s “American Impressionist: A Robert Altman Retrospective” commences Friday with a special one-week presentation of a fresh print of “Nashville” (1975), an instant landmark film that only looks better, if that is possible, with the passage of time. How inspired it was of Altman and his writer Joan Tewkesbury to set their vast yet detailed mural of American life in the immediate post-Watergate era in the capital of country music, the very epitome of the commercialization of a folk art. Driven by the music, which ranges from the corny to the authentically heart-wrenching, “Nashville,” which has an all-American mix of sex, politics, religion and violence, is set in motion by the arrival of an advance man (Michael Murphy) to line up talent to appear at a rally for an independent party presidential candidate to be held in front of Nashville’s Parthenon replica. It is amazing how Altman manages to blend often hilarious satire with depth, poignancy and intimacy -- and a flawless sense of nuance and gesture. On another level, “Nashville” remains a triumph of venturesome aural and visual sophistication. Series information: (310) 394-9741.