Miles Davis--as Actor--Jazzes Up ‘Dingo’

Talk about deus ex machina: “Dingo” (1990), which screens tonight at 9:15 as part of the American Cinematheque’s salute to the Grammys, opens with the late Miles Davis descending from a jetliner that has landed in a tiny community in the Australian bush--the date is Jan. 14, 1969. Without further ado Davis and his band set up, launch into a mini-concert, board their plane and fly off--all to the understandable astonishment of the locals. However, before Davis leaves he has a brief exchange with a young boy, who tells Davis his is the best music he has ever heard. Davis tells him to look him up whenever he’s in Paris.

The filmmakers spend the next hour laboriously contriving to get the boy to Paris and a reunion with Davis, a meeting that smacks of the inevitable. The boy grows up to be an impoverished dingo-trapper (Colin Friels) by day and the frustrated trumpet-playing leader of a country-and-Western band by night. As Friels dreams of playing trumpet duos with Davis’ Billy Cross, he’s caught up in a tedious, drawn-out replay of the old duty versus artistic fulfillment struggle.

“Dingo” boasts a great jazz score by Davis and Michel Legrand and Davis’ only screen role, in which he clearly is pretty much playing himself, an elegant figure of cool wisdom. This makes the film, which was directed by Rolf De Heer, of undeniable historic importance--if only there were lots more of Davis on the screen and lots fewer cliches in Marc Rosenberg’s script. Information: (213) 466-FILM.

USC’s “Off-Beat” series continues Thursday at 7 p.m. in Room 202 of Taper Hall with Ruy Guerra’s highly sensual, richly expressive “Opera do Malandro” (1987), a loose retelling of “The Three-Penny Opera” set down in a seamy Rio neighborhood inhabited by artists and crooks in the period of time between Pearl Harbor and August, 1942, when Brazil switched allegiance from Nazi Germany to the Allies.

A seamless blend of song, dance and romantic melodrama, a rich brew of Latin rhythms and political consciousness that is also a homage to the Hollywood musical, it stars Edson Celulari as a dashing petty criminal with ambitions for legitimate business success, Claudia Ohana as the equally ambitious daughter of a German cabaret owner, Elba Ramalho as a nightclub singer loved by both Celulari and a local cop (Ney Latorraca). Adapted from Chico Buarque’s stage musical, “Opera do Malandro,” which has excellent subtitles, is steeped in a glamorously seedy film noir atmosphere. Admission is free; information (213) 740-2666.

The UCLA Film Archive’s Michelangelo Antonioni retrospective continues Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater with “Zabriskie Point” (1970), which captures the sense of the student rebellion in the United States of the ‘60s, counterpointing it with vignettes of rampant all-American materialism. Sam Shepard, by the way, was one of the film’s four writers. It remains a visual triumph marred by casting inexperienced non-professionals, Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, as star-crossed lovers.

At once suspenseful adventure, a parable on the inescapability of responsibility and a tender love story, Antonioni’s 1975 “The Passenger,” which screens Saturday at 7:30 p.m., is a masterpiece of visual beauty and rigorous artistry that is as tantalizing as it is hypnotic. Jack Nicholson stars as a well-known journalist attempting to get some film on an elusive guerrilla war in an African dictatorship. Overcome by despair in the midst of a desert waste, he succumbs to an impulse to assume the identity of a dead man. Information: (310) 206-FILM.

The retrospective concludes Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with the elegant and poignant “Mystery of Oberwald” (1980), in which Antonioni shot Jean Cocteau’s “The Eagle Has Two Heads,” a period tale of doomed lovers starring Monica Vitti, as a bold video-to-film transfer experiment in color.

It will be followed by “Identification of a Woman” (1982), a stunningly beautiful variation on “L’Avventura,” in which a film director’s pursuit of two women (Daniela Silverio, Christine Boisson)--the first of whom disappears--becomes a meditation on the impossibility of finding love, and beyond that, meaning in life itself. Only art, suggests Antonioni, can confer meaning. Scandalously, these two films have yet to be released in this country. Information: (310) 206-FILM.