The French Had a Name for It: Film Noir : Movies: ‘Darkness, despair, deceit and ice in the veins’ are on display in a UCLA series showcasing little-seen Gallic gems.

Though the title may be questionable, the films definitely are not. “French Film Noir,” the tasty but misnamed UCLA Film and Television Archive series opening tonight at Melnitz Theater, offers a rare chance to see some exceptional work by directors whose underappreciated films are almost never available for American viewing.

And given that an accurate title, something like “Terrific Films by Directors You’ve Barely Heard of,” doesn’t exactly have the marquee value of “French Film Noir,” we can forgive the fact that some of these can be considered dark, fatalistic noirs only by the broadest definition of that admittedly elastic term.

And though the noir genre is as intrinsically American as the Western, it’s indisputable that the French, who after all first recognized and named it, have a certain genius for what the program notes call “darkness, despair, deceit and basic ice in the veins.” Even the most humanistic of French directors, Jean Renoir, could walk down that road, as he did in “La Chienne” (screening Tuesday).

Renoir’s first sound film and, dating from 1931, the oldest in the series, “La Chienne” stars the great Michel Simon as a mercilessly henpecked clerk who falls hopelessly in love with a duplicitous prostitute, aggravating her ruthless pimp. Remade as “Scarlet Street” by Fritz Lang and Edward G. Robinson, “La Chienne” is enlarged by Simon’s delicate performance as the archetypal timid soul, one of the most memorable fools in love ever put on film.

But if Renoir is well-known, the four directors who give this series most of its excitement are not as celebrated in this country. Between them, Henri-Georges Clouzot (whose “L’Assassin Habite au 21” plays with “La Chienne”), Jacques Becker, Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Franju have five films in the eight-film series, and each is as entertaining as it is largely unseen.

Clouzot’s masterful “The Raven” opens the series tonight, playing with Bertrand Blier’s absurdist 1979 “Buffet Froid.” Characterized by French critic Georges Sadoul as a filmmaker known for “pessimism and the taste for neurotic passions,” Clouzot is sometimes called France’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, a Gallic master of suspense most remembered for the classics “The Wages of Fear” and “Les Diaboliques.”

Only his second film, the deliciously misanthropic 1943 “Raven” is breathtaking in its scabrous portrayal of the depths of human nature. A small French town is flooded by anonymous letters, signed “The Raven,” which spitefully spread discord and bring on what one character calls “a whirlwind of hate and calumny.” And the worst of it is, almost everyone in town is a potential suspect for this awful deed.

Made during the German occupation and advertised in the rest of Europe as “a typical small French town,” “The Raven” was promptly denounced by the Resistance as detrimental to national morale. After Liberation, the film was banned for a time, the death penalty was suggested for its key personnel and, despite support by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, Clouzot was unable to direct again for four years. It’s that nasty a piece of business.

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Closest to American film noirs are the gangster films of Becker and Melville. And the Saturday-night double bill of the former’s “Touchez Pas au Grisbi” and the latter’s “Le Doulos” is the most satisfying program of the series.

A former assistant to Jean Renoir, who was one of the few traditional French directors the iconoclastic New Wave filmmakers admired, Becker’s Simone Signoret-starring masterpiece “Casque D’Or” is so well-loved in France that they put it on a stamp.

“Grisbi,” an underworld slang word meaning loot , follows a world-weary gangster (its the only kind they have in France) as he tries to balance the demands of loyalty to his pals with his interest in millions of dollars of stolen gold. Played with peerless sang froid by French superstar Jean Gabin, who can make Robert Mitchum seem expressive, “Grisbi” deals with a near-mythical French world of chic cabarets and elaborate wrought-iron elevators. It also stars a young, dark-haired Jeanne Moreau, whose scenes with Gabin have a fine passing-the-torch quality to them.

If Becker was a filmmaker the New Wave favored, Melville, whose one-man operation served as a kind of role model, was so well-liked he appeared as a celebrated director in Godard’s “Breathless.” An admirer of all things American (his last name is not his own), Melville is best known for “Bob Le Flambeur” and a trio of mythological gangster films starting with “Le Doulos,” and followed by “Le Deuxieme Souffle” and the knockout “Le Samourai.”

Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo in hat, trench coat and a cloud of cigarette smoke, “Doulous” is a tale of greed and revenge crawling with double and triple-crosses and assorted hard guys. Told in Melville’s trademark cool, laconic manner, it is stylish and fatalistic in a way even the classic American noirs would have trouble matching.

Georges Franju’s marvelous “Judex” (showing Sunday with Jean Gremillon’s “L’Estrange Monsieur Victor”) belongs to another tradition entirely. A tribute to and, in fact, a remake of Louis Feuillade’s inventive 1914 super-hero serial by a director whose credo was “what pleases is what is terrible, gentle and poetic,” “Judex” is surreal, romantic and sweetly disturbing. Like many of the other films in this captivating series, it will make you wonder how you’ve survived so long without it.

* Screenings are at 7:30 tonight, Saturday and Tuesday, at 7 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5, $3 for students and seniors. Parking , $5. Information: (310) 206-FILM or (310) 206-8013.