Jackie Chan, Then Bertolucci’s ‘Conformist’ at Nuart

The Jackie Chan Festival at the Nuart enters its second week with two of Chan’s most recent and best pictures--and two among his lesser-known pictures. “Crime Story” (tonight at 7:15), which is as fast and furious as action pictures get, provides a shrewd change of pace for Chan. As skilled at comedy as he is at kung fu, Chan this time plays it straight as an inspector in the Royal Hong Kong Police. His seriousness proves to be an effective foil to this exceedingly slick movie’s spectacular stunt work and its visual panache.

Inspired by a 1991 kidnap of a real estate tycoon, the 1993 “Crime Story” combines all the details of an astute police procedural with one exciting sequence after another. There are chases galore, a terrific episode aboard a flooded ship, a classic rescue of a child from a burning tenement and much more. Movies don’t get much more kinetic than this, and director Kirk Wong (plus an uncredited Chan) and a raft of writers make it fun all the way.

To watch Chan in the fresh and exhilarating “Super Cop--Police Story III” (tonight at 5:20 and 9:30) is like watching Douglas Fairbanks Sr. or one of the silent-era clowns in one of their biggest hits. In this 1992 film, Chan is a whirling dervish with a Beatles mop-top and an impish grin, a one-man Cirque du Soleil, and “Super Cop” shows off both his sense of humor and his acrobatic martial arts wizardry just as effectively as “Safety Last” served Harold Lloyd seven decades ago.

A fearless, devil-may-care Hong Kong cop, Chan is the inevitable choice for a highly dangerous mission to retrieve from a Chinese prison labor camp a gangster who is to lead him to his brother, a mighty Hong Kong-based drug lord.

Chan’s adventures lead him to a secret jungle compound along the border between Thailand and Cambodia and culminate in a whirlwind chase through Kuala Lumpur involving a helicopter, every kind of street vehicle and finally a train.

Chan is well-matched by his elegant leading lady Michelle Khan, playing a People’s Republic of China secret agent. Chan, director Stanley Tong and their cast and crew recall what Hollywood has largely forgotten: how to make pure escapist entertainment that’s fast, light, topical but unpretentious.

Restored to its original length and rich color under the supervision of its legendary cameraman Vittorio Storaro, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 “The Conformist,” which plays at the Nuart Thursday through Sept. 28, seems every bit the masterpiece it was when first released by Paramount.

In this dazzling film, Bertolucci manages to combine the bravura style of Fellini, the acute sense of period of Visconti and the fervent political commitment of Elio Petri, (“An Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion”)--and, better still, a total lack of self-indulgence.

Adapted by Bertolucci from an Alberto Moravia novel, “The Conformist” is at once a study of one man and an entire society. A traumatized product of an extravagantly decayed aristocratic family, Jean-Louis Trintignant’s Marcello, whom we meet at 30 in 1937, is a respected professor of philosophy.

He’s also a repressed homosexual so determined to maintain his respectability at all costs that he is ripe for recruitment by a Fascist espionage organization for a deadly mission that he believes will atone for a terrifying youthful incident.

Bertolucci has told Moravia’s story so well, fusing Marcello’s destiny with that of Italy, that when it comes full circle its culminating scene is devastatingly ironic even though it incorporates outrageous theatricality and bald coincidence.

“The Conformist,” which memorably co-stars Dominique Sanda as a sexually ambiguous beauty, is not merely an indictment of fascism--with some swipes at ecclesiastical hypocrisy as well--but also a profound personal tragedy. The 4 1/2 minutes put back in the film are part of a party scene in which all the guests are blind except Marcello. (310) 478-6379.