‘Worth’ Tells a Tale of Romance in the Changing West

“The Winning of Barbara Worth” (1926), which screens Wednesday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie, has a conventional love story in its foreground but a truly extraordinary background that makes it one of the most important late silents.

Ronald Colman stars as an engineer who accompanies his stepfather (who subsequently proves to be a crook) to the Imperial Valley, where they will attempt to tap the Colorado River to turn the desert into a rich farmland at the behest of the local banker.

Meanwhile, Colman falls in love with the banker’s daughter, Vilma Banky, also beloved by Gary Cooper, who has grown up with her and whom she regards with only a sisterly affection. (This must have been just about the last time the lanky 25-year-old Cooper was in danger of not winning the girl.)

Gracefully directed by Henry King from Frances Marion’s adaptation of the Harold Bell Wright novel, “The Winning of Barbara Worth” blends romance and drama most effectively as it captures that moment when the Old West is yielding to the new.

Producer Samuel Goldwyn had constructed for the film a classic western street, which has the look of the 1870s-’90s; we’re startled when we see a car driving down it.

There is throughout a wonderful sense of authenticity that is heightened by a dramatic re-creation of one of several ambitious irrigation projects that preceded construction of Hoover Dam.

Information: (213) 653-2389.

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Restless in Taipei: The UCLA Film Archive’s “Restorations From the Chinese Taipei Film Archive” continues Friday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater with Tsai Ming-liang’s 1992 “Rebels of the Neon Gods,” one of the most powerful Taiwanese films of recent years.

It takes us into the restless, bored lives of four young people living in Taipei. Tsai plunges us into an utterly soulless city of raw, garishly lighted streets, cheap dives and hotels and vast video game arcades. (It’s in an arcade that one of the four pauses briefly before a James Dean poster; Tsai holds the moment just long enough.)

He wisely makes no special pleadings for his people----indeed, it is very easy to sympathize with the rage of one of the youth’s fathers, a hard-working cabdriver, when he discovers that his son has become a dropout. Instead, Tsai simply lets us follow the quartet’s increasingly aimless and reckless path, allowing us to experience these young people’s overwhelming sense of futility.

It’s been said that King Hu transformed the martial arts movie with his superb 1967 “Dragon Inn” (Saturday at 7:30 in Melnitz), and it is a glorious saga in gorgeous color, as stylized and contemplative as the finest samurai films and similarly laced with leavening humor and action.

It’s 1457, in the Ming Dynasty, and the eunuchs of the Imperial Eastern Agency, in a power grab, execute the secretary of the military for refusing to take orders from anyone but Emperor Tai.

Years pass, but the chief eunuch decides that the military secretary’s son and daughter, now adults, whom he banished to a remote region in the North of China, ought to be eliminated.

As it happens, the siblings--the daughter is a martial artist (Pai Ying) dressed as a man--arrive at the Dragon Inn, a large rustic outpost facing the sea with a mountain range behind it, just as the chief eunuch’s contingent has commandeered the entire place.

Also arriving--and not prepared to go, despite serious urging--is a handsome, mysterious young man in a white kimono. Hu now has his key players in place for a chess-like battle of wits and swords that unfolds with crackling wit and awesome beauty.

Several years ago Tsui Hark drastically but effectively reworked “Dragon Inn” as a martial arts “Rancho Notorious,” with Maggie Cheung as the inn’s intrepid proprietor.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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Another Perspective: A “Welcome to the Neighborhood” series questioning the U.S. Good Neighbor Policy commences today at L.A.C.E., 6522 Hollywood Blvd.

Screening Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. is Dee Dee Halleck’s devastating “The Gringo in Man~analand.”

Halleck, whose father went to work at a Cuban mine in 1952 when she was 12, brings a personal perspective and a deadpan wit to her fascinating collage, culled from some 300 films, including Hollywood pictures, newsreels, travelogues and more revealing our sorry history in Latin America of exploitation, condescension, intervention and cultural imperialism. (310) 451-6526.