Welles, Renoir and a Deceptive Newcomer

Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai,” which returns Friday at the Fine Arts with a fresh print to marks its 50th anniversary, is like his later “Touch of Evil,” an amusing patchwork baroque divertissement, highlighted by its famous mirror-maze sequence, made by a man too brilliant to take standard mystery-thriller material too seriously.

Yet Welles is able, by the end, to evoke some sense of loss and betrayal experienced by his misbegotten hero, a two-fisted Irish waterfront organizer, Spanish Civil War veteran, would-be novelist and full-time adventurer. The part begs for Robert Mitchum, Humphrey Bogart or, better still, Sterling Hayden, but the already slightly puffy Welles cast himself opposite then-wife Rita Hayworth, who went blond as the lacquered wife of a powerful, crippled San Francisco attorney (Everett Sloane).

Information: (310) 652-1330.

*

Nick Veronis’ “Day at the Beach” (Sunset 5, Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m., and the Monica 4-Plex, Sept. 5-7) is delightfully deceptive. Veronis casts himself as an aspiring filmmaker who persuades his pals who work with him at a Lower Manhattan ravioli factory to appear in his movie.

Rehearsing a scene on a bridge, one of his actors (Patrick Fitzgerald) hurls a briefcase into the water below only to have it strike a man steering his boat. Veronis urges his friends to get in his car and drive off; subsequently, they learn the man was killed. Some time later a pair of detectives come knocking on Veronis’ door--but not in connection with the death.

Consistently inventive, Veronis, a former newspaper reporter making his feature debut here, displays a sure grasp for the interplay of plot, character and fate. This engaging tale includes a love story but has as its overall concern the need for the would-be filmmaker and his friends to grow up at last.

Veronis, skilled at setting up a complicated story, loses some momentum when it comes to unraveling it, but he is nonetheless an impressive first-time filmmaker.

Information: Sunset 5: (213) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

*

The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s wonderful ninth annual Festival of Preservation continues tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with a collection of newsreels from the Hearst Metrotone News Collection, highlighted by Marian Anderson’s 1939 Easter Sunday Lincoln Memorial Concert. Friday brings a delightful ‘40s double feature at 7:30 p.m.: Howard Hawks’ “Ball of Fire” (1941) and Rene Clair’s “It Happened Tomorrow” (1944).

“Ball of Fire” has been aptly described as “a screwball version of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ ” and it remains a romantic comedy classic, with its Charles Brackett-Billy Wilder script as scintillating as Hawks’ direction. Imagine Gary Cooper as a genius grammarian holed up in a Manhattan brownstone for nine years with seven other professors writing an encyclopedia (with luck they’ll be done in another three years).

In the interest of research on slang, Cooper goes to a nightclub where Gene Krupa and his orchestra are performing “Drum Boogie”--and the singer is Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea. In short order, Sugarpuss, girlfriend of slick gangster Dana Andrews, has to go on the lam--and winds up in that brownstone and, inevitably, in the arms of the naive but sexy Cooper.

Hawks, Brackett and Wilder are just the men to know where to take this predicament to its amusing limits. And of special note are Edith Head’s smart, flawlessly fitted clothes for Stanwyck.

The second film is the kind of nostalgic fantasy that cheered up World War II audiences. And the fact that it has more sophistication than many others surely can be attributed to Clair, who in his exile from Nazi-occupied France fared better in Hollywood than many other temporary expatriates from Europe.

His gallic joie de vivre is just what is needed to bring to life this romantic trifle adapted from a Lord Dunsany story by Clair and Dudley Nichols, with an assist from several other writers. Dick Powell and Linda Darnell star as a wealthy newspaper publisher and his wife whose unexpected squabble delays their appearance before family and friends, gathered to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

Their mild wrangling triggers a flashback to the turn of the century, an era greatly favored by wartime Hollywood and one re-created by art directors and costume designers with an impressive degree of authenticity, thanks to the treasure trove in studio prop departments, and the simple fact that the Gay ‘90s was still well within memory for millions of people in 1944.

Although Powell was actually 40, he displays a lot of youthful brashness as an ambitious newspaper reporter who falls for the lovely Darnell, who is appearing with her comically shrewd uncle Jack Oakie in a mind-reading act. Powell wants so badly to get ahead, and so wishes he had enough money to marry Darnell, that his paper’s venerable head librarian offers him a gift--an edition of the paper a day ahead. This allows the confounded but thrilled Powell to get the scoop that will make him a star reporter.

But when he asks for--and gets--yet another advance edition to cash in on the horse races, a twist emerges that cleverly generates suspense and suggests that you may not always want to know what the future holds.

This year’s Festival of Preservation closes Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with Robert J. Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” (1948) and Jean Renoir’s “The Southerner” (1945).

They are an apt pairing, but time has been lots kinder to the second than the first. Not really a documentary from the man who pioneered the form, “Louisiana Story” tells of the construction of an oil derrick in a Louisiana bayou and how the the oil drillers and the Cajun community come to find a common bond. (Standard Oil underwrote the picture.) This plays very dubiously in these ecologically conscious times, and the film’s nonprofessional actors, recruited locally by Flaherty, are never free from self-consciousness. Not surprisingly, the film’s visuals are its strongest asset, offering tremendous bayou vistas and dramatic coverage of the oil drilling.

Even though Renoir, having fled the occupation of France by Germany, lived in Beverly Hills to the end of his life, he never really found Hollywood congenial; he worked in France once again after World War II. The genre-ridden American motion picture industry was hard-put to contain Renoir’s expansive naturalism, his preference for revelation of character over plot, his profound sense of compassion for even the most vile of humans, and the exceedingly subtle social criticism that helped put “Grand Illusion” and “The Rules of the Game” on most critics’ all-time-best lists.

Yet Renoir did honorable work in Hollywood, and he did manage to make a remarkable film for its time and place in “The Southerner,” adapted by Renoir and others from George Session Perry’s “Hold Autumn in Your Hands.” Man’s relationship to nature was an enduring Renoir theme, and it found full expression in the struggle of a young Texas sharecropper (Zachary Scott) and his wife (Betty Field) who try to break the eternal cycle of poverty by leasing some land for cotton harvesting.

“The Southerner” is truly unforgettable, especially if you first saw it at your neighborhood theater when you were 9 years old and had seen virtually nothing but Technicolor World War II musicals and comedies. Imagine watching, at that tender age, a Scott neighbor (J. Carroll Naish, never better) refusing to give milk for a pellegra-stricken boy, not much younger than you; imagine witnessing parents slaving to harvest a cotton crop only to see it ruined in an instant by a storm.

Even so, “The Southerner” makes a deep positive impression because Renoir suggests that people, sustained by loving family ties, can dare to start over.

“The Southerner” represented a radical departure for Scott, a debonair leading man of his day: The same year as “Southerner,” he played opposite an Oscar-winning Joan Crawford in “Mildred Pierce” as the cad she loses to her own daughter. The film’s cast represents a deft mix of Hollywood pros and noted stage actors, and among the notables are Norman Lloyd, Blanche Yurka, Percy Kilbride, Estelle Taylor and Beulah Bondi, at times a bit much as Scott’s cranky, tough old granny.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.