Nurses in Lace : Stanwyck and Blondell show their star power in William Wellman’s romp.

For all of William Wellman’s vigorous direction, “Night Nurse” (1931), which the UCLA Film Archive screens tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, is a dated, if entertaining, melodrama. Yet Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Blondell and Clark Gable (in a small role) already have the impact of stars.

Stanwyck plays a dedicated novice nurse who’s horror-struck at discovering that her two small charges, both with huge trust funds, are being starved to death under an unscrupulous doctor’s orders. Their silly widowed mother (Charlotte Merriam) is an alcoholic, kept that way by her dominating chauffeur (Gable) who’s in cahoots with the doctor (Rolfe Harolde).

Forget the lurid, contrivance-laden plot; what counts here is the atmosphere, which is gamy indeed, with a wild party sequence and lots of gratuitous scenes with Stanwyck and Blondell in their lacy step-ins. Based on a Dora Macy novel, the crude and sketchy film captures the moral chaos and desperation of the post-crash, pre-repeal years. To be sure, Stanwyck’s nurse is a determined square-shooter, although she does fall for bootlegger Ben Lyon. This “Archives Treasure” presentation will be preceded by a vintage Friz Freleng-Paul Smith cartoon, a short featuring Horace Heidt and his band, and a Hearst Metrotone Newsreel.

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The Archives’ “The Films of Shohei Imamura,” a retrospective of one of Japan’s most committed and powerful directors, commences Friday at 7 p.m. in James Bridges Theater with “The Ballad of Narayama” (1983).

Legend has it that as recently as a century ago, when Japan was emerging from its feudal age, mountain villagers in the north still practiced the custom of abandoning their elderly on a sacred mountain, called Narayama.

In 1958, Keisuke Kinoshita directed the celebrated “The Ballad of Narayama,” based on Shichiro Fukazawa’s prize-winning story centering on this custom. Incorporating material from a related Fukazawa story, Imamura has made a stunning new version that took the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1983. It may be surprising that a filmmaker as original as Imamura would ever remake anything, but his “Ballad of Narayama” is entirely his own, a superb achievement that can stand as a summation of all that has concerned him throughout his career.

For Imamura, any understanding of humanity begins with a consideration of nature--its immutable laws, its capacity to ennoble or degrade. Although nature could scarcely be harsher than in “The Ballad of Narayama,” it does ultimately reward those who live in harmony with it.

Imamura begins by recording daily life in the village in all its often humorous, even outrageous earthiness. He concentrates on a family headed by a 45-year-old widower (Ken Ogata) who has a mother (Sumiko Sakamoto) nearing her 70th birthday, the traditional age for heading to Narayama. Gradually a story emerges, as events lead Sakamoto finally to insist that Ogata carry her to the rugged summit of Narayama where, by dying from either freezing or starvation, she believes she will enter the next life. The overriding question implicit here is, of course, whether the old woman’s fate is any worse or as cruel as that of many elderly people in contemporary society.

Imamura’s “Endless Desire” (1958), in which a small, motley group marks the 10th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender by digging up a cache of morphine buried during the war, and the director’s debut film, “Stolen Desire” (1958), a love triangle in a theater troupe, screen Sunday at 7 p.m. Neither was available for preview.

The Archive is also presenting on Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. two William Haines films to coincide with the publication of William Mann’s outstanding “Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood’s First Openly Gay Star.”

“Tell It to the Marines” (1926) is full of surprises. At first it seems simply an exceptionally genial, knockabout service comedy in which playboy Haines is shaped up by veteran Marine Sgt. Lon Chaney, whose gruff manner hides the familiar heart of gold. It develops into a romance in which Chaney and Haines vie for lovely Navy nurse Eleanor Boardman, only to take on an unexpected epic scale as all three end up in a bloody battle with a Chinese warlord (Sidney Toler, later famous as Charlie Chan) that brings the film and its love triangle unexpected emotional depth. Carmel Myers also stars as a South Seas vamp who momentarily distracts Haines from his true love. Directed by the little-known George Hill from a story and screenplay by E. Richard Schayer, “Tell It to the Marines” is one of those pleasing, unpretentious entertainments Hollywood has all but forgotten how to make.

In 1930, Haines was voted the No. 1 male box-office star in a trade publication poll, and in that same year he made a disastrous yet fascinating comedy western, “Way Out West,” in which he is both seriously paunchy and outrageously campy, playing a carnival con man who fleeces some macho cowboys only to be forced to pay them back by working alongside them at a ranch owned by lovely Leila Hyams. Haines even declares to comedian Polly Moran, playing Hyams’ servant, “I’m the wildest pansy you ever picked!” Haines knows how to throw a punch and, predictably, win the girl.

But Haines, although he had a good voice for talkies, was on his way out, as was his director, Fred Niblo, responsible for “Ben-Hur” and other major silents, who did not make the transition to talkies successfully. To the end of his life, Hyams’ widower, legendary agent Phil Berg, was proud that he and his wife were among those who helped launch Haines into an even bigger career as an interior designer. (310) 206-FILM.

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Among the films screening Saturday at UC Irvine’s 100 Humanities Instructional Building as part of the “Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema Festival” is Park Kwang-su’s 1995 “A Single Spark” (at 7 p.m.). As beautiful as it is bleak, it’s an account of a law school graduate (Moon Sung-keun) researching a book on a brave youth (Hong Kyo^ng-in) who, from 1965 to his death by self-immolation in 1970, agitated for better working conditions for Seoul’s virtually enslaved garment workers. Since the writer, already known as an anti-government activist himself, is beginning his work in 1975, just as President Park Chunk Hee has established a military dictatorship, he and his factory worker girlfriend are in constant danger.

“A Single Spark” is grueling but also impassioned and greatly accomplished. It will be preceded at 4:30 p.m. by Yu Hyo^n-mok’s “The Stray Bullet” (1961), a drama about a family unable to make ends meet in the wake of the Korean War, and a new short, Cho^ng Yun-ch’o^l’s 13-minute “The Recollection of the Bridge.” For ticket and parking information: (714) 824-7418; for festival information: (714) 824-1992.

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LACMA is winding up its “Luis Bun~uel in Mexico” series this weekend with “Abismos de Pasion,” the Spanish master’s subversive 1953 take on “Wuthering Heights,” which screens Friday in Bing Theater at 7:30 p.m., followed by “Daughter of Deceit” (1951), in which a macho type kicks out his unfaithful wife and puts their daughter up for adoption.

Saturday brings one of Bun~uel’s masterpieces, “Nazarin” (1958), starring Francisco Rabal as a defrocked priest determined to do good as he wanders over the Mexico of Porfirio Diaz. It screens at 7:30 p.m. and will be followed by “Mexican Bus Ride” (1954), perhaps the sunniest movie Bun~uel ever made.

Since Chaucer (and long before), writers have been taking groups of people on journeys and throwing in a couple of mishaps to find out what they’re really made of. Bun~uel saw the humorous possibilities in this old theme; the result was “Mexican Bus Ride” (“Subida al Cielo”). The story is simple: A dying mother sends her good son (Esteban Marquez) to a distant village to see a lawyer who will help save a portion of her estate for her grandson and keep his three greedy uncles from getting it.

At first you think Bun~uel is doing nothing more than stringing together a series of cliches about life in Mexico. But soon you realize he is poking fun at the stereotypes. The film’s funniest moment is when a group of Shriners swoop down on the bus driver’s home (“humble but clean,” says the guide) at the height of his mother’s party. It’s a charmer that ends this Bun~uel retrospective on an atypical light note. (213) 857-6010.

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You can’t say you weren’t warned: Sharon Lockhart’s “Goshogaoka,” which screens atMOCA today at 6:30 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday, places a static camera in a gymnasium and records a Japanese girls’ basketball team engaged in gymnastic routines that make them seem like a bunch of dextrous robots. Very impressive as a display of precisely coordinated body movement but a bore to watch.

Filmforum, which is screening Heinz Emigholz’s “Normalsatz” (1978/1981) Sunday at L.A.C.E. at 7 p.m., hails it as “one of the great masterpieces of the modern cinema.” It features in fragmented, skewed fashion various people sitting around and speaking in English and German. Alas, it is as off-putting as “Goshogaoka.” MOCA: (213) 626-6222; Filmforum: (213) 526-2911.