Murder 101

The 1950s were good years for scary movies. But the scariest--certainly the one with the most spine-chilling moments--came in 1955 from France: “Diabolique,” based on a novel (“The Woman Who Never Was”) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.

Much admired by Alfred Hitchcock, who later made “Vertigo” from another French novel by the same authors, “Diabolique” has an ingenious story heaped with suspense and fright upon fright.

The movie is set in a bleak boarding school for boys, where the abusive headmaster, his wife and his mistress (played by Simone Signoret), become the central figures in a murder. “Diabolique” will be screened Wednesday, 7 p.m., at the Argyros Forum, Room 208, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Free. (714) 744-7694.

Henri-Georges Clouzot, who directed the picture, called it a tale about “a corpse which would not lie down.” He made it, he said, “only to amuse myself and the little child who sleeps in all our hearts--the child who hides her head under the bedcovers and begs, ‘Daddy, Daddy, frighten me.’ ”

(If Clouzot did have a daughter, she must have been either brave beyond measure or very twisted.)

For another kind of scary movie, Gary Oldman’s “Nil by Mouth” is a profane and harrowing autobiographical account of a British working-class family riven by alcoholism, drug addiction, crime and brutal domestic violence.

Oldman, making his writing-directing debut, does not appear in the picture. Kathy Burke, who plays the abused wife, won the prize for best female actor at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Oldman took the Channel Four Director’s Award, a major prize, at the Edinburgh Film Festival that year. “Nil by Mouth,” which also has an original score by Eric Clapton, opens Friday for a weeklong run at the Port Theatre, 2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. $7. (714) 673-6260.

Also playing Friday is Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” (1972) at UC Irvine, 7 and 9 p.m., in the UCI Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium, Pereira Drive and West Peltason Road. $2.50-$4.50. (714) 824-5588.

Bergman, the filmmaker who brought Swedish cinema to the world’s attention, was just coming off a decade-long string of masterpieces when “Cries and Whispers” appeared. The previous year, the Cannes Film Festival had honored him as one of the five most distinguished award winners in its history (with Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Rene Clair and William Wyler).

“Cries and Whispers,” which is emotionally charged with incest, stars Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin and has much else to recommend it, including Sven Nykvist’s cinematography. But it doesn’t quite rank among Bergman’s greatest works.

As critic Pauline Kael once wrote, despite the picture’s “oracular power and the pull of a dream,” there’s “a 19th century dullness at the heart of it.”

The weather power of John Ford’s “Hurricane” (1937) blows in Friday as well. It screens at 6:30 p.m. at the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. $3-$5. (714) 759-1122.

The museum’s adjunct film curator, Arthur Taussig, writes about the film: “Welcome to the isle of Manikoora, where native life is idyllic for Jon Hall and Dorothy Lamour . . . except for the presence of vindictive governor Raymond Massey. . . . The hurricane gives them a few problems, too.”

The story of colonial injustice is slight. But an adept supporting cast (including Mary Astor) and Ford’s smart camera setups produce watchable results. The picture’s climax makes El Nino look like a minor disturbance.

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Also screening in Orange County:

* Two directors will make appearances with upcoming screenings of their movies: the internationally respected Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami and Park Kwang-Su, who has gained recognition as a major force in South Korea’s film industry.

Kiarostami, whose “Taste of Cherry” shared the top prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival with Shohei Imamura’s “The Eel,” will be honored at a benefit showing of his film for Relief International, a nonprofit group that helps victims of natural disasters and civil conflicts worldwide.

Not yet in commercial release, “Taste of Cherry” is “austere, rigorous but always involving,” reported Times film critic Kenneth Turan, who saw it at Cannes. It’s about a man’s attempt to persuade three people to help him commit suicide. The picture will be screened Wednesday, 7:30 p.m., at Edwards Town Center, 3199 Park Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $50 (including a reception). (310) 441-0097.

Park will be at the UCI presentation of “A Single Spark,” his 1996 documentary about a 22-year-old Korean labor-union martyr who immolated himself. The film will be screened Saturday, 7 p.m., in the continuing series of Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema at the UCI Film and Video Center, Humanities Building, Room 100 (on West Peltason Road). $4-$6. (714) 824-7418

Preceding that documentary in the same room will be Yu Hyon-mok’s “The Stray Bullet” (1961), set immediately after the Korean War. Yu’s picture “dramatizes postwar anxiety and pessimism by focusing on a desperate family that can’t make ends meet,” writes Kyn Hyun Kim, co-director of the series. The screening is Saturday, 4:30 p.m. $4-$6. (714) 824-7418.

* The Queer Film and Video Series continues today, 7:30 p.m., with a special event: Torie Osborn speaking on “Queer Politics in the Nineties: Where Are We at the Millennium?” 7:30 p.m., also at UCI Film and Video Center. Two videos, “True Inversions” (1993) and “Dry Kisses Only” (1990), follow at 9:30 p.m. Free. (714) 824-7418. The first video explicitly documents the performance art of a lesbian collective, Kiss & Tell; the second comments on lesbian subtexts in Hollywood movies.

* The Black Heroes: Hollywood Action series also continues today with “Cleopatra Jones” (1973), 7:30 p.m., at the Argyros Forum, Room 208, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Free. (714) 744-7694. This picture showed that the “blaxploitation” genre could use female action heroes. Jones is a CIA agent who battles a white drug kingpin while trying to rid L.A.’s inner city of drugs.

* Finally, “The Battle of Britain,” a World War II documentary in Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series (produced for the U.S. Army), will be screened Tuesday, 10 a.m., with a lecture. Both are free, in Mackey Auditorium on Gymnasium Drive, at the Ruby Gerontology Center, Cal State Fullerton (800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton). $1.50 for parking. (714) 278-2446.

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In L.A. and beyond:

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 gamy atmosphere, with a wild party 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. 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,” 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, mountain villagers in the north still practiced the custom of abandoning their elderly on a sacred mountain, Narayama.

In 1958, Keisuke Kinoshita directed the celebrated “The Ballad of Narayama,” based on Shichiro Fukazawa’s prize-winning story. Imamura’s stunning new version took the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1983.

Imamura’s “Endless Desire” (1958), in which a motley group marks the 10th anniversary of Japan’s World War II surrender by digging up a cache of morphine, and the director’s debut film, “Stolen Desire” (1958), a love triangle in a theater troupe, screen Sunday at 7 p.m. (310) 206-FILM.