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Playing Catch-Up

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

The American Cinematheque’s “Greatest Hits, 1993-1998,” a summer series of reprises, continues Friday at Raleigh Studio with a program devoted to a sampling of the early television work of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. The series offers a splendid chance to catch up with fine films you may have missed when the Cinematheque first screened them.

First screened two years ago are two episodes from the highly regarded but short-lived “Johnny Staccato” TV series (1959-60) that were directed by Cassavetes, who also starred as a Manhattan jazz pianist-gun for hire. They’re much closer in look and style to Cassavetes’ 1962 “Too Late Blues,” a studio-made B drama with a jazz background than to the gritty, highly personal, semi-improvised “Shadows” (1960), which he financed with his “Staccato” earnings and which launched his career as a major and distinctive independent filmmaker.

What’s intriguing about the two “Staccato” episodes that were available for preview--both involve men dangerously obsessed by women, one played by Elisha Cook Jr., the other by Walter Burke--is that as well-directed as they are, you could actually imagine them working equally well as radio dramas.

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Cassavetes teamed with Rowlands, his wife, in the 1965 Kraft Suspense Theater “Won’t It Ever Be Morning?,” in which Rowlands plays a jazz singer who’s terrific on stage but who must struggle to express herself when a lawyer (Cassavetes) puts her on the stand in defense of her devoted manager (Jack Klugman), wrongly accused of murder.

There will be a Spanish-language double feature of first-time films at 9:30 p.m. Alfonso Cuaron’s 1990 “Love in the Time of Hysteria” is a wonderfully risque sex farce in which we meet a handsome young Mexico City advertising copy writer (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), an incorrigible Don Juan. Suspense quickly builds as Cuaron deftly places a classic screwball comedy in a contemporary context with deadly serious implications.

For those of us who missed it when it was screened as part of the Cinematheque’s 1997 edition of its annual “Recent Spanish Cinema” survey, Iclar Bollain’s 1995 “Hi, Are You Alone?” proves to be a real treat. At the opening of the film, Nina (Silke), an attractive young woman of 20, is found in bed with a young man by her irate father, who forbids her to continue the relationship and orders her to spend more time working with him in his shop. This propels Nina onto a two-month adventure with her best friend Trini (Candela Pena).

Nina, who is a reflective, thoughtful type, is determined to discover what it is like simply to live--to experience life to the fullest but not recklessly, to earn enough money to get by and to resist getting caught up in the rat race. Dark-haired and patrician, she discovers passionate love with a sweet, tall Russian youth (Arcadi Levin) and seeks out the mother (Elena Irureta) she never really knew. By contrast, Trini, who is a lush, blond Madonna look-alike, is a pragmatic survivor who, unlike her friend, doesn’t worry whether some things are right or wrong.

There is an authentic sense of discovery in this modest, incisive and refreshingly unpredictable film.

Saturday brings “Best Shorts of Our Years,” composed of seven works screening at 7:15 p.m. In “Number One Local,” running just shy of eight minutes, Bianca Bob Miller introduces us to subway conductor Harry Nugent, whose witty quipping over his train’s loudspeaker brings cheer to his passengers while giving this self-described failed abstract painter a chance to express himself. Maya Deren’s 14-minute “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943) is a landmark that views film noir and ‘40s women’s pictures from a feminist perspective. A special delight is Sherry Breyer’s “Dresden,” an affectionate 10-minute visit to that vintage L.A. lounge, the Dresden Room, where those durable song stylists, Marty and Elayne, hold forth.

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“Best Shorts of Our Years” will be followed at 9:30 p.m. by a Werner Herzog double feature. “Lessons of Darkness” (1992) is a somber yet exalted 50-minute meditation on the devastation wrought on Kuwait, which paradoxically turns vistas of limitless destruction and desecration of the landscape into images of terrible beauty, accompanied by Herzog’s spare, incantatory narration and a score that contains great swaths of classical music.

Not surprisingly, the highlight of the opening weekend of the American Cinematheque’s New Films From Germany series two years ago was a one-hour documentary from the ever-venturesome Herzog. It’s called “Gesualdo--Death for Five Voices,” an elegant inquiry into the turbulent life and complex music of Carlo Gesualdo (1560 or 61-1613), the Neapolitan Count of Venosa.

No wonder Herzog, always drawn to the romantic and the outre, would be attracted to Gesualdo, who infamously got away with a crime of passion, a double murder in 1590, when he caught his wife (and cousin) Maria d’Avalo, believed to be the model for the Mona Lisa, with her lover of two years, the Duke of Andria. Roaming the ruins of Gesualdo’s palace, Herzog picks up from his guide gossip about a bizarre end for Gesualdo, who made a brilliant second marriage in 1594 but became a melancholy recluse. Herzog also visits, in his vast summer palace, the Principe d’Avalo, Maria’s gracious descendant and himself a composer. The film includes the Gesualdo Consort of London performing the count’s glorious, moody madrigals. (213) 466-FILM.

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Margaret Westcott’s “Stolen Moments” (Sunset 5, Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m.; Monica 4-Plex, Aug. 8 and 9 at 11 a.m.) offers a comprehensive, international survey of lesbian life and history. This fine documentary reminds us that lesbians have often suffered the same horrific fates that gay men have, simply for their sexual orientation. Sunset 5: (213) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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Tony Zarindast’s “Blood of His Own,” a technically competent but trite tale about a young Italian who enters the U.S. illegally to track down his brother in Los Angeles, opens Friday at the Monica 4-Plex. One bright spot: The ever-reliable William Smith, veteran of many an independent production, shows up briefly. (310) 394-9741.

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