Five Years Later, Rose Back in Jaunty Mood

Rose Troche, whose “Go Fish” five years ago was a breakthrough lesbian romantic comedy, returns with “Bedrooms & Hallways,” which was shown at Outfest ’99 and opens regular runs Friday at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) and the Playhouse 7 (673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena). It’s a jaunty British romantic comedy written by Robert Farrar and starring Kevin McKidd and James Purefroy as a gay man and a straight man discovering sexual fluidity as they become involved not only with each other but also, unwittingly, the same woman (Jennifer Ehle). There’s also an amusing spoof of the men’s self-esteem movement embodied by Simon Callow’s unctuous New Age guru. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Playhouse 7: (626) 844-6500.

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The UCLA Film and Television Archive’s “The Lodz Film School of Poland: 50 Years,” which runs Saturday and Sunday and Nov. 14 and 20 at the James Bridges Theater, offers a clutch of shorts, including “Two Men and a Wardrobe” (1958), from Roman Polanski, this prestigious institution’s most famous graduate. Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1964 “Identification Marks: None” (Saturday, about 8:30 p.m., after a 7:30 p.m. program of shorts) is remarkable for a first feature, for it elicits an unsettling ambiguity and uncertainty as effectively as subsequent Skolimowski films. Casting himself as a drifter finally caught up in the draft, Skolimowski uses astonishingly fluid camera work to allow us to see the world through his young man’s eyes. That world, shot stunningly in black and white, is a bleak city in which people go about the lackluster routine of their daily lives. His hero has dropped out of his postgraduate course in ichthyology but hasn’t told his glum older girlfriend, with whom he lives in a picturesque but shabby garret. (Skolimowski’s wife, Elzbieta Czyzewska, plays all four women in the film.)

The film opens with the young man facing a hostile draft board very early one morning. He has evaded his three-month obligatory military service, and now has been ordered to board a train at 3 p.m. to begin a two-year stint as a soldier. Will he actually show up? That’s from the start a very real question, for he is a determined free spirit with a candor scarcely welcome in a Communist state. But that’s the whole point as we follow the young man in the course of his day; very subtly he emerges as temperamentally at odds with his drab, corrupt totalitarian society. The world of the lyrical, flowing “Identification Marks: None” would seem just as somber if it had been shot in color.

So would “End of the Night” (Sunday, at about 8:30 p.m., following a 7 p.m. presentation of Polanski shorts). This powerful, beautifully shot 1956 collaborative effort reflects its bleak era as a group of young men, with little to hope for in their lives, hang out, steal vodka and get drunk, drifting toward disaster. Principal among them, the one who stands apart and can see what’s happening to them is played by Zbigniew Cybulski, tall, handsome, ever the sensitive rebel and an icon of the Polish cinema. (310) 206-FILM.

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Among the many films in the first International Jewish Film Festival and Conference, which gets underway tonight at the Music Hall (9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills), is the outstanding “Karussel” (“Carousel”), Ilona Ziok’s poignant and illuminating account of the life and fate of Kurt Gerron. It screens Monday at 8:15 p.m. Since he is today familiar to very few people, especially in the U.S., Ziok’s 65-minute documentary is the very model of how to acquaint an audience with an unknown individual and reveal his significance. A famous stage and screen comedian and character actor and a major cabaret artist of Germany’s Weimar era, Gerron made more than 70 movies. In “The Blue Angel” (1930) he played the seedy music hall promoter-magician who bluntly orders an indolent Marlene Dietrich to “get out there and sing.” He is best known today as the director of “The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a City,” the infamous propaganda documentary on the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he founded his Cabaret Carousel, that depicted it as a humane establishment when in fact it was a place of fear and starvation.

Gerron was a portly, unhandsome man who nevertheless had a talent and personality to more than match his girth. On stage he created the role of Tiger Brown in “The Threepenny Opera,” thus introducing the immortal song “Mack the Knife.” On screen he generally played shady types and was at the height of his career when Hitler came to power. As a Jew he was swiftly dismissed on the first day of shooting of his newest picture at UFA Studios and fled to France, becoming a film director as well as a performer and then to Holland. Gerron, seen in clips and photos, is recalled by his colleagues, among them Camilla Spira, who knew him and worked with him in Berlin and even appeared with him in cabaret at Westerbrook, the Dutch transit camp, from whence Anne Frank and scores of others were sent to their doom. Spira recalls Gerron with affection but admits he had a touch of vanity and complacency, which did not help his precarious situation.

Throughout the film an array of contemporary cabaret artists, headed by the internationally renowned Ute Lemper, perform the trenchant, bitterly humorous songs of Gerron’s era. “Karussel” is invaluable as a Holocaust document, a record of Gerron’s notable career and as a celebration of the cabaret life of Gerron’s era. (310) 274-6869.

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In making “East of Hope Street,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex (Figueroa and 3rd streets, downtown L.A.), Cal State Northridge film professor Nate Thomas drew upon his 10 years’ experience as residential counselor for children living in a group home. Indeed, you can well believe he and co-writer Tim Russ based their script on actual events in telling the story of Alicia (Jade Herrera), a 15-year-old who fled the civil strife of El Salvador for even worse, when she and her 8-year-old brother joined some 73,000 youngsters caught up in the trouble-plagued Los Angeles County Department of Children & Family Services. Every dire event that befalls Alicia is all too credible in itself, but Thomas and Russ pile them on to the extent that the film cannot sustain such melodrama. Still, the film is an entirely professional effort utilizing student interns on its crew, and the filmmakers were especially fortunate in finding Herrera to play Alicia with such focus and inner conviction. (213) 617-3084.

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American Cinematheque’s “The Great Big 70mm Festival” screens Friday through Nov. 21 at the Egyptian Theater (6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood) and opens Friday at 8 p.m. with a Super Technirama screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), which will be followed by a discussion with two members of its cast, Jean Simmons and Nina Foch, and Christopher Trumbo, son of the writer of its script, Dalton Trumbo. Among the other films screening: “Titanic” (with an appearance by Gloria Stuart), “Oklahoma!,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Apocalypse Now,” “The Sound of Music” and “War and Peace.” (323) 466-FILM.

The sixth annual City of Angels Film Festival, held Friday through Sunday at the Directors Guild of America, 7920 Sunset Blvd., will screen nine vintage films, starting with an 8:30 p.m. opening night presentation of Frank Capra’s “Lost Horizon” (1937). They have been selected as expressions of the theme “Embracing Apocalypse: Visions of Faith and Fear.” The festival aims to bring together filmmakers, theologians and moviegoers to discuss films that raise social and religious issues. (626) 304-3775.

The third annual RESFEST Digital Film Festival will screen Wednesday through Nov. 14 at various venues, with opening night at the Egyptian, where a program of shorts will be shown at 8 p.m. The festival will present three feature-length films shot on video. (323) 466-5141.

The American Cinematheque and 20th Century Fox will hold a 25th anniversary screening of Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein” tonight at 8 at the Egyptian Theater. It will be screened on a new 35-millimeter print, and numerous members of the film’s cast and crew are scheduled to attend. (323) 466-FILM.