Screening Room : Snake Charmer : Tony Curtis brings ‘Reptile Man’ to life in one of the actor’s best performances.

Stewart Schill’s funny, anguished and on-target “The Continued Adventures of Reptile Man (And His Faithful Sidekick Tadpole)” affords a glorious role for Tony Curtis in what is arguably one of the half-dozen best performances of his career. Curtis is actor Jack Steele, whose claim to fame rests entirely, it would seem, on “Reptile Man,” a TV series that ran from 1965 to ’69. Steele had the title role as a scientist who, after an experiment involving a snake misfires, is turned into a nearly invincible reptile-human mutant crime fighter.

Steele has long been reduced to donning his Reptile Man outfit and doing appearances at trade shows and the like. Arye Gross plays Lewis, a young actor so far so unsuccessful that he signs on as Tadpole, hoping that somehow Jack’s contacts will bring him a break.

Jack Steele never had a career remotely as major as that of Curtis, but Curtis has survived enough ups and downs to know Jack inside and out and possesses the courage and skill to make him come ebulliently alive, warts and all. Eschewing vanity, Curtis allows his current paunchiness to make Steele seem all the more ridiculous in his tight-fitting Reptile Man suit.

Ally Walker is Lewis’ put-upon but loving wife, and Kate Asner is Steele’s profoundly estranged daughter. “Reptile Man,” which warrants a regular-run screen for sure, is shown as part of the Laemmle Theaters’ “Summer Series” on Saturday and Sunday at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd.) at 10 a.m. and at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica) Sept. 18 and 19 at 11 a.m. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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As part of the “MUMIA 911: National Day of Art to Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal” at USC on Saturday, there will be a series of five socially conscious films screening from 11:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. in Norris Theater. Mumia, a journalist convicted of killing a policeman, is one of the most controversial death row convicts in the U.S. The film program will be followed by a celebrity reading at 8 p.m. of “It’s a Matter of Life and Death: Voice of the People,” hosted by Ed Asner.

Written and narrated by Melvin Van Peebles and directed and photographed by Mark Daniels, “Classified X” (1997) is Van Peebles’ caustic, take-no-prisoners survey of the American cinema as instrument of the systematic oppression of black people.

The clips are familiar: obedient servants, Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland rolling their eyes and acting dithery, as well as MGM musicals whose numbers by Lena Horne or the Nicholas Brothers might be easily snipped out by Southern exhibitors, and then on to postwar tokenism and the blaxploitation cycle.

But Van Peebles’ stance is impressively unyielding, and he makes his case that mainstream American movies continue to oppress African Americans. As for independent filmmakers like himself, Van Peebles acknowledges that it’s gotten easier to get financing but says distribution and exhibition still present formidable obstacles for blacks. You don’t have to agree with Van Peebles’ views on all the films he cites to appreciate how conclusively he makes his case.

“Classified X,” which screens at 2 p.m., will be preceded at noon by “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (1971), in which documentarians Howard Alk and Michael Gray introduce us, via archival footage, to Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, who was barely 21 yet already a charismatic speaker when he died.

Hampton was killed on Dec. 4, 1969, in what Chicago police described as a “desperate shootout.” A few hours later Alk and Gray had their cameras grinding away at the site of Hampton’s death, a shabby apartment in a once-elegant Victorian row house. They proceed to their investigation of Hampton’s death, presenting in persuasive, low-key fashion evidence supporting the conclusion that Hampton was assassinated.

Screening at 5 p.m. is Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Burn!” (1969), at once an epic adventure, an intimate tragedy and an urgent protest. A depiction of a black rebellion on a fictional sugar plantation island, a Portuguese colony in mid-19th century, it is a blunt indictment of white man’s exploitation of black, with obvious implications (but not redundantly underlined) for American history, past and present. Marlon Brando is a cynical aristocrat sent by the British government to the island of Queimada in the Caribbean to foment a revolution in order to break the foreign sugar trade monopoly. (323) 769-5580.

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Three epic films directed by Jerzy Hoffman from a trilogy of novels set in the 17th century by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who is best known for “Quo Vadis?,” will screen at the Monica 4-Plex Saturdays and Sundays at 10 a.m. through Oct. 3. Screening this weekend is the three-hour “With Fire & Sword,” a tempestuous romance set in the late 1640s along the border between Poland and the Ukraine, a site marked by a Cossack uprising that involved rivalries among Polish noblemen as well as Tartars and Turks eager to get a foothold in Europe.

Though the film has good English subtitling and engaging, swashbuckling characters, awesome battle scenes and gorgeous costumes and settings, it is all but impossible to follow for those not well-versed in the complex history of Poland in that era. “With Fire & Sword,” potentially so entertaining, needs a special introduction and periodic English narration on the soundtrack to enable non-Polish-speaking audiences to see the context and to follow the narrative line through an exceptionally complicated plot.

What is clear enough is the intense rivalry between Sir Jan Skrzetuski (Michal Zebrowksi), a handsome young Polish colonel who is fighting the Cossacks, and his enemy, the ruthless Ukrainian Bohun (Alessander Domogarov), who have both fallen passionately in love with the beautiful Polish noblewoman Helena (Isabellea Scorupco).

As much, if not more, time is spent on the adventures of three of Jan’s soldier pals, who carry on like the Three Musketeers: Zagloba (Kryzysztof Kowalewski), a beefy Fallstaffian character with a knack for getting others to do his duties; Wolodyjowski (Zbigniew Zamachowski), an ace duelist; and the quixotic Longinus (Wiktor Zoborowski), who has sworn to preserve his virginity until he beheads three enemies with a single stroke of his sword.

All these people and many others come alive vividly as appealing figures of humor and bravery. “With Fire & Sword,” a blockbuster on home ground, is zesty, stylish and would be completely captivating if we had a surer sense of what’s going on. Up next: “The Deluge” (1974), screening in two parts over two weekends, and “Colonel Wolodyjowski” (1968). Information and advance sales: (818) 982-8827.

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The Sunset 5 will mark the 10th anniversary of venturesome Strand Releasing with a three-month series to screen Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m., starting this weekend with the late Lino Brocka’s 1989 “Macho Dancer.”

The film exudes raw vitality and power as it tells of young people struggling to survive in an urban jungle and reflects Brocka’s knack for transforming melodrama into romantic tragedy. It can easily be read as an expose of Ferdinand Marcos’ legacy of poverty and corruption, but clearly Brocka perceives the timeless and universal in Ricardo Lee and Amado La Cuesta’s screenplay.

Throughout, there is the sense that, no matter what the political situation may be, impoverished, unskilled kids everywhere will be attracted to big cities and end up selling their bodies.

Brocka’s handsome teenage hero, Pol (Alan Paule), is a country boy who decides to try his luck in Manila when the American serviceman who has been paying him for sex ends his tour of duty.

Despite having been kept, Pol is an innocent when he arrives in Manila’s garish gay bar district, accepting work as a go-go dancer and hustler. He’s taken in by Noel (Daniel Fernando), who teaches him the art of “macho” dancing and invites him to be his roommate.

“Macho Dancer” takes us into a world of sensuality and danger. No matter how determined Pol and Noel and their friends are to survive, they are always at risk, from the temptation of dealing and then using drugs and from the fact that the clubs they work in or the porno films they appear in are controlled by a brutal cop and his minions. (Curiously, Brocka doesn’t deal with the specter of AIDS.)

At heart “Macho Dancer” is operatic, and its heightened sense of emotion rings so true as to sustain its occasional awkwardness as well as its tenderness. It also gets quite steamy. (323) 848-3500.

Note: “Films on Goethe and Goethe on Film” continues Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Goethe Institute, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100, with Rudolf Thome’s “Tarot” (1986), a modern-day adaptation of “Elective Affinities.” (323) 525-3388.