A Silent Star, Pre-’King Kong’

Fay Wray will always be remembered for being carried by King Kong as he scales the Empire State Building, but the real high mark of her long career occurred early in Erich von Stroheim’s late silent-era masterpiece “The Wedding March” (1928). The American Cinematheque is screening it at the Egyptian Friday at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday at 5 p.m. with live musical accompaniment. The screenings mark the 15th anniversary of the founding of the Silent Society, which is dedicated to the preservation and presentation of silent films.

Wray, now 92, is among the most radiant of Stroheim heroines as Mitzi, a harpist at a Viennese wine garden. She and Stroheim’s Prince Nicki lock eyes while he is serving as part of an honor guard outside St. Stephan’s Cathedral in which a Corpus Christi celebration is underway; the time is just before the outbreak of World War I. They have a prolonged, beautifully sustained flirtation, much to the growing consternation of her crude suitor Schanzi (Matthew Betz), the swaggering butcher that Mitzi’s mother (Dale Fuller) is eager for her to marry.

A playboy with a streak of melancholy, Nicki falls in love with the innocent Mitzi just at the very moment his aristocratic parents (Maude George, George Fawcett) are forcing him to marry the disabled daughter (Zasu Pitts at her most wistful) of a corn plaster magnate so they can replenish the family coffers.

“The Wedding March,” which Stroheim wanted to release in two parts, did not escape front-office trims (by Paramount in this case) but is considerably less mutilated than most of his pictures, although its original version had a more protracted and much darker ending. It is an homage to his native city, and a way of life that would never be the same with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which Stroheim viewed ambiguously; to him the Vienna of wine, women and song is alluring but also decadent; Stroheim skewers the hypocrisy of the privileged along with the brutality of the lower classes.

As a love story, “The Wedding March” is as seductive as it is tender. Charged with pathos, joy and longing, it is a timeless, richly expressive work of art, its vision of a Vienna of contradictory impulses undiminished by the years. (323) 206-FILM.

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The same cannot be said of “The Rains Came” (1938), which the UCLA Film Archive screens tonight at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater as part of its Archive Treasures series. Based on the Louis Bromfield novel, it is fortunately no less fun for being a dated disaster movie, noble love story and tribute to the glory of the British Empire, which Hollywood proclaimed as fervently and uncritically as England itself.

It’s dedicated to the proposition that there’s nothing like a disaster, in this instance a dam breaking in the fictional Indian state of Ranchipur, to get folks to straighten up and fly right. A stunning gold digger (Myrna Loy) and her pompous, titled, much older husband (Nigel Bruce) are visiting the local Maharanee (Maria Ouspenskaya) and Maharajah (H.B. Warner). Loy runs into an old flame (George Brent), a well-born playboy remittance man. She also meets and falls hard for a handsome, selfless native physician (Tyrone Power), who is the childless Maharajah’s designated heir.

Director Clarence Brown can’t keep this material from seeming artificial but he does elicit a glowingly credible performance from Loy, who keeps the nobility of her heroine’s spiritual redemption from becoming insufferable. Presented with contemporaneous short subjects.

By way of vivid but probably unintentional contrast, the UCLA Film Archive is also presenting “A River Runs Through It: The Bengali Cinema of Ritwik Ghatak,” which continues this weekend with 6:30 p.m. double features of “The Cloud-Capped Star” (1960) and “Subarnarekha” (1962) on Saturday; and of “E-Flat” (1961) and “Reason, Debate and a Story” (1974) on Sunday. Satyajit Ray called Ghatak “one of the few truly original talents in the cinema this country has produced.” (310) 206-FILM.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ latest “American Independents” cycle commences at the Sunset 5 Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. with Kevin Di Novis’ unsettling “Surrender Dorothy,” in which he also plays a junkie on the run who seeks shelter from the worst possible person. A restaurant busboy, Trevor (Peter Pryor), thanks to childhood trauma, is terrified of women yet no less attracted to them. The crazed Trevor sees in the junkie relief from his own frustration by forcing him to dress as a woman, the first step in his becoming Dorothy, Trevor’s love captive. The result repels as it undeniably compels, and is finally a enough of a jolter to keep from succumbing to sheer morbidity.

It screens at the Monica 4-Plex April 14 and 15 at 11 a.m. Sunset 5: 8000 Sunset Blvd., (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.

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The Silent Movie, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., launches a Lon Chaney series tonight at 8 with “The Penalty” (1920) and “The Unknown” (1927), which screen Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. In both films, Chaney, the “Man of a Thousand Faces” and master portrayer of grotesques, plays victims of bizarre dismemberments.

Directed by Wallace Worsley, “The Penalty” has an enduringly primitive power as Chaney plays a legless San Francisco criminal bent on avenging himself against the doctor who mistakenly amputated his legs above his knees when he was a child, and thereby, against all of society.

Chaney discovered in Tod Browning his greatest director, an artist of equal compassion and penchant for the bizarre. A tale of repressed passion with a mind-boggling plot twist, “The Unknown” finds Chaney, in a portrayal of extraordinary pathos and dexterity, cast as an armless wonder, a circus star who by using his feet is a knife-thrower and a sharpshooter. His human target is Joan Crawford, a gypsy who flaunts her sexuality yet has an aversion toward men. She does, however, respond warmly to Chaney, the one guy who can’t paw her. Seen today, “The Unknown” seems extravagantly Freudian, and one can only wonder about the degree of innocence with which it was made. (323) 655-2520.

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The fifth annual City of Lights, City of Angels Film Festival gets off to a lackluster start Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Directors Guild of America with Francis Veber’s “The Closet,” which stars Daniel Auteuil as a mousy, mid-level manager at a condom factory who announces he is gay to stave off being fired; a provocative premise has been crudely developed. Gerard Depardieu plays a gay co-worker in pursuit of Auteuil. Veber and leading lady Michele Laroque will introduce the film. On Wednesday at 7:30, Anne Villaceque will introduce her stylish and suspenseful “Petite Cherie,” in which a demure, somewhat plain young woman (Corinne Debonniere) encounters a handsome stranger (Jonathan Zaccai) on a train. DGA, 7920 Sunset Blvd.; (310) 206-8013.