‘Eve,’ Almost As Intended

Forty years ago, producers Robert and Raymond Hakim invited Joseph Losey to direct”Eve,” an adaptation of the James Hadley Chase novel, for which they had already signed Jeanne Moreau and Welsh actor Stanley Baker to star. It ultimately proved the director’s favorite among his films, so Losey was understandably devastated when he was advised to cut his 155-minute film by more than half an hour for its Paris release. Producers cut it further for its English-language version, which opened locally in 1964.

It will screen Friday and Saturday only, at the New Beverly Cinema, in apparently its longest extant version--two hours. Allowances must be made for the all-too-obvious dubbing of the supporting actors in this English-language version, because “Eve” now plays far more smoothly than ever. Most important, it emerges as the boldly expressive personal fable of destructive sexual passion Losey intended.

Baker’s Tyvian Jones has settled into la dolce vita in Venice, where the film made of his smashingly successful autobiographical novel has just had its world premiere at the city’s renowned film festival. The film version was produced by an Italian, Sergio (Giorgio Albertazzi), whose beautiful assistant Francesca (Virna Lisi) has fallen in love with Tyvian while Sergio has fallen in love with her. Approaching Venice by boat during a storm, Eve (Moreau), a high-priced French call girl based in Rome, seeks shelter in Tyvian’s posh home on an island near Venice. Eve, with a rich, older john in tow, makes herself right at home as easily as a cat curling up on a sofa and remains unfazed by Tyvian’s arrival.

Eve’s impact upon Tyvian is as immediate as it is devastating. Her only kindness is to warn him in all seriousness not to fall in love with her. Such an admonition naturally only heightens his ardor; in his grand passion he reveals himself to be a fraud as a writer and as a man. Under such circumstances Eve could not dare to be other than icy toward Tyvian, for to yield to emotion would make her vulnerable to being swept up in Tyvian’s self-destruction.

You can’t imagine anyone but Moreau getting away with the steely nonchalance of Eve; Baker superbly embodies the tormented Tyvian. Michel Legrand’s jazzy score and Gianni di Venanzo and Henri Decae’s swooping and swirling black-and-white images verge on the surreal. Risky in every way at every turn, “Eve” could just be Losey’s masterpiece after all. 7165 Beverly Blvd. (323) 938-4038.

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LACMA’s “Powerful Actresses in Early Hollywood” commences Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “Heart o’ the Hills” (1919), in which Mary Pickford plays a sharpshooting Appalachian teenager out to avenge her father’s murder, who joins forces with the son of a brutal man out to marry her equally brutal widowed mother for her inheritance. As usual, Pickford (here under Sidney Franklin’s direction) is magical. It is followed by Frank Borzage’s “Secrets” (1933), which shows how willing and able Pickford was in extending her range. Then 40, Pickford gracefully spans some five decades as a well-born New England teenager who elopes with a dashing but impoverished Leslie Howard. The heart of Pickford’s final film occurs at its halfway point, as a dignified, middle-aged Pickford faces up to her now-wealthy husband’s philandering. It’s no wonder that this sequence reverberates with authenticity, for Pickford at the time was confronting the disintegration of her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks--and the very-much-married Howard was beginning to earn his reputation as one of Hollywood’s legendary off-screen Lotharios. Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (323) 857-6010.

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One of the least-familiar offerings in the UCLA Film Archives’ “Comedies & Proverbs: The Films of Eric Rohmer,” which begins at 7:30 p.m. today with 1969’s “My Night at Maud’s” in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, is “The Marquise of O” (1976), a stunningly spare and rigorous adaptation of the Heinrich von Kleist novella in which feeling ultimately triumphs over form. So naive and high-minded is a young widow (Edith Clever), the daughter of a commandant whose fortress in Northern Italy is overrun by Russian soldiers, that she is truly perplexed as to how she could become pregnant, which threatens to result in her banishment to a country estate for life. The way the widow’s fate plays out attests to Rohmer’s ability to temper a most exquisite sensibility with precisely the right amounts of humor and chagrin. “The Marquise” screens at 7 p.m. Sunday, followed by the even more venturesome “Perceval” (1978), in which Rohmer expresses the Arthurian knight Perceval’s quest for the Holy Grail with the foreshortened perspective of medieval paintings. Further screenings through Jan. 27. (310) 206-FILM.

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The Silent Movie Theatre’s tribute to F.W. Murnau commences Friday at 8 p.m. with “Faust” (1926), a triumph of elaborate decor and fantastic imagery, adapted from Goethe.

To bring an end to a time of pestilence and suffering, the aged necromancer Faust agrees to sell his soul to Mephistopheles (Emil Jannings). But having accomplished good by evil means, Faust allows himself to be tempted by Mephistopheles’ promise of youth and is transformed into a handsome young man (Gosta Ekman). Bored by orgies in Italy, Faust returns home and instantly falls in love with the pure maiden Marguerite (Camilla Horn, who is fine, but Murnau’s first choice, Lillian Gish, would have been perfect). Epic in scope, sophisticated in sensibility, “Faust” is a landmark in the German Expressionist style.

The first of the Dracula films, Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu” (Friday through Sunday, and Jan. 19-21 at 8 p.m, with Sunday matinees at 1 and 4 p.m.) remains the greatest--and its making inspired the current “Shadow of the Vampire.” Max Schreck’s Count Dracula is one of the cinema’s most indelible images--cadaverous in the extreme, with pointed ears and clawlike hands. Craving fresh supplies of human blood, and no doubt human companionship as well, the count has told one of his acolytes, Renfield (Alexander Granach), to secure an estate for him in town. Although Schreck’s grotesque Dracula is the antithesis of Bela Lugosi’s suave, insinuating seducer, there is an aura of erotic longing in the film. (The pioneer film historian Lotte Eisner saw in Nosferatu an expression of Murnau’s homosexual torment and alienation.) Yet “Nosferatu” is a profoundly romantic film, with a deep, abiding faith in the ultimate redemptive power of love--a recurrent Murnau theme. 611 N. Fairfax Ave. (323) 655-2520.