It’s Italian, Forever

“Italian Cinema Forever: Restored Classics from the Mediaset Collection” opens tonight at 7:30 with Federico Fellini’s “81/2” at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and then moves to LACMA with eight more films, running Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. through Nov. 2.

Among films screening this weekend is one of Fellini’s finest, most personal, yet least seen early films, “I Vitelloni” (1953), which was also the work that first brought him international acclaim.

Lyrical, compassionate and perceptive, “I Vitelloni” remains a sublime achievement. It is a humorous yet melancholy portrait of a group of layabouts filmed in Fellini’s hometown, Rimini, an ancient, seaside community. These young men are hitting 30 and getting nowhere, still living at home and apparently unemployed. Fellini celebrates the simple eternal pleasures of the town, but the nostalgic emotions he stirs sharpen rather than blur the painful awareness that these friends are mired in a stagnant environment and their own immaturity.

The story line involves the local Lothario, Fausto (Franco Fabrizi), impregnating the sister of Fellini’s alter-ego, Moraldo (Franco Interlinghi), and responding to his subsequent shotgun marriage with incorrigible womanizing. Fausto’s rocky road in growing up provides a perspective for the introspective Moraldo’s increasing sense that he must escape his hometown if ever he is to make something of his life. Fellini’s visual sense and narrative gifts are already magical, as is Nino Rota’s genius as a composer of poignant scores.

The 7:30 p.m. Saturday screening at LACMA will be preceded at 5 p.m. with a panel discussion, “Reviving Fellini,” and “I Vitelloni” will be followed by Bernardo Bertolucci’s virtually unknown first film, “La Commare Secca” (1962), a “Rashomon”-like murder mystery set in Rome’s underworld. (323) 857-6177.

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The American Cinematheque celebrates the 79th birthday of the Egyptian Theater tonight at 7 with a 90-minute slide presentation on Lillian Gish narrated by her longtime manager James Frasher. It will be followed by Henry King’s “Romola,” an ambitious but stodgy film version of the George Eliot novel which originally premiered at the Egyptian. It does offer an awesome re-creation of 15th century Florence in which Lillian Gish and her sister Dorothy are innocents caught up in the chaotic aftermath of the toppling of the decadent Medici rule. But even the formidable Gishes could not save this melodramatic claptrap, dominated by a villainous William Powell and featuring an ineffectual Ronald Colman.

“Romola” ushers in the Cinematheque’s “Rare & Silent Classic” series, which runs Friday through Sunday. As part of the series, screening at 7 p.m. Friday is Peter Bogdanovich’s “The Cat’s Meow,” which deals the purported mystery surrounding the 1924 death of Thomas Ince, the pioneer producer-director and developer of the studio system. Ince is the most neglected of the early Hollywood giants, and this series offers a rare opportunity to see his most famous work, “Civilization” (1916), which screens following “The Cat’s Meow.” It is a flawed yet stupendous pacifist spectacle-cum-spiritual fantasy set in a bellicose nation closely resembling Germany.

Contemporary film critic Julian Johnson was on the money when wrote that its “absence of intimacy” kept it from being “a master film.”

A pair of hourlong Ince gems screen Sunday at 5 p.m. Ince brings to “The Return of Draw Egan” (1916) a touch of Hawksian tongue-in-cheekery to this William S. Hart western, in which Hart plays a bad guy who tries to redeem himself by signing up as marshal expected to bring law and order to a frontier town. Margery Wilson is the film’s vivacious leading lady and Louise Glaum, one of the earliest screen vamps, is the defiant queen of the local dance hall. Hart is wonderful as a stoic grappling with conflicting emotions. “The Coward” (1915) is a painstakingly evoked period piece, a Civil War drama which evolves a s tale of redemption capped by tragic irony. Cast as the son of a proud Southern colonel (Frank Keenan, father-in-law of comedian Ed Wynn and grandfather of character actor Keenan Wynn) Charles Ray elicit sympathy as he faces enlistment beset by fear and guilt. (323) 466-FILM.

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Written by Glenn O’Brien and directed by Edo Bertoglio, “Downtown 81,” which opens a regular run Friday at the Sunset 5, is a time capsule of a film, shot 20 years ago but only recently completed for release.

Lousy, weighed down by dreadful post-synched dialogue and banal voiceovers, it is of interest only as a historical document.

Cast just before he was to achieve fame as an artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat plays pretty much himself, a struggling painter just released from a hospital (for an undisclosed ailment) only to discover he’s been evicted from his Lower East Side apartment. As the film follows the easy-going 19-year-old Basquiat in the course of a day, during which he strives to raise the $500 in back rent, his quest provides the loosest of frameworks in which to present a wide array of downtown bands in performance with yet more groups heard on the soundtrack. (323) 848-3500.

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Karen Ishizuka’s eloquent, deeply moving “Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray” screens Wednesday through Oct. 30 in at varying hours in “Doctober,” the International Documentary Assn.’s fifth annual festival of films in their Oscar-qualifying one-week runs.

For more than half a century Miyatake (1895-1979) was a greatly gifted photographer, a Little Tokyo fixture. But Miyatake was much more than the wedding picture photographer of choice for generations of Japanese Americans: He was an innovator who was a leader in the fertile arts movement in the pre-World l War II Japanese American community and beyond. Defying orders, Miyatake smuggled a camera into Manzanar, recording concentration camp life in images all the more poignant for being so beautiful.

(213) 534-3600.

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Tariq Jalil’s “A Galaxy Far Far Away,” which begins a Friday and Saturday midnight run at the Sunset 5, is similar to Dennis Przywara’s “Star Wars” in that both acquaint us with the mostly young people who stood in line for 42 days to be among the first to see “Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace” when it opened simultaneously at the Bruin and the Chinese. Both documentaries are well-assembled and take an affectionate look at the fans for whom the “Star Wars” are nourishing spiritually. (323) 848-3500.