Warhol Series Presents ‘Lupe,’ ‘Lonesome Cowboys’

The American Cinematheque’s “Andy Warhol Does Hollywood,” presented in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art, continues through Aug. 28 at the Egyptian with screenings every night through Sunday, some teamed with vintage Hollywood movies starring the actresses being emulated, parodied or celebrated--or all three--in the corresponding Warhol film.

In the prophetic, split-screen “Lupe” (1965), which screens Friday at 7 p.m., the ill-fated Edie Sedgwick is simultaneously seen lolling about an elegant apartment in the Dakota, applying makeup and chatting with Warhol stalwart Billy Name, and in the other scene, beautifully gowned but alone and drinking away her dinner in a formal dining room. Both episodes culminate in conjoining images in which Sedgwick is seen as dead in a bathroom in emulation of the real-life fate of movie star Lupe Velez. The waif-like Sedgwick couldn’t have been more different from the “Mexican Spitfire,” yet she too was to die at an early age. It will be followed by the 1939 Velez movie “The Girl From Mexico.” Sedgwick is also featured in “Poor Little Rich Girl” (1965), screening Friday at 9:30 p.m. and followed by the 1936 Shirley Temple film of the same name.

Some of Warhol’s best-known features will screen over the next week, among them “Lonesome Cowboys” (1967-68), Saturday at 8:45 p.m. The outrageous parody of the western is frequently hilarious--and often tedious. It has the usual Warhol Factory ingredients: sex, nudity and four-letter words. Who but Warhol would portray a cowboy as a Times Square hustler, a sheriff as a transvestite and recommend ballet as a good exercise for sharpshooting?

With “Bike Boy” (1967-68), screening Sunday at 7 p.m., Warhol moved beyond camp to tragedy as he follows a footloose, hunky biker (Joe Spencer), presented as a sort of Rousseau-esque last natural man, in a series of encounters with typically decadent Warhol types. “Kitchen” (1965), screening Sunday at 4 p.m., is another of Warhol’s early collaborations with Theater of the Ridiculous playwright Ronal Tavel, a 66-minute sendup of kitchen-sink realism. Sedgwick plays a beautiful but self-absorbed young wife who’s brought her makeup kit into the kitchen, where she wrangles with her anguished husband (Roger Trudeau) while working on her face. The plot thickens with the arrival of unannounced visitors and, throughout, a relentless set photographer snaps away, adding to the film’s quality of humorous travesty.

Screening Wednesday at 7 p.m. will be “The Chelsea Girls” (1965), which marked the beginning of Warhol’s collaboration with Paul Morrissey, soon to become the true auteur of the Warhol pictures. “The Chelsea Girls” is surely Warhol’s most significant film, a darkly compelling three-hour, 20-minute, guided tour through Warhol’s Inferno, in which an array of decadent types, purported residents of Manhattan’s landmark hotel, dominate a split screen with monstrously self-indulgent, indolent misery. The film’s split-screen technique, which was Morrissey’s idea, helps create a demented world of its own. (323) 466-FILM.

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LACMA’s “William Wyler and the Tradition of Excellence” continues Friday at 7:30 p.m. with the screening of “Dodsworth” (1936), Wyler’s handsome, intelligent film of the Sinclair Lewis novel, which surely has a different impact today than was intended when it was released in 1936. Walter Huston, re-creating his stage role, plays a middle-aged Midwestern car manufacturer who retires so he and his wife (Ruth Chatterton) can take off for an extended vacation in Europe. Although determinedly unpretentious, Dodsworth is no hick, but a knowledgeable appreciator of the European culture he’s eager to drink in.

For his substantially younger wife, however, travel represents a new freedom that leaves her giddy enough to be vulnerable to the overtures of such debonair types as David Niven and Paul Lukas. Wyler and writer Sidney Howard, drawing from the novel and Howard’s own play, convey that the wife dutifully endured a suffocating small-town social life while her husband was meeting the challenge of becoming a captain of industry. They have also endowed her with considerable self-awareness.

Consequently, the film’s conclusion, praised for remaining true to its source, ironically now seems false, a betrayal of the film’s most likely unconscious feminist spirit. What’s more, Chatterton is such a brilliant actress and has made the wife so human in her frailties--indeed, a 20th century Madame Bovary--that one feels she is unjustly punished for a foolish display of bravado that masks an understandably wounded pride.(323) 857-6010.

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By coincidence an earlier and far rarer Wyler film, “The Love Trap” (1929) screens Sunday at 7 p.m. In Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater as part of the UCLA’s 11th annual Festival of Preservation. It’s been said that Wyler, who swiftly became one of Hollywood’s most prestigious directors with the advent of sound, would rather his earliest films, mainly westerns and made in the late silent era, remain forgotten.

Yet “The Love Trap,” adapted by various hands from a story by Edward J. Montaigne, is a Roaring ‘20s romantic comedy that’s lost none of its fizz. Since it is like lots of other movies of the era--poor girl lands rich guy and trouble ensues--that it holds up so well surely owes much to the already evident painstaking craftsmanship that was Wyler’s hallmark. (That it has a racy pre-code sensibility helps a lot.)

“The Love Trap” is also fascinating as a part-talkie, one of the group of films that were made during the chaotic transition from silents to talkies. So eager were the studios to make the changeover that they hyped up some of their silent productions already under way with sound sequences.

Interestingly, from frame one Wyler directs his actors conversing in a natural manner even if we cannot hear them and have to rely on intertitles until the film takes a dramatic turn near its halfway point and becomes a talkie.

Consequently, the actors’ switch from mime to speech is far smoother than in most part-talkies. (“The Love Trap” has a sound-effects track throughout, and its first half is sustained by a jazzy score.)

Laura La Plante, Universal’s lovely and versatile blond star in the late silent era, plays Evelyn, a small-town Illinois girl so klutzy that she’s fired from a Broadway chorus line only to arrive at her walk-up apartment to find all her possessions on the sidewalk due to overdue rent. Then it starts raining, but when a girl is as pretty as Evelyn, it’s only fitting that within 10 minutes a handsome young man, Peter (Neil Hamilton), stops by in a cab to rescue her. Almost the next thing we know is that Evelyn and Peter are blissfully happy newlyweds ensconced in a swanky duplex apartment.

The hitch comes with the return from Europe of Peter’s snooty mother (Clarisa Selwynne) and sister (Rita La Roy), who make it crystal clear that the sweet, adoring Evelyn is not good enough for a filthy-rich aristocrat like Peter. Evelyn is devastated, of course, but what makes “The Love Trap” such fun is how she handles this insult, which in similar instances is usually treated as an occasion for a lot of heart-tugging on behalf of the heroine.

But “The Love Trap,” which in some aspects foreshadows ‘30s screwball comedy, is too smart and sophisticated for that.

La Plante proves to be a sharp, resourceful comedian in one of her most delightful performances, and Hamilton is an ideal leading man for her. There’s lots of late Jazz Age atmosphere, and some knockout Art Deco decor.

The second feature is “Sweethearts and Wives” (1930), a comic murder mystery starring Leila Hyams and Clive Brooks and directed by Clarence Badger. (310) 206-FILM.