They Brought Life to the British Cinema

So sacred was the word in vintage British cinema that the majority of filmmakers never quite got to the imagery. A lot of these movies, some of them certainly worthy, strike Americans as talky and slow, no matter how beautifully acted. As a result, filmmakers who harnessed the visual power of the camera stood out boldly in contrast with their contemporaries, even those who made entertaining films. Among these exceptions to the British rule, Alfred Hitchcock topped the list, but not far behind was the venturesome team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

The American Cinematheque presents A Matter of Life and Death: The Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger today through next Thursday at the Egyptian. Fans of the team--by and large Powell directed and Pressburger wrote and they co-produced--will want to dip into the various rarely seen films in this series. But those newly acquainted with the filmmakers will want to check out their most celebrated work, which screens Saturday, starting with the beloved 1949 “The Red Shoes” (Saturday at 5 p.m.). It’s a bravura romantic fantasy in ravishing color, starring Moira Shearer as a ballerina pursued by two overpowering personalities, Anton Walbrook’s impresario and Marius Goring’s composer.

“Stairway to Heaven” (1946), released in the U.K. as “A Matter of Life and Death,” screens at 7:45 p.m. World War II inspired a number of fantasies about last-minute reprieves from heaven’s doorstep, and this is one of the most durable and persuasive, a work of visual elegance as well as sentiment. David Niven is an RAF squadron leader, trapped in a burning plane over the English Channel, who bids farewell to American WAC wireless operator Kim Hunter and bales out--only to wash ashore moments later as she’s passing by on her bike. But has Niven truly survived, or is he just on a brief reprieve? Can he appeal his death sentence? Or is he merely hallucinating his subsequent experiences?

“Stairway to Heaven” is a particular triumph for production designer Alfred Junge’s imagination, and his Other World is vast, starkly simple and not all that different from the underworld in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” (It’s Heaven, for example, that’s in black and white, and Earth in color.) It is a wonderfully romantic work, a celebration of the preciousness of life in the immediate aftermath of war. With Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Marius Goring and Abraham Sofaer.

“Black Narcissus” (1947), which follows, is unimaginable without its lush color. Based on a Rumer Godden novel, it verges on the outrageous in its evocation of incipient corruption and sexual hysteria. Headed by Deborah Kerr, a group of nuns attempts to turn an ancient Indian harem pitched on an incredibly high cliff into a convent. The atmosphere, heady as the “black narcissus” perfume on a scarf belonging to the bejeweled scion (Sabu) of the region’s ruling family, threatens to undermine the good sisters’ resolve. Not helping their situation is the irreverent, virile presence on an Englishman (David Farrar) in the employ of Sabu’s father.

For their impressive, though obviously artificial efforts in creating this seductive Shangri-La, production designer Alfred Junge and still-active cinematographer Jack Cardiff both won Oscars. A cult favorite, but a bit much, to put it mildly.

Timelessly provocative, disturbing and original, Powell made, without Pressburger, the 1959 “Peeping Tom” (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.), which opened to such ferocious London reviews it all but destroyed his career. Thanks to the efforts of Martin Scorsese, it finally hit local screens in 1980.

Daringly, Powell forces viewers to identify with a psychopathic killer just as it is making us unpleasantly aware of our own voyeurism--and in the process making clear the forces that twisted him so.

Powell’s use of the camera is so accomplished that the film is breathtaking. Alas, in its elegance of style and theatricality of its acting it was at jarring odds with the gritty realism of the angry working-class movies coming into fashion in the British cinema at the time of its release.

Carl Boehm stars as a shy, pale focus-puller at a movie studio who moonlights as a photographer of nude art studies. (323) 466-FILM.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s The Golden Age of Mauritz Stiller continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Melnitz Theater’s James Bridges Theater with “Erotikon” (1920). No wonder Ernst Lubitsch acknowledged his debt to Stiller for his famous “Lubitsch touch.” The lavish, large-scale “Erotikon” boasts one of the first aerial sequences in films and a ballet, created specially for the picture, performed at the Swedish Opera House before an audience of 800.

More important, it is an exceedingly sly and witty high-society comedy involving an absent-minded professor (Anders de Wahl), his bored, elegant wife (Tora Teje) and her very serious young suitor (Lars Hanson, who was to appear with Lillian Gish in Victor Sjostrom’s 1926 “The Scarlet Letter” and 1928 “The Wind,” two of Gish’s finest films.

A sequel to “Thomas Graal’s Best Film,” which screened last Saturday, “Thomas Graal’s Best Child” (1918) screens after “Erotikon.” It opens with a popular Swedish screenwriter (played by Victor Sjostrom) marrying his secretary (Karin Molander) only to quarrel immediately with her over what the sex of their first child should be.

The series closes Sunday at 7 p.m. with “The Atonement of Gosta Berling” (1923-24), which is being presented in a three-hour restored version that is the closest extant to its original four-hour form. Made as two feature-length films, it was cut to one when it met with sharply negative critical reception.

Adapted from a Selma Lagerlof novel, it stars Lars Hanson as a defrocked priest caught in a series of romances yet searching for redemption. One of the women who catches the ex-priest’s eye is a radiant countess, played by 19-year-old Greta Garbo in her feature debut. So impressed was Louis B. Mayer that he brought Stiller, who insisted his protegee also be given a contract, to Hollywood, where her success was as meteoric as his failure was abysmal. (Mayer’s daughter Irene Mayer Selznick, however, recalled that it was Garbo whom her father was “hell-bent” on signing, with Garbo insistent that her mentor be placed under contract.)

Returning to Sweden broken and in ill health after two compromised Hollywood productions, Stiller died in 1928. He was only 45. (310) 206-FILM.

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Even though “King Rikki,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the downtown L.A. Grande, has been adapted from Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” it is a routine sex-and-violence gang warfare tale set in East L.A., with Jon Seda in the title role and the equally charismatic Mario Lopez as the cop who thinks he can bring down the ruthless Rikki.

“Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky,” not to be confused with the above, is a primitive 1993 prison movie based on a cartoon and starring muscular Fan Siu Wong as a martial arts whiz of superhuman strength convicted of manslaughter for having avenged his girlfriend’s death.

The plot is just an excuse for one scene of blood-and-guts ultra-violence that is said to have made the film a cult classic. It screens, appropriately, Friday only at midnight at the Nuart. (310) 478-6379.

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The UCLA Film Archive is presenting in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, Tuesday through May 19, “Anne-Marie Mieville,” a series of films made by Jean-Luc Godard’s longtime associate. “Reaching an Understanding,” which opens the series Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., finds two women and two men, a quartet of sophisticated intellectuals, most likely in Geneva, going about their daily lives. But instead of conversing with each other in ordinary fashion, they hold forth in an extended philosophical debate about the challenging relationships between love, happiness and mortality. Meanwhile, the two women (Mieville, Claude Perron) gravitate toward the two men (Godard, Jacques Spiesser), respectively. “Reaching an Understanding” is elegant, dryly witty, but while its nonstop debating may be on a stratospheric level, it is also undeniably tedious.

Mieville seems to be questioning the limitations of language while suggesting it’s all we have to work with. (310) 206-FILM.

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Joe and Harry Gantz’s documentary “Sex With Strangers,” which has already aired on the Showtime premium cable network, opens a one-week run Friday at the Nuart. The Gantz brothers followed three swinging couples for an entire year to explore the effects of open relationships on their marriages.

The results are illuminating but hardly surprising: Swinging can sometimes strengthen marriages for those couples mature enough to meet the challenge of balancing multiple sex partners with their emotional commitments; others meet devastation beyond what they are prepared for. Clearly, the brothers won their subjects’ trust, and though candid they are not exploitative. Best left, however, to those interested in the subject matter. (310) 478-6379.