Legendary Sennett comedy all aglow

KEYSTONE KOPS never looked so good.

A painstakingly restored version of Mack Sennett’s “Tillie’s Punctured Romance” -- which featured Marie Dressler, Charlie Chaplin and a cast of comic Sennett legends -- screens tonight as part of UCLA Film Archive’s 12th Festival of Preservation.

An 82-minute six-reeler based on the play “Tillie’s Nightmare,” it is regarded as the first feature-length comedy and is still hilarious. Most familiar for early Metro talkies, Dressler in 1914 was a hefty 46-year-old stage star who, in her screen debut, throws herself into the slapstick and pratfalls that were the staples of Keystone Studios.

Dressler’s Tillie Banks is a farmer’s daughter who is persuaded by Chaplin’s city slicker to steal her father’s savings and run off with him. When Charlie runs through Tillie’s money, he ditches her for his regular girl and partner in crime (Mabel Normand). But when Tillie becomes a multimillionaire heiress, Charlie is determined to walk up the aisle with her. Sennett mines every comic twist imaginable from this simple plot.

There will be live musical accompaniment performed by Tillie’s Nightmare, a five-piece ensemble featuring Ken Winokur of the Alloy Orchestra, renowned for its original scores for silents.

The festival continues Friday with William Wyler’s still-potent 1933 film of the Elmer Rice play “Counsellor at Law,” in which John Barrymore gives one of his finest screen performances as a top-flight Manhattan attorney. Featuring Doris Kenyon as the attorney’s wife and Bebe Daniels as his secretary, the cast includes two future directors, Vincent Sherman (who will appear at the screening) and the late Richard Quine.

Shirley Clarke’s 1961 landmark debut feature, “The Connection,” which follows Emile de Antonio’s Oscar-nominated 1968 anti-Vietnam War documentary “In the Year of the Pig” on Saturday, is steeped in New York ‘50s cool. But seen today it seems as timeless as Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.”

The Living Theater’s 1959 production of Jack Gelber’s “The Connection” was unforgettable, thrusting the audience in a seedy room of junkies waiting for their fix to arrive. Yet Clarke did not merely record this groundbreaking play, she also turned it into a real movie while preserving its inherent theatricality.

In effect, “The Connection” is viewed via Roscoe Lee Browne’s hand-held camera. The jagged rhythms, punctuated by the jam sessions, gives a quality of naturalism to the actors’ monologues of alternately passionate and scabrous despair.

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ScreeningsScreenings

UCLA Film Archive’s 12th Festival of Preservation

* “Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” 8 tonight, Samuel Goldwyn Theater, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. $5.

* “Counsellor at Law,” 7:30 p.m. Friday, James Bridges Theatre, Melnitz Hall, UCLA. $8.

* “In the Year of the Pig” and “The Connection,” 7:30 p.m. Saturday, James Bridges Theatre, Melnitz Hall, UCLA. $8.

Info: (310) 206-FILM or www.cinema.ucla.edu.