Film series lets the real L.A. stand up

Its sunlit skies, broad avenues and beckoning topography notwithstanding, Los Angeles is a hidden city. Welcoming first impressions notwithstanding, it is a metropolis not given to being easily figured out, and, much more than New York, it is stingy with knowledge about itself.

This is especially true, and especially paradoxical, as it relates to the Los Angeles we see on screen. The movie industry, as nobody needs to be reminded, is centered in this town, but the L.A. it shows the world is by and large the stuff of cliche, the myth of Malibu and the Hollywood Hills as filtered through the lens of valet parking and vapid blonds.

In its shrewdly titled series “Los Angeles: Site Unseen,” the UCLA Film and Television Archive has decided to redress that balance. From a rare showing of Kent MacKenzie’s “The Exiles” this Friday night to Sam Fuller’s ripping “The Crimson Kimono” on May 28, UCLA will showcase 10 features and nearly as many shorts in which the real Los Angeles hides, almost forgotten and ripe for rediscovery.

While all local film buffs have their favorite L.A. movies, from Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly” to “Chinatown” and Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger,” what is most exciting about the UCLA series is how rarely seen and almost unknown many of the films in it are.

Most of these were independent films produced in a world before Miramax and Sundance, low-budget items, small scale and well-made, that were shot in the real L.A. because that’s where the filmmakers lived and worked. Without completely intending to, they captured the city as it was and preserved it in a way studio product wasn’t interested in doing.

The jewel of the series is the almost never seen “M.” No, not the 1932 Peter Lorre-starring German film but a close remake directed in 1951 by Joseph Losey that transfers the disturbing story of a child murderer on the loose to downtown Los Angeles and features the landmark Bradbury Building decades before “Blade Runner” did the same.

Losey has said in interviews he didn’t like the idea of a remake, and especially one that came “with a restriction on the structure and the basic story line, because the censorship office wouldn’t pass it as a new script, only as a remake of a classic.”

One of the reasons Losey agreed was an interest in David Wayne, who in fact gives an exceptional performance as the soft-spoken murderer. Strong supporting work came from Martin Gabel, Raymond Burr, Jim Backus, Howard da Silva and Luther Adler. Best of all is the gritty sense of downtown L.A. and long-gone Bunker Hill that helps give this “M” an atmospheric authenticity.

The series’ opening night program also features Bunker Hill, in both a 1956 short of that name and the 1961 feature “The Exiles.” Both were directed by Kent MacKenzie, whose short, a poignant look at the about-to-be-destroyed low income neighborhood of old Victorian houses and apartment buildings, was made when he was a USC film student.

“The Exiles” is a more ambitious and a more unusual project. It’s a cinema verite look at 12 hours in the life of a community that seems to have disappeared from downtown, the Native Americans. Made over the course of several years with respect, sensitivity and skill, it shows the confusion of a people trying to exist cut off from their culture and takes us to long-gone spots like a Main Street bar and Native American hangout called the Ritz.

Two other films have a similar independent spirit and concern with people of color. Showing together are Haile Gerima’s “Bush Mama,” which brings a great sense of place to its depiction of the radicalization of a woman living on welfare in Watts, and Billy Woodberry’s “Bless Their Little Hearts.”

Made in 1984, the Woodberry film, written and photographed by Charles Burnett, is an unusually fine, naturalistic examination of how the struggle to earn a living and raise a family in a hostile environment wears on a couple, evocatively played by Nate Hardman and Kaycee Moore. The film’s moving depiction of decent people in despair at problems beyond an easy fix is difficult to shake.

One interesting aspect of the UCLA series is that three of the films were made by French filmmakers, directors who perhaps used their outsider status to better see and appreciate Los Angeles.

Two of the films will be shown together and, tidily enough, they are by a husband and wife. “Mur Murs” is Agnes Varda’s sympathetic 1980 documentary on the murals of Los Angeles, while Jacques Demy’s “Model Shop” creates a sense of the casualness of Los Angeles and speaks to the director’ s great love of the place. “It’s a fabulous city,” he has his protagonist say, looking over the skyline. “To think some people claim its an ugly city when really it’s pure poetry.”

The other French film, “The Outside Man,” is a hard little crime drama, cool and precise, that was made in English by director Jacques Deray, a crime specialist who usually worked with Alain Delon.

Here, the film’s protagonist is Jean-Louis Trintignant, who plays a French hit man who comes to Los Angeles and finds himself the target of fellow assassin Roy Scheider.

The film, which will be shown in its X-rated version, features an engaging performance by Ann-Margret as the manager of a topless bar and visually captures the beautiful emptiness of the city’s bland yet dangerous streets.

“The Outside Man” is on a double bill with “Cisco Pike,” directed by Bill L. Norton, the 1971 film that served as Kris Kristofferson’s adept screen debut. He sings several songs and plays a dealer/rock musician trying to go straight and, with the help of girlfriend Karen Black, avoid the bad karma of narc Gene Hackman. “Cisco” also has a notable supporting cast, including Viva and Harry Dean Stanton in one of the characterizations that made him Harry Dean.

A strong performance by Joanne Woodward is one of the highlights of 1957’s “No Down Payment,” a look at the seething discontent lurking behind a freeway-close subdivision called “Summer Hills Estates.” The Hollywood Reporter called it “a domestic drama as modern as split-level housing and the picture window,” and the Los Angeles Times, not willing to be outdone, said it was “the ‘Grand Hotel’ of the subdivision.”

On the same double bill is Sam Fuller’s hard-boiled wake-me-up, “The Crimson Kimono.” It involves a rivalry in love between two LAPD stalwarts, one a Japanese American, as they investigate the murder of a stripper named Sugar Torch, who was gunned down on downtown’s Main Street.

Though the scene was shot guerrilla-style, “live, no rehearsal, in real traffic,” Fuller reported that “ironically, I really did not get much dramatic reaction. This girl was running down a street and nobody seemed to care. Nobody looked. An almost naked, 6-foot-tall blond is running for her life down the street and nobody does a double take.”

Now that’s the real L.A.

*

‘Los Angeles: Site Unseen’

Where: UCLA Film and Television Archive, James Bridges Theater, 1409 Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus, Westwood. (310) 206-8013.

Featured films:

“The Exiles,” “Bunker Hill,” 7:30 p.m., Friday

“M,” “Selected Shorts,” 7:30 p.m., Saturday

“Model Shop,” “Murs Murs,” 7 p.m., Sunday

“Bless Their Little Hearts,” “Bush Mama,” 7: 30 p.m., May 19

“Cisco Pike,” “The Outside Man,” 7:30 p.m., May 22

“No Down Payment,” “The Crimson Kimono,” 7:30 p.m., May 28.