Master of moral ambiguity

By Kevin Thomas

Feb. 24, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Otto Preminger, who set many trends while not believing in them himself, receives a long-overdue retrospective from the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Preminger was an envelope-pushing studio stylist adroit at capturing moral ambiguity and complexity. He elicited many-shaded portrayals -- even though rumored to be a tyrant on the set -- and was capable of exploring great institutions in thoroughly entertaining and unpretentious fashion. If Preminger’s career was uneven, it was not any more so than those of most other major directors, and his best work stands the test of time.

Inevitably, the series begins with his first big success, “Laura” (1944), the suspense classic with the famous David Raksin theme song and score and starring Gene Tierney as the enigmatic heroine with whom Dana Andrews’ detective becomes obsessed.

One of the rewards of this series is that it calls attention to Andrews, who did some of his best work for Preminger. On the strength of the success of “Laura,” Preminger cast him as the lead in the also noirish “Fallen Angel” (1945), which screens after “Laura.” It is not nearly as well known but is quite satisfying in its own way, primarily because Andrews so adroitly expresses the inner conflicts of a would-be con man. He plays a down-on-his-luck New York publicist who is headed to San Francisco from Los Angeles but, because he can’t afford a more expensive train ticket, lands in a small seaside community 150 miles south of his destination.

He’s desperate enough to try to marry for money, setting his sights on the demure but beautiful daughter (Alice Faye) of the town’s founding family while developing a yen for sultry diner waitress Linda Darnell. Of course things go wrong, but the key revelation is the unsuspected warmth and inner resources of Faye’s spinster. It was Faye’s first important dramatic role after a decade as Fox’s popular musical star, and it’s a shame that she believed that her role, which she thought would take her career in a fresh direction, had been sufficiently diminished in the cutting room to prompt her immediate retirement from the screen.

Follow the oil

Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy on Saturday will screen an abridged version of their recent documentary “The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror,” presented by Neighbors for Peace and Justice, San Fernando Valley. The film charts the human toll of war in Iraq and Afghanistan while building a powerfully persuasive case that the overreaching purpose of the Bush administration in both countries is to establish and maintain control over the world’s remaining oil reserves.

On camera, Ungerman and Brohy interview many experts about this complex subject and related issues, including human rights abuses, pollution and enduring dangers posed by landmines and radiation from weaponry. They also speak to many ordinary citizens of Iran and Afghanistan. What people tell the filmmakers, the hardships and suffering the cameras record, and what the research uncovers, add up to an indictment of U.S. policies reaching back several administrations. At the screening, actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. will speak on alternatives to dependence on foreign oil.

A closer look

In connection with the opening of “Downfall,” a best foreign-language Oscar nominee from Germany starring Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler, a retrospective of the esteemed and versatile actor will run throughout March at the Goethe-Institut and the Italian Cultural Institute. The series, “The Many Faces of Bruno Ganz,” opens Tuesday at the Italian Cultural Institute, with a reception followed by Silvio Soldini’s leisurely, beguiling “Bread & Tulips” (2000). Ganz, a master of wistfulness, plays a formal but generous middle-aged waiter from Iceland at a Venetian restaurant who offers shelter to a radiant but underappreciated 40-ish Italian housewife (Licia Maglietta) who inadvertently discovers a new life for herself in Venice.

Oh, so romantic

Ronald Colman (1891-1958), one of Hollywood’s most polished actors and a top romantic lead in the ‘30s, made one of the smoothest transitions from silent films to talkies. (It revealed his resonant, British-accented voice.) The American Cinematheque’s weekend Colman retrospective is titled “Ronald Colman, Hollywood’s Forgotten Superstar,” which may be overstating the case -- but probably not.

The series opens Friday at the Egyptian with Colman’s most famous film, “Lost Horizon,” Frank Capra’s 1937 film of the James Hilton novel. In this timeless romantic adventure, Hilton’s mythical Shangri-La has long been a synonym for an earthly paradise, a refuge from the world’s ills.

That its story is very much an expression of hope from an age of comparative innocence is why it works so well. Colman is ideally cast as a noted British diplomat-writer who supervises the evacuation of Westerners from a Chinese province amid civil war.

Taking the last plane out, they wind up not in Shanghai, their destination, but on a mysterious trip to the Himalayas. With Jane Wyatt, Sam Jaffe, John Howard, Thomas Mitchell, Margo and others. The series repeats at the Aero beginning March 4.

Note: In connection with its exhibition “Deconstructing Apartheid: The Photography of Peter Magubane,” the California African American Museum in Exposition Park will offer a free screening at noon Saturday. It is composed of two shorts and two features, “City Lovers/Country Lovers” (1982), a chronicle of two interracial affairs based on Nadine Gordimer stories, and “State of Denial” (2003), about South Africans struggling against opportunistic drug companies and the inaction of their own government in the fight against AIDS. (213) 744-7432.

Screenings

UCLA’s Otto Preminger retrospective

“Laura” and “Fallen Angel”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Where: James Bridges Theatre, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

Contact: (310) 206-FILM, www.cinema.ucla.edu

‘The Oil Factor’

Where: Unitarian Church of Studio City, 12355 Moorpark St.

When: 7 p.m. Saturday; doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Contact: (818) 766-3658

‘The Many Faces of Bruno Ganz’

“Bread & Tulips”: 7 p.m. Tuesday

Where: Italian Cultural Institute, 1023 Hilgard Ave., Westwood