Sampling the Don Siegel style

The UCLA Film Archive’s Don Siegel retrospective offers a rare opportunity to discover why Siegel was one of Hollywood’s best directors -- a terse, dynamic master of genre whose heroes and villains are complex individuals struggling against the forces of fate and society as surely as their counterparts in Fritz Lang films. It was to begin Wednesday evening with a salute at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and continues Friday through Aug. 7 at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater.

Educated at Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Siegel (1912-1991) served an invaluable apprenticeship at Warners, eventually heading the montage department. Later in his career, Siegel, along with Sergio Leone, would become a crucial influence on Clint Eastwood as an actor and director.

Preceded by his Oscar-winning 17-minute 1945 documentary “Hitler Lives?,” the series begins Friday with Siegel’s breakthrough 1954 film “Riot in Cell Block 11.” The latter reflects producer Walter Wanger’s concern for prison reform after having served a sentence for having shot and wounded his wife Joan Bennett’s agent, Jennings Lang. Rarely has a message been socked over with such passion, as Neville Brand leads a hostage-taking revolt in the “punishment block” of an old stone prison.

His list of demands -- no more leg irons, chains, brutal guards or overcrowded conditions and the establishment of a job training program -- concurs with the views of the prison’s progressive warden (Emile Meyer), frustrated by the indifference and ignorance of the government and public. In this regard, “Riot in Cell Block 11,” crisply written by Richard Collins, is depressingly timeless, a quality that extends to Brand’s understanding of the power of the media.

Screening afterward is the taut “Escape From Alcatraz” (1979), Siegel’s fifth and final collaboration with Eastwood, who plays bank robber Frank Morris. Morris was one of three convicts who on June 11, 1962, managed to get outside the walls of San Francisco Bay’s famous island prison and vanished. There’s a strong probability that they drowned, as other escapees had, but there was no real proof. The possibility that they might have succeeded is the basis for Richard Tuggle’s adept adaptation of a novel by J. Campbell Bruce.

Eastwood’s Morris is a sardonic Dirty Harry-on-the-other-side-of-the-bars, an archetypal strongman of few words who hits upon an escape plan that just might work. Siegel was able to pull off a tour de force of pure suspense that few, if any, other directors could match. Although the film makes a case against so resolutely non-rehabilitative an institution as the Rock was, this is not the message movie “Riot” is, in the best sense of the phrase.

Saturday’s first feature, “Baby Face Nelson,” starring Mickey Rooney, was unavailable for preview and is followed by the fast and amusing “The Big Steal” (1949), which re-teams Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, who ignited the screen in 1947’s “Out of the Past.” It was co-written (with Gerald Drayson Adams) by Daniel Mainwaring under his novelist’s pseudonym Geoffrey Homes, whose “Hang My Gallows High” was the basis for “Out of the Past.”

Essentially the film is one long, witty -- and sexy -- chase, as Mitchum, an Army payroll officer, heads for Veracruz, Mexico, in pursuit of suave crook Patric Knowles, who’s made off with $300,000, leaving Mitchum blamed for the theft. Army Capt. William Bendix is pursuing Mitchum, who has just crossed paths with Knowles’ innocent but feisty fiancee Greer. Her ability to hold her own with the freewheeling, sardonic Mitchum generates a sizzling chemistry.

Stirling Silliphant’s script for “The Lineup” (1958), screening Wednesday, involves a pair of gunmen determined to track down a cache of drugs in San Francisco. Though the script is more efficient than inspired, it’s sturdy enough for Siegel to turn it into a fast-moving adventure, including a terrific car chase -- and, best of all for San Francisco nostalgists, a grand climactic sequence shot in Sutro’s Baths, the elaborate Victorian landmark that burned to its foundations in 1966. Eli Wallach stars.

“The Lineup” is followed by the deft and violent “Dirty Harry” (1971), the most ambiguous and popular of the Siegel-Eastwood collaborations. Eastwood’s Harry Callahan is the toughest San Francisco cop ever, driven to take the law into his own hands to capture an elusive Zodiac-like killer (Andy Robinson). Would that Siegel and his writers had added another layer to this entertaining yet disturbing film and commented on the pleasurable response they elicit to savage reprisals.

*

Screenings

Don Siegel retrospective

* “Hitler Lives?,” “Riot in Cell Block 11” and “Escape From Alcatraz”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

* “Baby Face Nelson” and “The Big Steal”: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

* “The Lineup” and “Dirty Harry”: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus

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