Sassy scenarios rule the roost in Outfest’s shorts program

Outfest presents its fifth annual collection of gay and lesbian shorts tonight, and it is one of its strongest to date. Of the nine films in the program, seven were available for preview, and the standout is P.A. Weite’s 16-minute “Katia’s Husband’s Fridge.”

In this warm and amusing vignette, Weite suggests that multicultural Paris can become a happy melting pot. Paco, a young man looking for a place to sleep, shows up at the apartment of a vivacious Brazilian actress named Denise. She immediately assumes he is the husband of her friend Katia, to whom she is giving her old, small refrigerator. This is just the beginning of confusions that play out happily in cramped quarters.

French Canadian filmmaker Mathieu Guez’s erotic 19-minute “The Last Night” concerns a good-looking young couple deciding that the best way to save their relationship is to hire an equally good-looking young Russian hustler, but the result is not what the couple expect.

Another promising vignette is Irish filmmaker Neasa Hardiman’s 11-minute “Olive,” in which the repressed schoolgirl Deirdre is liberated by the arrival of the pretty, madcap Olive.

David Planell’s droll Spanish film “Charisma” features two young lesbian girlfriends who are intense news junkies. When one correctly suspects that the other has been unfaithful, she utters the time-worn lament, “What has she got that I haven’t got?” The other answers, “CNN.”

On a blithe, jaunty note, Buboo Kakati’s 12-minute “The Nearly Unadventurous Life of Zoe Cadwaulder” features a young heroine who’s obsessed with natural disasters until she meets an athletic, outdoorsy young woman from whom she learns that nature can also be wondrous.

Dishy back story

“Mills of the Gods” (1934) would be an otherwise odd inclusion in the UCLA Film and Television Archive series “Sin Uncensored: Hollywood Before the Code,” were there not every reason to believe that Fay Wray’s and Victor Jory’s characters had made love the night they spent at a mountain lodge -- an effect ironically heightened rather than softened by trims forced by the new enforcement of the code.

Wray plays the spoiled granddaughter of May Robson, who in her 40 years of widowhood has turned her husband’s plow-making business into a major Illinois industry.

It’s the depths of the Depression, and Robson has summoned her family -- Wray’s delicate brother (James Blakely), her pompous playboy uncle (Raymond Walburn) and her countess aunt (Josephine Whittell) -- hoping they will agree to break open the $50-million family trust to keep the factory going.

Meanwhile, Jory’s factory worker is stirring up a labor demonstration.

Directed in terse, workmanlike fashion by Roy William Neill from Garrett Fort’s adaptation of a Melville Baker-Jack Kirkland story, “Mills of the Gods” is major-picture material squeezed into a B-picture budget and running time -- 66 minutes.

The result is fascinating as a rare example of Hollywood tackling the ravages of the Depression head on, but Neill is not skilled enough to pull off abrupt shifts of character smoothly in such severely proscribed circumstances.

*

Screenings

Outfest shorts

When: 7:30 tonight

Where: Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM

UCLA Film Archive

* “Mills of the Gods”: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA, Westwood

Info: (310) 206-FILM