A scheduled course in German classics

IN connection with its exhibition devoted to artist Max Liebermann, the Skirball Cultural Center will present several evenings of classic German films, starting with tonight’s presentation of Leopold Jessner’s 1921 “Die Hintertreppe” (Back Stairs) and Wolfgang Hoffmann-Harnisch’s 1927 “Die Frauengasse von Algier” (The Streets of Algiers). Virtually unknown in the U.S., the films will be screened with live piano accompaniment by Robert Israel.

With its highly atmospheric settings by Paul Leni, who would soon become an important director in Berlin and Hollywood, the 40-minute “Back Stairs” is an Expressionist gem. Henny Porten plays a maid in an ornate, 19th century-style Berlin boarding house who is caught up in a budding romance with a young man (Wilhelm Dieterle, later a key Warners director as William Dieterle). They arrange their meetings via letters from Dieterle delivered by a creepy postman (Fritz Kortner, best known as the newspaper publisher in “Pandora’s Box”). Suddenly the letters stop, and Porten’s distraught maid turns to the postman for solace, which has unforeseen dire consequences. Disregard the foolish and patronizing introduction in English at the film’s beginning.

If “Back Stairs” is an enduring work of art, the 67-minute “The Streets of Algiers” is a thoroughly entertaining potboiler of a luridness and improbability that the movies didn’t risk with the advent of talkies, outside serials. Algiers-based Mme. Brison (Maria Jacobini), rendered destitute when her husband disappears while on a gold-prospecting expedition, falls into the clutches of the Street Wolf (Warwick Ward), a ruthless pimp who turns her into his mistress and ensconces her as the madam of his Casbah cabaret-brothel-opium den.

Somehow -- don’t ask -- she manages to live a double life, as a doyenne of colonial society living in a hilltop mansion and as the mysterious veiled Musa Samarra of that cabaret.

For 17 years she has lived this way, secretly supporting her daughter Adrienne (Camilla Horn) in a South of France convent, but she is now prepared to bring her back to Algiers. Traveling on the ship with Adrienne is a police commissioner (Jean Bradin) charged with ridding the Casbah of white slavery; naturally, he falls in love with Adrienne. Subplot and complications escalate deliriously.

Song and dance

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Filmi Melody: Song and Dance in Indian Cinema,” running through Oct. 30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater, begins with the Friday screening of Mani Ratnam’s “Nayakan” (1987). It is a solid, broadly melodramatic epic about the rise and fall of a Godfather-like figure, well-played by Kamal Hassan.

As a boy, Hassan’s Velunayakan witnesses the police assassination of his labor-leader father, fatally stabs the cop who had promised him nothing would happen to his father and takes off for Bombay. Against a background of police brutality and desperate poverty, Velunayakan works his way up the ranks of the underworld but also becomes a Robin Hood in his community. Yet his assumption that he is above the law and is fundamentally doing no wrong in an unjust world is his undoing. In the film’s 155 minutes there are only several musical sequences, and they are better integrated than in most traditional Bollywood fare.

On Sunday, the UCLA archive’s Jacques Rivette series presents “Up/Down/Fragile” (1995) in the James Bridges Theater. “Up/Down/Fragile” is like no other musical, clocking in at two hours and 44 minutes, with no singing and dancing numbers in its first hour and not much plot until yet another hour. Yet Rivette rewards the demands he places on viewers. He has said he was inspired not by the classics but rather by MGM’s modestly budgeted musicals of the ‘50s, specifically Stanley Donen’s “Give a Girl a Break,” in that it followed the fortunes of three young women in a big city.

Rivette’s three young women are Louise (Marianne Denicourt), Ninon (Nathalie Richard) and Ida (Laurence Cote). Louise has emerged from a coma of several years. Ninon has been living with her gangster boyfriend but has fled from him, landing a job as a moped delivery person. In Paris only three months, Ida has landed a job at the Library of Decorative Arts and is obsessed with learning the identity of her biological parents, her mother especially.

What Rivette is up to is discovering beauty and meaning in daily life in workaday Paris. The graceful manner in which his three actresses move keys how Christophe Pollock moves his camera, and this concern for movement allows the musical numbers to occur spontaneously. Ultimately, he makes fantasy from reality in the most natural manner possible.

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Screenings

German Classic Films

* “Back Stairs” and “The Streets of Algiers”: 8 tonight

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

Info: (310) 440-4500

Filmi Melody: Song and Dance in Indian Cinema

* “Nayakan”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

Jacques Rivette series

* “Up/Down/Fragile”: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA campus

Info: (310) 206-FILM