Show time at the Wilder

By Susan King

Feb. 8, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

THE UCLA Film & Television Archive’s new venue, the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, officially opens Friday with a screening of the Oscar-winning 1960 Wilder classic “The Apartment.”

Two days later, the archive kicks off its “Art of Light” series, which celebrates cinematography. The opening program spotlights Hungarian-born cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs (“Easy Rider”) and Vilmos Zsigmond. Zsigmond won an Oscar for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and is nominated this year for “The Black Dahlia.”

For the record:

12:00 a.m. Feb. 12, 2007 For The Record
Los Angeles Times Monday February 12, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 46 words Type of Material: Correction
“48 Hrs.”: The Screening Room column in Thursday’s Calendar Weekend said that the 1982 film “48 Hrs.” was about a Los Angeles cop (Nick Nolte) tracking down bad guys in L.A. The movie is set in San Francisco, and Nolte plays a San Francisco police officer.

The duo, who escaped from communist Hungary 50 years ago, will discuss their work, show clips from their early films and screen rarely seen footage they shot of the 1956 Hungarian revolution.

The archive’s comprehensive retrospective of seminal Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini begins Feb. 16 with a new print of his landmark 1945 drama “Rome Open City.”

Photographed on the streets of war-torn Rome and featuring a largely unprofessional cast, the stark drama deals with a radical fighting the Nazis who must flee the city when he learns that the Gestapo is on his trail. Marcello Pagliero and Anna Magnani star. Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei received an Oscar nomination for their screenplay.

Screening with “Open City” is 1943’s “The Man With the Cross,” the final of the director’s three films that were commissioned by Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Scheduled for Feb. 17 is 1946’s “Paisan,” the second in Rossellini’s postwar trilogy. The drama, told in six vignettes, explores the diverse relations between the American GIs and the Italians. The film, released in the U.S. in 1949, was Oscar-nominated for its screenplay.

The second feature that day is the rarely seen 1960 World War II drama “Escape by Night,” which stars Giovanna Ralli as a woman who risks her life to hide three escaped POWs -- played by Peter Baldwin, Sergei Bondarchuk (who later would direct the Oscar-winning “War and Peace”) and Leo Genn.

Rossellini’s final installment in his trilogy, 1948’s “Germany Year Zero,” screens Feb. 18. Shot on location in the bombed-out streets of Berlin, the drama deals with a young boy (Edmund Moeschke), trying to survive with his ailing father, who finds his life taking an even more downward trajectory after a chance encounter with a former teacher.

Pair of McQueens

Most of the revival theaters of the 1970s and ‘80s, such as the Vagabond, the Tiffany, the Sherman, the Encore and the Fox Venice, are now stardust memories. But not the New Beverly Cinema. It keeps chugging along year after year.

On tap at the New Beverly for Wednesday and Thursday is a delectable Steve McQueen/director Norman Jewison double bill: 1965’s “The Cincinnati Kid” and the ultra-romantic 1968 caper thriller “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

Two underrated Robert Altman films starring Elliott Gould are scheduled for Feb. 18-19: the iconoclastic filmmaker’s compelling 1973 re-envisioning of Raymond Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye,” starring Gould as rumpled L.A. shamus Philip Marlowe, and 1974’s quixotic buddy picture “California Split,” also starring George Segal.

Gotta have a friend

The American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica celebrates one of cinema’s most endurable genres -- the buddy picture -- with the retrospective “Buddy Films: The Art of Playing Off of Each Other.”

The series kicks off tonight with the hit 1988 comedy “Midnight Run,” starring Robert De Niro as a no-nonsense bounty hunter who meets his match in the persona of a manic former Mafia accountant (Charles Grodin). Martin Brest directed. Rounding out the bill is Cheech and Chong’s first stonedout comedy, 1978’s “Up in Smoke.”

A Paul Newman-Robert Redford double bill is scheduled for Saturday. Spooling first is the multi-Oscar-winning 1973 caper comedy “The Sting,” for which Redford received his only best actor Academy Award nomination, followed by the 1969 western that teamed up the leading men for the first time, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” George Roy Hill directed both films.

Two buddy pictures directed by Arthur Penn are scheduled for next Thursday: his seminal 1967 caper drama, “Bonnie and Clyde,” starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the infamous Depression-era bank robbers, and the rarely seen 1989 black comedy “Penn & Teller Get Killed,” starring the bad boys of magic, Penn Jillette and Teller.

Robert Culp is scheduled to discuss 1972’s “Hickey & Boggs,” which screens Feb. 18. Culp, who directed the film, stars with his “I Spy” cohort Bill Cosby in this detective noir set in Los Angeles.

Also on the bill is Walter Hill’s 1982 comedy-action thriller “48 Hrs.” Eddie Murphy made an auspicious film debut as a fast-talking thief on temporary parole to help a world-weary L.A. cop (Nick Nolte) track down some bad guys on the streets of L.A. An added plus is the terrific Busboys tune “The Boys Are Back in Town.”

The Great Profile

The Silent Movie Theatre presents the 1927 romantic John Barrymore drama, “The Beloved Rogue,” tonight. The Great Profile stars in the handsome period drama directed by Alan Crosland as the infamous French poet and Robin Hood-esque thief.

Marceline Day is his ladylove and Conrad Veidt the vainglorious Louis XI.

susan.king@latimes.com

Screenings

UCLA Archive

* “The Apartment”: 7:30 p.m. Friday

* An Evening With Laszlo Kovacs and Vilmos Zsigmond: 7 p.m. Sunday

* “Rome Open City” and “The Man With the Cross”: 7:30 p.m. Feb. 16

* “Paisan” and “Escape by Night”: 7 p.m. Feb. 17

* “Germany Year Zero” and “A Foreign Affair”: 2 p.m. Feb. 18

Where: The Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Info: (310) 443-7000

www.hammer.ucla.edu