A full slate at the Cinematheque

The American Cinematheque will celebrate a brooding actor, a blacklisted director and a bronco-buster this weekend.

With his sonorous voice and good looks, James Mason had a truly stellar career in England and America. Tonight, the Aero Theatre will mark the centennial of his birth by showing Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 “Lolita,” in which he plays a professor obsessed with a nymphet (Sue Lyon), and Carol Reed’s 1947 classic “Odd Man Out,” which casts Mason as a wounded IRA gunman.

This Friday through Sunday, the Aero shifts gears, paying tribute to director-writer-actor Jules Dassin, who fled the U.S. to Europe in the 1950s because of the blacklist. The retrospective opens with 1948’s seminal crime drama “The Naked City,” starring Barry Fitzgerald, and his 1960 romantic comedy “Never on Sunday,” in which he plays an American besotted with a beautiful Greek prostitute (Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife). The film scored several Oscar nominations, including best director for Dassin and best actress; Manos Hadijidakis’ title tune won for best song.

On tap Saturday is Dassin’s riveting 1954 French caper thriller “Rififi,” which features a brilliant 30-minute heist sequence sans dialogue or music, and his 1964 caper flick “Topkapi,” for which Peter Ustinov won a supporting actor Oscar as a bumbler involved in an emerald heist. The series ends Sunday with two film noirs: 1950’s “Night and the City” and 1949’s “Thieves Highway.”

Over at the Egyptian Theatre tonight, veteran actor Don Murray will be on hand for a screening of 1956’s “Bus Stop,” for which he received a supporting actor nomination as an innocent cowboy who falls for a singer (Marilyn Monroe), and the 1959 Irish drama “Shake Hands With the Devil,” also starring James Cagney. www. americancinematheque.com

Macabre menu

“The Witching Hour,” a gloriously scary series presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Hammer Museum and curated by artist Francesca Gabbani, features a compilation of short films Saturday at the Hammer focusing on the occult, sorcery and the macabre. The program is definitely not for the kiddies.

First is Dudley Murphy’s 1922 silent “Danse Macabre,” followed by Murphy’s first film, “The Soul of the Cypress.” Next up, the 1928 German silent short “The Black Mass” is described as an “X-rated depiction” of a satanic Black Mass. The night ends with Kenneth Anger’s 1969 “Invocation of My Demon Brother,” featuring music by Mick Jagger; Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1948 “They Caught the Ferry”; and 1968’s “Toby Dammit,” Federico Fellini’s surreal contribution to the anthology film “Spirits of the Dead,” starring Terence Stamp as an actor on the skids. www.cinema.ucla.edu

Iranian shorts

The Film Society in association with IFVC will present its Short Film Festival this Sunday at the Felicia Mahood Auditorium in West L.A. Among the films to be screened are Ahmad Faroughi-Qajar’s “Dawn of the Capricorn” and Bahman Ghobadi’s “Life in Gog.” www.filmsocietyhf.org

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susan.king@latimes.com