UCLA Offers Gems From British Cinema

Today, The UCLA Film Archives’ third annual Festival of Preservation at Melnitz Theater (213-206-FILM) offers some gems and rediscoveries from the British Film Institute.

David Lean and Noel Coward’s 1945 eroto-spooky high comedy, “Blithe Spirit,” with Rex Harrison and the sublimely dotty Margaret Rutherford, is an official classic, though a little cool and arch for my taste. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s underrated 1951 “Tales of Hoffman”--their typically swank-chintz version of the Offenbach opera. In it, hapless Hoffman (sung by unctuous Robert Rounseville), recounts three love catastrophes: ravished by a puppet, a vamp and a dying opera singer and hounded by the exhilarating high-camp villain, Robert Helpmann.

“The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine” (today) is a breezy, minor city-slickers-in-small-town murder mystery, directed by Lean mentor and blacklist victim Bernard Vorhaus and beautifully shot by the great John Alton--who gives this “B” a luster most “A’s” can’t match.

Vincente Minnelli’s personal favorite of his career screens today at LACMA’s Minnelli retrospective at Bing Theater. Surprisingly, it’s not one of his Oscar-winners, musicals or romantic comedies. Of the 1955 Van Gogh bio, “Lust for Life,” one-time painter Minnelli wrote: “It remains my favorite film, simply because it contains more . . . favorite moments than any other film I’ve directed. . . . This is one of my pictures I feel should survive . . . and yet a color-perfect print is a rarity.”

Not today, when LACMA will present a newly struck print--with all the mad Arles colors and tormented imagery, plus Kirk Douglas’ most passionate performance ever, breathing and seething again.

Information: (213) 857-6010.