The Reel Thing at Paris’ Renowned Film Museum : There’s more vintage U.S. movie memorabilia at Cinematheque Francaise than in Hollywood.

PARIS —  Paris, 1960. An employee of the Cinematheque Francaise, an internationally renowned film archive, museum and library, opens a small package that arrived by mail. To his horror, he finds a human skull, with teeth and long gray hair intact.

Although he searches for a note amid the packaging, he cannot find one.

Five days later, Cinematheque founder Henri Langlois receives a letter from director Alfred Hitchcock. The letter, with characteristic Hitchcock humor, reads: “I hope you received my gift.”

Today, Hitchcock’s gift--the same “Mrs. Bates” who frightened us all in the closing scene of his 1960 horror classic “Psycho”--is prominently displayed as she was in the film, sitting in a chair, wearing a blue shawl, under flattering lighting at the Cinematheque’s Museum of Cinema. “Very fortunately for us, the person who opened up the package didn’t throw it out and didn’t have a heart attack either,” said tour guide and film historian Glenn Myrent, as he showed us around the museum in September.

Hollywood has been the film capital of the United States for the past 80 years, but filmmakers and movie buffs alike must still travel to Paris’ magnificent Place du Trocadero to find such a collection of costumes, set models and American movie memorabilia as exists at the Cinematheque Francaise.

Myrent, who gives tours of the Cinematheque’s museum in both French and English, said Hollywood lacks a similar museum because Americans seem to find less importance in history than in the here and now. “We tend to ignore immediately our past because it’s over with,” said Myrent, who grew up in Chicago and moved to Paris 14 years ago. “You’re only as good as your last movie.”

Still, the Cinematheque is no stranger to those who work in the American film industry. Clint Eastwood has been sighted taking the museum tour, which draws 35,000 visitors a year. Actors such as Sean Connery, Mickey Rooney and Kirk Douglas have appeared in person for film retrospectives on their movies. And director Roman Polanski, who fled America in 1978 after being charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old model and aspiring actress, comes to the Cinematheque to watch Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” (1941) for inspiration before starting a new film project, according to Myrent.

“Citizen Kane” is just one of 30,000 films in the Cinematheque’s vast archive of classic and contemporary international movies, which can be watched in one of two theaters. One theater, which opened in 1963 in the Palais de Chaillot, now is undergoing a $500,000 renovation. The second is a couple blocks down the street in the Palais de Tokyo. Typically, both theaters show two or three movies each evening and often run longer retrospectives of films by one director.

A photographer friend and I visited the Cinematheque’s Museum of Cinema during a 10-day trip to Paris in the fall. It was one of three museums we went to, including the d’Orsay and the Louvre, and was undeniably different from any museum I’d been to in San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York or London. Being a film buff, I thought it might be a nice change from the typical French Impressionist fare, the marble statues and the crowds they draw. And it was.

Paris, where an atmosphere of romance and intrigue pervades the narrow streets, is the perfect site for this museum. Walking through its 60 small, dimly-lit rooms, one is drawn to the movie sets--both miniature and life-size, original and replicated for the museum--lining the walls, to costumes worn by actors who have since died, and the huge black and white blowups hanging from the ceiling. Just as spending the afternoon in a movie theater can be a great escape, a couple of hours in this museum is that and more.

The museum has 3,000 artifacts on display, and another 6,000 in storage, all one-of-a-kind items donated by movie stars, producers and friends such as Los Angeles’ Western Costume Co. Lisa Nesselson, Variety’s film critic based in Paris, has been to the museum more than 75 times. She says she always manages to find something that she had not noticed in past trips. Her first impression upon viewing this American “cinemabilia,” as she calls it, was: “I’m so glad someone saved this stuff.”

And there is much stuff to be seen.

But first you have to find the museum. Its entrance is tucked behind the Palais de Chaillot, on the back side of the building, not the kind of place you’d notice without a bit of a search. We were there on a Thursday, in the middle of the day, and the museum was practically empty except for another small tour that went through as we were finishing up. We had an appointment, made several days earlier, for an English-speaking tour of the museum with Myrent.

A number of highlights stick in my mind still. In one room about midway through the tour, I walked right up and touched Elizabeth Taylor’s beige satin dress from “Little Women,” made in 1949 when Taylor was 16 and had an astonishingly small waist. It was displayed on one of those headless dressmaker forms.

The large metal contraption that Sean Connery used to help him fly in “Never Say Never Again” (1983) sits in the lobby, looking awfully heavy.

A black-and-white photograph of 31-year-old Rudolph Valentino is mounted on the wall above the black tunic the heartthrob wore in his last film, “The Son of the Sheik” (1926). Douglas Fairbanks’ leather pants from “The Black Pirate” (1926) hang nearby.

The burlap frock and jacket Ingrid Bergman wore in “Joan of Arc” (1948) and a dark green taffeta dress the actress sported in “Gaslight” (1944) are displayed around the corner.

On an opposite wall, sketches and watercolor paintings of Vivian Leigh’s costume from “Gone With the Wind” (1939) provide a backdrop for the actual gray and green dress they depict. Visitors are given a side view of the dress, a French favorite according to Myrent, to see how wasp-waisted the actress really was. The French, Myrent said, “are amazed that it’s here and not in America.”

There are some items of star clothing that will no longer be seen here, thanks to the thieves who robbed the museum in 1972. After the disappearance of James Dean’s jacket from “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and Marilyn Monroe’s dress from “Let’s Make Love” (1960), the museum was closed to the public until funds could be raised to hire security guards. Today, even taking photographs is prohibited without prior permission. We had obtained permission earlier that week, but even so we weren’t allowed to photograph a limited number of displays because of restrictions placed on them by the families of the artists involved.

Langlois’ love for silent films drove him to create the Cinematheque with his best friend George Franju in 1936. The collection exhibited today started out as a few artifacts stored in the family bathtub. Langlois believed that movie-making actually began hundreds of years ago in the form of Chinese shadow puppet shows. The tour takes you through movie-making history, guiding you from the primitive to the modern. I could feel the romance, the thought and the creative energy that went into making films as I saw the mounting sophistication of technique and machines.

Several rooms of the museum are dedicated to the machines that illustrate this fascinating evolution of technology, which finally resulted in moving pictures. Particular attention is paid to the 1800s, when inventors made leaps and bounds. For example, one of Edison’s Kinetoscopes, a coin-operated short-film viewing device, is on display.

Blow-ups of movie stills from American and foreign films are displayed on walls throughout the museum, lending an international flair to the tour. Of note is a hand-colored shot from the 1905 French propaganda film, “Les Victimes d’Alcholisme,” a predecessor to the American film “Reefer Madness” (1936) that warned citizens away from the the evils of marijuana. The wall-size poster shows men and women getting sloshed in a tavern, with the police bursting in on the revelers’ night out.

Myrent’s favorite artifact, a large poster that has become a museum emblem, can be found in the lobby. The poster, the first ever to be censored, advertised the 1913 French movie “Fantomas.” It depicts a giant man, dressed in a black mask, white gloves and a tuxedo, standing astride the city of Paris. Fantomas, the popular villian-hero of pulp novels, originally held a knife in one hand, but authorities ordered the film producers to remove the weapon from the poster. What the authorities didn’t notice, Myrent pointed out, is that Fantomas’ foot was still planted in the middle of the Palais de Justice.

“So he’s crushing out justice,” Myrent said.

By the last room of the tour, my brain was full of dates and the names of films and the actors and directors who put them together. We came back to Mrs. Bates, where we’d started, because she’d caught our eye. Nearby the “Psycho” display hangs a donkey skin worn by Catherine Deneuve in a French film by that name. I, of course, stood under it and pulled the hooves around my neck and had a wonderful photo to take home and share with my friends.

Part of the Cinematheque Francaise, the movie museum known as Le Musee du Cinema-Henri Langlois is open every day but Tuesday at 7 av. Albert de Mun, Place du Trocadero, 75016 Paris; from U.S. telephones call 011-33-1-45-53- 74-39. The nearest Metro stops are Iena and Trocadero. Admi s sion is about $4.50 per person. Groups or individuals who call a few days in advance can usually arrange a guided tour in English. Tours are conducted at 10 and 11 a.m. and at 2, 3 and 4 p.m.