Acting by Instinct

“Rashomon” burst onto the Western scene at the Venice Film Festival in 1951. It not only won the top prize from out of the blue but put Japanese cinema on the world stage for the first time.

The movie announced the arrival of a little-known master filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, and a great new male star whose outsize screen machismo has rarely if ever been matched, Toshiro Mifune.

Another remarkable, though rather different, movie of that period, “The Bicycle Thief”--also made by a master, Vittorio De Sica--drew huge international acclaim on its release in 1948 and, despite a decline in reputation, is still regarded by many critics as the best example of Italian “neo-realism.”

Both movies have screenings coming up in Orange County:

* “Rashomon” will be shown Friday, 7 p.m., at Saddleback College, Science/Math Building, Room 313 (28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo). Free. (714) 582-4788.

* “The Bicycle Thief” (“Ladri di Biciclette”) will be shown Wednesday, 7 p.m., as part of the Film Classics series at Chapman University, Argyros Forum, Room 208 (333 N. Glassell, Orange). Free. (714) 744-7694.

Mifune, who died last year, starred in 16 of the 17 pictures that Kurosawa made from 1948 to 1965. Set in medieval Japan during a period of civil turmoil and famine, “Rashomon” tells a story about the rape of a noblewoman and the murder of her husband from four points of view, including the dead man’s.

Playing the notorious bandit accused of the crime, Mifune established the hallmark traits of the many vagabond warrior roles for which he would become famous. Nobody has ever projected surly independence, physical prowess and intense pride with such growling flamboyance or fearsome vitality.

Yet in person, his leonine bearing notwithstanding, Mifune took a modest, even casual attitude toward his extraordinary screen charisma. If anything, he downplayed his importance to Japanese cinema and the dramatic skills that Kurosawa regarded as an “overpowering force.”

“You may be looking at an illusory image of me,” Mifune once said. “The Japanese don’t recognize me at the high level that the world outside does. It was just luck that I met Kurosawa and was invited to play in so many of his productions.

“Nothing was especially hard that Kurosawa ever demanded of me. . . . He trusted my intuitive acting and he accepted the result. I was just doing my best. There was no consciousness of creating something artistic.”

Coincidentally, De Sica, too, believed in the “truth” of intuitive acting and chose to make “The Bicycle Thief” with nonactors in a cinema verite style--which none of the studios in Italy, France or England would finance.

He eventually shot the picture whenever he could--a day here, a day there--for $25,000. (Thus the term “shoestring masterpiece,” a play on the title of De Sica’s earlier “Shoeshine,” was coined for the cheaply made neo-realist films that ranked as the movement’s best.)

“The Bicycle Thief” takes us on a working-class tour of the back streets of Rome after World War II. De Sica saw himself as a crusader. He intended to draw attention to poverty and chaotic social conditions.

Our guide is a 10-year-old boy whose unemployed father at last gets a job posting bills. But it requires a bicycle. So the family gets the father’s bike out of hock (by pawning the bedsheets). In short order, someone steals it.

Desperate, father and son go hunting for it. No luck. The father sends his son home and tries to steal a bicycle himself. Worse luck: he’s caught. A crowd gathers, then beats him up. Worse still, his son did not go home. He witnesses his father’s humiliation.

De Sica’s screenwriter, Cesare Zavatinni, the leading light of the neo-realist movement, believed in “a rigorous fidelity to the actual facts” (though neither he nor De Sica always practiced it). In “The Bicycle Thief,” however, they kept the verisimilitude so real that the rigor of the style has struck some critics as unnecessarily awkward.

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Screening elsewhere in Orange County:

* “The Dress” (1997) opens Friday for a weeklong run at the Port Theatre (2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar). This Dutch film follows the fate of a dress that passes through many hands. It’s a “satire on the enduring absurdity of the human condition,” Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas wrote. “Paranoia, racism, sex and the perverse workings of coincidence and pure chance” enter the mix.”

* “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (1989) screens today, 7:30 p.m., at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 Main St., Santa Ana. Free with museum admission: $2-$6. (714) 567-3600. It’s a documentary about the lives and times of notable women blues singers who have played a vital role in American culture: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters and others.

* “Shaft” (1971), the first of the “blaxploitation” action pictures, screens today, 7 p.m., at Chapman University, Argyros Forum, Room 208 (333 N. Glassell, Orange). Free. (714) 744-7694.

* “Chacun Cherche Son Chat” (“When the Cat’s Away”) (1996) screens Friday,, 7 and 9 p.m., at the UC Irvine Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium, Pereira Drive and West Peltason roads. $2.50-$4.50. (714) 824-5588. It follows a young woman searching for her lost cat through a Paris neighborhood that is being torn down.

* Post-Colonial Classics of Korean Cinema” continues Saturday at UCI, 4:30 p.m., with “The Coachman” (1961), a top prize-winner at the Berlin International Film Festival, and “The Six Day Fight in Myong Dong Cathedral” (1997) in its U.S. premiere, 7 p.m. Both in the UCI Film and Video Center, Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100, West Peltason Road. Separate admissions. $4-$6. (714) 824-7418.”Coachman” relates the story of a family challenged by modernization. “Six Day Fight” documents a historical demonstration that was pivotal in bringing down South Korea’s military dictatorship 10 years ago.

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In L.A. and beyond:

The UCLA Film Archive’s “Film India” offers a varied sampling of recent movies from that country’s little-known regional cinemas.

Organized by journalist Mira Advani, the festival opens tonight at 7:30 in the James Bridges Theater in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall with a sure-fire winner in Waris Hussein’s “Sixth Happiness.” The film stars Firdaus Kanga, who adapted his autobiographical novel, “Learning to Grow,” for the screen.

Born in Bombay in the ‘60s to a Parsee family, Kanga has a disease that causes his bones to be brittle, leaving him diminutive in size and confined to a wheelchair. But Kanga, who has striking dark eyes that radiate intelligence, became determined that his affliction not become a restriction. Often on the screen you can’t see the person for the disability, but that’s emphatically not the case with Kanga, who has a rapier wit and a vibrant, commanding presence.

Screening Friday at 7:30 p.m. is Santwana Bardoloi’s highly challenging “The Flight” (Adajya), which is set in the ‘40s at a religious and cultural center in Assam that is run by a Brahmin family, whose very role in the community means lives of the utmost proscription for the widows, all relatives, in residence.

The focus is on the youngest and prettiest, who dares to rebel when a good-looking Westerner arrives to study some ancient scrolls. The film is steeped in local rituals, customs and beliefs that make it seem remote and somewhat daunting for the foreign viewer. Bardoloi will be present.

Mani Rathnam’s “The Duo” (Iruvar), screening Sunday at 7 p.m., is a vastly entertaining epic, spanning several decades in the friendship between a movie star, Anandan (Mohan Lal), and a politician, Selvam (Prakash Raj, who will attend the screening). Anandan is an aspiring actor when he crosses paths with Selvam, who has written the script for the swashbuckler that will catapult Anandan to stardom. Both men share a passion for political change, and their mutual support helps carry both to the heights--and an eventual rivalry.

Exuberant and passionate, “The Duo” is in the classic style of elaborate mainstream Indian movies, replete with musical interludes. Yet it also keeps its unique, sharp-eyed view of the workings of politics and the world of movie-making.

Also screening is a 7:30 p.m. Saturday double feature, “The Red Door” and “Journey to Wisdom.” (310) 206-8588.

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Among the many notable films screening in the Pan African Film Festival as it enters its final weekend at the Magic Johnson Theaters is Tommy Morgan and Frank Underwood Jr.’s “Sister, I’m Sorry” (today at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.), a record of a deeply moving healing service conducted by Pastor Donald Bell of the Faithful Central Church and hosted by actress Margaret Avery.

A man of profound wisdom and spirituality, Pastor Bell encourages women, all of them young, attractive and intelligent, to come forward to tell totally believable accounts of terrible abuse from the men in their lives. Their stories are interspersed with symbolic, eloquent recitations of forgiveness spoken beautifully by a series of well-known actors: Blair Underwood, Tommy Ford, Michael Beach, Tico Wells, Clifton Powell, Steven Williams and musician Howard Hewitt.

The video’s purpose is to strengthen relations between black men and women as a way of strengthening the African American community, but what “Sister, I’m Sorry” deals with equal forthrightness and sensitivity applies to men and women of all colors and creeds.

Guinean filmmaker Mohamed Camara’s “Dakan” (Destiny), which screens Saturday at 6 p.m., is a gay love story of much charm, humor, courage and imagination. Manga (Aboubacar Toure), raised by an adoring single mother, and Sory (Mamady), son of a rich, self-made contractor father, are college students who fall in love in their profoundly homophobic society.

Manga’s mother simply denies the very existence of homosexuality while Sory’s ambitious, hard-driving father, who intends his son to become his business partner, is apoplectic. (213) 896-8221.

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On Wednesday and Feb. 19, the Nuart is presenting what appears to be one of its most popular offerings: “Doris Wishman: Queen of Sexploitation,” with Wishman in attendance. Between 1960 and 1978, Wishman, a former secretary and saleswoman for producer-distributor and legendary promoter Joe Levine, made 24 lurid low-budget pictures that are now being rediscovered for both feminist sentiments and, above all, camp value.

Widely considered her masterpiece, “Bad Girls Go to Hell” (1965), which screens both nights at 7:30, reveals Wishman to be an instinctive, dynamic storyteller with a camera as she follows a young woman (Gigi Darlene), who has fled Chicago because she’s convinced no one will believe she killed a rapist in self-defense. Wishman’s style, which at times recalls Sam Fuller and Russ Meyer, is adroitly expressive of her heroine’s anguish.

Playing with “Bad Girls” on Wednesday at 6 and 9:15 p.m. is the hilarious “Double Agent ‘73,” a perfection of ‘70s kitsch that stars stripper Chesty Morgan, whose uppermost measurement might well have supplied inspiration for the film’s title. As a government agent, Morgan has a mini-camera temporarily implanted in her left breast, which means that she is constantly revealing her formidable charms in the line of duty.

Feb. 19’s second feature is “Let Me Die a Woman” (1978), an early documentary about transsexuals, replete with graphic surgical details and dramatized scenes in which tastelessness vies with compassion and even tenderness. You can’t watch this picture without thinking of the photography of Diane Arbus.

Although Franz Reichle’s “The Knowledge of Healing” (Nuart, Friday through Tuesday) rambles and becomes highly technical, it makes a persuasive case that Western medicine has lots to learn from ancient Tibetan medicine and healing practices.

The key potential of Tibetan medicine, according to a Swiss researcher, lies in the non-contagious diseases of arteriosclerosis and cancer and in combating the aging process. Doctors in Dharamsala, North India, site of the Dalai Lama’s government in exile, strive to preserve the ancient teachings and says that only about 12 traditional doctors, all elderly, remain inside Tibet. We also learn that such doctors have been regarded by China as a chief obstacle to a “great leap forward.” Eliot Tokar, one of the few practitioners of Tibetan medicine in the U.S., will introduce the 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday shows. He will also give a free lecture followed by a question-and-answer period on Sunday at 11:30 a.m. (310) 478-6379.

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Times staff writer Kevin Thomas in Los Angeles contributed to this report.