To Love and Die in L.A.: Thriller Explores Loneliness in the City

To honor the late James Bridges, whose name graces the theater in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall, the university’s School of Film, Theater and Television and its Film and Television Archive will screen at 7:30 tonight one of Bridges’ best yet most underrated films, the 1984 “Mike’s Murder,” which only looks better with the passing of time. It has elements of suspense but is a portrait of love and isolation in eternally transitory Los Angeles, where so many people from different worlds meet in passing so easily--and sometimes with unforeseen consequences.

Debra Winger, who never looked more attractive, stars as an intelligent, upwardly mobile young woman who meets Mike (Mark Keyloun) on the tennis courts in Brentwood Village. The young man has a lot of confidence and smoothly charms her off the courts and into her bed for a night of intense passion. Phone numbers are exchanged, but Winger’s Betty never hears from Mike until he spots her driving on Sunset and flags her down for a lift, then asks her to turn off the road for a while.

If Betty is the archetypal young L.A. woman who has everything but Mr. Right, Mike is the guy who’s made it to L.A. from somewhere else but has no real resources beyond his looks and charisma. Mike hustles for sure, and now that he’s behind on his rent, a not-infrequent occurrence, he does a little drug dealing. Only this time, teamed up with a reckless, weaselly and not very bright pal, Pete (Darrell Larson), he’s dangerously in over his head.

“Mike’s Murder” certainly lent itself to conventional lady-in-distress thriller treatment, but Bridges played against plot to explore character. The point about Winger’s Betty is not that she is desperate in her single state (she has a boyfriend), but that she has never been so thrilled--or, ultimately, so touched--by a man as she has by Mike, who has retained an innocence at his core and is indeed fatally naive.

Mike is also loved by two men, a paunchy, middle-aged, alcoholic photographer and a wealthy gay man who lives in Hollywood Hills splendor. This second man, urbane and wise, is brilliantly played by Paul Winfield. As the film comes full circle, it emerges as a compassionate exploration of two lonely worlds, that of a career woman and that of a certain segment of gay life, presented with subtlety and insight. Winger and Winfield excel, but then so do Keyloun, Larson and others. “Mike’s Murder” ends on a note of realism and doubtlessly would have had a better shot at the box office (where it bombed) had Bridges gone for a conventional thriller climax. But his uncompromised stance resulted in a film that is enduringly honest, wise and affecting. Winger and associate producer Jack Larson, Bridges’ longtime friend, will speak before the screening. Larson established the Bridges-Larson Foundation after the director’s death in 1993 and underwrote the remodeling of Melnitz Hall’s auditorium, renamed in Bridges’ memory. (310) 206-FILM.

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The UCLA Film Archives’ “The Art of Bo Widerberg,” also screening at the Bridges Theater, celebrates the career of one of Sweden’s most eloquent filmmakers, best known for his art-house blockbuster, the 1967 romantic tragedy “Elvira Madigan.” The series starts Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with “Adalen 31” (1969), a powerful, epic-scale melodrama set against an actual 1931 police riot directed toward striking factory workers. It will be followed by “Raven’s End” (1963), in which the charismatic Thommy Berggren (who was to co-star in “Elvira”) plays a factory worker whose struggle to become a writer is complicated by an affair with a young woman in his working-class Malmo neighborhood. Both films are striking in their use of black-and-white cinematography and their blend of romance and social protest. (310) 206-FILM.

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Steve York’s “A Force More Powerful,” which screens Friday only at the Music Hall and moves to the Monica 4-Plex, where it will screen Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. on the next three weekends, is a veritable manual on how to mount a successful nonviolent resistance movement. York begins with the great pioneer, Mohandas Gandhi, whose successful experiments with nonviolence in defending oppressed Indians in South Africa in the early part of the century would be put to good use in winning independence for India, where he is remembered as a canny saint. In September 1959, a young black Nashville minister, James Lawson, who had studied in India, put what he had learned from Gandhi’s example into action when he led students in sit-ins at the lunch counters at Nashville’s three downtown chain variety stores. Drawing upon a rich lode of archival footage, York then has Lawson and his colleagues take us step by step through the strategies that succeeded across the South and throughout the nation. This outstanding documentary comes full circle quite literally as York surveys how Gandhi’s principles were put to use to end apartheid in South Africa. Music Hall: (310) 274-6869; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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“Stuart Bliss” is an admirable, low-budget first film about a nerdy San Fernando Valley advertising executive (Michael Zelniker) who, once his wife leaves him, becomes increasingly paranoid, detecting conspiracies everywhere and becoming convinced that the end of the world is near. Director Neil Grieve and Zelniker, who wrote and produced the film with Grieve, are inventive, but their film isn’t sharp or funny enough to hold interest or set it apart from similar ventures. “Stuart Bliss” opens a one-week engagement Friday at the Grande 4-Plex, Figueroa and 3rd streets, downtown L.A. (213) 617-0268.

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Visual Communications, the nation’s leading Asian Pacific American media arts center, will present the world premiere of Janice D. Tanaka’s revealing one-hour documentary, “When You’re Smiling,” Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 Judge John Aiso St. (formerly North San Pedro Street) in downtown L.A. between First and Temple streets. By now, many documentaries have addressed the injustice of the World War II internment camps for Japanese Americans, but this is one of the few to focus on the long-term impact of the experience on the sansei generation. (The issei were the immigrants, the nisei were their children, and the sansei the children of the nisei).

Tanaka and her interviewees are all younger sansei, those who were born after the war and came of age in the 1960s. (The older sansei, who experienced internment with their parents and grandparents and who came of age in the conservative ‘50s, may well have been spared some of the inner conflict of their younger brothers, sisters and cousins.) By and large, the nisei, out of a mixture of shame, anger and horror, stood proud but remained silent about the camp experience and, in the words of one interviewee, became determined that they and their children would be “110% American.” With imaginative use of archival materials, Tanaka chronicles the despair and defeat behind the “model minority” image the Japanese American community has strived so hard to create and sustain, but ends on a note of understanding, both of her own generation and that of her parents. (213) 680-4462, Ext. 58.

Jon Reiss’ “Better Living Through Circuitry: A Digital Odyssey Into the Electronic Dance Underground,” which screens at the Egyptian Theater tonight at 8 as part of the Resfest Digital Film Festival, makes a smart, lively and informative case for the total electronic experience. It’s a celebration of the rave phenomenon shot on video, featuring exciting electronic music accompanied by multimedia presentations. This largely underground movement among the youth of the world makes a positive case for technology in helping create a global village. One young person after another attests to the uniquely communal experience of raves--that indeed, in the words of one young man, “the sharing of energy with other people” is even more important than the music itself. “Better Living Through Circuitry” is important and provocative as well as entertaining, and deserves to finds its audience. (310) 859-5588.

As part of the first International Jewish Film Festival and Conference, there will be a 10th-anniversary screening of Pierre Sauvage’s landmark “Weapons of the Spirit” (Sunday at the Music Hall at 6 p.m.; Wednesday at noon at the Town Center, Encino). It’s a different kind of Holocaust documentary, a thorough and heartwarming probe by Sauvage of how his birthplace, a small Christian village in south-central France, became a refuge for 5,000 Jews, including the filmmakers’ parents, during World War II. The answer lies in the community’s enduring Huguenot heritage, with its memories of religious persecution, and the leadership of its courageous, ecumenical-spirited pastor. The result is a rare and stirring illustration of the power of religion to unite rather than divide people. Sauvage is currently making “And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseilles,” a documentary on the American who saved some 2,000 lives from the Nazis. Music Hall: (310) 274-6869; (818) 981-9811.

Note: Oscar-winning visual effects specialist Volker Engel (“Independence Day”) will appear with “New Animation From Germany” Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Goethe Institute, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 100. (323) 525-3388.