Lethal Truth-Teller

With “Claude Chabrol: Innocents with Dirty Hands,” the UCLA Film Archive calls attention to the French New Wave pioneer and one of cinema’s enduring masters. For more than 40 years, Chabrol, with dark wit and style, has revealed nasty, lethal truths lurking beneath the facade of bourgeois propriety. Murders occur frequently, in Chabrol films, and they always leave us with unsettling truths about the world in which we live.

Born in Paris in 1930, the son and grandson of pharmacists, Chabrol trained to follow in their footsteps but, after military service, was drawn to film criticism, joining the controversial and influential Cahiers du Cinema journal.

The archive will screen 11 of Chabrol’s 51 features over the next three Saturdays and Sundays in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater in a provocative mix of several of the filmmaker’s most celebrated films and some of his least-known, all of which are rewarding.

The series commences with a real rarity, “A Double Tour” (1959), also known as “Web of Passion” and released in Los Angeles in 1964 as “Leda.” Stylish and colorful, Chabrol’s third feature is the New Wave at its splashiest. Outrageous, lushly, romantic, thoroughly entertaining but ultimately serious, it starts out as a comedy and turns into a murder mystery in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock, who, along with Fritz Lang, is Chabrol’s major and enduring influence.

“I like to have the screen full of color, 20 colors on the screen, 50 colors,” Chabrol said of this film.

Cinematographer Henri Decae, a major New Wave contributor, created scene after scene of breathtaking beauty: burnished gold for the interiors of an elegant manor house, brilliant red for a field of poppies.

But color for Chabrol is not merely art for art’s sake. The dazzling camera work and photography are central to his theme, which is that the beauty of woman has the power to reduce man to an insect and thus drive him to destroy her. To demonstrate that this is true, Chabrol is not afraid to teeter on the ludicrous.

For Leda, the heroine, who must be as beautiful as the Greek figure for whom she is named (as difficult as casting Helen of Troy), Chabrol first wanted Suzy Parker but finally decided on Antonella Lualdi, who proved an ideal choice. Jacques Dacqmine plays her middle-aged lover. For her role as his witch-like, miserable wife, Madeleine Robinson won a top acting award at Venice, and Jean-Paul Belmondo is hilarious as a cheerful boor.

“A Double Tour” will be followed by Andre S. Labarthe’s “Claude Chabrol, Entomologist,” a 1991 interview with Chabrol made for French TV and unavailable for preview.

Sunday brings at 7 p.m. a major double feature, “Le Beau Serge” (1958) and “Les Cousins” (1959). If Agnes Varda’s 1955 first feature, “La Pointe Courte,” about a young couple attempting to shore up their faltering marriage, is a precursor to the New Wave, “Le Beau Serge,” financed by an inheritance from Chabrol’s first wife, is the first true New Wave film, a break with France’s highly polished “cinema of quality.”

The production company Chabrol formed, AJYM, launched a slough of New Wavers, notably Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Philippe De Broca and Jean-Luc Godard.

Filmed in a bleak black and white in one of those quaint but dour ancient French villages, “Le Beau Serge” stars Jean-Claude Brialy as Francois, a young man who returns to his native village after a 12-year stint in a Swiss sanitarium for tuberculosis.

In that time, Francois has become urbane and polished, while the village has lost its spirit and momentum and is clearly on the decline. Worse, his best friend from childhood, Serge (Gerard Blain), who had won a scholarship in architecture, had to give up his dreams when his girlfriend, Marie (Michele Meritz), became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy with Down syndrome who soon died. A truck driver for a lumber merchant, Serge drowns his sorrows in drink.

Most likely because of his own brush with mortality, Francois, well-meaning but ham-fisted, tries to help Serge, who is so embarrassed and ashamed to be seen by his old friend in his current state that he can only rebuff him with increasing belligerence. Francois nonetheless decides to dig in, for he begins to see in breaking through to Serge a means of spiritual redemption.

Wonderfully well-acted, “Le Beau Serge” is surprisingly close to Bresson, “Diary of a Country Priest” in particular. A deft subplot entangles Francois with the local tart, played by the ever-sly Bernadette Lafont, who would also be a scene-stealer in “A Double Tour.”

Brialy also stars in “Les Cousins,” a country mouse-city mouse fable with dialogue by Paul Gegauff. Brialy is a Paris law student, a glib, unabashed hedonist living in a spacious Playboy typepad, complete with the latest in hi-fi equipment.

We’re told that with great reluctance, his apparently widowed aunt has allowed her son (Blain) to go to the city to pursue a law course himself, only because she’s reassured that he will be under the protective wing of his cousin; clearly she did not know her nephew well.

“Les Cousins” is a remorseless study of the plodding Blain’s casual destruction. Because Brialy’s Paul is so trendy and Blain’s Charles so very naive, the film has a dated quality, though once it felt totally “now”; even so, it builds steadily to a well-structured and suitably devastating payoff.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

*

Chabrol might well be amused by Francois Ozon’s “Sitcom,” which screens Friday through Monday at the Nuart (11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A.). It centers on a very Chabrol-like family, a wealthy couple who live in a fine 19th century manor house with an interior decorated in the kind of impeccably restrained good taste enshrined by Martha Stewart.

Indeed, Helene, the chic, attractive wife and mother, is the kind of role that Chabrol’s ex-wife and frequent star Stephane Audran often played: the relentlessly efficient, middle-aged, upper-middle-class woman to whom there’s more than meets the eye.

Helene has a self-absorbed husband, Jean (Francois Marthouret), and two willful children, the marriageable Sophie (Marina de Van) and the teenage Nicholes (Adrien de Van). The family is no more and no less functional than many--until Jean brings home a caged white rat as a pet.

Mere contact with the rat unleashes in one and all hidden sexual desires and psychological quirks, and “Sitcom” swiftly emerges as a darkly outrageous satirical farce. “Sitcom” is consistently inspired, imaginative and fearless, with Helene emerging as a true heroine. “Sitcom” is most gratifying--and lots of fun. It will be followed by a Tuesday-through-Thursday run of “The World’s Best Commercials of the Century.”

Information: (310) 478-6379.

*

Screening tonight at LACMA (5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.) at 7 and again at 9:15 p.m. is another program of TV commercials, those made for British TV. “BABA ‘99” is an approximately 110-minute collection of winners of the annual British Advertising Broadcast Awards.

On Friday at 7:30 p.m. the museum continues its “Here’s Looking at You, Bogie” centennial retrospective with “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948), the John Huston classic from the B. Traven fable of greed involving three Americans (Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston and Tim Holt) prospecting for gold in Mexico, and “The Petrified Forest” (1936), in which, at Leslie Howard’s insistence, Bogart re-created his stage role as Duke Mantee, a gangster terrorizing the proprietors and customers of a desert roadside diner.

Howard plays a British tourist with an intellectual bent, and Bette Davis, prettier than even she remembered she had ever been, as the dreamy young woman yearning to escape this bump on the road. At last Bogart was able to establish a memorable tough guy image that would sustain him for the next two decades.

Veteran writer A.I. Bezzarides will appear Saturday with the 7:30 p.m. screening of “They Drive by Night” (1940), adapted by Jerry Wald from a Bezzarides novel and directed by Raoul Walsh, and “Sirocco” (1951), which Bezzarides co-wrote with Hans Jacoby for director Curtis Bernhardt.

In the first, George Raft and Bogart play ambitious truck driver brothers coping with their boss’ dangerous wife, Ida Lupino; Ann Sheridan also stars. In the second, Bogart plays a gun runner operating in French-occupied Syria in 1925. Photographed by the esteemed Burnett Guffey.

Information: (323) 857-6010.

*

First-time writer-director Troy Duffy’s “The Boondock Saints,” which opens Friday (Vine Theater, 6321 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, [323] 463-6819; University Village 3, Hoover Street at Jefferson Boulevard, [213] 748-6321) on its way to the video stores, is some under-inspired blarney about a pair of Irish American brothers (Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery), Boston meat-plant workers, who take on Russian mobsters intent on closing down their local bar. Swiftly involved in the deadly aftermath is a gay FBI agent (Willem Dafoe).