TWO BORZAGE FILMS SET TO SCREEN AT MELNITZ

“Three Comrades” (1937) and “The Shining Hour” (1938), which screen Thursday at 7:30 at UCLA Melnitz, suggest that director Frank Borzage’s move to MGM from Paramount was a mixed blessing.

Both films represent a fortuitous collaboration between him and the inimitable Margaret Sullavan, but Borzage got a big glop of Metro gloss in the bargain. “Three Comrades” is often regarded as a career high point for Borzage, but it’s actually pretty slow and solemn for all of Sullavan’s husky-voiced radiance as the dying bride of a devoted Robert Taylor. Adapted from an Erich Maria Remarque novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edward A. Paramore, the love story unfolds in post-World War I Germany against the rise of Nazism, and also stars Franchot Tone and Robert Young.

“The Shining Hour” is another matter entirely. An archetypal Joan Crawford movie, it is more than that because of Crawford’s spunk and honesty combined with Borzage’s transcendent spirituality. Though its material may be dated, even though one of its adapters (from a forgotten play) was Ogden Nash, no less, it remains vital and moving. Crawford is perfectly cast as a brassy nightclub dancer who marries rich, debonair Melvyn Douglas, only to be confronted with Douglas’ possessive, kill-joy spinster sister (Fay Bainter) and with his brother (Robert Young), whose initial disapproval of Crawford quickly turns to love. There’s a special poignancy in “The Shining Hour” that comes from the realization of how much of her real self Crawford poured into this role. Information: (213) 825-2581.

The Nuart’s “Human Rights in South Africa” concludes Tuesday with two remarkable films: British documentarian Mira Hamermesh’s new “Maids and Madams” and “Boesman and Lena,” a 1973 film of the Athol Fugard play directed with passion and grace by Ross Davenish. The bitterest irony which Hamermesh reveals in her direct, understated manner is that at least a million black South African women displace their love for their own children, from whom they are so often separated, onto the children of the white people for whom they work as domestics. Some of the well-off South African matrons Hamermesh interviews are enlightened and even courageous, one defying apartheid laws to permit her live-in maid to keep her grandchild with her; but we come to agree with another matron that all the white women’s considerable efforts on behalf of their maids are finally dedicated “to preserving the status quo.”

His skin darkened by makeup, Athol Fugard himself plays Boesman in his rich, brave drama about the plight of South Africa’s Coloreds. The intense love-hate relationship between the desperately marginal drifters Boesman and Lena (Yvonne Bryceland) brings to mind Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

West German film maker Doris Dorrie’s stunning, implacable “Straight Through the Heart” plays at the Nuart Wednesday through Friday, paired aptly with a rerun of Bette Gordon’s “Variety.” This is a cool, detached study of disturbingly acute psychological validity about a pretty Hamburg supermarket cashier (Beate Jensen) who agrees to become a paid live-in companion to a middle-aged dentist (Josef Bierbichler)--sex is optional. What neither of them reckons with is the extremes to which Jensen is driven to try to break through the dentist’s formidable emotional armor. “Straight Through the Heart” is a compelling expression of obsessiveness flowering amid contemporary urban loneliness. Information: (213) 478-6379, 479-5269.