Two Offbeat Offerings in Gay, Lesbian Fest

The L.A. International Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival concludes Wednesday at the Directors Guild with two offbeat offerings, Lothar Lambert’s “Drama in Blond” (at 7 p.m.) and “The Everlasting Secret Family” (at 9:30), which Michael Thornhill directed from Frank Moorhouse’s adaptation of his own novel.

A longtime underground film maker, West Germany’s Lambert casts himself as a nebbishy bank clerk who is shocked to discover he really wants to be a female impersonator. As before, Lambert takes an affectionate and amusing tone with sexual anguish, but his home-movie style makes an endless string of awful drag acts seem as though he’s trying to stretch out a short story to feature length. Sweet-natured but tedious.

“The Everlasting Secret Family” is decidedly unusual, a power-and-sex fable suggesting an obverse side to the myth of Australian macho perpetuated by the “Crocodile Dundee” movies. It imagines that eminent gay men have formed a secret fraternity that inducts handsome young men as their virtual slaves, to be relegated to lesser posts--e.g., chauffeur--once they have lost their sexual appeal.

Although “The Everlasting Secret Family” brings a delightfully dry, highly ambiguous tone to outrageous material, it also boggles the mind in its calm assurance that gay men in high places, even in politics, are virtually invulnerable to blackmail (or to any other kind of exposure). Intriguingly, the film stars three of Australia’s best-known actors: Arthur Dignam, as a cold-blooded senator, Mark Lee (Mel Gibson’s co-star in “Gallipoli”) as the kept youth determined to preserve his allure and beat the system, and John Meillon as a distinguished elderly judge with kinky sexual appetites--and this is the same actor, the grand old man of the Australian cinema, who’s also Crocodile Dundee’s sidekick! (213) 665-4464.

Among the fine vintage films in the UCLA Film Archive’s “Images in the Shadows: A History of the Spanish Cinema” is Juan Antonio Bardem’s heartbreaking “Calle Mayor” (“Main Street,” also known as “The Lovemaker”), which screens Wednesday in Melnitz Theater following the 8 p.m. screening of “Marcelino, Bread and Wine” (1954).

In the wake of her Oscar-nominated performance as the plain young woman Ernest Borgnine finally wins in “Marty” (1955) Betsy Blair went to Europe to make two extraordinary films, “Calle Mayor” (1956) and Antonioni’s “Il Grido” (1957). For Bardem she is once again the wistful spinster, a naive, sheltered woman of 35 named Isabel who lives in a beautiful but static provincial Spanish city. A group of middle-aged businessman, who gather regularly on the city’s quaint principal thoroughfare, relieve their boredom by playing cruel practical jokes. They maneuver one of their younger members, Juan (Jose Suarez), a handsome, unmarried man of 33, into proposing to Isabel without regard to the consequences to her (or to Juan, for that matter).

Poor dubbing cannot smudge Blair’s luminous portrayal. Her Isabel is as fragile and gallant as a Tennessee Williams heroine, but no Tennessee Williams play, with the exception of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” ever received such sustained lyrical expression on the screen. Beyond the delicately delineated Isabel, there looms a larger portrait of Franco’s Spain as a hidebound, oppressively gloomy culture weighed down by tradition and religion. In its quiet way “Calle Mayor” is a very courageous film.

Shot in the Neo-Realist style in a black-and-white so carefully modulated as to take your breath away, Carlos Saura’s first feature, “The Hooligans” (“Los Golfos”) screens Friday following the 8 p.m. screening of Luis Berlanga’s “The Executioner” (“El Verdugo”). Saura uses non-professionals in this stunning 1959 film to tell a classic story of a group of Madrid youths surviving on petty thievery and striving to gather sufficient funds to launch one of their friends as a bullfighter. That these young men can be so concerned about each other yet so ruthless in their thievery gives them a challenging, disturbing dimension. For full schedule and more information: (213) 206 FILM, 206-8013.