Male Bonding in ‘Girl in Every Port’

There’s no wonder G.W. Pabst cast Louise Brooks in his legendary “Pandora’s Box” after seeing her in Howard Hawks’ “A Girl in Every Port” (1928), which screens Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie along with Buster Keaton’s “Seven Chances.”

“A Girl in Every Port” is the first of the Hawks buddy pictures, and we’re more than halfway into the 62-minute film before the radiant Brooks appears, playing a gorgeous American high-diver working in a Marseilles carnival. Thoroughly amoral, she captivates thickheaded sailor Victor McLaglen and threatens his friendship with his pal Robert Armstrong, who knew Brooks’ “Mam’selle Godiva” from her Coney Island days.

The film is marked by Hawks’ easy style and an innocence not possible today in the depiction of the intense bond between McLaglen and Armstrong.

Information: (213) 653-2389.

“Queen of Diamonds,” the latest feature from Nina Menkes, one of the most challenging and provocative artists in film today, will premiere Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Raleigh Studio’s Chaplin Theater as a benefit for Filmforum, the weekly showcase at LACE for experimental filmmakers.

Once again, Menkes’ pale, beautiful sister Tinka stars, cast as a Las Vegas blackjack dealer whose monotonous existence is punctuated by her ritual caring for a dying old man. What Menkes does--and what few filmmakers can get away with--is to hold a shot for a very long time, creating a feeling of time passing, of life being lived in an indifferent universe.

Tacky, barren side-street Vegas is a perfect locale for Menkes’ vision of alienation and decay as she evokes a sense of the eternal cycle of life and death with both scenes of a marriage and of a funeral.

Taxing, shimmering, hypnotic, “Queen of Diamonds” demands being seen more than once to fully absorb its beauty and meaning.

There will be a post-screening champagne reception at Cafe Largo. Filmforum will screen two earlier Menkes films, “The Great Sadness of Zohara” (1983) and “Magdalena Viraga” (1986), on Monday, April 8, at LACE at 8 p.m.

Information: (213) 389-7143.

The UCLA Film Archive’s Jon Jost retrospective continues Saturday at Melnitz Theater at 5:30 p.m. with 90 minutes of early short films followed at 7:30 p.m. with “Slow Moves” (1983). This film and “Bell Diamond” (1986), which screens Sunday at 7:30 p.m., knock us out with their straight-as-an-arrow directness, works of the utmost freshness and simplicity.

After years of experimentation, Jost really knows how to make images work for him. He makes them endlessly expressive of the thoughts and feelings of his people in these two fiction features, which were improvised with their nonprofessional actors but are as formal and precise as the films of Robert Bresson, who also prefers nonprofessionals.

Rangy Marshall Gaddis, who has the masculine sensitivity of a Frederic Forrest, plays in the first film a withdrawn Viet vet, apparently left sterile by Agent Orange and unemployed in the wake of the closing of the Bell Diamond copper mine in Butte, Mont. Now, he’s facing the breakup of his seven-year marriage to a woman (Sarah Wyss) he loves but with whom he is unable to share his pain.

In “Slow Moves” Gaddis plays a San Francisco construction worker specializing in handling steel girders at great heights but who now has lost his nerve after suffering a minor injury. He drifts into a romance with a highly disciplined, hard-working young woman (Roxanne Rogers) that catches them up in the American dream of the open road.

For all his social consciousness, Jost never preaches but instead takes us deep inside his people, whose fates are gratifyingly unpredictable.

Following “Bell Diamond” is “Plain Talk and Common Sense” (1987), also known as “Uncommon Senses,” in which Jost, in an intensely personal definition of America in words and images, expresses his concern by our progression from nature to technology at nature’s expense. Following “Slow Moves” is “Stagefright” (1981), a complex film essay centering on a consideration of the relationship between audience and performance.

Note: Czech film maker Dusan Hanak will attend the “Critics Choice” presentation of his remarkable documentary on what it is like to be aged, “Pictures of the Old World.” It screens Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in UCLA’s Melnitz Theater.

Information: (213) 206-8013, (213) 206-FILM.