DeMille’s ‘Cheat’ Gives Festival a Lift

The Silver Lake Film Festival, running tonight through Sept. 21 at the Vista Theater and other venues, will present a mix of films old and new, traditional and unconventional, that mirror the community and its colorful past and present. There will be some raunchy and bizarre offerings, to be sure, and the festival will close with Cecil B. DeMille’s delightfully sensational interracial melodrama “The Cheat” (1915), starring Sessue Hayakawa and Fannie Ward, a stage veteran of the era and famed as an early enthusiast of the face lift.

The festival opens tonight at 7 at the Vista with “Letters of the Underground,” in which 15 filmmakers contribute vignettes inspired by the correspondence, diary entries and journals of innovative artists ranging from Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith to Luis Bunuel. A couple were available for preview, and Todd Hughes’ take on Gertrude Stein (Dominique Dibbell) and Alice B. Toklas (Jamie Tolbert Franklin) is exquisitely original .

Iva Svarcova’s “When Grandpa Loved Rita Hayworth” (Vista, Sunday at 1 p.m.) is a bittersweet Czech comedy, a warm family chronicle in which giddy, even sitcom-like moments collide tellingly with the painful twists and turns of history. It takes place between the moon landing in 1969 and the astronauts’ return to Earth, and during that time 13-year-old Hannah (Karen Fisher) and her parents and little sister have undergone their own adventurous journey. With the tragic end of the “Prague Spring” with the Russian invasion, Hannah’s parents decide they must flee the country, but only West Germany will take them.

For the father, Kuba (Vladimir Hajda), it means a return to the land in which he was once a concentration camp prisoner. For his wife, Lida (Ewa Gawryluk), West Germany becomes a consumer’s paradise. While little Maruska (Veronika Albrechtova) grows silent, the resilient Hannah is open to new experiences and copes well. The film is a tribute to family solidarity in the face of adversity.

Film lovers lament the terrible loss of old movies on nitrate film stock. The occasional disintegrating image on a newly preserved film usually creates a sense that it has been rescued in the nick of time. Bill Morrison’s imaginative experimental feature “Decasia” (Micheltorena School, Saturday 11:15 a.m.)--the title is a play on “Fantasia”-- flies in the face of that sentiment. A collage of disintegrating--or made to seem disintegrating--found footage set to Michael Gordon’s symphony, “Decasia” discovers beauty in decay, and images that seemed to be licked by flames or attacked by fungus possess an alternately lacy and cobwebby quality that elicits the feeling that we are watching the past fade before our very eyes.

Along with many sidebar events the Silver Lake festival offers an array of significant classics and revivals, such as Allison Anders, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss’ “Border Radio,” as well as “Chinatown,” “Toll of the Sea,” “Eyes Without a Face,” “Johns” and a tribute to Shirley Knight composed of “Dutchman” and “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.” Among worthy films resurfacing from ecent local festivals are “Better Luck Tomorrow,” a satirical look at a ferociously ambitious Filipino American high school senior, Paul Cox’s venturesome, Impressionist “The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky,” the good-natured “Tattoo: A Love Story” and “Night Train,” a noirish thriller set in Tijuana. (323) 993-7225.

*

The Laemmle Theaters Documentary Days series continues at the Sunset 5 Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. with one of its most extraordinary offerings, Monteith McCallum’s “Hybrid.” The filmmaker presents a portrait of his grandfather, Milford Beeghly, set against a poetic evocation of the Iowa farmlands where Beeghly has spent his life. Muted black and white give McCallum’s images the look of steel engravings, and they provide a sharp contrast to a remarkably sturdy old man. Milford Beeghly was a pioneer in the crossbreeding of corn, a man who married late and was so obsessed in his experiments and promoting his superior seeds that he had little time for his wife and children. Yet McCallum clearly developed a rapport with his grandfather, who has mellowed a bit with age and a happy second marriage following the death of the mother of his children. With his deep voice and flat Midwestern drawl, Beeghly speaks with the quiet force and clarity of a biblical patriarch as he reveals a profound spiritual connection with the land. Beeghly, approaching his 100th birthday, emerges as a man as warm and humorous as he is heroic in stature. (323) 848-3500.

“Hybrid” screens at 11 a.m. on the weekend only Sept. 21 and 22 at the Monica 4-Plex, (310) 397-9741; Sept. 28 and 29 at the Playhouse 7, Pasadena, (626) 844-6500; and Oct. 5 and 6 at the Fallbrook, West Hills, (818) 340-8710.

*

The International Documentary Assn.’s DOCtober in September Showcase runs Friday through Thursday at the Monica 4-Plex. Among the films screening is Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s “Lost in La Mancha,” which was supposed to record Terry Gilliam’s fulfilling a 10-year dream of filming his “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” in which Johnny Depp is an advertising man time-warped into the past where Don Quixote (Jean Rochefort) mistakes him for Sancho Panza. Instead, it is an account of a nightmare in which flash floods on location in Spain plus Rochefort being felled by a double-herniated disc halts production after only six days. It is a portrait of a group of film professionals struggling to overcome adversity but realistically accepting defeat. The tantalizing little that Gilliam was able to shoot, however, suggests that he is right to try to resurrect the project so appropriate to a filmmaker who has tilted at his own windmills.

Jason Van Vleet’s “Terror from Within” makes an engrossing, persuasive case that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols did not act alone in the Oklahoma City bombing. One has to wonder how Van Vleet got hold of so much footage of paramilitary activities at various far-right enclaves that McVeigh seemingly had far greater contact with than is generally known. In any event, Van Vleet puts it to good use in a chilling account in which he accuses the FBI of failing to grasp information that might have prevented the bombing and of subsequent cover-ups. All films in “DOCtober” screen seven times. (213) 534-3600.

*

The American Cinematheque is bringing back to the Egyptian today through Sunday Neil Marshall’s horror film “Dog Soldiers,” which finds a group of British soldiers on exercise maneuvers in a remote area of the Scottish Highlands where people tend to disappear. Before one can say “The Blair Witch Project,” scary stuff starts happening--scarier (and gorier) than in the low-budget 1999 phenomenon. Sean Pertwee, Kevin McKidd and Emma Cleasby star. (323) 466-FILM.

*

With “Low Heights,” which opens a regular run Friday at the Music Hall, Iranian filmmaker Ebrahim Hatamikia has taken the hoary plane-hijacking plot and given it a brave political twist. Unfortunately, while airborne it is weighed down with an excess baggage of histrionics, messages and protracted running time. He started with a terrific premise: An impoverished man, Gasheem (Hamid Faroknejad), desperate to emigrate to give his family a better life, hijacks a plane from Ahwaz, a town 40 miles from the border with Iraq, on a 20-minute flight to the city of Bandar Abbass. Hatamikia is critical of the lot of the poor in Iran and of government policies that make immigration so difficult for ordinary citizens. (310) 274-6869.