A Cannes Celebration

Before launching its “Cannes 50: A Tribute to the Cannes Festival on Its 50th Anniversary” on Friday, LACMA screens tonight at 7:30 Manuel Poirier’s “Western,” this year’s winner of the jury prize. “Western” is a potentially wonderful movie, and a Unifrance representative reports that Poirier is working on trimming its unconscionable 136-minute running time by 20 minutes. It has a terrific beginning and ending but, in its present cut, sags mightily in the middle. (“Western” is a misnomer: “Road Movie” is more like it.)

It begins with a burly, pleasant-looking young Catalan shoe salesman, Paco (Sergi Lopez), stranded in a Brittany town of endearing picturesqueness. An even more charming shopkeeper (Marie Matheron) gives him shelter. Just as these two seem to be heading into a delightful romance, Poirier cleverly shifts plot gears and propels Paco into a three-week Brittany ramble with a slight, wistful Russian emigre Nino (Sacha Bourdu).

They are a very likable duo, and the Bretons prove by and large amiable, but in depicting meandering, the film itself meanders. As the film’s structure is episodic, it should not be too difficult for Poirier to sweat out a couple of segments, bringing us more quickly to a finale in which he deftly makes the point of how badly men need a port in a storm, especially when they’re in a foreign land.

Sponsored by Playboy Enterprises, LACMA’s retrospective of winners of top Cannes prizes gets underway Friday at 7:30 p.m. with a major double feature, starting with “A Man Escaped.” The film won Robert Bresson the best director prize in 1957 for his rigorous, compelling step-by-step re-creation of an escape plan devised by a member (Francois Leterrier) of the French Resistance imprisoned by the Nazis.

As always in a Bresson film, his hero’s quest for freedom becomes a spiritual odyssey. If this landmark film seems exceptionally authentic to you, it should, for not only is it based on an actual incident, it was re-created from the account of the hero’s teenage cellmate.

Playing with it is Luis Bun~uel’s “Viridiana,” named the best film at Cannes in 1961. After an absence of 29 years, Bun~uel returned to his native Spain. He managed to get the script past the Franco censors only to create a film sure to be banned.

An all-out attack on Catholicism’s sins of hypocrisy, “Viridiana” has in its title role Silvia Pinal, then a top international star in the Spanish-language cinema. As a novice about to take her final vows to become a nun, Viridiana has been ill-used by her uncle (Fernando Rey) and his son (Francisco Rabal).

In an act of charity, she turns the uncle’s estate into a shelter for disabled homeless people and beggars, who at one point participate in Bun~uel’s devastating parody of the Last Supper. The film drew a condemnation from the Vatican followed by international success and acclaim for Bun~uel.

Screening Saturday at 7:30 p.m. is the restored version of H.G. Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear,” a suspense classic that won both the grand prize and the best direction award in 1953. As first released, it became a suspense classic, despite having been trimmed by 43 minutes. In the restored version, the film emerges as considerably more than an exceptionally taut thriller.

Four Europeans (Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli and Peter Van Eyck) are stranded in a remote South American village, headquarters for an American oil company. They are hired, for $2,000 each, to deliver a ton of nitroglycerin over terrible mountain roads in order to put out a fire at a distant well. Lulli and Van Eyck take one truck, Montand and Vanel another. The uncut version most of all reveals the full extent of the film’s prophetic indictment of U.S. south-of-the-border imperialism, plus enriching the relationships among the four men and enabling the film to become a far more comprehensive study of character and human nature. Information: (213) 857-6010 or Ticketmaster: (213) 480-3232.

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George Casey’s “Alaska: Spirit of the Wild,” which opens Friday at the Imax Theater in Exposition Park, is a glorious 40-minute nature film celebrating the natural splendor of our 49th state with special emphasis on its richly varied animal life, which we observe coping with the changes of the seasons. There are plenty of cavorting bears, whales and sea lions to delight children, yet the narration, spoken eloquently by Charlton Heston, encourages reverence for nature’s eternal cycles in settings of unspoiled grandeur. Information: (213) 744-2014.

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Dave Wewee’s “Cause ‘N’ Defect,” which screens Friday only at 8 p.m. at the Alex Theater, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale, is an especially fresh and engaging coming-of-age film, loaded with humor and vivid characterizations. Don’t be thrown by a bizarre pre-credit sequence set in Los Angeles, for although the story begins in a small town in Oregon, it is set in L.A. Like many another film about young people in L.A., “Cause ‘N’ Defect” shows how tough it can be simply to survive in the City of Angels.

Twentysomething Danny (Don Handfield, talented and promising) heads to the Southland, where he hopes to get financial aid to attend college. (He might have best checked that out before leaving home.)

In a neighborhood bar, Danny meets Bill (Brad Sergi), a rugged, bearded 40-ish guy, very warm and friendly, who’d like to hire Danny to deliver pot to his regular yuppie customers. Bill makes it sound not at all risky, but “Cause ‘N’ Defect” makes convincingly clear how swiftly a naif like Danny can become swept up in big-time trouble.

Sergi is great at revealing the bad guy lurking just beneath the avuncular surface, and there are strong turns by Ken Arquello as Bill’s crazed partner Rudy and by Daniel Murray as Bill’s wised-up former delivery boy.

Along with the screening, there will be live performances by two of the bands featured on the film’s soundtrack, 12 Hour Mary at 7 p.m. and Ruby Diver at 10 p.m. Information: (310) 568-1561.

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Laemmle Theaters’ fifth annual “Classic Western Roundup” begins Friday at the Monica 4-Plex with a one-week run of Richard Brooks’ vigorous, lusty 1966 “The Professionals,” in which four soldiers of fortune (Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan and Woody Strodes) are hired by tycoon Ralph Bellamy to rescue his beautiful young wife (Claudia Cardinale) from bandido kidnapper Jack Palance. Brooks received Oscar nominations for both his script and his direction of “The Professionals,” which is returning with a brand-new 35-millimeter Panavision print struck by Columbia Pictures’ Repertory Division.

“The Professionals” launches a Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. series, commencing June 28 and 29 with “Shane” and continuing through Aug. 30 and 31. Information: (310) 394-9741.

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“Swingers’ Handbook,” an American Cinematheque series of vintage films that may teach you how to act cool, begins tonight at 7:15 with “A Guide for the Married Man” (1967), in which Walter Matthau gets lessons from Robert Morse on how to commit adultery. It wasn’t all that funny, if memory serves, but it has an amazing lineup of cameos, ranging from Jack Benny and Lucille Ball to Sid Caesar to Jayne Mansfield. Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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Laura Dern will be the first guest of the American Cinematheque’s new monthly series, “A One-Night Stand With . . . ,” in which guests will speak after the screening of one of their films. The film will be “Citizen Ruth,” in which Dern stars as a feckless young woman inadvertently caught up in a controversy over abortion; it will screen at 8 p.m. Saturday at Raleigh Studios. Information: (213) 466-FILM.