By Rebecca Ostriker, Globe Staff, 6/20/2004

I think it was that scene in the Paris sewers, with the light streaming down from a hole in the street like rays from cinematographers' heaven. That's when I gave up and started liking Rene Clement's "Is Paris Burning?"

The 1966 film is a valentine to the French Resistance during World War II, and it's an absurd bouillabaisse: The mood-swinging script is by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola; the mismatched multinational cast includes Orson Welles, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford, Anthony Perkins, and virtually every star of the French New Wave. It's hilariously anachronistic: The Nazis are all out of "Hogan's Heroes," while the beautiful women, with their long hair and tight skirts -- including Leslie Caron as a fearless fighter in pearls! -- could have stepped out of a Godard film.

But Paris looks beautiful in black and white. All the little boulangeries, the view from the rooftops near Notre Dame, the boulevards filled with bicycles -- even those sewers -- get a romantic salute, and the film's loving backward glance alone makes it worth watching. That and seeing the pudgy Welles, during an ostensibly tense negotiation scene, lick chocolate frosting off a cake in a German general's pantry.

"Is Paris Burning?" is part of "Treasures From the Harvard Film Archive: A-Z," a summer series of double features that starts Saturday and runs through Aug. 15. In some ways, it's emblematic of this potpourri of a program, which is drawn from the HFA's trove of 9,000 prints. Throughout, gems are nestled in cherished settings, and pleasures can be had in unexpected juxtapositions.

The series is organized alphabetically. "B Is for Backstage" (June 28-29), for example, includes "Sweethearts," a 1938 Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical about a Broadway couple that gets extra zing from a screenplay co-written by Dorothy Parker. It's matched with "The Boy Friend" (1971), Ken Russell's flamboyant Busby Berkeley pastiche featuring Twiggy's film debut as a fantasy-prone stage ingenue.

On July 23-24, "M Is for Mack the Knife" features G.W. Pabst's "The Threepenny Opera" (1931) -- minus some of Bertolt Brecht's bite, but with Lotte Lenya saying all that needs to be said in the way she slumps across a room, and with Kurt Weil's music mostly, gloriously, intact. It's next to Peter Brook's little-seen version of the work on which "Threepenny" is based: "The Beggar's Opera," featuring, of all things, a singing Laurence Olivier.

"We know what we have in our collection, and this is really the opportunity to find clever and interesting ways to put these films together," says HFA programmer Ted Barron. "There are so many films that draw from others. . . . What's fun about `A-Z' is it gives us the opportunity to put them together."

Some pairings offer striking contrasts. "U Is for University Professors" (Aug. 7-8), for example, matches the ruminative elderly doctor of Ingmar Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" with the babel of chattering, sex-obsessed academics in Denys Arcand's "The Decline of the American Empire." In "L Is for Lost in Translation" (July 20, 22), the common thread is Japan, but "The Geisha Boy" (1958) is a Jerry Lewis comedy (aficionados, you know who you are), while "The Saga of Anatahan" (1954) is a stylized drama featuring Kabuki-trained actors that was director Josef von Sternberg's swan song.

Other pairs feel like close cousins. Take "Y Is for Yellow Journalism" (Aug. 12), which offers two looks at the seamier side of the newspaper business, one affectionate, one not. In "The Front Page" (1931), the wisecracks rattle past like locomotives, including this summation of the reporter's life: "Journalists! Peeking through keyholes! Running after fire engines . . . . A lot of daffy buttinskis, swelling around with holes in their pants, borrowing nickels from office boys. And for what? So a million hired girls and motormen's wives will know what's going on." It's a short stroll from that blithe cynicism to the darker vision of "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), in which an unscrupulous gossip columnist says acidly, "My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in 30 years."

One show that's always a hit, says Barron, is "T Is for Trailers Trailers Trailers," a collection compiled and introduced by HFA conservator Julie Buck. Vintage trailers embody both the history of film and the history of advertising, "all wrapped up into one big bonbon of fun," Buck says. There are more than 1,500 trailers in the HFA's collection; this year's picks include an exploitation film from the '30s called "Marijuana" and the young Arnold Schwarzenegger in "Conan the Barbarian."

It's nice to see the HFA's tribute "G is for [Spalding] Gray Day" (July 10), featuring two of the late actor/writer's best-known works: "Swimming to Cambodia" (1987) and "Monster in a Box" (1992). In these monologues, Gray seemed like the most fascinating dinner-party guest imaginable: funny and self-revealing, setting off insights like Fourth of July sparklers. Now we know he was also struggling with depression and, near the end, despair. To paraphrase Walt Whitman: Like this film series, Gray was large; he contained multitudes.

"Treasures From the Harvard Film Archive: A-Z" begins Saturday and continues through Aug. 15. A special pass to see every screening (more than 50 films) is available for $90. For more information and a complete schedule, visit www.harvardfilmarchive.org.

This story ran on page N10 of the Boston Globe on 6/20/2004. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

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