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A remarkable first feature, “George Washington” [USA – Cowboy Booking International] is the handiwork of a 25-year-old writer-director, David Gordon Green. This alternately lyrical and raffish study of mixed-race relations among young folks in an impoverished rust belt town near Winston Salem, NC, is an oddity. It is by turns, a rueful or picaresque and high-spirited curiosity centering around a black youth wearing a football helmet to protect his soft, unformed skull. The boy’s aspiration is first to act and, finally, to become heroic, so he is nicknamed “George Washington,” and, at the end, he is wearing the tights and cape of a comic-strip hero. Essentially, “George Washington” is another “River’s Edge,” with a group of youngsters banding together to conceal the circumstances of the death of one of their own, which occurs early in the picture.

Some of Green’s crucial story points are fudged in the editing. For instance, we can only infer who were the passengers in a key car wreck and attempt to puzzle out who survived. But for an ambitious, color, CinemaScope feature, shot in 12 days (by gifted cinemtographer Tim Orr) on a budget of under $500,000, the result is quite spectacular.

I don’t know of a director since Mulligan or Truffaut who has obtained such remarkably non-self-conscious performances from non-professional kids — and their elders — all of whom Green enables to bloom before his camera. These untrained kids actually speak Green’s text as though it was their own speech.

I am grateful to my friend Armond White, a film critic of New York Press and Film Comment, for touting this unheralded film to me. It’s a beaut.

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Ingmar Bergman is alive and well and still writing autobiographical screenplays–which he no longer directs. Bergman has entrusted his latest, “Faithless,” [Sweden – Samuel Goldwyn Films/Fireworks] to the direction of his former leading lady and partner, Liv Ullmann.

After Mr.B. gave Ullmann the script, he suggested that they not discuss it until she had completed the film. True to his non-interventionist word, Bergman didn’t say anything until Ullmann showed him her rough cut, two years later.

Although Ullmann is, obviously, neither as prolific nor as brilliant a film director as Bergman, “Faithless” deserves to be seen for its dissection of adulterous jealousy and its permutations and fall-out. It also boasts a great, star turn by the dazzling Swedish stage star, Lena Endre. “Faithless” begins with an ancient screenwriter (Erland Josephson) named Bergman who conjures up the screenplay with the help of the leading lady (Endre). The ensuing film features such evident autobiographical references as Bergman’s island retreat. Moreover, it features a seducing film director (Krister Henriksson) who, as a close family friend, makes both himself and a loyal wife (Endre) “faithless” to a renowned conductor (Thomas Hanzon) and the couple’s young daughter, who becomes the helpless pawn in her parents’ battle over her custody.

Ullmann claims that Bergman only furnished the film’s dialogue, while she provided all of its “stage directions.” Unhappily, Ullmann views Bergman’s text as holy writ, for, at two hours and 35 minutes, the picture feels decidedly overlong. Nor does the tiresome sameness of Ullmann’s over-the-shoulder shots help matters.

But, overall, there is something invigorating about another round of Bergman’s marital misery on screen and I always enjoy a return to his isle of discord. The picture has so many unexpected twists that we are reminded of Bergman’s gift as a master story-teller even when he is not providing his film’s mise-en-scene.

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“Pollock,” [Sony Pictures Classics], Ed Harris’s eight-years in-the-making biography of the painter, was justly singled out as the Festival’s Centerpiece. It may be the first instance of an actor showcasing himself well enough to win the best male actor Oscar.

Harris’s performance as the tormented artist is as uncompromising as Robert DeNiro’s violent Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” Both actors gained considerable weight to show their characters’ dissipation with age (Harris took off filming for six weeks to put on 35 pounds) and both were unafraid of showing their protagonists’ ugliest features.

Harris’s depiction of the artist as an abusive drunk begins at the very start of the film. Pollock cleaned up his act and achieved his signature drip style when he and painter wife, Lee Krasner (the brilliant Marcia Gay Harden), left Manhattan for Long Island’s South Fork. He falls off the wagon once more when he finds no new style to succeed his innovative splatter technique.

Harden adopts a heavy and authentic Brooklyn accent to match the actual speech of Lee Krasner. When Pollock once more hits the bottle and the sheets with a young admirer, Harden makes us feel Krasner’s keen sense of betrayal as well as her certain knowledge that booze will deprive Pollock of his artistry.

I find “Pollock” superior to all of the other tormented artist screen biographies, including three of Vincent Van Gogh. Unusually, it dares to include some of the critical appraisals of Pollock’s work by the leading art critics of his day which, for a time, bouyed Pollock’s depressive spirits and his asking price.

Part of the picture’s weakness is that, in order to grasp it, you have to know a bit about the New York art world of ’40s and ’50s and, especially, who Peggy Guggenheim, Clement Greenberg, and Willem de Kooning were. Amy Madigan (Harris’s wife) is splendid, though unrecognizable, as Guggenheim. Val Kilmer, as de Kooning, is wasted in a part, cut to a bit, of the painter whose talent awed Pollock.

I find the dourness of Barbara Turner, who co-authored the screenplay of “Pollack” with Susan J. Emshwiller, as pervasive and overbearing here as in Turner’s 1995 script, “Georgia,” for her daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh.. “Pollack” could use some more lighthearted moments such as the one when the drunken Pollock ejaculates prematurely while awkwardly attempting to service his demanding patron, Guggenheim.

Finally, “Pollock” is a less accomplished film than “Raging Bull” because Harris is not yet the virtuoso director Scorsese was in mid-career. This is, after all, only Harris’ first effort as a filmmaker.

But “Pollock” is unforgettable for the combative interplay of Harris and Harden — what a phenomenal acting team they make! How I want to see the film again to watch them. And when Harris has a truly histrionic moment in clearing a fully set table, a la Stanley Kowalski, or gets the inspiration to paint his breakthough, monumental, abstract mural in Peggy Guggenheim’s townhouse hallway, Harris has the combined directing and acting talent to capture these moments vividly.

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Athol Fugard’s celebrated stage play, “Boesman and Lena” (1971) is, basically, a sordid two-hander depicting the unending feud between a pair of indomitable survivors: an Afrikaner husband and wife forced to tramp the wilderness as they are outcast by their mixed-racial geneology. For the blacklisted American film director John Barry, who could not work in the U.S.– except to mount a stage revival of “Boesman and Lena” — the film has all the attributes of a personal allegory. The play has been revived often in New York for famous black actors, such as Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and James Earl Jones. It has now found French backing [France/South Africa – Kino International] as a vehicle for two African-American film stars, Danny Glover and Angela Bassett, who over- emote to lesser and lesser effect as the film wears on.

“Boesman and Lena” reminds us that theatre pieces very rarely translate well into films, even with the inclusion of flashbacks showing Danny and Angela looking younger and happier in the past, which the play, obviously, lacks. From the couple’s mutual, evoked memory of a joyous mating dance, shown near the end of the film, you might mistake this squalid bore for a comedy.

“Boesman” became the final film for the 82-year-old Barry, who died in late 1999, just after completing “Boesman’s” post-production. Barry died in Paris, where he had emigrated nearly 50 years before, when his American career was terminated after he had made his best film, “He Ran All the Way,” (1951), starring Barry’s fellow Leftist, John Garfield.

The irony is that if “Boesman and Lena” had been made in the US, the white Barry would likely have been prevented from making a film with two American black stars by the same African-American protectionist organizations which kept Norman Jewison from making his film of Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” in 1968.

“Boesman and Lena” is no “Waiting for Godot” although it would dearly like to be. Beckett’s play, about the futility of existence, is supremely funny and sad. “Boesman and Lena” is neither.

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As a retrospective selection, the Festival offered a superb, little known Budd Boetticher western, “Seven Men From Now” (1956, color, Scope, Warner Bros.) produced by John Wayne’s company, Batjac. The plot seems like conventional western fare — vengeful ex-sheriff (Randolph Scott), while aiding a hapless, Eastern husband and wife (Gail Russell) trek cross-country in their covered wagon, hunts for and implacably guns down the “seven” who shot and killed his wife in a Wells Fargo holdup. One of this fine, B-picture’s notable features is the intelligent screenplay by future-director Burt Kennedy, which won him the lifetime friendship of Boetticher. The script keeps unfolding its backstory for two-thirds of its 78-minute length. Kennedy’s plotting is as intricate as a chess match and his dialogue has real bite.

The film’s other distinction is the startling performance by third-billed Lee Marvin as the ultra-cocky villain, slain in the final shoot-out with Scott. You can tell just what an ingenious scene-stealer Marvin had become, five years into his film career. He cops a light from the ciggie of the Wells Fargo ringleader he has just shot and killed. He’s truly wicked! Only Gail Russell as Scott’s renounced romantic interest is worn and drab. Future leading man Stuart Whitman appears early and briefly as message-bearing cavalry officer.

UCLA’s Film and TV Archive has done its usual resplendent job of restoration. It was a surprise to see Budd Boetticher, 85, hobbling in to his Festival press conference on two canes due to hip replacement surgery. The great director claimed that the print of “Seven Men from Now” looked better today than it did 44 years ago. Boetticher was verbally frisky and irreverent throughout his give and take with the press.. He explained that Burt Kennedy could not attend because he was “desperately ill” (and has since passed away.)

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The successful painter, Julian Schnabel, has made his second painterly and sensationalist biographical film about a doomed artist. In his first, “Basquiat,” (1996), the young, black, primitive painter protagonist succumbs to a drug overdose. In Schnabel’s new one, “Before Night Falls,” the Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas — exiled to the South Bronx and wasted by AIDS — has his companion suffocate him. “Before Night Falls” is the title of Arenas’ posthumously published autobiography — a paen to the joys and freedom of gay life in Havana prior-to-Castro, whom the poet initially worshipped as his country’s liberator. Even in the detention camps mandated by the repressive Castro regime to regiment gays, Arenas discovered both literary and homosexual outlets.

Just as Schnabel found a perfect Basquiat in the actor Jeffrey Wright, he has the ideal Arenas in Javier Bardem, Spain’s leading male film star and a near look-alike for Arenas. Bardem’s characterization is vivid enough to have garnered the award for the best actor at the Venice Film Festival. Bardem is tremendous in the part; but requiring him to narrate the film, no less attempt English dialogue, is unfair to an actor who does not speak English. Olivier Martinez, who plays Arenas’s brutal and perfidious lover, has the same problem. I found the picture nearly incomprehensible verbally, except for two cameos by Johnny Depp as an extravagant prison drag queen and as a sadistic prison guard who uses his crotch to entice Arenas. In a brief bit part, Sean Penn uses a heavy Spanish accent to play a wagon driver, but even with their accents, Penn and Depp are Gringo-clear to American ears, while Bardem and Martinez are not.

Towards the end of the film, Arenas/Bardem recites a poem in Cuban- accented Spanish (which Bardem said was particularly difficult for him, a resident of Madrid, to attempt) accompanied by cityscapes of Havana, Miami, and New York. The audience breathed a collective sigh of relief. For once, they could understand Bardem because of the use of sub-titles. In fact, if the film cannot be redubbed, Fine Line should consider sub-titling it, in its entirety, as “Trainspotting” was to compensate for its impossible Scots speech.

[I am informed that at the Toronto Film Festival and at a late November screening at Disney’s New York theater, Bardem and Martinez’s English was quite comprehensible. Attribute the anomaly to the Alice Tully Hall sound system as well as my aging ears.]

“Before Night Falls,” however, is not to be missed because Schnabel the painter’s imagery is stunning. For example, fifty or so inmates, by fire-light, hold out bits of precious soap on strings to entice Arenas to write their letters for them. Because we have never seen anything like this weird transaction before, it takes a while to comprehend the meaning of the amazing image. (At first, I thought the prisoners were extending candles.) Another scene is ambiguous but it becomes hilarious as soon as we get it. Depp, as the delirious drag queen, is shown shuffling painfully through the prison’s corridors. When it’s clear that the transvestite’s discomfort and peculiar walk is due to his having secreted Arenas’ pages in a tube up his capacious rectum (in order to spirit them out to a foreign publisher), the audience broke into a jubilant roar.

In “Before Night Falls,” Schnabel returns to his “Basquiat” towering wave and water imagery. In person, the painter has, a la Gauguin, taken to wearing a yellow print sarong around his protuberant belly. Schnabel may be eccentric, but his second film seems to be superior to his signature, crockery-pierced paintings.

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