A Treat for Cinephiles: Rialto Pictures

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AS MOVIE BUFFS warm themselves by the glow of their plasma screens, classic cinema is getting harder to come by in the theater.

Over the next few weeks, the AFI Silver presents the best of Rialto Pictures, a distributor that for 10 years has fought to ensure that art-house monuments are seen as they were intended: in public, in the dark, larger than life and without someone phoning every 20 minutes.

This weekend's offerings include "The Third Man," dubbed "probably one of the best, if not the greatest, non-auteur films ever made" by no less an authority than Peter "I Had a Drink With That Guy" Bogdanovich, high praise indeed from a fellow who drops the names of only the finest.

The Bog apparently wasn't pals with the picture's director, but Orson (Welles, of course) told him that Carol Reed needed no help from him.

Although Reed would go on to ignominy with "The Agony and the Ecstasy," in 1949 the journeyman Brit delivered the goods with a suspenseful, atmospheric Euro-noir about an American pulp writer trying to get the goods on a friend's death. Shot largely on location in postwar Vienna, the film is awash in echo and shadow. Dutch tilts, untranslated dialogue and bombed-out swathes of wasteland combine to suggest both claustrophobia and a conspiracy that stretches past the hero's comprehension.

Next week, "Rififi" represents the best of Jules Dassin, who would eventually hook up with Melina Mercouri to deliver patronizing corn like "Never on Sunday." But in 1955, he was at the top of his game, fighting to hold on to his career as McCarthyists, having already hounded him from the States, sabotaged projects across Europe. It's no accident that his caper flick, famously built around a wordless half-hour heist sequence, is about getting hard work done in the face of your enemies and under the nose of the authorities.

Starting Saturday afternoon is 1966's "Au Hasard Balthazar," by Robert Bresson. You might not think a slow-paced story about an ill-used donkey would make for one of the most moving experiences in cinema. But then you'd be the ass.

» AFI Silver, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring; see afi.com/silver/new for full schedule, $6.75-$9.75; 301-495-6700. (Silver Spring)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon

Photos courtesy Rialto Pictures