Blood and Sand/Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison
(1941/1957) As fantastic a serving of Iberiana as the movies ever gave us. Despite the exotic locales and the Prado-worthy imagery in Technicolor, it is a fairly simple yarn: Tyrone Power plays a humble bullfighter ruined by a bad girl. As a bullfighting critic (!), played by Laird Cregar, comments, "If this is death in the afternoon, she is death in the evening." "She" is the as-always treacherous Rita Hayworth, who soon finds her attention span straying. BILLED WITH Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. A shipwrecked Marine (Robert Mitchum, the wrong man for the job) is stranded deep in the South Pacific with a prim nun (Deborah Kerr). Kerr is as good with an Irish accent as she was with the Scots dialect in the original Casino Royale, but it's a basically unappetizing film, correctly remembered as a poor cousin to director John Huston's earlier The African Queen. (Plays Dec 15 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

Cleopatra
(1962) A priceless evocation of an ancient era lost in the sands of time: namely 1962. The definitively bankrupting version of the Cleopatra story; Elizabeth Taylor in the lead, sitting prettily while Mark Anthony (Richard Burton) and Rex Harrison contend for her hand. A legendary debacle. Conceived of as a small Joan Collins film, the movie began to grow; after being signed on for the first $1 million salary ever paid to an actor, Taylor fell ill to meningitis and a near-fatal case of lobar pneumonia. The original sets were built near London, with the Thames giving an Oscar-worthy performance as the Nile; predictably fog and rain drove the cast to Cinecittà in Rome. Then came a flurry of new scripts (Lawrence Durrell did one pass), gossip, strikes and cries of agony from the director Joseph Mankiewicz. The backstory has far more skullduggery than what's onscreen. (Plays Dec 16-17 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

Lancer Spy/Lifeboat
(1937/1944) George Sanders plays an Englishman who is the exact double of a German officer; while undercover in the Kaiser's Reich, he's hunted by a German spy (Dolores Del Rio). BILLED WITH Lifeboat. Hitchcock's experimental drama, talking place in a lifeboat full of survivors of a torpedoed freighter. As they try to survive, they begin to realize that one of their number is a Nazi. This is Tallulah Bankhead's most significant movie role. Here, one sees, half-drowned (by booze, not seawater), the beauty that made Bankhead swarmed by admirers of both sexes during her heyday in the 1920s. Walter Slezak co-stars. (Plays Dec 13-14 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

Miracle on 34th Street
(1947) Edmund Gwenn plays an old department-store Santa who is convinced that he's the real Santa Claus; Natalie Wood co-stars as a little girl who believes his tale. (Plays Dec 18-20 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

The Transformers: The Movie
(1986) See Cult Leader. (Plays Dec 15 at midnight in Campbell at Camera 7 and Dec 16 at midnight at Camera 12.)

White Christmas
(1954) To bail out their former officer, owner of a rural resort that is going bankrupt, a pair of song-and-dance men (Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye) offer to set up a show to lure in the trade. Fifteen second-tier Irving Berlin songs include "the inevitable title dirge" (John Douglas Eames); it was the first film shot in VistaVision, and for what it's worth Rosemary Clooney steals the movie. (Plays Dec 17 at 7:30 in San Jose at a free show at the California Theatre; organ recital first at 6:45; also plays Dec 18-20 in Palo Alto at the Stanford Theatre.)

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