Gangster

In two surprise openings, the Charles offers five-day runs of films that provide terrific holiday-season counter-programming. In Ramona Diaz's remarkable documentary Imelda, the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, emerges as an improbable blend of Jackie Kennedy and Evita Peron, with (at least in her own mind) a bit of Mrs. Santa Claus mixed in. A singing beauty who helped her husband Ferdinand to the presidency and increased her support and personal power as he moved from democrat to dictator, she's a remarkable character.

THOSE WHO didn't make it to see the restored print of Touchez Pas Au Grisbi (in English, "Don't touch the loot!") at the AFI Silver last fall should seize the chance to see it this week at the Charles. This seminal 1954 gangster picture is a great choice to kick off the theater's latest revival calendar. Telling the story of two criminals pushing past their prime - a master thief named Max (Jean Gabin) and his unreliable right-hand man, Riton (Rene Dary) - legendary filmmaker Jacques Becker set the mark high for directors of later Gallic heist films.

Val Kilmer throws his head back and laughs at the question. Then he narrows his eyes and furrows his brow. He looks skyward to ponder the question for a few moments. "Hmmm, there must have been one," he says. "Oh, what about Top Gun? I suppose that was one. "And Batman Forever. That was definitely one. And I really thought Red Planet was one, although it didn't turn out to be one." He shakes his head. "That might be it. I can't think of any more." The question was: "Have you ever picked a role because it might actually help your career?

The most scintillating movie receiving its area debut this weekend (at the AFI Silver Spring) is the seminal 1954 French gangster picture Touchez Pas Aus Grisbi or, in English, "Don't touch the loot!" Essential viewing for lovers of later Gallic heist films like Rififi, Grisbi is distinctive from the start for mixing macho stylishness and irony with intimations of mortality. Telling the story of two criminals pushing past their prime - a master thief named Max (Jean Gabin) and his unreliable right-hand-man, Riton (Rene Dary)

Twenty-five years ago Al Pacino was walking down Sunset Boulevard with some friends when he passed a revival theater showing Scarface, the 1932 classic directed by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht about the rise and fall of a Chicago gangster, played by Paul Muni. Pacino promptly purchased a ticket. "I had been wanting to see it since '74, when I had done a workshop production of Arturo Ui," said Pacino, referring to Bertolt Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a thinly veiled fable about Hitler's rise to power set in the world of Chicago gangsters.

COUDERAY, Wis. - There's not much here, even if you count the abandoned general store, shuttered antique shop and vacant bar lined up along the slight strip that passes for a downtown. Beyond the clapboard church and stone post office, this remote town consists mostly of thick forests, a blue lake and vacation homes. The area is good for hunting and fishing - and peace and quiet. As folks nicknamed The Terrible, Machine Gun and Greasy Thumb discovered. During the 1920s and 1930s, rural Wisconsin and Minnesota were a summer sanctuary for gangsters.

MOSCOW -- Corrupt police officers linked with gangsters have been planting false evidence on victims and extorting bribes from them, Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov said yesterday amid a wave of arrests. These "wolves in sheep's clothing" include agents of the criminal investigation department of the Moscow police, Gryzlov told reporters, adding that they have "planted handguns and drugs, instituted criminal investigations and then extorted money for closing them." Gryzlov portrayed the new wave of searches and arrests as the first step in a "war on organized crime and corruption," which he proclaimed Friday during a visit to the southern city of Rostov-on-Don.

The AFI Silver Theatre opens a restored print of Jean Cocteau's 1946 Beauty and the Beast today for a two-week run. With the clear-eyed, soulful Josette Day as the Beauty and dashing Jean Marais as both her thick-headed village suitor and the gallant Beast, it has picture-perfect casting. Costumed and (in the case of the Beast) made up by Christian Berard, the performers are 18th-century etchings sprung to life - but with dimensions rarely found in storybook illustrations. The Beast is a predatory Puss 'n' Boots.

Tim Reid decided early in his acting days that he wanted to be a producer, too - to hold the reins of his career. That realization hit right about the time when a white network official fired him from a proposed television show because he wasn't "black enough." "I'm not sure black folks fully understand the power that media has in our life," Reid told roughly 200 people yesterday at the Carl Murphy Fine Arts Center. "We are becoming who they portray us as being. We've allowed ourselves to become a collection of negative statistics.

Jean-Pierre Melville, who died in 1973, was one of France's towering movie mavericks and most striking individualists - for starters, he changed his name from Grumbach after reading Moby Dick. Forty minutes longer than the previous American-release version, the complete cut of Melville's 1970 Le Cercle Rouge, receiving its regional premiere today at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, reveals this hard-guy epic to be a great, eccentric gangster film. A self-styled classicist and loner, who wore dark suits with stetsons or fedoras like his beloved action-movie heroes, Melville inspired the New Wave with his ingenious, low-budget techniques.