Over the years, I've seen many of Mr. Shepard's productions on stage, and I recall being moderately impressed by their explosive renderings of family conflicts and sibling rivalries, but I can't say they've continued to resonate in my mind. Yet with all the honors the 60-year-old Mr. Shepard has received over his 40-year career-as an actor, playwright and screenwriter, stage and screen director, poet, journalist, short-story writer, monologist and celebrated movie hunk besides-he qualifies as the closest thing we have to a bona fide Renaissance man.

Since it's unlikely that many people will bother to see this latest manifestation of Mr. Shepard in Mr. Almereyda's difficult-to-describe nonfiction enterprise, it's reasonable to assume that Mr. Shepard had some compelling personal reason to reveal some hitherto guarded aspects of himself-if only to himself and his most devoted admirers. Mr. Almereyda gives us a clue as he recalls the initiation of the project: "When Sam Shepard asked me to make a movie about his new play, neither of us had a fixed idea about what would come of it. I showed up with digital-video cameras and a small crew. Soon enough, I had cause to realize how rare it is for actors to allow themselves to be filmed in rehearsal-under pressure, searching, exposed."

Mr. Almereyda goes on to describe the imponderables of his own modus operandi: "In the editing room, I considered resorting to half-whispered narration-like what you'd get in a nature program about lemurs in Madagascar, tracking the elusive creatures in their natural habitat. A certain rawness, an element of exposure, lingers in the finished movie. There's something thrilling, I think, in the spectacle of working actors-in T-shirts, pajamas and a variety of odd hats-recklessly flinging themselves from the heights of Sam Shepard's language. And there's something equally fascinating in watching Mr. Shepard wrestle in public with the ghost of his father, whose death triggered the writing of the play."

So there we have it. Mr. Shepard wanted to say something about his feelings for his father, dead or alive-or, rather, dead and resurrected-in the messy process of bringing a literary conceit to life by collaborating with a troupe of largely autonomous actors. It's a blurry form of double exposure, if you will, an uneasy mixture of rhetorical affectation with bits and pieces of confessional sincerity. Since I've only seen Messrs. Nolte, Penn, Harrelson, Gammon and Marin on the screen (I can't remember ever having seen Ms. Tousey in any medium), I can only speculate on how good any of these people were onstage. There is no substitute, after all, for physical immediacy. But what were they showing me? Something that looked like good stage work represented through the medium of film, or the real thing? It's a tricky proposition any way you look at it, especially when the writer and director, Mr. Shepard, is giving his own intuitively expert performance. The awkward moment when Mr. Shepard begins to tease Mr. Nolte about his football days at the University of Nebraska is alone worth the price of admission. Otherwise, This So-Called Disaster is an unbridled orgy of uninhibited Stanislavsky.

Retracing the Tramp

Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) at the Film Forum was either hailed or reviled in its time as the first Chaplin film to tackle a theme of social significance with any degree of ideological consistency. Yet its alleged topicality was always the least of its charms. Chaplin, like René Clair before him in À Nous la Liberté (1931) and Jacques Tati after him in Mon Oncle (1958), hated machinery for reasons more aesthetic than ecological-an attitude more Luddite than Leninist. Still, the mechanical feeding sequence in Modern Times is probably the funniest routine in cinema history. It's hardly surprising that the humor is derived not from the historical logic or technological plausibility of the feeder, but from Charlie's goggle-eyed reaction to his mechanical tormentor. Chaplin's factory may be half–René Clair pseudo-modern and half–Fritz Lang comic-strip totalitarian, but Chaplin himself is the supreme cinematic performer of all time.

Nonetheless, it's hard to believe today that an astute 30's critic like Meyer Levin could praise Chaplin for aligning the Tramp with the world's working stiffs. The feeling that emerges most clearly from Chaplin's characterization is a studied distaste for his comrades in industry. Nothing personal or anti-socialistic, mind you; the Tramp just happens to hate work, and this hatred is consistent with the logic of his classical prototypes. He may chortle at the dove-like gyrations of a young middle-class couple, but he ends up yearning for the most grotesque tokens of economic security-a cow to be milked at the front door, grapevines crawling around the cottage like Virginia creepers, and a resourceful street gamine as immaculate child bride (played by Paulette Goddard-here and in The Great Dictator -as the urban descendant of Mary Pickford's girl of the rural slums). For the sake of this regressively childlike and sexless ménage, the Tramp announces proudly that he will make the supreme sacrifice and go to work. He is clearly one of the poetically unemployed, Mr. Micawber masquerading as Mother Courage.

At times, the Tramp's happiness is uncomfortably opportunistic. Unjustly imprisoned, he thwarts an attempted jailbreak and is rewarded with a comfortable cell and other special privileges. The siren call of liberty holds no charm for him, and his fellow convicts, like his fellow workers, sink into the slough of anonymous grayness reserved for abject creatures of economic necessity; hardly the stuff of comrades in arms for the supposedly oncoming revolution. All in all, Chaplin's Tramp gets off quite a few stops before the Finland Station.

The Western Front

Also being revived at Film Forum is Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (1952), from a screenplay by Carl Foreman and produced by Stanley Kramer. The press release claims the film is the favorite Western of three Presidents, Reagan, Clinton and Bush II. It's certainly not mine, but if you've never seen it, you could do a lot worse these days than to check it out, particularly with this spanking new print struck directly from the original negative, which is unprecedented even for its original release 52 years ago.

This 85-minute Oscar contender came out at a time when Oscar contenders could run for only 85 minutes without being considered hopelessly unimportant. The story concerns an aging sheriff (Gary Cooper) about to retire with his Quaker bride (Grace Kelly) and move to another town in the Old West to operate a grocery store. But he's forced to confront a returning outlaw (Ian MacDonald), just released from prison and vowing revenge with his gang on the sheriff who sent him there in the first place. To make matters more desperate, and more bitterly ironic, the sheriff is abandoned by the whole town, which he has made safe for its law-abiding citizens. Even his deputy (Lloyd Bridges) deserts him out of pique at not having been named his successor.

High Noon is one of the least scenic and horse-oriented Westerns ever made, as all the action is confined to a dusty town and its train station, where the arch villain is scheduled to arrive shortly before high noon on Judgment Day. There are innumerable shots of clocks taken from all angles, punctuating with showy montage the suspenseful passage of time.

Howard Hawks once asserted that his Rio Bravo (1959), with John Wayne and Dean Martin in the lead roles, was partly intended as a rebuke to High Noon , which spent most of its running time commiserating with its miserably lonely and forsaken hero, who then proceeds virtually single-handedly to kill the whole gang, after which he drops his badge into the dirt at his feet to express his disgust with all the townspeople belatedly gathered around him after the big shoot-out.

Wayne's sheriff in Rio Bravo , facing hordes of hired killers, pointedly refuses help from law-abiding volunteers because their inexpertness with firearms would make them more trouble than their civic spirit is worth. Zinnemann retorted angrily that Hawks was entitled to his opinion, but High Noon and Rio Bravo were two very different movies. Hawks wanted to remake High Noon to his own specifications, and he went ahead and did so. For his own part, Zinnemann added, he had no desire to remake Rio Bravo . Strangely, I'm more sympathetic to Zinnemann now than I was back during my polemical frenzy with the politique des auteurs .

I am still suspicious, however, of the exalted reputation of High Noon for its allegedly allegorical assault on the McCarthyism of the 50's by soon-to-be blacklisted screenwriter Carl Foreman. The moral cowardice of an entire frontier community is tediously depicted again and again by a steady procession of hammy character actors displaying the same old yellow streak. In Zinnemann's defense, however, I should add that Wayne's sheriff in Rio Bravo actually ends up with three very competent helpers in his deputy played by Martin, a young gunslinger played by Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan's old geezer, still very handy with a shotgun.

When I interviewed Zinnemann (1907-1997) in 1982 after his last somewhat underrated film, Five Days One Summer , I brought up the sensitive subject of Grace Kelly's singularly pallid performance in High Noon . I say "sensitive" because it was strongly rumored that Kelly had a ring-a-ding-ding with Zinnemann, as was frequently her wont on the sets of her movies. Zinnemann freely acknowledged that she hadn't been very good despite all his efforts, and then he went on to say that Hitchcock had managed to get so much more out of her in Rear Window (1954), Dial M for Murder (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). I liked and respected him for his frankness and generosity, and I felt vaguely guilty for having hammered him so hard in The American Cinema .

I still prefer the romanticism of Ford in The Searchers and Hawks in Rio Bravo to the comparatively sober realism of Zinnemann in High Noon , and I still think that Wayne has been as underrated as Cooper has been overrated. Indeed, I firmly believe that Joel McCrea had a wider acting range than did Cooper. I was recently looking at Zinnemann's Julia , and though I didn't like most of the movie, the last few scenes in Germany reminded me of the Zinnemann of People on Sunday (1930), a potentially free spirit too often hobbled in his later career by an excess of prudence and caution, but still more than incidentally a very nice guy.

The old question arises: What is Shakespeare to cinema and what is cinema to Shakespeare? We have been told often enough that if Shakespeare were alive today he would be in Sundance with a script and a cell phone. Also, it can be argued that by jazzing up an old chestnut as if it were some sort of video game, more young people will become familiar with a great literary landmark of Western civilization. Yet as a reviewer for a teen-age magazine remarked, this latest update of Hamlet will never replace Cliffs Notes.

As for Mr. Almereyda's claim to our attention as a low-budget innovator in the medium worthy of a retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, I must confess total ignorance of his past decade's output that has caused Film Comment to lionize him as "indie-cinema's best-kept secret." Nonetheless, Mr. Almereyda, a bit like Woody Allen, has developed a talent for persuading interesting performers to work for beer-and-pretzel money. Hence, any project with Ethan Hawke as Hamlet, Kyle MacLachlan as Claudius, Diane Venora as Gertrude, Liev Schreiber as Laertes, Julia Stiles as Ophelia and Bill Murray as Polonius is not without some iconic anticipation apart from the inevitable derision to be expected from American Anglophiles brought up on the Knights and Dames of the British stage peerage. In this respect, unfortunately, I fully qualify as an Anglophile of the first order, and so I shall not waste time and effort reminding myself of the standard-setting epiphanies of John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Richard Burton, Wendy Hiller, Celia Johnson, Vanessa Redgrave, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Margaret Leighton, et al., on stage and screen that I have actually witnessed. It would be too boring therefore to complain that Mr. Hawke's Hamlet lacks the dark humor of Olivier's and the extraordinary charm of Burton's.

Though Basil Sydney's Claudius in Olivier's Hamlet (1948) is still the Claudius to beat, Mr. MacLachlan's runs a close second for his originality in stressing the womanizing side of the character over the traditional pseudopatriarch. Ms. Venora tries hard to make new sense of Gertrude, but the bizarre staging of the big scenes defeat all her efforts.

Mr. Schreiber seems too levelheaded as Laertes to play the hothead, and Ms. Stiles still looks like a comer, particularly by keeping a straight face as Ophelia when Mr. Murray's Polonius wires her for her meeting with Hamlet as if she were Linda Tripp.

On the whole, however, Mr. Almereyda has created some interesting effects with a wide variety of mirrors, screens and natural reflections, thus magnifying the central character by the sheer multiplicity of his likenesses in both real and virtual reality. The director is astute also with his deployment of paparazzi in the certification of today's media mania over celebrities as the equivalent of yesterday's crowd scenes under the balconies on which crowned heads waved and ruled for centuries. A more cynical reviewer than I might itemize also the suspiciously prominent product placements over the dazzling Manhattan nightscape. As it is, I still like to give struggling artists the benefit of every doubt.

The Lady Eve: Rush To Meet France's Karin Viard

Catherine Corsini's The New Eve ( La Nouvelle Eve ), from a screenplay by Ms. Corsini and Marc Syrigas, combines the buoyancy and high spirits of Hollywood's classic screwball comedies with the sexual sophistication of the post-censorship era. One hopes also that The New Eve will introduce American audiences to Karin Viard, reportedly the hottest new star in France after Haut les Coeurs! , a harrowing but emotionally exhilarating story of a pregnant cancer victim who insists on delivering her baby despite the risk to her own life. This movie was shown at the recent Film Society French series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2000 at the Walter Reade Theater. People in the know tell me that there is absolutely no chance of its being picked up for American distribution inasmuch as it makes previous American films on the subject look like Mary Poppins .

Though I deny the widespread rumor that I have abandoned La Politique des Auteurs for La Politique des Actrices , I must confess that the one-two punches Ms. Viard has delivered with the nervy comedy of The New Eve and the heart-wrenching drama of Haut les Coeurs! have hit me harder than anything since Greta Garbo's hat trick with her gallantly smilingly, ill-fated courtesan in George Cukor's Camille (1937) followed by her emotionally and comically vulnerable Bolshevik in Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939). So rush off to see The New Eve , which can certainly stand on its own as sparkling entertainment, but I hope against hope that you will get a chance to see Ms. Viard in Haut les Coeurs! as well.

War Games: A Basketball Opera

Rich Cowan's The Basket , from his own screenplay, resolves retroactively to plead for tolerance in a small Northwestern town in the midst of anti-German prejudice during World War I. How out of tune with the Zeitgeist can you get? A similar subject was treated as a subplot in Elia Kazan's East of Eden back in 1955, but it is much more centrally located in The Basket , in every respect one of the strangest and most original films of the year so far.

The title of the film has a double meaning in that it refers both to the basket used in basketball and to the title of a made-up Mahlerish opera composed by Spokane, Wash., native Don Caron, and performed in the film by the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra, and more singers, both solo and choir, than conductor Matyas Antal could shake a stick at. If you break through your instinctive resistance to a virtuous film overflowing with humbly collective good will, the rousing music is alone worth the price of admission, that and the fascinatingly detailed sequences of early basketball, with their emphasis on passing from a stationary position in what we now recognize as a half-court game.

The only "names" in the cast are Peter Coyote as Martin Conlon, a schoolteacher from Boston who introduces basketball to a small farming community in the Pacific Northwest, and Karen Allen, a farm housewife and Gold Star mother who stands up to her domineering and anti-German-bigoted husband who finally sees the errors of his ways and accepts two hitherto traumatized and persecuted German orphans, Helmut and Brigitta Brink, played by Robert Karl Burke and Amber Willenborg. Conlon ingeniously introduces what we now know as the zone defense to basketball, and it helps defeat the previously invincible big-city Spokane team. With the point spread, local farmers can finally afford to buy a mechanical harvester.

Oh, well, you get the idea, but I hasten to assure you that the movie is more pleasant to watch and listen to than you might expect and Mr. Coyote and Ms. Allen are in good form indeed.

May Movie Revivals: Arthur, Buñuel and Ophüls

The mantra for current screen revivals and restorations is A.B.C. for Arthur (Jean), Buñuel (Luis), and Conscience (Marcel Ophüls' The Sorrow and the Pity ). The illustrious Jean Arthur, 30's and 40's comedienne par excellence, is represented by three of her brightest comedies in Jean Arthur: From the Archives (May 13 to May 18 at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 at the Museum of Modern Art, 708-9480): George Stevens' The Talk of the Town (1942) and The More the Merrier (1943), and Mitchell Leisen's Easy Living (1937) from a vintage Preston Sturges script. Also showing is Frank Borzage's luminous romance, History Is Made at Night (1937) and Mr. Stevens' Shane (1953), which, for all its virtues as a western, is not exactly Ms. Arthur's cup of tea. While the debate rages on between her champions and those of Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck and a few others, mark me as undecided.

Buñuel's Oscar-winning The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is opening on May 12 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and is one of the most wickedly beguiling of the master surrealist's collaborations with French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. A belated nod of gratitude is due also the YWCA Cine-Club (610 Lexington Avenue at 53rd Street, 735-9717) for its series of Buñuel's Mexican films running through July 30.

Woody Allen is officially presenting Marcel Ophüls' seminal The Sorrow and the Pity , which will run at Film Forum from May 12 to May 25. But those of you who have not yet seen this stirring cri de coeur on the painful subject of French collaboration with, and resistance to, the wartime Nazi occupation will no longer have to take Mr. Allen's word for it. The Sorrow and the Pity is one of the must-sees of the last millennium and this one as well.