NEW YORK: It's a great week for wild men in the Big Apple repertory scene. The Italian-born Marco Ferreri was the kind of artist who is unimaginable without the 1960s but who wasn't quite of the '60s: he was the kind of older, shaggy figure who was attracted to exploring ideas of liberation, revolution, self-transformation, and chaos but who was never easily convinced that they led to utopia. An eight-film DVD box set of Ferreri's work was released here last year; with any luck, it might create a new audience for such works as La Grande Bouffe and Tales of Ordinary Madness (starring Ben Gazzara as a stand-in for Charles Bukowski). One film not included in the set is the 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, which, starting today, plays for a week in a new 35 mm. print at BAM. The film stars the pre-eminent French Mr. Smooth of his generation, Michel Piccoli, who comes home one night for a long evening of cooking, gun-polishing, and soul-searching while his missus, played by Keith Richards muse Anita Pallenberg, is zonked out in the bedroom. Dillinger does not come our way often, so this screening is highly recommended.

Actors like Rip Torn don't come dancing down the main drag every day, either, and it's hard to think of another irascible, once-borderline-unemployable thespian crazy who's mellowed into such a surefire entertainer without losing much of his edge, piss, and vinegar. Anthology Film Archives has concocted a mini-Rip Torn festival that begins next Thursday with Maidstone, the legendary Norman Mailer improv party that ends with our hero, dissatisfied with the ending Mailer had settled for, trying to juice things up by attacking his director with a hammer after Mailer thought the shoot had wrapped, and 1973's Payday, arguably the finest full-length showcase of Torn's career, in which he stars as a third-rate country music star barnstorming across the back roads while his fuse gets shorter and shorter and his heart rate gets perilously faster.

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NEW YORK: A dependable highlight of the Museum of Modern Art's film programming, "To Save and Project: The Sixth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation" (October 24–November 16) opens with Melvin Van Peebles's 1971 Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Other seldom-seen, painstakingly restored and preserved items on the menu include Marco Ferreri's scandalous Dillinger Is Dead (1969); Ernst Lubitsch's 1025 version of Lady Windermere's Fan; the 1934 James Cagney-Bette Davis vehicle Jimmy the Gent; D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World; Anthony Mann's Korean War classic Men in War, and the 1947 musical That Man of Mine, "featuring a young Ruby Dee, who will appear after the screening in a discussion with historian Pearl Bowser." All in all, "baadasssss" is putting it mildly.

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This week, the Screengrab is honoring "the 15 Top Bars of Cinema", which provides us with a handy occasion to remember many filmmakers' favorite literary drunk, Charles Bukowski. Aside from the best-known Bukowksi-based movie, the 1987 Barfly (which Bukowski wrote in tribute to himself), the man has been well-represented on-screen in such films as the 1981 Tales of Ordinary Madness (in which his alter ego--"Charles Serking" he's called this time--is playing by an enthusiastically rutting Ben Gazzara) and the more recent Factotum starring Matt Dillon, as well as the posthumously assembled documentary Bukowski: Born Into This, which is full of footage of the man himself, explaining the world to the camera to kill time while wondering when his good friend Peaches is going to call. Worth tracking down: J. J. Villard's 2003, award-winning animated short Son of Satan, a heart-warming tale of cruel youth based on a Bukowski story. (We're still holding out hope that we might someday get to see the 1977 Supervan, in which Bukowski is said to have a small, uncredited role as "Wet T-Short Contest Water Boy.") The real ringer in the Bukowski filmography is the 1987 Belgian feature Love Is a Dog from Hell, a sensitive three-part story about a man with a romantic spirit who longs to be in love and to be loved but whose inability to meet the real world halfway dooms him to a life of terminal loneliness. It was directed by Dominique Deruddre, who used Bukowksi's story "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California" as the basis for a short film and then came up with the other two episodes as lead-ins to the concluding episode so that he could expand it to a feature. It's about how the adult Harry (Josse De Pauw), a ruined drunk in his early thirties, finds one night of bliss with a beautiful woman who can't reject him--a corpse (Florence Beliard) that he and a buddy swipe from the back of a hearse.

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