Reopened this year, the Fine Arts theatre, nestling in the shadow of Loew's State, the Christian Science Monitor building, and Mass. Avenue station, gives to Boston in small quantities what New Yorkers can find in a number of spots. So far it has limited itself to foreign films; through tomorrow, it is presenting what amounts to a telling comparison between a good foreign picture and a good American picture.

For American audiences, anxious about the American cinema art, the Mayer-Burstyn production of John Steinbeck's "The Forgotten Village," released in 1941, should be of considerable interest. It is worth noting, primarily, that no major studio took on this documentary of the Mexican village of Santiago and its fight against typhoid fever. Squalid ignorance is not the sort of thing Hollywood can treat sympathetically, as a rule, but a small outfit has presented the conflict between the old and new in a manner that rivals the job S. M. Eisenstein, the Russian director, did in the same area in 1933 with his "Time in the Sun."

Burgess Meredith does all the talking in "Forgotten Village," but the camera is the hero. It shies at nothing, going even farther than the Russians' recent "Rainbow" in showing the agony of a woman in primitive childbirth. Generally when Hollywood runs down to Mexico to make a movie, it leaves out all the flies and filth; "Forgotten Village" is full of both.

"Pepe Le Moko," from which United Artists made "Algiers" in 1938, is in most ways a better picture than its carbon copy. United Artists knew a good thing when they saw it, and they took large chunks--still recognizable shots, and in some cases apparently the very same sets--of the French original as a backdrop for Boyer, Lamarr, Sigrid Gurie, and Gene Lockbart.

But "Pepe" is less dressed up than "Algiers," just as "Forgotten Village" is less finicky than, say, "How Green Was My Valley." It is helped, too, by having a Jean Gabin kind of cast: "Pepe's" characters are not the technically standardized characters of the Hollywood cloth. It's a refreshing change, despite some fast French and a few sloppy English titles. jgt