Chaplin. Central Square's program might be a bit too much Chaplin to take all at one sitting. Modern Times(1936) shows Charlie at work on an assembly line--this film is one of Chaplin's three greatest silent films. It is actually a sound movie, but Chaplin himself never talks. The dialogue and sound effects were the only compromises Chaplin was willing, at the time, to make with the new era of sound. Chaplin Revueincludes three fairly short films that predate Chaplin's first full-length comedies. A Dog's Life is the funniest, and most poignant; Shoulder Arms isn't very funny at all; The Preacher comes after so much continuous Chaplin that it's hard to judge. The three films are connected by some hokey talk about Hollywood, and all three have overdone orchestral scores written by Chaplin, instead of his original piano scores.

Last American Hero. The drawing card for Harvard Square's double bill will probably be the mediocre Paper Chase, but it probably should be The Last American Hero, starring Jeff Bridges, a movie which was originally released for drive-ins, was highly praised by a number of critics, and has finally shown up in Cambridge. An ink blot in my mind has temporarily covered over my knowledge of other details of this film--which I never went out to the suburbs to see--and when I called Harvard Square, the theater staff pleaded similar amnesia.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) is one of the films that was most responsible for acceptance of the French New Wave among intellectuals, back when it was a new wave. Alain Resnais, who made the film, does not seem such a major artist judging from the films he has made in the last 15 years, but Hiroshima itself is still potent--especially in the few scenes about the nuclear disaster. The film begins with a French actress falling in love with a Japanese architect in Hiroshima, and after that the associations of love and war provoke a dislocation of memory and time.

Cyrano de Bergerac (1950) includes Jose Ferrer in a captivatingly romantic performance, perfectly suited to Edmond Rostand's lightweight romantic play. Eating half a macaroon, playing with his swords, swaggering about town, Ferrer is always as flamboyant as the part demands. Michael Gordon's direction is nothing special, and the rest of the cast is mediocre in this one-man show.

Mastroianni. Marcello Mastroianni always seems the epitome of the bourgeois Italian, a man who has the time and the interest to cultivate the appearance of urbanity for its own sake. Even when, as in La Dolce Vita, he had an aloof, introspective, critical streak as an observer of society, he was still getting himself involved in meaningless ego-enhancing encounters with Italian starlets. To me, the hedonistic pilot he played in The Grand Bouffe seemed the perfect role for him.

But in The Organizer (1961), showing at the Brattle, Marcello Mastroianni is a different man: leading a worker's rebellion. The Organizer may be his best film. Certainly director Mario Monicelli has put together one of the best films about a labor movement, carefully drawing his characters; building up suspense as the workers begin to organize; moving, with precise editing, to a gloomy yet somehow very inspiring ending. Set in Turin in the late 19th century, this film has a photographic restraint which keeps it from preaching. Monicelli never overdoes a scene. He presents striking scenery, for example, in a mature way: not to impress the viewer in David Lean style, but to pace the film so as to create an impression as strongly intellectual as it is visual. In A Drama of Jealousy (and other things), Marcello is back in a more familiar role as a jealous husband. This film was originally titled The Pizza Triangle.