Mamba

Back in the 1930s and '40s, independent productions flourished on Hollywood's Poverty Row, a strip of Gower Street between Sunset Boulevard and the Paramount lot. The companies produced low-budget genre films that often had "strange, illusive qualities" not found in major studio movies and tackled taboo subjects like venereal disease and "medical quackery." The UCLA Film & Television Archive preserves and restores these rare and endangered works, and tonight, the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque will present one of them: Mamba, a film about an evil plantation owner who lives in German South Africa. The film is part of a program dubbed Down & Dirty in Gower Gulch: Poverty Row Films Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The film screens at 7:30 tonight and again at 7 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets cost $11, or $8 for Cinematheque members and students. (Niesel)