Fans of foreign and independent movies in Nashville will put up with abuse that multiplex audiences wouldn’t take for a second. That’s not a compliment. Because art-movie patrons are so grateful for the crumbs they get each month, they won’t complain about lousy screening conditions; and they’re way too timid to ask for more movies, let alone for advance schedules that would let them know what’s coming. As a result, dozens of movies each year never arrive in local theaters, even though Nashville has more than 150 screens. The art movies that do get here are shown with bad sound, dim projection, and no care whatsoever for their overall presentation. And they disappear before most people even know they’ve arrived.

That leaves Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema to make up for the commercial theaters in town, either by showing movies the chains wouldn’t dare or by giving Nashvillians a second chance to catch good ones that got away. Sarratt isn’t perfect, but it is trying to show better prints, including many in 35mm. It also understands how to cultivate an audience through calendars and smart scheduling. Plus, at $4 a ticket and a buck for popcorn, it’s a cheap date—something anyone can appreciate.

Just in the first week of its terrific fall semester, Sarratt is showing two NC-17 movies that were banned by Carmike and Regal: David Cronenberg’s Crash (Thursday), and the fine, disturbing erotic drama Broken English (the following Monday through Wednesday). The rest of the semester offers revivals of classics, great trashy midnight shows, and Hollywood blockbusters—as well as many of the films on Nashville moviegoers’ wish lists. These are a few of the fall highlights:

Night of the Hunter (Sept. 7) It’s too bad actor Charles Laughton never directed another feature, because his only directorial effort, adapted from a Davis Grubb crime novel by James Agee, is a perfect nightmare vision of the adult world through a child’s eyes. Psycho minister Robert Mitchum (with “L-O-V-E” tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and “H-A-T-E” tattooed on the other) pursues two children and stolen loot across an expressionistic Southern landscape; the kids’ flight turns into a struggle between the forces of darkness and light. Goodness wins, of course, but for Mitchum fans there’s no contest: His leering, murderous man of God is the scariest villain in movie history.

La Promesse (Sept. 21-23) In this acclaimed Belgian drama, a teenager (Jérémie Renier) is torn between loyalty to his father, who uses African immigrants for slave labor, and to the dying worker who makes the boy promise to look after his wife and child. The first movie by Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne to win U.S. release.

The Last Klezmer (Sept. 24) On the night before Sarratt’s live presentation of the Swiss klezmer band Kol Simcha, the theater screens this moving 1994 documentary about Leopold Kozlowski, the last active klezmer musician trained in the pre-World War II Eastern European tradition. As the camera follows the 69-year-old musician through the cruel sites of his youth—including the concentration camp where his music accompanied prisoners to the gas chamber—the movie shows how Kozlowski’s bitter experience translates into joyous, deeply felt music.

Underground (Sept. 30-Oct. 1) Until New Yorker Films picked up Emir Kusturica’s surreal epic earlier this year, the film’s failure to win U.S. distribution was an international scandal—especially after Underground won the grand prize at Cannes in 1995. This will probably be your only chance to see the controversial three-hour extravaganza, which uses black comedy, music, fantasy, violence, and lots of cinematic razzle-dazzle to depict 50 years of unrest in the former Yugoslavia. The movie has been alternately hailed as a masterpiece and reviled as pro-Serb propaganda, but a chance to see it on a wide screen shouldn’t be missed.

Irma Vep (Oct. 7-9) A fanciful comedy about filmmaking by French director Olivier Assayas, who pays homage to the fantastic serials of early French film pioneer Louis Feuillade. Jean-Pierre Léaud (The 400 Blows) portrays a dissolute director trying to shoot a remake of Feuillade’s Les Vampires; Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung plays herself, drafted to play a criminal mastermind in skintight black leather.

In the Company of Men (Oct. 13-15) Neil LaBute’s aggressively nasty satire concerns two middle-management executives stuck for six weeks in an unnamed Midwestern burgh; to pass the time, the slimier of the execs (Aaron Eckhart) suggests they avenge their troubles with women by wooing, seducing, and dumping a deaf secretary (Stacy Edwards). The movie has provoked such hostile reactions—even from admirers—that Sarratt has scheduled a Project Dialogue discussion right after the movie.

Waiting for Guffman (Oct. 20-22) 1997’s funniest movie takes place in Blaine, Mo., best known as the town that once made a footstool for William McKinley. As the no-talent locals commemorate Blaine’s 150th anniversary with an original musical, Red, White, and Blaine, writer-director-star Christopher Guest (This Is Spinal Tap) sweetly lampoons their self-delusions—and delivers some mighty belly laughs with the help of several veterans from SCTV and Fernwood 2Night. Don’t leave before the closing credits, or you’ll miss the My Dinner With Andre action figures.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Oct. 26) As part of a monthlong tribute to James Stewart, Sarratt shows John Ford’s 1962 classic, an elegy for the passing of the West and the Western. Stewart plays a genteel lawyer who won fame and fortune as the killer of outlaw Liberty Valance (a chilling Lee Marvin); John Wayne, a wonderfully ravaged hero, is the forgotten gunslinger that history shoved aside in Stewart’s favor.

Pink Flamingos (Oct. 31-Nov. 1) You can judge any society by its taboos, which makes John Waters’ legendary 1972 filth-wallow a virtual Rorschach test of Nixonian America. Eating crap, eating cops, sex with chickens, and 31 flavors of fetishism—in this company, incest seems positively bourgeois. Next time you hear pundits droning on about today’s permissive society, direct ’em to Sarratt on Halloween night.

Chronicle of a Disappearance (Dec. 7-8) Elia Suleiman, a filmmaker born in Nazareth who spent 14 years teaching in New York, portrays himself in this fictionalized “diary” about his return to his homeland—where the days blur together, merchants peddle “holy water” to customers who never appear, and the director’s identity as an Arab in Israel is always questioned.

Watch also for Sarratt’s weekend lineup of cult movies at midnight, including Clerks (Sept. 5-6), Freaks (Oct. 3-4), A Clockwork Orange (Oct. 17-18), and Army of Darkness (Dec. 5-6). For a complete schedule, drop by the Sarratt main desk, or call the theater’s new hotline at 615-343-6666.—Jim Ridley

Less Moore, more lessons

The one thing we learned from the stunning first half of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket was that military training drips with inherent drama. Potential soldiers are faced with well-defined obstacles under set conditions, and they either succeed or fail. The audience roots for them like it roots for athletes in sports movies. That’s what draws us into G.I. Jane, not the hot-button issue the movie purports to be about. And for nearly the length of an ordinary movie, that’s enough to make it worthwhile.

Since this is a Ridley Scott film starring Demi Moore, the ensemble spirit of the training class gives way to the star turn. Moore plays Army intelligence officer Jordan O’Neill, picked by an aggressive female senator (Anne Bancroft) to undergo Navy SEAL training as a test case in preparation for placing women in combat roles. The course, supervised by a brutal Master Chief (Viggo Mortensen), is sadistic beyond anything previously put on film. But the physical challenges are supplemented by the machinations of the senator, who uses O’Neill as a pawn in a base-closings quid pro quo.

From the neverending first day of training, to the muddy live-fire obstacle course, to the S.E.R.E. course—which includes capture, interrogation, and torture—we are immersed and indoctrinated in the military culture right along with the recruits. And we buy it, because the survival of these trainees depends on their buying it and working within it. Director Scott has never seen a fully lit room he liked, but the gray shadows that blanket this film are institutional and impersonal, just like the military itself.

This simple momentum is beset on all sides, however: by the political plot, which assumes that no one but soldiers have honor; by the glamour shots of Moore working out and showering; and finally by a ridiculous coda that lasts half an hour after the movie is really over. During this last 30 minutes, a real-life battle brings every thread neatly full circle and introduces an awful cinematographic innovation that my husband dubbed “Throb-O-Vision.” It’s a testimony to the power of the central story that these travesties don’t destroy the movie.

There’s a scene in which O’Neill shaves her head after telling her commander that she doesn’t want special treatment. The scene lasts about two minutes, and the reason for all that screen time is not to symbolize O’Neill’s commitment—it’s to make the audience marvel that Demi Moore the superstar actress is really cutting her hair. The filmmakers linger more over that “reality,” the kind that throws us out of the story, than over the forced underwater push-ups and sleep deprivation. Moore, Scott, and company may not have known what makes this movie worth seeing, but luckily, they left enough of it in.—Donna Bowman