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My favorite character in The Maltese Falcon is Captain Jacobi, played by Walter Huston, the old man in Treasure of Sierra Madre and the father of the director. He bursts into the office of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), gasps "Falcon!" and dies. But the film offers still more: Sidney Greenstreet at his most rotund, Elisha Cook in an oversized overcoat. This third and most faithful adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel dwarfed its predecessors and became the screen's classic American crime tale. This was the film that established John Huston as a director.

The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, was almost titled Springtime for Hitler, after the musical within the movie. The real producers decided that just wouldn't sell. This very funny movie was the first film with Mostel and Wilder. Their most recent has Zero Mostel hilariously and violently turning into a rhinoceros. But he was so funny there that he helped turn Ionesco into a travesty and a sham. He's never quite so funny in The Producers, but Mel Brooks's film contains no pachyderms.

Yasujiro Ouzu's Autumn Afternoon (sometimes titled The Taste of Mackerel) is, quite, simply, a masterpiece. Its muted color and rigorously simple camerawork are consistently a joy to watch, and its emotional insight into post-war Japan is consistently moving. Little more could be said without delving into the intricate simplicity of this wonderful film.

Last week, I began a plug for Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, which is playing first-run in Boston, but it was cut short for lack of space. This film takes a simple Daphne du Maurier story and raises it above its original status as a thriller, achieving a level of visual drama rarely encountered in any film. This is a film of exceedingly dramatic imagery and psychological complexity. The story line is, at times, almost non-verbal, because the dialogue is scant and simple and because the images are photographed and edited with such finesse that most dialogue is unnecessary.

Donald Sutherland mumbles his lines with great exactitude: he is an artist who reconstructs Venetian churches, and he has little need to be articulate. His emotions, and those of Julie Christie, as his wife, are presented through imagery. This is ostensibly a film about second sight, but its greatest scenes have to do more with the psychological than the psychic--the way the characters, and the camera, look at things; the love scene full of remembrances. The visual events of this film are the most important since The Conformist, and if on a few occasions there are slight problems with the film, it is because of problems implicit in the story itself. The film is far from perfect. It is groping in its originality and in its attempt to rise above its subject material--that is partly what makes it such an exciting film to see.