THE SCREEN

Romance. The romance festival at the Orson Welles hits its peak in the next week. Ophuls's The Earrings of Madame De... is a beautiful, refined story with counts and barons and ballroom scenes, staircases and grand entrances, but a lot to say about this ethereal world. It plays tonight with Letter From an Unknown Woman with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jordan. and starting Sunday, Asquith's version of Pygmallon, with Leslie Howard playing Higgins young and tough-as-nails, which sometimes works well. Wendy hiller's Eliza Doolittle is absolutely amazing. Playing with arguably Katherine Hepburn's best work, Summertime, seldom shown. When Hepburn talked to Cavett in those interviews, Summertime was the film she remembered best.

The Bugs Bunny amalgam is really very good, and though the tone of the tons is shrill and annoying, the wit of this set of Warner Brothers shorts, and the consciousness-forming remembrance that goes with them, is worth checking out. The Hitler and Stalin ones are missing, but the great Bogart-Bacall spoofs are here. (I remember seeing the shadow-faced smoking tough guy on a Saturday morning long ago, and feeling what an intense character it was without knowing this was Bogie: any Bogart mania now owes a lot to that early Resh, I think. And it's a trip to see the original I-taut-I-saw-a-puddy-tat, I did, I did. Every theme, whether Elmer Fudd chasing down Bugs or Sylvester on the prowl, is hunted outwitting the hunter, of course, whatever that means.

One P.M. Opening tonight at Off The Wall, this is Jean-Luc Godard's filmed visit to America doing a film he never finished, made by D.A. Pennebaker, the cameraman for Don't Look Back and Monterey Pop Full of real late-sixties stuff--Cleaver, the Airplane. Tom Hayden. Call 354-5678 for info.