Coming down

Paul Bowles, Sands & Stars, John Huston

Jennifer Baichwal, a Canadian, was befriended by writer Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky) when, in her early 20s, she ran away to Morocco to meet him, dizzied by his mesmerizing prose. Her wonderfully intimate documentary, Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, at the Brattle this weekend (June 11 and 12), attests to the trust of Bowles, now in his late 80s, in his young filmmaking protégée.

Lying comfortably back in his bed, smoking kif through a sleek cigarette holder, Bowles, a rheumy-eyed old buzzard (William Buckley at 95) with a droll wit and a disarming smile, holds forth on a very long and highly eventful life. His charmingly self-depreciating stories range from his stern New England childhood to his Paris meetings with Gertrude Stein, from his legendary marriage (she was lesbian, he was gay) to novelist Jane Bowles to his encounters with an endless stream of famous visitors (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Capote, Cecil Beaton, Tennessee Williams) who made Bowles's Morocco a kind of floating boy-sex-and-drugs literary salon.

As a solitary child, Bowles wrote precocious books out of boredom. "My father didn't think it was normal," he explained, but he got Oedipal revenge later with a published short story in which "a wolf grabbed Donald's father by the throat" and ran off with the yanked-off head. Bowles Sr.'s reaction to his son's sadistic prose? Bowles gleefully recites from memory (more than 60 years later) his dad's furious note: "My oh my in what gutters you have lain! Have you thought of sitting on the curb for a while, where the view may be better?"

Of his 1938 marriage to Jane Bowles: "I was fed up with being alone, and she was such fun." He wasn't; Janey's nickname for him was "Gloompot." Bowles: "It must have been very boring to be alone with me and hear `Oy vey' all the time." Of his sexuality, Bowles is reticent, faithful to his New England upbringing and a code of silence about such things. But the documentary supplies ample stories from others about his Moroccan boyfriends, and about randy times in Tangiers. Composer Ned Rorem: "I don't think it was that different from Provincetown . . . except that it oozes poverty."

Let It Come Down has one historically essential scene for anyone who swears by underground aesthetics: in 1995, the last meeting of Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, as they sat before the camera at New York's Mayflower Hotel. They reminisce about druggy Tangiers days, about how Ginsberg got crabs there, how Bowles is misplaced among "Beat" writers; and Burroughs waxes eloquent about his belief that The Sheltering Sky is virtually a perfect novel. What 1999 film can boast a scene so transcendent, so infinitely moving, as the true-life formal shaking hands "goodbye" (forever!) of Bowles and Burroughs, both these ancient proud giants bowed over on their canes?

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More filmic transcendence: in Istanbul, a Jewish cantor praising Jehovah in Hebrew, trading sublime solos with a throat-singing Muslim intoning the wonders of Muhammad in Arabic, in Chants of Sands & Stars, which plays (free) at the Boston Public Library this Friday (June 11) at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. The film, shown in collaboration with the Boston Early Music Festival and the Boston Jewish Film Festival, is a revelation, a celebratory Jewish complement to Tony Gatlif's Gypsy Latcho Drom. The filmmakers went about the world, from Brooklyn to Tunisia, from Jerusalem to Azerbaijan, capturing the rich, astonishingly multivaried music of the Jewish diaspora, from the Eastern European-based klezmer clarinet to, in the tiny Sephardic "Jerbian" community in Tunisia, a wizened "chazzan" (cantor) singing a raw, archaic song of Abraham, of eating buffalo and whale, while accompanying himself on an oud.

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Filmmaker John Huston (The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Dead) never was averse to making frivolous pictures, especially if he got to film in an interesting location with actor friends, and if he got paid enough money to support his gambling habits. Beat the Devil (1954), which plays this Friday at the Brattle, was that kind of project: a shoot in Southern Italy, a reunion with his pal and frequent leading man Humphrey Bogart (most recently in The African Queen), and a fun opportunity to collaborate with then wunderkind Truman Capote on the screenplay.

The story is typical Huston in a minor key: thieves on a Holy Grail quest that, though thrilling in the planning and execution, fails at the end. It's Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, The Man Who Would Be King, and of course Huston's first film, The Maltese Falcon. In Beat the Devil, the bad boys (Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, et al.) are after someone's secret plan of an African uranium deposit, and this time Bogey's unserious version of Sam Spade has thrown in with the motley gang, at least for a time.

Bogart is married here to Gina Lollobrigida! For Hollywood Code 1954, Beat the Devil is daringly raunchy in having Bogey in the arms of another's wife, the more obviously suited Jennifer Jones. But what makes the film most unusual is its tongue-in-cheek, campy tone . . . long before camp was invented.