When James Dean died in that 1955 auto crash, at age 24, only those who had seen East of Eden had glimpsed his mythic talents, since neither Rebel Without a Cause nor Giant had been released. "James who?" was the reaction of most Americans.

People were equally puzzled after the February 3 slaying of 40-year-old film actress Lana Clarkson at the mansion of rock producer Phil Spector. I’d never heard of Clarkson before her murder. According to the Associated Press, she was discovered by Roger Corman, who remembered: "Lana was a beautiful woman . . . and an adventurous spirit." She played in B-movies, including Barbarian Queen (1985), which Corman claimed was the basis for TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess.

The International Movie Database (us.imdb.com) reveals that she made guest shots on TV series, including The Jeffersons and Three’s Company. She appeared in 12 movies, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) to March (2001). What kinds? Low-budget genre films. Sword-and-sorcery epics with ersatz Tolkien talk, and formulaic serial-killer flicks, the kind championed by Adaptation’s Donald Kaufman. And sexploitations. She was best known, it turns out, for her more-than-ample bosom. On one Web site, movie titles are italicized in which she bares her breasts. Several sites move from free to pay if you want Clarkson show-all photos. (I didn’t go there.)

Her still-active personal Web site is chaste: G-rated photographs of a six-foot-tall blonde California beach gal. A childhood picture of Lana on horseback. Publicity shots from movie roles. Nothing much, nothing intimate. If you dig deeper on the Web, you can construct a show-biz biography with a downward turn. She peaked in popularity in the 1980s, a fresh sexpot thing. By her late ’90s, she had become an item of nostalgia, making live appearances around LA to reminisce about her old movies. She met her loyal fans at K-Mart-sponsored events and comic-book gatherings.

Clarkson was a nice person, a good sport. I read Web testimonials from regular folks who had met her at conventions. She was rated the most cooperative of celebrities, affably signing autographs by the hour and gamely posing for snapshots with her fans.

And her dozen movies? I tracked down the bulk of her mini-budget Ïuvre, a journey through denigrated genres. But try as I might to appreciate Lana Clarkson, murdered movie actress, there wasn’t much there on screen. If you don’t remember her movie debut, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, that’s because she’s in two shots at the prom, as the bodacious wife of the goofy bio teacher, Mr. Vargas. Nerds gasp at her anatomy as Clarkson breathes her one and only line: "Hi."

She’s an awkward, hesitant superhero in a bunch of pagan, shot-in-Argentina costumers (when or where in time?): Deathstalker (1984), Barbarian Queen (1985), Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II (1988). A serial killer is after her in Blind Date (1984), and she, a raw detective, is after a serial killer in Vice Girls (1996). Neither film is distinguished. She’s a parody of her unrobing self as a large-of-chest space chick in the amusing title sequence from Amazon Women on the Moon (1987).

Do I have a Lana Clarkson movie to recommend? In memoriam, The Haunting of Morella (1990), a decent Corman-in-the-’60s Poe throwback, in which she’s fairly effective as the homicidal lesbian lover of a reincarnated evil witch.

KEN LOACH, England’s revered filmmaker of social conscience since the late 1960s, made the 2001 film The Navigators (which screens at the Brattle all week, February 21 through 27) for British TV. It’s inconceivable that American television would consider such a class-conscious, Marxist-ambient drama. Loach’s fictional story focuses on the dire repercussions for laborers employed by English Rail to lay down the train tracks as their government-run company becomes privatized. Are we far from Bush country as we witness the strong-armed management team from the private sector rip up longstanding union contracts and bully senior workers into early retirement ("redundancy"), without the slightest fear of prosecution?

The Navigators loses its urgency whenever it wanders into subplots (one is about a worker’s divorce; another finds pranks being played on a dim-witted janitor). It’s at its savage best when it remains at the workplace, as in the chilling scene of Social Darwinism in which the new Machiavellian boss forces the old paternal manager to do his union-busting bidding or become redundant himself.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com