NEW YORK: Jean-Luc Godard's 1966 Made in U.S.A. has long been one of the best-hidden features from the director's '60s golden age. Godard claimed the "Richard Stark" (i.e., Donald Westlake) novel The Jugger as the credited basis for the script, but nobody bothered to get Westlake's permission or cut him a check, with the result that the writer managed to get a proper release of the film in the U.S. squashed. So its appearance at Film Forum for two weeks starting today counts as big news even for the Forum, which has taken to showcasing Godard's color classics from his Pop Art phase at the rate of about one a year. The funny thing is, the movie's connection to Westlake might be just another admiring reference point in a movie that features characters named "Donald Siegel" (for the veteran b-movie director who would ultimately hit paydirt with the original Dirty Harry and "David Goodis" (for the crime novelist whose Down There provided the basis for Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player), as well as villains named "Richard Nixon" and "Robert McNamara", and that Godard claimed was his attempt to remake The Big Sleep with his then-wife and muse Anna Karina in the Bogart role. (Her male co-star is Jean-Pierre Leaud, as Don Siegel.) This splashy affair, described by J. Hoberman as "more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-20th-century pop than any movie Godard made before or would make after," also features a cameo by Marianne Faithfull, singing "As Tears Go By" in the first full bloom of her misspent youth. It's being shown in a gleaming new 35-mm. print.

The first half of Film Society of Lincoln's Center' annual "Dance on Camera Festvial" is underway and runs through this weekend, with the usual invaluable collection of performance shorts and features and documentaries, including a tribute to Busby Berkeley that makes room for a screening of his 1943 surreal choreography classic The Gang's All Here. The series concludes next weekend with the Indian musical The Chosen One/Ishanou and an American Masters documentary profile of Jerome Robbins.

Related Stories: Donald Westlake, 1933 - 2008