This weekend, the Castro Theatre offers a rare glimpse at four films by arguably the finest openly gay filmmaker past, present and for the foreseeable future. The late John Schlesinger began a career that would span four decades on the tail end of Britain's kitchen-sink cinema of the late 1950s-early 60s. Of his first six films, three featured queer characters and themes, one (Midnight Cowboy) was the first X-rated movie to capture a Best Picture Oscar, and another (Sunday, Bloody Sunday) had two leading men locking lips 35 years before Brokeback Mountain.

Schlesinger was openly queer, proudly Jewish and unashamedly intellectual. After Oxford, the BBC became his film boot-camp. His first big break: a script in which longtime collaborator Alan Bates shone as an angry young man making do in an unhappy marriage. A Kind of Loving led to a series of quirky low budget British New Wave films featuring new talent: Tom Courtenay as Billy Liar, drunk on daydreams; Julie Christie as the luxury-loving fashion model whose gay friend (Dirk Bogarde) sees her through several bad affairs in Darling; a chance detour through Thomas Hardy country (Far From the Madding Crowd) occasioned a divine first-time collaboration with Peter Finch (half of Sunday, Bloody Sunday's pioneering gay couple).

Saturday's Castro double-bill, Midnight Cowboy (7 p.m.) and Marathon Man (9:45 p.m.), will be hosted by longtime Schlesinger partner/photographer/producer Michael Childers.

Sunday, Bloody Sunday Schlesinger at the top of his game. Peter Finch, a legend for his hard-drinking, womanizing ways, would proceed to reinvent himself as the aging London physician who finds grace amongst the travails of single gay life, his Jewish heritage and the fickle disposition of a bisexual lover (saucily played by British pop singer Murray Head). The back s

Director John Schlesinger.

tory bears more than a passing resemblance to Schlesinger's own, as the director had discussed many of its core beats with screenwriter Gilliatt.

How big is that kiss? An eternity when first seen, it times out to be under five seconds, but it does blindside many viewers, coming just 22 minutes into the story. The gasps from 1971 filmgoers were audible worldwide. Oscar handicappers argue that the kiss cost Finch an almost-sure Best Actor prize: he lost to Gene Hackman for The French Connection , an outcome reminiscent of this year's Best Picture dustup between Brokeback and Crash. Later in the venerable Oscar tradition of the payback award, Finch would receive the first posthumous Best Acting Oscar for his delicious madman newscaster Howard Beale ("I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore") in Paddy Chayefsky's Network .

Among the film's many delights are a witty aside on eight-year-olds smoking pot, a cheeky cameo for a schoolboy Daniel Day-Lewis, and a most memorable film soliloquy by a queer character. (Castro, 6/11, 2:15 & 7 p.m.)

The Day of the Locust "Jesus owns the oil wells, and the gasoline is prayer." An almost unbearably faithful adaptation of Nathaniel West's corrosive look at Hollywood as a symbol of everything that was wrong with Depression-era America. Don't come expecting Sunset Blvd.

Waldo Salt's screenplay tracks the lives of a struggling set director (William Atherton — boy, was he pretty back then!) who gets more than he bargained for befriending a wannabe actress (Karen Black, sublime despite appearing cross-eyed) and her dying father (an Oscar nomination for the hammy Burgess Meredith). Every fantasy about the movies is exploded: we see messy, unrequited affairs, cheap drunks, men who sell snake oil and stage cockfights (the chicken variety), high-priced call girls, disgruntled female impersonators, early radio preachers, and a Hollywood premiere that plays like War of the Worlds. (Castro, 6/11, 4:15 & 9:05 p.m.)

Midnight Cowboy A film (based on James Leo Herlihy's novel) that made the queen's vernacular for a young hustler part of the language, it's dated less than you might imagine. While some of the more colorful sidebar characters (Brenda Vaccaro, Sylvia Miles and John McGiver) are a tad over-the-top, the scenes between Jon Voight's naïve Joe Buck and Dustin Hoffman's swimming-in-grease Ratso Rizzo are sublimely right. Voight (his career breakout role) and Hoffman ("I'm walking here") hang in against all odds to form a most unlikely couple whose final scene still burns in the brain.

Voight, who professes to be proud of the picture, does add, "If we remade Midnight Cowboy today, the relationship between Buck and Ratso would have to be sexualized or at least made, you know, like in love, to be sexually or erotically honest." (Castro, 6/10, 7 p.m.)

Marathon Man After the box-office bust of Locust, Schlesinger again proved he could make movies people would pay to see. Based on a novel by William Goldman (also responsible for the roller coaster of a screenplay), Marathon Man at its worst represents a risible subgenre, "Nazi or Holocaust kitsch." The film's quintet of top performances — Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider, William Devane and Marthe Keller — turn implausible pulp into some memorably scary moments. There's no way a critic can spoil your first (or 10th) glimpse of Olivier's sadistic Nazi dentist hissing, "Is it safe," or the almost unbearably frightful scene where the great actor trespasses onto the gums of Hoffman, whom he referred to offscreen as "dear boy." (Castro, 6/10, 9:45 p.m.)