• Claus Nissen (1938-2008) - Actor. Played "The Perfect Man" in Jørgen Leth's The Perfect Human, which was featured in and updated for Leth and Lars von Trier's documentary The Five Obstructions. He also played the character "Jensen" in von Trier's miniseries The Kingdom and The Kingdom II and appears in Susanne Bier's Family Matters, Bernard Girard's The Happiness Cage, Erik Balling's Olsen Gang series and Leth's Notes on Love and Good and Evil. He died April 29. (Danske Film)

• Carl Belfour (1952-2008) - Chief projectionist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He died of a brain aneurysm April 23, in Los Angeles. (Variety)
• Nino Candido (1942-2008) - Property master and actor. Worked on Bull Durham, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Smile, Timescape, Night Game and TV's My Name is Earl. He appears in Hud and I Come in Peace. He died April 26, in Laughlin, Nevada. (IATSE Local 44)

A trio of insanely great series recently started in New York City, once again displaying the cultural embarrassment of riches with which those of us lucky enough to live here grapple on a daily basis (I'm not complaining, trust me).

Friday saw the opening of Summer Swashbucklers at Manhattan's Film Forum, a series of 30 pirate and adventure films -- most made between 1920 and 1950 -- that will unspool over the next three weeks, many of them in double features. Among the films in the series are such Errol Flynn classics as Captain Blood (his first starring role, in which he displays a surprising knack for screwball humor) and The Adventures of Robin Hood, the elder Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers, and Gunga Din, starring the junior Fairbanks and Cary Grant.

Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, the BAM Cinematek has put together two truly magnificent series that will run concurrently though the month of August. The first half of each week features the work of controversial American master Sam Peckinpah, from the shocking Straw Dogs (that one's showing Tuesday the 15th -- go see it, if you haven't) to the Steve McQueen starrers The Getaway and Junior Bonner. Then, from Thursday to Sunday each week, the theater is given over to a series called Leading Men of French Cinema. As you might expect, the films showcase the work of a wide range of French stars, in films that are equally diverse. Highlights of the series include Purple Noon, Rene Clement's 1960 version of The Talented Mr. Ripley (starring Alain Delon at his most impossibly beautiful), Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (starring the wonderful Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Les tontons flingueurs, which stars Lino Ventura, a wrestler who transformed himself during the 1960s into an unexpectedly appealing screen presence.

While September is sure to bring good series of its own, these are all well worth sweating on a subway platform to see.

As even the least film-dorky among us know - if only from the story of Kevin Costner's editing room transformation from Big Chill supporting actor to a body on a slab - directors shoot storylines and sequences that don't make it into the final cuts of their films. Sometimes, as with Costner, the faces that end up on the cutting room floor are very familiar ones, which inevitably leaves us wondering about what might have been. (Harrison Ford? In E.T.?!)

The folks at Film Threat recently put together a list of the Top Deleted Performances of All Time and, while the title seems wildly inappropriate (some of the performances were bad, and many have never even been seen), the list offers up ten very recognizable names who, for a variety of reasons, were relegated to the rubbish bin. Among the names on the list are such megastars as Tyrone Power, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, and Alain Delon (Why anyone would want to cut him out of anything is beyond me.), and the widely-varied stories behind their disappearances are fascinating and well worth a look, for trainspotters and fans alike.

Though they only released three today, the ten previews on the new releases strongly suggest that Kino is planning to flood the American market with Alain Delon DVDs. And I, for one, fall at their feet in gratitude.

Alain Delon is-- totally objectively, I swear-- possibly the most beautiful man ever to walk the earth. You look at him and are stunned more than turned on:  how on earth can someone who looks like that actually exist? To Delon's credit, though, and that of his directors, he has always been more than willing to manipulate audience reactions to his beauty, and the handful of truly great films that he's made all play off of those reactions.