NOT ESPECIALLY PROLIFIC over a long career haul (from his 1942 first feature, Ossessione, to 1976's The Innocent, which was released posthumously), Luchino Visconti is one of the most familiar among great directors – few of his 14 features have been hard to access for any long period. This weekend the PFA Theater's complete retrospective offers a rare peek at the two exceptions to that rule, both offered in newly struck 35mm prints. They're a striking contrast to one another and fascinating illustrations of how a major artist's instincts can fail him or her. The gaga Vaghe stelle dell'orsa, also known as Sandra, finds Visconti's taste for operatic melodrama leading him straight off the high-camp cliff. An Electra in contemporary La dolce vita dress, it sets the heavily painted Claudia Cardinale into a frenzy of pouting and bosom-thrusting as the beauty forced to return to her ancestral home in picaresque seaside Volterra. Despite the ballasting presence of American husband Michael Craig, she's immediately sucked into a black hole of "hereditary taint" whose other living examples are a lunatic mama (Marie Bell, pure prosciutto) and decadent brother (Jean Sorel, an Alain Delon lookalike who against all odds manages to keep his florid final scene from being ludicrous). Its Freudian deep-dish underlined by Cesar Frank's lofty piano torments and gorgeous black-and-white imagery, this baroque pulp is undone by international bombshell Cardinale's plight – despite all her mighty "Pinch me, I think I'm Callas" efforts at tragic divahood, her bonbon presence exposes the goulash of incest, murder, suicide, and madness as pure high-art hooey. If Sandra offers an overripe overdose of what Visconti is good at, The Stranger finds his talent constrained and misapplied. He was no doubt the wrong director for Camus, no matter that he'd pursued this project for decades. A valiant Marcello Mastroianni plays the French Algerian accused of a murder committed in a momentary panic but convicted of refusing to "play the game" – his admitted indifference to family, girlfriend, religion, and more strikes society's hypocritical moralists as a worse crime than taking a life. Solemnly silly and turgid where it should be grimly absurdist and unrelenting, this honorable failure is the flattest film of Visconti's career, but the disconnect between intention and result holds a perverse fascination. After all, nothing reveals a true artist so intimately as his or her mistakes. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)