EACH YEAR, the Academy Awards run a montage of those who passed away during the previous 12 months, and this past Sunday we saw this year's parade of familiar, departed faces—Dom DeLuise, Brittany Murphy, Patrick Swayze. But although the sequence controversially didn't include Farrah Fawcett or Bea Arthur (yet somehow gave screen time to publicist Arthur Canton), the montage ended on exactly whom it should have ended on: Karl fucking Malden.

Malden played one of his best roles in 1954's On the Waterfront, which screens Sunday, March 14, as part of the Northwest Film Center's Frontier Justice series. The squishy-nosed Malden holds his ground against Marlon Brando, who plays a longshoreman pressured to testify against the mob boss who runs the union; Malden's priest is the conscience of the movie.

Henry Ford similarly played the conscience of 12 Angry Men (Sunday, March 21), Sidney Lumet's still-astonishing 1957 masterpiece. Indeed, the Northwest Film Center has come up with a foolproof banner for this upcoming run of films: Frontier Justice, as a theme, could apply to almost any important American movie I can think of, and the Northwest Film Center strings together eight of the best, from 1948's Red River to 1972's Deliverance. (A ninth, Easy Rider, kicks off the series on Friday, March 12, but apart from the great scenes with Jack Nicholson, Rider's way more indulgently boring than you remember.)

Frontier Justice could most obviously apply to the quintessentially American genre of the Western, and while Red River and The Magnificent Seven are cornerstones of the lineup, think of the racial frontier that Sidney Poitier explores in 1967's In the Heat of the Night (Saturday, March 13) as a black detective solving a murder in a hick Mississippi town. Or contemplate the vast frontier of outer space that Stanley Kubrick depicts in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Friday, March 19).

Actually, just contemplate seeing 2001 on a big screen. Yeah. Wow.