Cinema is frequently called the art form of the 20th century, but jazz lays equal claim to the title. The two crossed paths early on, beginning in the late 1920s, as Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway lent a bawdy dazzle to Max Fleischer’s cartoons on their way to bigger matinee stardom.

But jazz didn’t really seep into the cinematic consciousness until the 1950s, when directors began to find ways to integrate the music’s improvisatory verve and percussive tension into their story lines — rather than, say, making a biopic about a jazz musician (think “The Glenn Miller Story”) or throwing some racy saxophone into a sleazy nightclub scene in a film noir. The Museum of Modern Art’s sprawling new program Jazz Score, which includes screenings of more than 50 films, an exhibit, and live performances, takes encyclopedic note of the ways jazz has influenced film.

The series, which begins tomorrow and runs through September 15, includes plenty of no-brainers — the kinds of films that jazz fans treasure, either for their soundtrack albums or for the way they factor into a legendary performer’s career. Highlights include Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows,” with its brooding Miles Davis score; Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder,” which marked a breakthrough for Duke Ellington; John Cassavetes’s “Shadows,” with its practically ambient backdrop of Charles Mingus pieces, thumping as if in the next room, and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris,” whose libidinal Gato Barbieri theme became a boudoir staple in the mid-1970s.

The series also examines how movie composers soaked up jazz influences, whether reflected in Henry Mancini’s border-town exoticism in “Touch of Evil” (later remade as a killer homage by jazz greats Ran Blake and Clifford Jordan), or excursions into the genre by Japan’s Tôru Takemitsu (“Crazed Fruit”) and Poland’s Krzysztof Komeda (“Knife in the Water,” “Le Depart”).

Thankfully, the series avoids the more obvious “jazz flicks,” such as Bertrand Tavernier’s “‘Round Midnight,” in favor of genuine obscurities. The 1970 documentary “Jack Johnson” inspired Miles Davis to record one of his groundbreaking electric sessions, and the 1962 Danish film “Dilemma” transposes Max Roach’s “Freedom Now Suite” to the deserted streets of apartheid-era Johannesburg. But rarely has the music meshed as naturally with visual style as it did in “Mickey One,” Arthur Penn’s neglected 1965 film, which opens the series tomorrow with an introduction by the 86-year-old Mr. Penn. Exhibited in a fabulous restored print that lends seductive depth and richness to its black-and-white palette, “Mickey One” remains as curious as ever. Its opening scene establishes a surreal tone, as a nightclub comic (played by budding heartthrob Warren Beatty) lights up a cigar in a sauna, sitting fully clothed in foppish finery as a laughing chorus of fat, old guys cackles at him. Must be the 1960s.

Mr. Penn was flexing his creative muscles after an Oscar nomination for “The Miracle Worker” helped to win him a hands-off, two-picture deal with Columbia. “I didn’t want to hear a bunch of suits talk to me about script changes,” the director, chatting recently by phone from his Manhattan home, said. “The idea was for it to be an unexpected movie.” Mr. Penn was so successful at that goal, expanding writer Alan Surgal’s stage piece into a kind of Kafka-meets-the-New-Wave fever dream, that “Mickey One” actually forecast the 1960s. The movie’s prevailing air of paranoia — as Mr. Beatty’s title character goes on the lam to escape an unspecified mob menace and invents a new identity — and tilted sense of reality succinctly captures the bizarro spirit of the times.

Cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, who would collaborate with Robert Bresson on several classics, contributed greatly to the film’s fugue-like atmospherics, with its pulp-fiction mugs of bartenders and bums leering as if through the bottom of a shot glass.

“I wanted black-and-white because I thought, there’s nothing about this film that’s colorful,” Mr. Penn said. “Conversely, when we were going to make ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ they said, ‘Do you want to shoot this in color?’ And we had to. If it was black-and-white, it would be a documentary.”

But most of all, it’s the score, by big-band arranger Eddie Sauter with solos by saxophonist Stan Getz, that defines the spirit of “Mickey One.” The music matches, or anticipates, Mr. Beatty every step of the way, as his character improvises a new identity and tumbles through the back alleys and burlesque dives of Chicago. The music alters its shape as vertiginously as Mickey perceives the city’s underbelly, cutting between Dixieland bustle and passages of breezy bossa nova, Bartók-inspired abstraction, and fiery bop, constantly lit up by Getz’s improvisations. As it turns out, the latter was a happy accident.

“There we were, getting the score down and I didn’t anticipate that Stan Getz was a great pal of [Sauter’s],” Mr. Penn said. “Stan kept dropping by the scoring sessions, and picked up his horn and went to work.”

The film was very much a reaction to its times, Mr. Penn said. “I was pissed off at the movie business. I had started to work on a film with Burt Lancaster, but it turned out he had made a secret deal with John Frankenheimer to take it over. Burt arrived and had me fired.”

Eager to create something he could shove in Hollywood’s face, Mr. Penn also was responding to the previous decade in American life. “The paranoia? Oh yeah. The heritage of the McCarthy era. He scared a whole generation.”

But it was Mr. Penn who apparently instilled fear in his studio. Columbia opted out of the second picture in their deal. The director re-teamed with Mr. Beatty to shoot David Newman and Robert Benton’s New Wave-inspired screenplay of “Bonnie and Clyde,” and nothing was ever the same again. “Mickey One,” meanwhile, has lingered in the shadows, like one of Getz’s plaintive tenor solos. “They didn’t get it,” Mr. Penn said. “They really didn’t. But left by itself, it continued to have a life. It’s incredible that as time goes by, there’s a higher estimation of it.”

Through September 15 (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9400).