Sunday, December 3, 2023

Alexander Ratter | Leave It Alone / 2022

an improbable romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexander Ratter (screenwriter and director) Leave It Alone / 2022 [6 minutes]

 

In German-born Alexander Ratter’s 2022 short film, a man, Leo (Michael A. Phoenix), who has been heavily drinking, sits alone on a bench in downtown New York City. He is soon joined by his friend, Matthew (Brad Hamler).

 

    These both seem to be working men, perhaps with families, marriages of their own, although we are given no background for either of them. We know only that Leo, a black man, and Matthew, a white, both in their 40s or even early 50s probably have been meeting up there, on that bench or some place nearby for a long time through the years.

     Both are understandably frustrated, Matthew in this case because, as he tells his friend, Leo is already clearly drunk. Leo sings a song, and reaches out to Matthew, who sits him down next to him on the bench, repeating “You’re drunk.”


     Finally, Leo stands goes to the fence and looks out over the river, Matthew soon joining him. Leo begins a clumsy dance and, at one point, attempts to kiss Matthew, which he dodges, perhaps because of his friend’s condition. 

    Yet soon after, he reaches out and strokes Leo’s face, this time Leo pulling away. He sits, Matthew joining him, putting his head upon his shoulder and Matthew gently strokes his face. But when Matthew finally moves toward a kiss, this time Leo pulls away, shouting “Leave it alone.”

     Matthew tries again, with the same response, “Leave it alone,” but finally responds, “I’m not sure I can.” The two friends and lovers sit for a short while before they both join in a kiss, breaking, and kissing again.



      It is clear that they cannot “leave it alone,” cannot cease their often or perhaps even nightly visits without being able to express their sexual feelings for one another. Whatever worlds they live in, these late night meet-ups are all they have, the only time they can fight through the walls in their lives to demonstrate their love.

       Everything seems to push them away from each other, their apparently closeted lives, their inability to join up with one another in real privacy, and their own racial differences; yet they cannot quit one another, pulled each to the other through a love that refuses to be quelled.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Frank Capra | Arsenic and Old Lace / 1944

buried bodies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein (screenplay, based on the play by Joseph Kesselring), Frank Capra (director) Arsenic and Old Lace / 1944

 

It has always been my contention that if you stare at the screen of a Cary Grant movie long enough you’ll spot a naked limb—poking out of a closet or from under the bed—of some other man living in the same house where the actor has just married or is about to marry his female co-star. That other man may be a secondary figure in the plot or perhaps another version of our hero, one that looks very much like him but behaves in an entirely different manner, a kind of inverted doppelgänger. But in either case he is dangerous force ready to destroy the couple’s conjugal life as soon as the credits scroll to the film’s end. 

 

    Of course, most people don’t spot the arm, the leg, or even the penis of the “other,” and if they do, by the time they’ve returned home after seeing the film they’ve forgotten all about it. And no one I know imagines the film as having a life after the screen has declared “The End.” But I’m queer that way, always wondering how he’s going to explain the other man living in his house to his wife the next day or the day after when she opens the closet door or attempts to run the vacuum cleaner under the mattress.

     Given her own sexual interests, Katherine Hepburn as Susan Vance would probably have never given it a second thought; and if Irene Dunne playing Ellen Wagstaff Arden might have been a little surprised to see her former companion Adam (Grant’s real-life lover Randolph Scott) swimming in their family pool, she’d probably be happy to have such an intimate friend hanging around, and besides she already knew “the awful truth” way back in 1937; given her beauty, Grace Kelly as Frances Stevens could easily find herself another man than the former cat burglar she still suspected of stealing her mother’s jewels; Joan Fontaine’s Lina McLaidlaw Aysgarth was already on her way to her mother’s house in terror of the man she married; Eva-Marie Saint pretending to be Eve Kendall, was accustomed to duplicity and had herself lived a morally suspect life; and after all those marriages to Rock Hudson, Doris Day portraying the hard-to-get Cathy Timberlake was perfectly at home with the idea that there might be another man in her husband’s life.*

     But poor Priscilla Lane after all that waiting around for hours and hours for her husband Cary to settle his family affairs in Arsenic and Old Lace. I worry about her. She’d not only be disappointed, but, as a preacher’s daughter, probably quite shocked, even if by film’s end she knows he’s left a fairly large number of buried bodies in his path to the marriage altar. But I’ll talk about that later.

      Lane, playing Elaine Harper, Mortimer Brewster’s (Grant) next door neighbor, has the deck stacked against her, sexually speaking, from the very first frame. Elaine and Mortimer have escaped the wild woods of Brooklyn—where even the Brooklyn Dodgers’ baseball game quickly devolves into a violent donnybrook—in order to get married, as the early intertitles proclaim, in the United States “proper,” Manhattan. But once there, we see Mortimer, still hiding in the closet or, at least, trying to cover up his identity, not because he might be recognized as a gay man but because he’s waiting in the line to register his marriage with Elaine. It’s an odd twist, but it establishes from the very beginning of the work that there is something definitely queer about him. In this case, we discover, the noted drama critic has also penned several volumes arguing against marriage and has become, as he puts it, “the symbol of bachelorhood,” and he’s terrified of the press reporting his perfidy to the cause. When, despite his dark glasses and attempts to whisper his name to the wedding clerk, reporters catch a glimpse of who’s behind the “cheaters,” he grabs Elaine and bolts, joining another unsuspecting man in a suddenly overcrowded telephone booth.

     As he attempts to explain to his about-to-be-wedded wife: “How could I marry you? Me? ...l’ve written four million words against marriage. ...Marriage is a superstition. It’s old fashioned. ....I can’t go through with it. I won’t marry you and that’s that.” In short, Mortimer seems to represent, as they used to describe homosexuals, a man who is “not the marrying kind.”

 


     Yet inexplicably before he has returned to the New York borough where “anything can happen and usually does,” he has, to use in this case a very appropriate metaphor, “tied the noose.” He and the new missus seem so utterly delighted with one another that even the taxi driver (Garry Owen) complains, upon delivering them up to the Brewster mansion situated next to ancient cemetery on Halloween night, that they have so oscillated the frame of the cab that he may have to get new shock absorbers. Elaine and Mortimer stop by their homes for a change of clothing before they’re off to Niagara Falls to enjoy every honeymoon clichĂ© in the marital scrapbook.

     Mortimer’s doting aunts Abby and Martha (impeccably performed by the extraordinary duo of Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) are delighted by the news and insist upon serving up a cake which, having predicted the event weeks before, they have kept ready in the cooler. And even Elaine’s disapproving father (Grant Mitchell) is finally prepared to bless the event. Mortimer goes so far as to demand his aunts burn his notes for his new manuscript of Mind over Matrimony. When Mortimer finally realizes that nearly everyone near him had long ago presumed that he and Elaine would marry, he asks “Did everyone in Brooklyn know I was getting married except me?” Twenty minutes into the film, accordingly, it might seem that, despite the couple’s rocky start, Arsenic and Old Lace—if somehow you’ve managed to miss one of the thousands of annual high school and amateur theater productions—is about to present a seemingly perfect world of normalcy.


      But it is at the very moment that things begin to go awry. Just as I described in the first paragraph of this essay, bodies, although in this case apparently completely clothed ones, begin to appear. Mortimer discovers the first stashed away in his aunt’s window seat. It’s a Mr. Hoskins, they explain, who Abby entertained while Martha was out on an errand. He’s a Methodist Abby announces. As the aunts scold Mortimer “We never dreamed you’d peek.” 

    “It’s one of our charitable endeavors,” the women calmly explain to their astonished nephew. Apparently when elderly gentlemen ring their door in response to their “room for rent” sign, they serve the generally unhappy, lonely men without families—translated from the polite parlance of the day into what we now might describe as elder homosexuals—a delicious homemade elderberry wine, with Martha’s recipe of a few spoons of arsenic and strychnine and “just a pinch of cyanide” stirred in.

     Calling upon the help of their delusional brother, Teddy (who believes he is Teddy Roosevelt) to take these suffering men to the basement and bury them in the locks of the Panama Canal he digs for the occasion, they have provided peace to twelve such men, “a baker’s dozen,” marking their graves with flowers and praying over them.

    Needless to say, the previously excitable would-be lover now suddenly develops the ticks of a hysteric, forcing his eyes to nearly pop from their sockets, and dropping his jaw with the regularity of his stuttering incredulity for the rest of the film. Indeed, Grant’s new tics grow so severe that the first time I saw this film decades ago, I thought the actor was undergoing some sort of nervous breakdown from which I feared he might never regain his formerly suave surety. But Capra often has had that effect upon his actors, and Grant, fortunately, regained consciousness two years later in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, where his film-studio-intended bride promptly marries another man. (Regarding Capra’s effect on his leading actors, if you recall Gary Cooper was ready to hurl himself off the top of the city’s highest skyscraper in Meet John Doe and the suicidal James Stewart jumped into the local river in It’s a Wonderful Life.)

      But then what is a character to do upon discovering that his beloved aunties—who almost raised him during what we soon discover was an abusive childhood—are serial murderers? He does what any good nephew might do, accept the bodies as his own responsibility (after all, as I declare above, male bodies have always been left behind as evidence of Grant’s sexual interests in his films so he’s a pro), and to deflect Abby and Martha’s terrifyingly good intentions by locking away their more obviously mad brother in the institution they’d already agreed upon, Happydale, a kind of pretend therapeutic retreat.

     Mortimer spends much of the rest of the film looking after the details about Teddy’s (John Alexander) incarceration: a call to the director of Happydale (the always implacable Edward Everett Horton), and signatures from a lawyer, a doctor, and Teddy himself, all of which lead to further frustration as the lawyer attempts to burst into various clichĂ©-ridden speeches, the doctor fusses over his meeting with the mad President who elevates him to the position of an ambassador, and the patient signs as Roosevelt, needing to be convinced that Brewster without the ‘b,” rooster and a forthcoming coming trip to the African veldt is code for the 26th President’s name.

     Clearly the newlywed no longer has time to attend to a wife. When Elaine calls, Mortimer answers “Not now! Not now! Whatever you do, keep your shirt on!” When she finally storms over for a showdown she’s met with complete rejection: “What are you doing here? You better go home. Will you get out of here!” Their love seems as dead as the first syllable of his name.

     Throughout Joseph Kesselring’s play, skillfully adapted by the noted screenwriters Julius and Philip Epstein, people keep transforming into other beings: the uncle has permanently become Roosevelt (when his sisters suggested another identity, they tell us, he crawled under his bed and “refused to be anybody”), the sweet Brewster aunts become murderous villains, and now Mortimer himself becomes more and more unhinged, as he mistakenly wears the dead man Hoskin’s hat, and reverts to his pre-martial self, a harsh critic of marital bliss. As one of the aunt’s observes, “Mortimer doesn’t quite seem to be himself today.”

 


    Enter his brother Jonathan (Raymond Massey) who looks like Boris Karloff (and in the original Broadway production was hilariously played by Karloff pretending to be someone else) along with Jonathan’s “partner” in crime Dr. Herman Einstein (a role perfectly cast with another hyperthyroid figure, Peter Lorre).

      Jonathan and Herman are also a kind of queer couple who together commit murders, having racked up by traveling throughout the world twelve male victims of their own. Accordingly, the aunts, as Einstein observes, are just as good as Jonathan, the quartet having together done in 24 men, one for each hour of day. The sadistic Jonathan and his passive cohort are clearly more into sadomasochism and torture, and their love making, so it appears, consists mostly of Einstein lovingly practicing plastic surgery upon Jonathan’s face. The scene in which Lorre, hovering closely over the scarred Frankenstein-like creature he has created as he sensuously describes what he plans for Jonathan’s ears, nose, eyes, and chin is far sexier, I’d argue, than Grant’s languid kisses of Lane.

      Indeed, Lorre may be the most loveable figure in the entire work, as he shyly pleads for another drink, a little sleep, and less torturous methods for the murder than Jonathan is planning of his brother. When late in the work, Einstein sneaks away from his former companion, escaping arrest and imprisonment through the miracle of the absurdly unobservant police chief, it is with such an appreciative smile of delight that we almost want to applaud him as he closes the otherwise endlessly opening door of the Brewster house.

  


     The sudden arrival of Jonathan along with the window seat appearance of yet another body not only heightens the sense of chaos but forces the now hysterical dramatic critic to turn into a silent observer of the very story he has helped to concoct, including his own being gagged and hog-tied to a chair as the police, through mere happenstance, save the day by almost accidentally arresting Mortimer’s mad brother. By coincidence, the two guilty sisters suddenly get a hankering to join Teddy in the sanatorium to where he’s about to be whisked off. It’s a perfect solution to Mortimer’s problems, particularly since the aunts are now even admitting to the police that there are 13 bodies in their basement.

      Once he is finally released from his gag and bindings, and—through his aunts’ confession that he is actually the son of a sailor married to the family cook—freed from his previous blood-links to the Brewster ancestors, relieving his fear of insanity which seems to gallop through the family genes, Mortimer now needs only to establish the unreliability of his two aunts as well, hoping without calling them insane to their faces, he can prevent the chief of police from investigating their claim of all those buried bodies.

      In a grand acting out of a charades-like game, Mortimer goes charging up the stairs like his uncle, and when the aunts once more claim the burial of the 13 men, he ludicrously insists he himself has hundreds more in the attic. The dense-headed police chief still can’t quite make sense of his extravagant camp-like message, Mortimer takes up a new tact; when Abby and Martha insist all the graves are marked with flowers, their nephew argues that his graves feature neon lights. When the sisters claim that, despite the one intruder put there by Jonathan and Einstein, that the other twelve are all their “gentlemen,” Mortimer minces in the manner we’ve become accustomed in Hollywood films’ portrayal of faggots, “Oh, you’d like mine better. None of mine are gentlemen!” If we ever wondered what Mortimer Brewster was doing between shows all those years he covered Broadway, we now have the evidence.

     Finally, of course, the chief decodes the message, realizing that it might be better to send off the Brewster women to Happydale and leave the cellar to myth and exaggeration. Yet anyone who can read gay code realizes the true message is that Mortimer clearly does have all sorts of male bodies in his attic—or at least locked away in his head if not in his actual past. And now that he is freed to become his “real” self, the son of sailing cook, who knows on what voyage his mind might take him?

     Meanwhile, the completely ignored and almost forgotten Elaine has snuck into the basement through the storm cellar door only to discover the truth. Her claim that “There really are 13 bodies in the basement” must be silenced by Mortimer’s long kiss, as he carries her off to her own bedroom where presumably he will demand his spousal rights and restore the film to the normalcy of its first quarter.

      Yet the wife, at film’s end, still knows the truth. And the bodies her husband has been trying so hard to cover up won’t simply go away. How will Mortimer deal with her questions the next morning? Who are all those men and where did they come from? His aunts and uncle will surely never have answer for them since Mortimer has freed them from suspicion by assuring they are safely locked away.

      You see what I mean? In this film there’s not only a few male limbs to account for but an entire crypt full of skeletons in the closet which Grant’s character has worked so hard to keep others from checking out. Given all the queer goings on in both the film and stage version of Arsenic and Old Lace (although the Epstein’s clearly added the juicer tidbits) it’s a wonder that high school students and amateur actors keep putting new flesh on this work’s old bones. But then, as I recall, when my high school presented this play, I acted the role of one of the dense-headed cops without imagining anything unusual at all might be going on.

 

*For those acquainted with Cary Grant’s oeuvre, I am referring obviously to the films Bringing Up Baby (1938), My Favorite Wife (1940), Suspicion (1941), To Catch a Thief (1955), North by Northwest (1959), and That Touch of Mink (1962). I’ve written about the first two films within the LGBTQ context as well as both Hepburn’s and Grant’s sexually ambiguous roles in Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and Grant and Dunne’s divorce and reunion in The Awful Truth (1937). I’ve also discussed Grant’s confused sexuality in regard to Kiss and Makeup (1934) and I Was a Male War Bride (1949).

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

Sahra Bhimji | Chemistry / 2022

the well-known chemistry of opposites

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kaylynn Barley and Sahra Bhimji (screenplay), Sahra Bhimji (director) Chemistry / 2022 [11 minutes]

 

Waleed (Christopher Batres) is what you might describe as a shirker student, the kind who, without paying attention to anything his chemistry teacher is saying, allows his cellphone to ring the very moment his black-board buried prof recognizes that he speaking to a class of students by asking a question. All Waleed can seem to notice is another boy, Liam (Garrett Hannigan) staring at him in disbelief.


     The personable but discombobulated Waleed has not even heard the professor tell them of their next assignment, and attempts, after class, to get the information from Liam, who disparagingly tries ignore the eager classmate, turning away when he suggests they might meet up to talk about the assignment and even do an experiment or two together. Liam is off to the library, which Waleed, in jest, pretends to have not even know of its existence.



     In the very next frame, we see Liam asleep in the library, being told it has just closed. The presumption is that he has been working so long and hard that he has finally fallen asleep.

      But in the very next frame, in full daylight, Liam leaves the library where, once more in runs into Waleed, who claims to have just gotten out of another class. I’d suggest that director Bhimji has a problem with continuity here (no college library that I know of closes in the middle of the day—although it may be that Diablo Valley College is the kind of commuter school where everyone leaves campus by 5:00) and, perhaps, equally has a problem with a rather unbelievable situation where the two boys meet up again. Even Liam wonders whether Waleed might be stalking him.

      We do know, however, that Liam has been working in the library since he has just submitted his assignment on line. Even Waleed is a bit wowed, complementing his peer by suggesting that he’s “really awesome, and…very studious, and will probably be transferring to someplace like Berkeley or Harvard.” Liam interrupts, “Stanford.” But still the shirker asks him out to dinner.

       Liam admits that he’s “super broke,” but Waleed offers to pay as long as he lets him pick the restaurant. Liam, however, requests vegetarian, and the always agreeable Waleed declares that he too is vegetarian—as of today! Off the two go to dinner.

      We watch the two leave the restaurant, obviously thoroughly enjoying one another’s company and coming together in a manner that we suspect is sexual as well. But Liam asks if Waleed has actually submitted the assignment, since it is now due in an hour.

       “Such a downer dude, we were having so much fun,” is Waleed’s response. Liam’s response makes it clear that the two have, in fact, quickly become more than buddies as he take’s Waleed’s hand and suggests maybe he can come over and help him out.

 


      Waleed, however suggests Liam’s place since his will be messy, but Liam counters that he doesn’t mind messy. the two moving in for a kiss.

        But almost immediately, Liam backs off. “Actually, that’s not going to work.” As he drops Waleed’s hand, the boy wonders if he had done something wrong, offering him to give a drive home, Liam responding that his car is close by. We are as confused at what is now transpiring as is Waleed, Liam thanking him for dinner and rushing off.

        A moment later, however, all is made clear as we see Liam drive to an isolated spot, and paste up pieces of cardboard on his car windows. Obviously he is one of those students hardly able to afford paying for his education, living out of his van.

        Liam undresses, cleans his face and mouth with tissues, and finally down to sleep, the sounds of sirens, walking feet, arguments etc. filling the night. If you’ve ever slept in a car or in an apartment near an open window in a highly urban neighborhood, you know the sounds.

        But then there is a tapping on the car window itself, something truly frightening to the boy.

       A voice calls out, “Is everything okay? Liam, it’s me.” Now we are certain that Waleed has been stalking his new friend. Liam rightfully insists that he step away from the car.



        Waleed obeys, but explains that he will call him when he reaches his own auto.

        “Why are you here?” Liam angrily asks.

        “Why are you hiding in your car?”

        “Why do you think?” Waleed, as we’ve noted, is no deep thinker.

        “Oh shit, I just realized. Are you sleeping in your car?”

        The question would be funny if the truth behind it wasn’t so very sad.

        “It’s just temporary, okay. I’m just between places.”

        “…I’m so sorry. I’m an idiot. I thought you were hiding from me.”

        Liam assures him he’s fine, but begs him not to tell anyone, the dilemma all such students surely face, yet something that is nearly impossible to fully hide.

        Waleed admits that he has also lied when he has told Laim that he has his own place. “I live with my parents, Liam responding that he had figured that out, but that “sounds kind of nice.” After a long pause, he adds, “Mine are asses.” We can only wonder, did Liam parents disown for being gay?

         Waleed, always the comic, continues, “And my grandparents, and my three sisters…and two cats, which I’m allergic to.”

          Liam laughs. “Okay, maybe not so nice then.”

          Waleed adds that his family is super conservative. “I don’t know how I’m ever going to come out to them.” After a long pause, he adds, “Unless like we get married!”

          “We’d probably have to elope or something.” After another pause, Liam asks, “So, what? Is it past your curfew?”

         “Oh, way past my curfew.”

      Liam suggests that there’s still 22 minutes left until the assignment is due. On the phone, he explains how to open the assignment to begin the work. But we suspect that eventually he might invite the terribly tardy son into van to share his bed for the night.

       For once, both young men—the shirker and the far too serious-minded student, a comic and a young man living a drama he shouldn’t have to face—might come together to share a few joyful sexual moments in the night. That’s the well-known chemistry of opposites.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

William Haddock | Billy and His Pal / 1911

disconsolate billy

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Haddock (director) Billy and His Pal / 1911

 

We’ve seen dozens of films of this genre: a young boy looks up to and admires an older man who becomes an idol for the youth. This was, indeed, one of the central themes of cowboy buddy films which often bordered on the homoerotic with a soupçon of pederasty. Even otherwise totally innocent films such as Shane are totally comfortable within this trope. But with just a little bit of scratching we can see it clearly for what it is, a sublimated desire to be closer to or in a deeper relationship with the hero, symbolically “marrying” the other in the attempt to take on the values and mannerisms of the beloved mentor.


     One of the strangest works of this genre, however, occurs early on US film history in William Haddock’s 1911 Billy and His Pal. Either in order to attenuate the sexual implications of such a male-male relationship or even, rather perversely, to accentuate them, the hero of this short film of 15 minutes is played by a woman in male costume, Edith Storey who idolizes the cowboy Jim (Francis Ford).

      Filmed near San Antonio, Texas this film tells the tale of Billy—who the intertitles, obviously by mistake, refer to as Bobby—who, basically happy to serve simply as the lanky cowboy’s gofer, is sent to the local general store to pick up some tobacco.

      Just previously, Billy/Bobby has witnessed Jim saving a young woman from the unwanted attentions of a dark-clothed Mexican as she attempts to mount her horse, and now, at the store the boy overhears the resentful man plotting with others to do Jim in. Quickly purchasing the pouch, the boy rushes back to tell his hero of what he has just learned.

      In the meantime, however, Jim has been tied-up and kidnapped by the gang who drags the cowboy to a crag at the bottom of a cliff with the intention of dropping a huge rock from the cliff-top upon his body below.

      Billy arrives back to the spot where he has left his pal, discovering him missing with only a discarded tobacco pouch and a hat of one of the malefactors left behind. Hurrying into action, Billy/Bobby rushes to a nearby ranch, evidently owned by the woman to whom Jim has previously attended, rustling up a posse of cow-punchers and explaining the situation to Jim’s woman friend.

       Anxiously, they rush to the spot to which Billy has sent them, saving Jim just as the huge boulder comes crashing down from above. They round up the Mexican villains and send them off to their deservèd punishment, while Jim returns to courting the woman, leaving his younger pal alone and disconsolate for having lost his best friend by saving him.

       Who wrote this obviously racist tale is unknown, just as we are today uncertain whether or not Haddock directed it. But the company that produced it was not American but of French origin, the story of which is worth mentioning.

       I quote Frank Thompson’s “Film Notes” from The National Film Preservation site:

 

“At the dawn of the 20th century, the films of French filmmaker Georges MĂ©liès were among the most popular in the world. And the most pirated. Unscrupulous American film studios regularly took MĂ©liès’s films, obscured his trademark, and sold the works as their own.

     MĂ©liès sent his older brother Gaston to the United States to enforce his copyrights. Gaston arrived in New York in November 1902 and immediately placed an ad in the trade papers announcing his uncompromising attitude toward protecting his brother’s work, reading in part, “…we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice; we will act!”

     Eventually, Gaston began making his own moving pictures. In 1910, looking for a warm, sunny place to film during the winter, he moved his company to a farmhouse in San Antonio, Texas, near a health resort called Hot Wells Hotel. The makeshift studio was dubbed the Star Film Ranch and over the next year the company made more than seventy one-reel films, westerns, comedies, and romantic tales of old Mexico. Some were released as MĂ©liès Star Films and others—including this one—were released under the name American Wild West Film Company.”

      In 2010 this one-reeler was discovered in New Zealand where it had apparently been re-issued for a British Commonwealth audience as Bobby and His Pal. Restored, the film now represents only one of five remaining of those produced by Gaston MĂ©liès’ company.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...