Jacques Feyder | Daybreak / 1931

a testimonial to the hero

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cyril Hume and Ruth Cummings (screenplay, based on the fiction by Arthur Schnitzler), Jacques Feyder (director) Daybreak / 1931

Jacques Feyder’s Daybreak, not to be confused with Marcel Carné’s 1939 masterwork, Le Jour se Léve (also released under the title Daybreak), was based on one of Viennese Arthur Schnitzler’s heterosexual long tales concerning Lieutenants serving the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian army, men who lived lives of sexual excess, knavery, and honor. Since the Emperor himself had to approve of any marriage, those such as the central figure in this work, Willi (played quite intelligently by Mexican-born gay actor Ramon Novarro), felt safe in almost nightly seducing innocent young women or visiting the local whorehouse to pick out their favorite girl, and leaving early the next morning with the excuse that they had to be in formation or lose their comfortable mode of living. These men, as Willi’s wealthy uncle General von Hertz (C. Aubrey Smith) describes his nephew late in the work, were trained for nothing of importance in the world but soldiering, none of them imagining that in their own lifetimes they might actually see war, as well as the end of the Empire which supported them.

    On the first night of this story, Willi, having just been scolded once more for his womanizing and gambling, takes in the whorehouse of Madam Saguss—a plump cigar-smoking “tough old bird,” whose demeanor hints at lesbianism—wherein he is about to join his friends for dinner and a pretty girl of the house, when he catches a glimpse of a young innocent waiting by the door, Laura Taub (Helen Chandler), a music teacher, being guided upstairs by the notorious wealthy reprobate, Her Schnabel (Jean Hersholt).

     Suspicious of the incident, he follows them upstairs only to hear the young woman pleading with Schnabel to leave her alone. Like a hero of a melodramatic tale, the role many of Schnitzler’s handsome soldiers perform when not themselves playing the villain, he enters the room, demands Schnabel unhand her, slugs him out when he refuses, and walks back down the stairs, just as his soldier friends might imagine, with Laura on his arm.

      Before the end of the night, and after a great many attempts on her part to play the proper young woman, he seduces her into a wine garden, gets her drunk on wine and the lovely nearby river full of swans, and ferries her back to her apartment in his carriage.  

      The obviously inexperienced commentator who wrote the description of this film for Wikipedia, seems almost outraged that Laura should take these incidents so seriously, arguing they represent “nothing more than two or three harmless smooches and getting her a bit tipsy on a couple of glasses of French wine.”

     Obviously he or she doesn’t speak the language of Schnitzler nor MGM motion pictures, which has made it clear that when Laura awakens the next morning to serve Willi breakfast, she has spent night in bed with him. Sharing a soldier’s cape, even the night before, is the same basically as sharing blankets with him in the morning. 

    What truly outrages the young girl, who even admits she has plotted a bit to get the handsome Lieutenant to be seated at the breakfast table where she serves him strawberries, is that unthinkingly the suave operator leaves her a 100 Guilder note, which she quickly perceives means, that for Willi she seen is a kind of prostitute, a young girl whom he intends to pay instead of marry, a fact that he confirms the next time he meets her, e and which earlier we have heard expressed in his quip, “Love has nothing to do with marriage.”

     Her reaction is not at all typical of Schnitzler women, who sometimes become hardened, but just as often feel shamed and retreat to unfortunate consequences. Laura determines to take the lesson as the first of many, returning to the arms of the ugly Schnabel, who can at least provide her with a more regular source of money than her beloved Lieutenant might be able to.

      But in that act, and the continued assurances of Willi that he does, in fact, love her, it is Laura who has entrapped in unfortunate circumstances.

      Unable to change her mind, Willi goes back to his regular ways, at the high point of the film, proving his male collegiality by trying to help out a fellow soldier who admits he is married and whose wife is about to have a baby which he cannot afford. Taking up a collection from his peers, Willi has still far less than the necessary 200,000 guilders, his friends suggesting that he take the money he has raised and bet it at the gambling tables.

 

     He does so, and wins big, betting at the Baccarat table against Schnabel, handing over the winnings to his needy friend.

      Laura, however, having observed the events, hints that perhaps she might be won back if he were to go up against Schnabel for far more serious winnings, a suggesting which at first Willi rejects. But suddenly imagining the he is impervious to failure, he takes up the challenge, ending up owing 14,000 Guilders to the villain.

      Without any money, and finally feeling it inappropriate to approach his wealthy uncle to bail him out over his love of a woman, Willi must face the consequences, which we have witnessed early in the film when another soldier has put a gun to his head and pressed the trigger If you cannot pay by the next morning, suicide is prescribed as the only honorable way out.

       Hearing of the situation, General van Hertz appears in Willi’s quarters, offering him the money, but only if agrees to marry the woman of wealth and breeding he has chosen for his nephew, Emily Kessner (Karen Morley)

       Surprising, perhaps, even himself, Willi, appreciative as he is for this uncle’s attempts to save his life, he refuses the terms, the General about to leave in exasperation and despair. At that very moment, however, Schnabel’s representatives appear at the door to remind him that he is due at Schnabel’s office with the money by noon. 

       Willi assures them he will do the honorable thing.

       Again, recognizing what that means, his uncle agrees to give him money without his stipulation, as Willi immediately pays off the debt and runs off to see Laura, who after the gambling incident has finally left Schnabel and returned home to teach piano lessons.

       So, in a sort of tepid version of Schnitzler tales (one need only compare this basically comic version with the association of terrors which Lieutenant Gustl conjures up in the superior Schnitzler titularly titled novella as he contemplates his suicide for much lesser reasons), the hero is saved, resigning from his military position to become a healthy member of Viennese society.

       But even Laura’s family seems to miss Willi’s handsome uniform, he lying to them by suggesting he is off to a costume party. And most certainly Willi’s servant, Josef (the wonderful Clyde Cook) will miss him and the uniform.

       Even Feyder could not free himself in this film from the pernicious pansy craze, forcing Josef in the early scenes of this film to wear his employer’s underwear over his own as he bathes Willi in a bathtub next to another fellow soldier.

      When Willi has entered his rooms early, Josef has thrown a towel around his waist. And when Willi, having finished being scrubbed down, pulls the towel Josef has claimed as an apron he recognizes the sight of his own undershorts. Joseph quickly explains: “You see, the laundry shrunk them and I’m wearing them to stretch them out.”

 

       Asked if he likes them, Joseph positions himself into full pansy mode, declaring with emphasis, hands a flutter: “I think they’re beautiful!”

       At which point Willi kicks him in the butt, demanding he immediately take them off!

     In this manner, we needn’t hear it from a woman that our hero is a fully proportioned man from his very large size of his white underwear to the cut of his coat, we have heard it from source closest to the man in the buff.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

 

Oliver Zel and Hunter D'Ancona | Blister / 2022

not among the survivors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oliver Zel and Hunter D’Ancona (screenwriters and directors) Blister / 2022 [18 minutes]

 

The second year of the COVID crisis has produced a truly inordinate number of movies, both short and feature, that represent the unhappiness, break-ups, and break-downs of gay relationships and the individuals involved in them. Even some of their titles—Hideous, Infested Hearts, I Wish I Never Fucking Knew You, The End, and Spoiler Alert (“he dies at the end”)—clue us in to fact that something has gone wrong in the gay world.

     US directors Oliver Zel and Hunter D’Ancona’s Blister is one the nastiest of these. As one of the usually generous IMDb commentators observed: “Yet another short showing violence as a means of sustaining a relationship and of resolving problems. There seems to have been a rash of these sorts of films lately - nasty and brutish.”

     In this case we even have confirmation in the director’s statement, something I don’t usually quote, and never at the beginning of my essays. But here it alerts us to what is coming:

“To us, Blister is a disturbing tone poem about how toxic masculinity profoundly and often unconsciously permeates the queer man’s ability to love and be loved. 

     Each with distinct perspectives on masculinity, our mutual understanding of the queer man on-screen was narrow and warped. As longtime friends but first-time collaborators, we set out to tell an intimate, homonormative story that conveys an emotional complexity that queer men rarely embody on screen. With a shoestring budget, a crew of six, and daily temperatures approaching 100 degrees, we set our production sights on the vast California desert and its endless dunes to evoke the abrasive and mountainous distance between our protagonists.

      In post-production, Blister underwent notable changes. We chose to boldly exclude context and exposition to reimagine a once more traditional narrative into a spare, emblematic one with hopes to better unravel this unique dysfunctional dynamic, not uncommon in hyper-masculine partnerships.

      In simplifying our story, we were better able to explore the vicious cycle of abuse - both physical and emotional - inherent in our troubled lovers. We believe that Blister tells a beautiful yet unforgiving story about man's struggle to love against the masculine need to dominate.”

 

     It begins with Keith (Brian Loud) washing off the bloodied, blistered back of his roommate Maxwell (Hunger D’Ancona). No words are spoken as Maxwell takes a shower, and it clear that neither man has any desire to share his experiences with the other. And when do speak, it is in clipped short sentences, their mouths half-full of food, making it difficult to even comprehend what they are saying about “a job,” a former roommate, “trying to keep up,” etc.

     In the morning, facing the landscape in which their seemingly comfortable apartment exists (the film was shot in Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, Glamis, California), we recognize that their small safe-haven is in the middle of a desert from which they evidently have no escape, waiting of Keith’s friend of whom he is no idea of when of even if he might arrive to save them.

    Their cellphone doesn’t work and the landscape looks as forbidding as the world in which Gregg Araki’s characters find themselves in The Living End (1992) or Israeli director Guy Sahaf’s 2015 short film Thirst, in which to keep his friend with him, one of two weekend desert campers purposely empties their canteens.

     Their situation becomes a vague sort of Waiting for Godot trope, as the two frustrated men are now forced to wait, not even knowing if anyone is coming to save them. Keith wants to “look around,” but it is clear, given the surrounding landscape, that he is crazy. There is nothing more to see but the astounding desert world that, to give them credit, directors Oliver Zel and Hunter D’Ancona have brilliantly captured on screen.

      As Keith moves forward into the world of nothing, Maxwell asks the important question: “And what if he shows up while we’re gone?”

 

     Nonetheless he follows as they crawl among the dunes. They do, finally, spot something, a man almost entirely buried in the sand, with only his purple head unburied, his heart still beating. They can do nothing for him and walk away. Was he their “godot? or simply a remnant of another victim who Keith has destroyed in previous relationships.

       Keith tells a story: “There was this kid I knew. Some guys thought it’d be fun if they tied his hands back and dragged him all the way clear out here. They humiliated him. Pried his mouth open and pissed in it. They branded him. Held my face in the sand as they did it. And then they just left. I felt I’d feel different coming back…but I knew I deserved it.”

 

      Maxwell seems to intuit that even back then Keith loved the young man more than he does him, that their relationship, whatever is left of it, is over. The two brutally wrestle, slug, and kick one another as if, given the metaphorical landscape, they weren’t already dead men.

       After, however, Keith still crawls back on his knees to the finally defeated Maxwell, kissing him even as blood and saliva run from their mouths—a second later, only to spit in the younger man’s face and walk off.

       Because of their self-hate, we recognize, these men can never be survivors.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Hettie Macdonald | Beautiful Thing / 1996

where does out come to?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Harvey (screenplay, based on his drama), Hettie Macdonald (director) Beautiful Thing / 1996

 

The British film Beautiful Thing (1996) is an early model of what I have been describing as the B version of the LGBTQ film genre of “coming out” or “coming of age” works. Hettie Macdonald’s film, set in the tough south London Thamesmead Estate, however, has so very much else on its mind, that it seems at times only a rough draft of what in a couple of years would be so more fully expressed in Simon Shore’s Get Real and David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen.

     We never actually learn very much at all about the two young gay high school students of the film, the shy Jaime (Glen Berry)—who’s mocked and inexplicably labeled as queer by his school peers—and his next door neighbor, Ste (Scott Neal)—a more popular boy at school, but beaten and verbally abused by his alcoholic father Ronnie (Garry Cooper) and his drug-dealing brother Trevor (Daniel Bowers). Unlike the other two films I mentioned, these two boys, although next door neighbors, don’t even seem to know one another well until Ste is so badly beaten that Jaime’s mother Sandra (Linda Henry), who finds the neighbor boy brooding and in tears outside their motel-like apartment, brings him into her own flat and allows to sleep toe-to-head in Jaime’s bed.

     Within a period of two nights the boys are hugging one another closely, having moved into head-to-head buttock-to-balls position, discovering they like each other’s touch. Unlike any movie before or since, these self-perceived straight boys identify startlingly quick as queers (it takes Ste a day or two more to come to terms with the fact), have few difficulties with adjusting to their new identities, and realize and accept the fact that they’re in love, desperate to find a place in which they might cuddle together without mothers, fathers, and brothers sitting on the other side of the thin bedroom walls. Roger Ebert expressed it best with his bemused reaction:   

 

“After they tentatively accept that they are gay, for example, they go to a pub advertised in Gay Times and find drag queens putting on a floor show. (One of the songs is “Hava Nagillah”). Here they realize they are not alone in the universe....

     I swear, when the movie actually seems to think that once you come out of the closet, you head straight for the pub and live there happily for the rest of your life.”

 

     And in this sense, Beautiful Things is not truly a “coming out” film as much as it is an excuse to present the truly weirder (a word of which scriptwriter Johnathan Harvey is quite fond) and outsider figures surrounding them. It may be somewhat dangerous to be gay in Thamesmead, particularly for Ste who several times repeats that if his father finds out he’s gay he will surely kill him—a viewpoint with which all the others agree—but compared with the African-English neighbor girl Leah (Tameka Empson), who to drown out her sorrows and boredom has convinced herself that she is Ma Cass of the 1960s group The Mamas and the Papas, their situation is far less complex.

     And compared with Sandra, an under- educated but street-savvy barmaid who’s determined to open her own pub; and her younger lover  Tony (Ben Daniels) whose identity somehow got caught up in a vortex of time between Tennessee Williams’ The Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie and a hippie who just got back from Woodstock, the bland buggerings of Jamie and Ste seem so utterly normal that by the end of the film we don’t even blink when they wrap their hands round one another’s waists to dance to Ma Cass’s “Dream a Little Dream of Me” in the Thamesmead Estate parking lot. Far more scandalous is the fact that the forever warring Sandra and Leah decide to join them.

       Fortunately, Empson, Henry, and Daniels are such strong actors that when the homosexual story supposedly at the center of this fable disappears into the private fantasies of the film’s incidental figures, they’re able to turn them into powerhouses of eccentricity. Flipping realities, writer Harvey and director Macdonald transform the trio of eccentrics into queers who constantly fascinate us with their shape-shifting relationships with one another in the world in which they all feel entrapped.

       The only problem is that while at least Jaime and Ste, except for their easy assimilation of gay life and their deep love for one another—two very different and usually difficult conundrums for young folks—they at least seem to be recognizable as human beings, the others seem a bit like the tubular balloons tied down to advertise products and locations as they sway and shimmy in the wind. If the foul-mouthed, hard-hitting, yet loving and flirtatious Sandra has one foot on planet earth, the other two seem to have been created out of the imagination of a writer who has seen too much TV, listened to too many pop records, and locked himself away with typewriter in his bedroom for far too many years at work on this script.

      It’s not that Beautiful Thing is not appealing. Slant Magazine reviewer Eric Henderson begins his look-back on the film with these words:

 

“Hettie MacDonald’s Beautiful Thing might be the most beloved of all the gay-youth movies released in the late ‘90s, which also included Edge of Seventeen and Get Real (which was an almost note-for-note replay of Beautiful Thing’s blueprint). It almost certainly has the largest cult fan base.”

 

     The British Film Institute recently named it one of the best 30 LGBT movies of all time. And I have to agree I was thoroughly engaged throughout by the charm this movie imbued. This film, I assure you, appears on every list of favorite gay films that I have consulted over the years.

      Yet, I can’t help but feel that its charm came out of a can gaffed up with so many artificial ingredients that I’m worried if I were to swallow it’s good-feeling taste all over again I might fall down with a gnawing ache in my belly.

      And I have no clue when the credits start to role where the two boys buried deep in the stuff and nonsense of this crowd pleaser might have gone to live out their lives, particularly since I can’t even imagine who they are, what they like except cuddling up, and what they might desire to do when they’ve finished their dance. As for Sandra, well she might be able to manage that new pub well enough to get that couch and all those other things she wants to give her pleasure, but with  whom might she share them? As for Leah and Tony, since they never existed in the real world I can only imagine they went floating off in our memories of their absurd imaginings of the past.

     I like fantasy, I assure you, as much as anyone else. But coming out is no fun when there’s nothing out there to go to except a noisy pub or a public park to run and chase each other through. The gay world, fortunately, is not the same as the Gay News.

 

Los Angeles, April 10, 2021

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