Don McDougall | The Mark of Zorro / 1974 [TV film] || Peter Medak | Zorro: The Gay Blade / 1981

what does it mean to have a gay twin?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brian Taggart (teleplay, based on the screenplay by John Taintor Foote and the original story by Johnston McCulley), Don McDougall (director) The Mark of Zorro / 1974 (TV film)

Hal Dresner, Greg Alt, and Don Moriarty (screenplay, based on the story by Johnston McCulley), Peter Medak (director) Zorro: The Gay Blade / 1981

 

      Before I discuss the Peter Medak version from 1981, I should mention the other The Mark of Zorro, the ABC television film of 1974 starring Frank Langella.

     Basically, it repeats Moumalian’s 1940 version except that this Zorro keeps his dual identities secret until the last moment, allowing the fop and lover to at least coexist throughout most of the film, hinting once more of a comfortable bisexuality. The TV version also features a far more complex relationship that Don Diego (Langella) develops with Don Luis’ wife (Louise Sorel) so that Diego can more closely keep an eye on Don Luis’ (Robert Middleton) and Captain Esteban’s (Ricardo Montalbán) activities.

     Given the inability for most heterosexuals—and homosexuals, for that matter—to truly understand bisexual behavior or the complexities of a tormented homosexual unable to fully come out of the closet—although in the case of earlier Zorros, it is the heterosexual who is unable to fully “come out”—the creation of a pair of Vega twins obviously resolved what appeared as the original film’s implausibility. By first introducing the Spanish educated Don Diego Vega, called home to discover his father’s recent death (a tortoise, so we are told by the evil Captain Esteban, had startled his horse leading the man to fall to his death), the story is able to establish a womanizing hero without confusing the audience as evidently Mamoulian had imagined his theater goers might be. No double life for this Don Diego (George Hamilton) is truly necessary. His Zorro and his own character are so much one and the same that even Esteban (Ron Liebman) immediately suspects his childhood friend and, we later learn, his female lover has suspected from the start.

      In order to allow for the “other” side of Zorro’s historical character, the “poof” who in the original Niblo version Diego pretends to be and the “fop” Mamoulian’s Zorro feigns, the writers and director serve up Diego’s twin brother, Ramón (also Hamilton), who instead of being sent to Spain to learn traditional forms of swordplay and horsemanship, was sent by his father to sea in order to “make a man of him”: “It’s said the navy makes men; well, I’m living proof that they made.” Identifying now more at British, Ramón now calls himself Bunny Wigglesworth, and is a far more flamboyantly effeminate gay man than the original, snuff-sniffing Zorro could have allowed himself to be.

      His arrival is perfectly timed with Diego’s injury as having jumped from a first story of Algalde Esteban’s home, and spraining or breaking his leg, he is his frustrated in continuing the struggle for justice that he has just undertaken after having discovered that his and Ramón’s father was the original Zorro.

 

    His twin may seem ready to take over the role they have inherited, but only by replacing plum, avocado, cherry, green, and finally even yellow perfectly accessorized capes and robes for the original’s Zorro’s bleak black and exchanging the sword for a whip, hinting that perhaps Bunny has taken up some of the British sailors’ S&M habits

     Yet, oddly this film almost loses interest in the gay brother once he has taken up the role. We hear of his many-colored robes mostly from hearsay, and the movie fortunately does not give us a constant dose of limp wrists and hisses which might make it almost unbearable; what we know of Bunny’s behavior is reported only by Esteban. And indeed, director Medack appears to be more interested in the private sexual kinks of the film’s straight figures than in its obvious gay one.

      Visited by Esteban’s sexually voracious wife Florinda (Brenda Vaccaro) when her masquerade party is destroyed by the visit of Zorro and her husband’s response, she jumps immediately into his bed, suggesting that it must lonely there each night. Diego’s response is not what we might have expected: “Sometimes Paco [Diego’s loyal comrade, equivalent to the first Zorro’s Bernardo] has nightmares and I let him sleep with me.”

      Soon after—Florinda not even having time to escape—Esteban himself pays a late night visit to Diego, mostly to vent his frustration over Zorro’s appearance at their party and his escape. When he sees his friend in bed, he wonders momentarily whether Diego himself might be Zorro, and knowing that the bandit has hurt himself in the jump, requests that Diego stand and walk for him. When Diego protests that he has seen him walk for most of his life, Esteban again utters an unexpected comment: “You always do it with such manliness that I never get tired of watching you.”

      Even Ramón, upon his return, explains who he is to his brother, who cannot quite recognize him, by describing himself as a former “roommate.”

      Later, after the gay blade has made several conquests of his tax collectors and compañeros, Esteban brings Diego a poster of a traditional sketch of the masked Zorro, making the ridiculous claim that now that they have a sketch they surely find him. Again wondering if the eyes of the sketch might not match Diego’s, he suggests that his friend “act gay,” demanding that he speak in a hiss, flap his arms, walk a swishy manner, etc. By requiring the supposedly straight men act out the gay stereotypes, the film’s “real” gay figure seldom has to reveal himself as just that.

 

     And near the end of the film, when Diego attends another masked ball at Esteban’s and Florinda’s hacienda—having secretly demanded all the guests to appear as Zorro—Ramón appears in drag, introduced as Diego’s cousin from Santa Barbara. Esteban dances with her and is so completely entranced by her, that he appears to actually have in love with the talk buxom blonde. At one moment, he takes Diego aside, beginning his sentence, “Your cousin is not a woman,” before finishing the sentence with a stage pause, “she’s a goddess.”

      In short, the film seems far more interested in exploring the subterranean gay emotions of the two boyhood friends, Diego and Esteban (whose lives openly parallel those of Judah and Messala in Ben Hur, another Fred Niblo 1920s film), than it is in representing the exploits of Bunny Wigglesworth.

      Moreover, when it comes to Diego’s exploits with the woman he loves, the unflappable social reformist Charlotte Taylor-Wilson (Lauren Hutton), Diego, laid up with the leg injury, sends his gay brother Zorro in his stead. Despite his outrageously queer identity, the lady claims her love for him and admits that she would do anything that he asks of her, hoping quite obviously that it might be of a sexual nature. In this instance, Bunny takes over the role of Sebastian’s wife in Mamoulian’s film, to suggest that she might go shopping with him since there are new prints and colognes just in from Spain.

      More importantly, when, after he has healed, Diego pays her a visit, she appears to have also seen through his disguise, perceiving him as Diego and suggesting that at first she thought there were two of him but that she has now realized that they are just two sides of one man who is changing,” nearly reiterating my comments about the Niblo version of Diego Vega.*

      Given her remarkable perceptions about the inner turmoil of one man coming to self-discovery, —even Diego admitting that he has discovered that he can now be “bulnerable,” she comically attempting to correct his mispronunciation—it is almost unfortunate that the actual gay twin need show up again after he has bid farewell in order to save his brother from the firing squad. But then Hollywood isn’t good at leaving things unanswered or allowing a film to suggest issues to which it truly doesn’t wish to attend.

    By film’s end the gay and straight have been properly bifurcated and we have returned to Mamoulian-land, the director to whom this film is dedicated, and the film has become so self-consciously corrective and conservative that it sends it major characters off to live in Boston.

      Yet, whether knowingly or unknowingly this comic film has come so very close to Niblo’s vision of Zorro that it is a shame it couldn’t admit to the fact that bisexuals do exist and that even heterosexuals can find themselves torn by their own subliminal queer urges. In any event, I’ll gladly accept what Medack offered, a film about a gay man in which he not only doesn’t die but saves his straight brother(s).

           

* I made the comments about Niblo’s film before seeing Zorro: The Gay Blade this morning, having first seen it when it appeared in theaters but having completely forgotten almost all its events.

 

Los Angeles, July 6- 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).