Ralph Steiner | Pie in the Sky / 1935

starving for god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ralph Steiner and company (scenario), Ralph Steiner (director) Pie in the Sky / 1935

 

Photographer, cinematographer, and film director Ralph Steiner is known best for his 1929 experimental film H20, listed among the films of The National Film Registry, his 1930 short Mechanical Principles, and his later photographs of clouds—in short of his abstract depictions of nature and industry—than he is for his very human, narrative works such as his role of co-cinematographer with several others for Pare Lorentz' The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and the short film of 1935, Pie in the Sky. Arguably, however, that last-named film may over time come to seen as one of his very best works.

     The piece, for which credit is also given to the Public Theater collective and the newly-formed collaborative group Nykino, co-stars the later director Elia Kazan (whose credit reads Elia “Gadget” Kazan) and Ellman Koolish playing a couple of Depression garbage-dump hobos.

 

    Near starvation, they attend with numerous others of their kind a sermon at the local Christian Mission in which a preacher delivers an endless sermon about sin and salvation as the poor homeless attendees yawn, fall to sleep, show their disdain, and tear the petals from a flower to “He loves me/He loves me not,” apparently provoked by the seemingly random attentions of God himself.

   Finally, in protest some of the congregation began to tap their plates, having waited far too long for their promised piece of pie, evidently the reward to attending the sermon. After properly scolding his parishioners, the preacher reveals the pie itself and, counting off his congregation, cuts it into small slices. All evidently get their tiny piece the two waiting last in line, Kazan and Koolish, who in pained frustration are assured by the preacher, pointing at one of the placards posted throughout the mission: “He will provide.”

 

    Fed up with promises, the two retreat to their home in the dump. There the two starved men search through the debris, one coming up with a small dress dummy he names Mae West (a figure which even at the time was recognized by many as an actor who performed her own gender as if she were in drag) playfully making love to it, an act not at all appreciated by the other. The first tosses his new love into the lap of his friend and walks off in a huff.

      But the other, still dismayed by the intrusive bust of the famous beauty, tosses her away and goes looking for his friend.

      We immediately recognize them in this act as a couple in the manner of Flaubert’s great fiction of an odd male couple, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and even more as the couple Samuel Beckett created in their tradition, Mercier and Camier who live together, travel together, sleep together, and even occasionally employ one another in their sexual acts since there is no one else around and, despite their everyday arguments, they love one another. They are all predecessors to Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon or even the cinematic duo Laurel and Hardy, who as I have shown throughout this volume have several homosexual-like encounters. The focus in all of these pairings is not sex itself, although Beckett often hints at it in the narrative (particularly in Mercier et Camier), but in their impossible but truly necessary dependence upon one another.

      In this case, Kazan finds Koolish in a derelict auto and joins him, Koolish soon after reaching into the other’s coat pocket for a cigarette stub as if it were mutual territory, Kazan pulling the small case of stubs out of another pocket, offering up one to his friend and lighting up the other before he bends over to light the other’s stub with his own already lit cig; if their lingering face off cannot be described as a deep kiss, then what was the point of Humphrey Bogart lighting up his and Ingmar Bergman’s cigarettes in his mouth at the same moment before handing her the other?

 

   And it is soon after this that the two go for an imaginary car ride and chase that becomes the central action of Steiner’s short work and demonstrates the true joy—it depicts after all, a true “joyride”—these to find in one another’s company in a world of few other pleasures. The very length of this scene, and the absolutely joyous smiles with which they engage each other makes it clear that, like children this ride is something of absolute delight. As if they can’t get enough, they follow it up—when one of them finds the front end of another vehicle and ropes it up to create a kind of box car contraption—with a drag race between the two of them.

      Suddenly interrupting their play they go on a further search of the dump site, one of them discovering a doorway marked “Welfare Department,” behind which Kazan jumps, turning his vest the other way to suggest a priest at the confessional, demanding to know of his friend’s sins, who pleads his only sin was going hungry.

       Welcoming his friend into the confessional and by association, heaven, he preaches over his new found convert, even at one point symbolically baptizing him.

       For a few minutes he disappears to discover several old tubes and tires which he places round his neck and with an old piece of cloth which drapes around him becomes alternately a sort of angel and a high priest.

      Returning to his other, he delivers mocks a sermon, while Koolish keeps pointing to an old tin simply asking for the promised food, some beans he wonders whether Mary, a doll posted on a piece of wire, might grant him. The priest scolds, constantly pointing to the sky. And before the two can even continue their skit they become, both of them, saints—with hubcaps and wire as their halos—as they sing the absurd choruses of “Pie in the Sky” (aka “The Preacher and the Slave”), Joe Hill’s satiric song of 1910 that’s sung to the music of Joseph P. Webster’s “The Sweet By-and-By.”

 

You will eat, bye and bye

In that glorious land above the sky

Work and pray, live on hay

You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (that’s a lie)

 

And the starvation army they play

And they sing and they clap and they pray

Till they get all your coin on the drum

Then they tell you when you’re on the bum

 

You will eat, bye and bye

When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry

Chop some wood, twill do you good

And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye (that’s no lie

 

    Finally, perhaps exhausted or as the lyrics suggest, nearly “dead,” we see the now holy duo lying next to one another. But on Kazin’s crotch we suddenly spot a full pie tin. The pie might have been located on the ground between them, or on one or another of their chests, or at their feet. But Steiner has placed it precisely on the crotch and when both inevitably spot the illusory object and go for it, it is Kazin’s crotch which the starving Koolish goes after—starving perhaps for both food and sex—the couple cursing to the heavens for their state of being.

       Clearly, Steiner and his collaborators have relied, like Beckett, on the homoerotic in which to contextualize their social satire. And is equally clear that these two “angels” will have to wait for a long time for a visit from “Godot,” the Beckett play which did not premiere until 1953.

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).