Alfred E. Green | Parachute Jumper / 1933

a gay male farce

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Francis Larkin (screenplay, based on a story by Rian James), Alfred E. Green (director) Parachute Jumper / 1933

 

Alfred E. Green’s 1933 film is ostensibly a heterosexual comedy in which Bill Keller (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is romantically involved with two women, one a wealthy mistress of the film’s villain, Mrs. Newberry (Claire Dodd) who hires him as a chauffeur whom she hopes  to engage in sexual pleasures after hours, and Alabama (Patrica) Brent (Bette Davis), a woman without a job or a place to stay, whom he invites to share his and his friend Toddles Cooper’s (Frank McHugh) apartment—even though, as Bill later puts it, their rent is so overdue that their bankrupt landlady wants to move in with them.

     Bette Davis does not remember this film fondly, describing it as “dead last” in the films she made. And many critics have savagely attacked the movie. Its dialogue, however, is often quite witty, and the plot is for cleverer than one might imagine. It is however unkind to Davis in several respects, mostly given the fact that she had not discovered her persona and does a rather poor Alabama accent that comes and goes and the story continues. I’d argue it her acting that is weak, not necessarily the film.          For the most part, the movie attempts to portray Fairbanks as a version of Clark Gable, which generally works, except that his interchanges with both the women of the film, Dodd and Davis, are lacking in intensity and even believability. What John Francis Larkin’s script concentrates upon, even if the plot seems to go in another direction, is Fairbanks’ remarkable relationships in this film with men.

      In the story, Bill and Toodles begin as Marine flyers, who as in all such movies, have established a deep friendship that borders on a bromance. As Toodles, McHugh is especially personable, singing throughout the film at the oddest moments while still making a wisecrack that demonstrates his love and admiration of his roommate.

 

      Their relationship, if not precisely gay, certainly flirts with the possibility, in one scene the two engaging in a rather fey series of comments as Bill virtually strips Toodles, who has just returned exhausted from searching for jobs, Bill needing to put on his pants simply because it is the only pair the two own, and change into his friend’s shirt and tie since is own are drying over the bathtub. Bill, slapping his friend with the imitation loose wrist of a queer, comments: “If you sewed your panties once in a while, we could hunt jobs together,” hinting that a shared experience together might be great fun, like two gay men out shopping.

     Toodles answers “Sewing is woman’s job.” Then turning his fanny towards Bill, he adds, “But I can run you up a hooked rug,” suggesting by the word “hooked” the street word for engaging in sex, and in the word rug, hinting at the hirsute condition of his behind. This scene, in which the two clearly are playing with notions of gay sex, doesn’t represent exactly new territory for Fairbanks, Jr.

  Unlike his macho father, the younger Fairbanks has long been rumored to have explored homosexuality as a young man, perhaps with gay tennis star Bill Tilden, who was evidently quite fond of younger boys, being arrested twice for having sex with boys, one aged 14, another 17. Tilden, who was a close friend of Charlie Chaplin, often played on Chaplin’s home tennis court and was well known to Fairbanks’ parents, Douglas, Sr. and Mary Pickford. Douglas, Jr. was a teenager in just those years when Tilden was winning his first championships. Below are photos with Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Bill Tilden, Charlie Chaplin, and Spanish tennis player Manuelo Alonso from 1923, and another of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. with Lester Stoefen, Bill Tilden, Paulette Godard, and a young Judy Garland. Fairbanks, we should remember, was also a child actor.

 

     

 

    Fairbanks Jr. went on to marry three times, Joan Crawford in 1929, Mary Lee Epling in 1939, and Vera Shelton in 1991, bearing three children. But throughout his life, Fairbanks’ closet friends were gay and bisexual, among them Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice Lillie, Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Rex Harrison. And during his marriage to Crawford he had an affair, he admits, with Katherine Hepburn.

      It’s fascinating, I would argue, that Olivier and Hepburn were bisexual, Hepburn according to Scotty Bowers’ Full Service, being primarily lesbian, as were Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie, long rumored to have had an affair together. Coward, as is well known, was an open homosexual in a time when being so was truly dangerous, and the Duke of Kent had an affair with Coward for 19 years as well as covert gay relationships with several other men.* Although Harrison, who married four times, was known to be a homophobe, some friends argued that it was simply a front to hide his own bisexuality. Harrison is certainly not known for his sympathetic relationships with women, two of his wives having committed suicide. All of which perhaps made him perfect for the character of Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady, a misogynist who preferred the company of his friend Colonel Hugh Pickering.

      Moreover, at least two of Fairbanks Jr.’s early film roles were ones in which he played gay men: A Woman of Affairs (1928) and Little Ceasar (1931). In the first Fairbanks plays Jeffry Merrick, brother to Greta Garbo’s character Diana, a woman who is in love with Jeffry’s dear friend and imagined lover David Furness (Johnny Mack Brown). As I wrote of that film, based on Michael Arlen’s almost scandalous 1924 fiction, The Green Hat:

 

      “The moment that David wins the rowing competition for Cambridge the very next day, Jeffry leaps down a substantial distance—almost as Fairbanks’ athletic father might have—from the high banked viewing cabana where he has been watching the race with others in order to be at the river spot where David shores his boat, the first to greet and congratulate him.

       If this isn’t love, pure homosexual desire—not youthful idolatry as the script would have it—I might never trust my “gaydar” again. But I can fully trust director Clarence Brown’s coding and strangely Fairbanks’ compliant acting. Jeffry loves David so deeply that when the latter jumps to his death, Jeffry immediately retires to a room in order to drink himself to death. The film allows no other logical explanation. In short, Jeffry is a homosexual in love with David, whether or not they have ever engaged in sex.”

 

        In the later film, Fairbanks’ first major role, he plays Caesar Enrico Bandello’s long-time friend and gang partner, Joe Massara, who leaves his friend to become a nightclub dancer, with an only slightly coded message that he remains Caesar’s deepest love, who despite his new “assistant”/lover Otero, he cannot do without, and whose courting of and demand that Joe return ends in Little Caesar’s death.

      My point in all of this is that writers and directors seemed not at all afraid to use the young Fairbanks Jr. as a handsome figure representing, even if highly coded, a homosexual. In their minds Fairbanks fit the part. And his acting, in both these roles, are some of the best moments of his early career.

      Is it any wonder then that the very best moments of Parachute Jumper are when Bill finally hooks up with the film’s villain, Weber (Leo Carrillo), the actor a leading man at this point in his career who would later be forced to play Pancho to Duncan Renaldo’s The Cisco Kid, one of whose major films was titled The Gay Amigo (1949).

    Once Weber discovers the chauffeur kissing his girlfriend, moreover at her insistence, he immediately rids himself and the film of Mrs. Newberry, and from that moment on stays as close as he can get to Bill, using him as his truly “in house” body guard.

       It is, in fact, at this point when the dialogue suddenly ceases being merely clever small talk and begins to truly take on sexual connotations, although previously while Alabama and Cuddles wait outside of Mrs. Newberry’s mansion wherein their friend Bill is trapped, they too begin to move the film into some of its sexual dimensions.

      Having just been told that he’s been asked to light Mrs. Newberry’s fireplace, the two wait below.

     Tired of their wait, Alabama laments, “He’s been up there an hour Toddles. It wouldn’t take that long to light a fire with a pocket lighter.”

     Cuddles answers in a manner that might almost suggest a male/male encounter: “Maybe he’s rubbing two dry sticks together.”

      Alabama adds: “Look, one of the lights went out,” with Cuddles still attempting to cover for his friend, “He’s making a few electrical repairs.”

        But it’s only when Weber has finally kicked out his girlfriend that things truly light up with sexual innuendo.

        

          carillo: “Now that we’ve turned this into a stag affair, would you like a little drink?

          bill: “Try me.”

          carillo: I must admit, you are some shot. So, in a manner of speaking, I could use a young man. I like your intestinal fortitude.”

 

      Bill considers the all-male world which Carillo is hinting at. But before he can even answer, Carillo continues: “Do you object to cracking**…I should say “bending” the law a little bit?”

      Even Bill is not certain to what law he is referring, the law of sexual desire or the civil laws of society: “What law?”

       “The one we all laugh at.”

       Understandably Bill is still a bit confused and more than a little troubled. But Carillo even makes it clearer in the coded language he is speaking: “You don’t know how uneasy I am without a stout friend behind by back.”

       On the surface, of course, he is simply inviting bill to be his bodyguard, but even Bill is not so naïve that he doesn’t recognize a sexual come on, answering “I’ll try anything once.”

       Carillo’s answer is still sexually loaded; “And it’s much better than being shot climbing under a bed,” suggesting, one imagines, that Bill “climb into bed with him” instead.

        Even now, as I retype the lines I hear in the film, I’m startled that many people will accuse me of “reading in,” and that several of my most sophisticated friends will not perceive the multiple sexual puns. To me, it shows that coding is still quite effective. We in the US are still such a puritan folk when it comes to sex that we simply cannot imagine that people speak in such a “winking” language, even though, in this case, Alabama realizes that “even the stars are winking.”

        But if we thought that might be the end of their sexual game-playing, the script only prolongs it, as we soon discover that as a body guard, Corillo requires Bill to actually remain in a sort of closet, a side room of his office covered by large curtin which, at the push of a button, opens so that Bill can finally come out momentarily to protect him. Never before was the idea of living a closeted life made more literal in film until works such as Wrik Mead’s Closet Case (1995)

        Understandably, Bill complains: “I feel like I’m practicing to be a hermit being in there all day alone….”

        Carillo responds: You’re getting paid to be lonesome. …Get behind that curtain and stay there. Let me give you some advice, put women out of your mind while you’re working for me.”

        Never has a starving, supposedly heterosexual hero had to pay so much to a gay sex-starved villain in order to finally get his girl, which, of course, is a conclusion necessary in all such films. Even Cuddles adjures him for not getting a vaccination for love, as Cuddles finally once again joins up with the Marines, with three meals a day and all the friendly men he might want.

 

       And even in the final moments of this male-on-male oriented film, in search of Alabama, as Bill begins to open door after door of a high rise in which he’s seen her enter, he pulls one door too many to find a scene out of almost any of the early 1930s films, a prissy male secretary (played by, who else, but Franklin Pangborn?) taking notes from a quite obviously lesbian boss, a perfect closing vignette for what is basically a gay male farce.

          And I haven’t even spoken about all the between-the-legs hard rod maneuvering it takes for both Bill and Toddles to bring their planes back to safety. As one Letterboxd commentator named Genry put it: “there’s no way Joseph Breen would have approved Douglas Fairbanks Jr. holding a thick, long pilot stick between his legs like that.”

         No wonder Bette Davis didn’t like this film! The female role was merely obligatory.

                

* According to the internet site The Rake, love letters from George to Coward were believed to have been stolen from Coward’s house in 1942, and another group of letters had to be bought back from a male prostitute in Paris who was blackmailing him. Additional gossip suggests that George dallied with his distant cousin Prince of Prussia Louis Ferdinand and with art historian and, later, Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

 

**”Cracking” here clearly means entering the asshole, which his next term, “bending” further hints at. But since Weber’s major business, it turns out, is narcotics, it also hints at the use of “crack cocaine.”

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

 

Michael Cocoyannis | The Cherry Orchard / 1999

a place not really theirs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Cacoyannis (screenwriter, based on the play by Anton Chekhov, and director) The Cherry Orchard / 1999

 

Unlike the stage version of The Cherry Orchard, Michael Cacoyannis’ 1999 film version of the great Chekhov play begins in France, with Anya (Tushka Bergen), along with their eccentric governess, Charlotte Ivanovna (the wonderfully comic Frances de la Tour) who have traveled to bring her mother, the beautiful Ranyevskaya (Charlotte Rampling), home. In the small, grungy apartment they find her, after she has run away from her Russian home because of the drowning death of her son, and where taken up with an unnamed lover, as well as recently attempting suicide.

      By beginning the work far away from their provincial Russian home, Cacoyannis establishes from the very outset of this tragi-comedy that at least the house’s owner has already abandoned it. And, although the story will take a while unwind in describing the entire series of events, it is clear from her own condition of near-poverty (having already had to sell her villa), that despite her returning to the nest, so to speak, she, her brother Gayev (Alan Bates), and the entire family have already lost their estate.

     One can almost sit back, accordingly, for the rest of the film and watch the often comic and sad machinations of the family and its servants that demonstrate the reasons for their downfall.

     Bates plays Gayev as a kind of madman, addicted to billiards the way, it is hinted, that Ranyevskaya is to—is it snuff or cocaine? Or, perhaps the way Ivanovna’s dog is addicted to nuts.

      Yet the true marvel of this film is that Ranyevskaya is not played, as she often is, as a kind of frail early version of O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone, a woman with no head for money or facts, but rather a woman who intentionally resists what she knows is the truth: the fact that, as Lopahin (Owen Teale) reminds her again and again, she must sell the lovely cherry orchard to create expensive subplots for the growing rich in order to pay off the estate’s growing debts. Rampling portrays Ranyevskaya, rather, as a woman who will not act precisely because she believes that, having sinned so deeply, she and her slave-owning family of the past deserve their fates. 

      There are moments when, caught up in her loving memories of life at the estate, of life beside a lake that also contains of the largest cherry orchards in Russia, that she certainly appears to be living in a dream. Yet, we often catch a glint in her eyes of steely determination, perceive a quiver about the lips of terror, making it quite clear that the woman everyone else perceives as frail, has a heart, perhaps, of rock. In Rampling’s deeply moving portrait, Ranyevskaya has already died, and her only real role is to help her beloved, daughters, Anya and Varya (Katrin Cartlidge). her brother. and her servants realize that they too will soon be homeless, if not dead themselves. If only she could marry off her daughters, perhaps they, at least, might be saved.

 

    Perhaps for that very reason, Lopahin, in this film version, is not portrayed as the utter villain he has been, as critics have pointed out, in many stage productions. Here, despite his inability to comprehend the family’s adoration of the house and land which surely represent their sacrificial pyre, he attempts, again and again, to help and save them. Yet, the one thing that he might do to redeem any of them, to marry Varya, he simply cannot accomplish. Besides, he is already married—to his money and to his determination of rectify his own past. If this far gentler Lopahin, at least during the estate auction, we imagine might be fighting for his own gain, he is doing it, nonetheless, but on behalf of the family he has attempted to warn. Yet, in the end, he is still a kind of monster, unable to even allow them a few more moments of peace before the hack of axe put to the cherry trees heard in the distance (here actually visualized).

      The only one who truly might have escaped is Anya, particularly after she meets up again the former family tutor, Trofimov (Andrew Howard), who, as the eternal student attempts to educate her about what the future will soon bring, a complete transformation of cultural order. And, for moment, she seems to perceive the truth: that all the beauty about them, the rambling house and its orchards, has never been “theirs”—the wealthy and elite—but was created by the serfs. As she puts it, “the place has not really been ‘theirs’ for a very long time.”

      But, of course, Trofimov has no money, and can offer her no protection from what is soon to occur, even if they survive the complete destruction of their kind.

      There are some problems with Cacoyannis’ telling. At times, in his attempt to let the story tell itself, the director’s script is simply too oblique. It is hard, for example, to quite know what the role of Yasha (Gerald Butler) is all about. How, precisely, is he somehow attached himself to Ranyevskaya and how, later, does he fall in—although it makes perfect sense—with Lopahin? And it is hard to comprehend why Trofimov, given his current values, has even bothered to return, except perhaps for his sublimated love of both Anya and her mother. And, except as comic relief, why does the German-educated Ivanovna even exist. Obviously these are problems in Chekhov’s original as well.

      Overall, however, Cacoyannis does a quite splendid job of portraying both the humor—which I might have put a little more in the foreground—and the sadness of events in this grand melodrama of the end of 19th century Russia. Yes, these folk, like those in Vanya, are all quite tired and, at times, boring. But here, there are indications of the joyous folk they once were. And Rampling as Ranyevskaya makes such a remarkably astounding ghost.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2017).     

Werner Herzog | Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God) / 1972, US 1977

a private war of madness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Herzog (screenwriter and director) Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, The Wrath of God) / 1972, US 1977

 

If nothing else you have to give Werner Herzog credit for working, five times no less, with the near-mad actor Klaus Kinski, as well as discovering and featuring the difficult to deal-with actor, Bruno S. But then Herzog clearly liked the challenges of doing near-impossible movies.

      Already in his second film, Even Dwarfs Started Small, we see him filming with an isolated and fairly insane group of imprisoned little people. By the time of Aguirre, The Wrath of God he was warming-up to the even more-impossible-to-film Fitzcarraldo (also with Kinski). At least in this Amazon-based story the characters are not saddled with carrying an entire ship by land. Here, as Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) descends from the already-conquered Incan empire to the jungle in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado, at least there is enough man-power to possibly accomplish the task.

     As we know, mostly from the writings of a Gaspar de Carvajal, a Spanish monk ministering to the Indians and the Spanish, most of those involved never returned, and the men, women, and native Incans who Pizarro sent down river to check out the feasibility of the remaining of voyage all were either killed or went mad before they were destroyed by natural causes.

     Several critics have written about the early scenes of Herzog’s near-miraculous film; as the camera begins in a broad view of Spaniards, dressed in helmets and metal plates, who slowly make their way with a procession of chained Incans down the mountainside, women carried in gilded hand-coaches, the music by West German progressive/Krautrock band Popol Vuh plays an ethereal score, as if suddenly the heavens have opened up to celebrate these new gods’ trek from the high country into the verdant jungle below.

      It is only when the camera moves in on the party as it begins to reach the intense jungle growth that Herzog reveals how arduous is their voyage and how absolutely ridiculous the participants of this voyage are. The Spaniards, barking out German-language orders, attempt to save their foodstuffs, their cannons, and particularly their women from the mud in which they are now engulfed. But, by the time their reach the river, they are exhausted, and the force of the Amazon is so powerful that it’s clear they must travel downstream even if they might wish to make the voyage of quickly constructed rafts. Even the vain Pizarro perceives the impossibility, holding most of his retinue back, while sending some of his strongest men ahead to check out whether such a route is possible.

      Among the raft-borne voyagers are the already mentioned monk, Carvajal (Del Negro)—who in real life, never took this voyage—Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra), named head of the party and his mistress Inés de Atienza (Helena Rojo), the already slightly mad Lope de Aguirre (Kinski) and his daughter Florés (Cecilia Rivera), Perucho (Daniel Ades), a friend of Aguirre, the only royal among them, Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling), and numerous Peruvian slaves.

      From the beginning the trip down river does not go well. One of the four rafts is soon caught up in an eddy, and cannot be moved across to join the others who have made an encampment. By morning they discover all the occupants of the raft dead, shot by local tribal Indians. Ursúa demands that others attempt to cross to bring back the bodies, but Aguirre, determined to move forward, orders Perucho to send a cannon blast to the trapped raft, spilling the bodies in the heaving river.

     By morning, the river, having risen during the night, has taken away the other three rafts. Ursúa determines that there is no way of moving forward, and orders the group to return through the jungle to Pizarro and the others to tell them the route is impassable.

      Quickly maddened by the legends he has heard, Aguirre shoots Ursúa and another supporter, and takes command, giving the title of the “King of Spain” to the fat and quite ignorant Guzmán. But even Guzmán will not order the death of the recovering Ursúa, although both he and his mistress know it is only a matter of time before Aguirre will attempt to kill him. When Inés dares to ask Carvajal why he not spoken out in the name of the Church against Aguirre’s acts, he explains that the Church has always supported the strongest, never the weak, restating a theme that will be expressed time and again in Herzog’s films. Society and religion are never to be trusted when it comes to the individuality of the human being.

     Constructing one larger raft—brazenly hand-built by Herzog and his crew for the film  itself—we sense the very real danger the characters and their actors must undergo to reach their destination—the end of the film itself. To make things worse, Kinski and Herzog grew increasingly disenchanted with one another, and film legend will never quite be rid of the notion, later denied by the director, that he threatened to shoot Kinski if he dared to leave the set. No matter, Kinski clearly took the entire company (including the local natives acting in the film) hostage in his fits of tyrannical anger. In order to get a quieter performance out of the volatile Kinski, the director would purposely anger him before shoots, allowing his temper to dissipate before moving forward, in short, detonating the fuse before its on-screen explosion.

    Aguirre’s madness, nonetheless, becomes increasingly clear, as, one by one, his fellow raft-mates are killed around him by native arrows, while he, himself, plans to marry his own daughter in order to create “the purest dynasty the world has ever seen.” Like the original Aguirre, he ultimately kills her himself, declaring his acts as the “wrath of God.” It’s hard today to not perceive metaphorical comparisons to Aguirre’s behavior in one of our major political leaders.

      The film ends in one of the most startling images ever put to screen, as Aguirre, the lone survivor, is surrounded on his “raft” kingdom as his floats wildly to sea with hundreds of squealing monkeys, as if the very project that Herzog had created had run amok. The memorable images call our attention to the actor and director more than the character. Who might ever think to create such a totally mad vision of the world, we can only ask? We have our answer, of course, in the figures who have dared to make Aguirre come into being. This is a private war of madness, which, by the very end of the decade, would be revisited as a public war of madness in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalyse Now. Both reveal the deepest “heart of darkness” imaginable.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2018).

 

unknown director | The "Pay-as-You-Enter" Man / 1913 [lost film]

the thanksgiving sissy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maibelle Heikes Justice (screenwriter), unknown director, The 'Pay-as-You-Enter' Man / 1913 || lost film

 

Evidently influenced by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Maibelle Heikes Justices’ screenplay for The ‘Pay-as-You-Enter’ Man is a holiday tale involving Henry Rosser (Richard Travers) who has worked behind the silk counter of a large department store for 20 years, his salary having grown to the plump sum of $20 a week. Yet with that salary he has managed to buy a miniscule house in the suburbs and raise several children.

     The family looks forward every year to Thanksgiving, but Rosser has been unable to afford a turkey because of his innumerable small purchases including the payment on the house. On the eve of the holiday, on his way home via the ferry, he meets up, quite by accident, with a friend exciting a saloon, a huge gobbler under his arm, which he explains he has just won in the bar raffle.

     Feeling he has little to lose Henry decides to take a chance on the next raffle, which he wins!

     But at that very moment the police enter, arrest the proprietor for running an illegal lottery, and hold Henry and his huge turkey, taking him off to spend the night in a police cell. Facing a night of misery and the shame it will surely bright his wife and children, Henry dares to call his employer, Mr. Straussman (E.H. Calvert), whom he has never before met.

      To his surprise, Straussman not only shows up to bail him out, but gives a $50 bonus and promises him a substantially higher salary.

      The next day the family celebrates eating up the turkey to the very last bone—but not the turkey which Henry has won, having brought them so very much luck, but another turkey he purchased, keeping the lucky gobbler as a pet, a bit like the annual White House celebration of a pardoned turkey.

      Thanks to the research of cinema writer Shane Brown, we know that somewhere embedded in this family story that today might have been produced by Hallmark, is a sissy, about which an unnamed film reviewer of the day took great umbrage, asking “Why interject the abominable ‘sissy’ in the score—such stuff is not comedy.”

       Apparently, in this lost film a sissy suddenly appears for no apparent reason, a precursor surely—just as was the manager of the matrimonial agency in Hilda Wakes—of the numerous 1930s cinema pansies—effeminate and persnickety young men whose appearance seemed to be justified only by the comic laughs brought on by a primarily heterosexual audiences who saw homosexuality as something to be laughed at—during what was described by film critics of the day as the “Panze Craze.”

       The sissies of the mid-1910s, accordingly, can be recognized as a way of slipping homosexuality into cinema, not as an attempt to speak out upon how to alter a child’s gender confusion as Brown sometimes suggests its role might have been. The fact that, as the critic claims, it needn’t have at all appeared in this narrative, speaks loudly to my argument that film needed queers.

 

Los Angeles, September 1, 2022