Emir Kusturica | Otac na službenom putu (When Father Was Away on Business) / 1985

the sleepwalkers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Abdulah Sidran (screenplay), Emir Kusturica (director) Otac na službenom putu (When Father Was Away on Business) / 1985

 

Winner of the 1985 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, then-Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business, at moments, is both a charming portrayal of family life in the Saravejo of the early 1950s, and a painful drama of secrets and lies of the post-World War II period in which Tito was coercing his citizens away from Soviet Communism to the Tito-brand of Communism in which “Tito was the party and the party was Tito.”

     It may seem strange today for Americans to think that some preferred the Soviet-style Communism to a home-bred version—often presented as a milder Communism than the Stalin authoritarian rule—but as we know strong dictatorial-run governments, such as Albania and Romania, were often more autocratically run, punishing its citizens than those directed from the more-distant Moscow. The movie begins, indeed, with a local farmer singing a song in Spanish since, he argues, it’s “safer.” Even then, he is later arrested for having Soviet Communist material in his home.

     So too does Mehmed “Meša” Malkoč (Miki Mianojlović) feel that the Tito government has gone too far with a newspaper cartoon depicting Marx at a desk with a photograph of Stalin upon the wall, expressing his disdain to a mistress, Ankica Vidmar (Mira Furlan) on a train as he travels on business. She is upset that their affair is going nowhere, since it is apparent he will never divorce his wife at home, Sena (Mirjana Karnović) who has borne him two sons, Malik (Moreno De Bartolli)—from whose point of view we see the actions of the movie—and Mirza (Davor Dujmović) who seems destined to become, like this film’s director, involved with filmmaking.

    At home things seem quite placid, with a large extended family and friends gathering round the table to celebrate the traveling salesman father’s return home. The food seems bounteous, the conversation joyful, as the scene is played out in a sense of familial pleasure. But gradually women rise, one to read a secretly passed letter from a soldier-lover, another unhappy neighbor entering the bathroom to sneak a drink from her hidden liquor flask. We already know that the beloved father is a sexual philanderer. Things are clearly not as they seem.

 

    When Anika Vidmar comes to town, displaying her aviation skills, it is clear that she has ditched Meša for a higher-up in the government, Meša’s brother-in-law, Zijo. A casual mention of Meša’s reaction to the editorial cartoon brings retribution upon him. But although he is accused of being involved with the Cominform (The Communist Information Bureau, a group advocating shared information among the nine European Communist-run nations), we know that the real reason is Zijo’s recognition that Meša has had an affair with Anika. Meša is sent to a labor camp, for reasons his wife is told very little.

     This traumatic event is symbolically brought home to his two sons by their sudden circumcisions by a family member barber, Malik screaming out in terror and pain.* The event and the age of the children suggest what we might already perceived, that the family is Muslim.

     To protect her children from worrying about their father’s sudden absence, Sena tells them a lie: their father is away on business. But this lie is far more troubling for everyone involved. The children are lonely and worried to see their mother often in tears. Suddenly, the table is barer; when Malik attempts to purchase a soccer ball with money he has saved up, his elder brother steals it from him, the two of them returning it to their mother. With no communication with her husband and no knowledge about his crimes, Sena can only suspect the worse, but, when approached, her relative will tell her nothing. As a metaphor for all the figures in this tale, the young Malik begins to sleepwalk, endangering his life by climbing and walking across a train trestle.

     When Sena finally is invited to meet with Meša aboard a train near a mine where he is working, their night together is thoroughly interrupted by the somewhat unknowing interference of Malik, who insistently joins them in bed.

      Sometime later, Sena and her sons are invited to come and live with Meša in a town in which he is now working, in the industrial villlage of Zvornik. There life continues, with Malik meeting a young girl his age, the local Doctor’s daughter, Masha Liakhov (Silvija Puharić), with whom the boy becomes infatuated. But even here, information is kept secret, as we suddenly discover the girl is very sick, and ultimately is taken away in an ambulance at the very moment that Malik has rushed to her side.

       Suspecting her husband of womanizing, Sena fights with Meša, particularly when he reports he will be traveling to a nearby town noted for its sexual activities. To prove her wrong, Meša takes along Malik. When the father beds a woman, Malik is sent to sleep in the truck under the watch of a friend, who himself falling asleep, suddenly realizes Malik is missing, the boy gone on a sleepwalking prowl once again. His disappearance into the wild ends up with both the men and their whores desperately in search of him.

        Sena is now certain of her husband’s infidelity, having previously encountered and challenged Anika in public. Meša can only presume that it is his son who has betrayed him, but it is Zijo who has insinuated the truth.

 

       Sleepwalking through their lives, covering up all truth with the secrets and lies of the society itself, the family figures finally gather at the wedding of Malik’s youngest maternal uncle, where Zijo reveals he is now suffering from diabetes and with whom Meša encourages Sena to make up. Reluctantly, she does so, but as Zijo falls to the table drunk, Meša, once again, seeks out Anika, virtually raping her in the cellar, an act that Malik accidently oversees as his soccer ball bounces against the bars of widow. Afterwards, disgusted by life, Anika wraps the toilet cord around her neck, determined, it is apparent, to commit suicide. But her action simply pulls the metal cord from its connection. And she is left crying in despair, very much alive.

     The final image of the film is of the young Malik, his face half-turned from the audience, with a slight smile, as if looking toward to the future but recalling all of these past events with some gentle humor.

 

      That image, in turn, brings up even darker possibilities for this culture than we have been shown in this film. Will Malik become a man like his father, superficially loving his family, but at heart a liar and traitor—not so much of Tito’s government, but his own values—a rapist and a misogynist brute? Although the characters might in no way to imagine it, we know now what ultimately happened to Sarajevo, and how in that world neighbor came to destroy neighbor. There is almost something smug, accordingly, in Kusturica’s final image, a boy who might, with the fall of Tito, desire a Bosnia free from Serbian control. Despite the film’s pretense of familial solidarity and potential forgiveness, the audience perceives just how hateful and deceitful all of these figures truly are—even the seemingly innocent young boy who has witnessed it all.

      Although Kusturica has twice convinced the judges of the Cannes Film Festival of his cinematic brilliance, I am still uncertain of his greatness, despite his obvious cinemagraphic gifts. Any man who admires the Russian President Putin as much as he apparently does, can only bring questions to my lips. Apparently, the sleepwalking through history continues.

 

*This just pre-puberty circumcision was particularly painful for me to watch, since at the age of 14, I was hospitalized to have my tonsils removed, but at the same time, without telling me, my parents arranged a circumcision. Waking up to feel pain in another part of the body was not only a shock to me, but presented me with sense of parental betrayal. I can now understand that my parents didn’t know how to talk about it, how to describe it to me. But, in a sense, I’ve never able to completely forgive them for their silence. All of this was not helped by the fact that for a couple of weeks after, I suffered ether (the popular amnestic drug of the day) dreams. I might also mention that through much of my childhood I sleepwalked, going so far one night to put on an overcoat and attempt to walk into the cold, snow-covered Marion, Iowa streets. 

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2013).

 

Roy Del Ruth | The Life of the Party / 1930

in the dark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Darryl F. Zanuck and Arthur Caesar (screenplay), Roy Del Ruth (director) The Life of the Party / 1930

 

Critic Richard Barrios includes the 1930 film The Life of the Party directed by Roy Del Ruth on his list of LGBTQ-related films simply because its central character, Flo (Winnie Lightner) momentarily refers to her and Dot’s (Irene Delroy) employer at the ACME music company as a “pansy”: “Here comes the pansy,” she warns her friend. The actor playing that role does not precisely fit the “pansy” type, although he is a bit persnickety and is certainly not fond of his women employees. But nothing is particularly made of the moniker, and the film doesn’t explore any gay affectations or traits. He fires Flo mostly for her foul mouth and Dot for her inability to properly convey the songs through her piano playing through which he sells the scores. Moreover, the good-looking Dot is attracting men who simply have no desire to buy sheet music; they hang around her rather to see if they can get a date.

 

     Flo’s line is one of the first in the film, and I was ready to abandon watching the rest of it, finding so little of importance regarding my focus on LGBTQ filmmaking that it seemed superfluous.

      But I had enjoyed Del Ruth’s first version of The Maltese Falcon and his Broadway Melody of 1936, and although the film’s plot shares the genre of the gold-digging girls of films such as Gentlemen Prefer Friends (1953) and How to Marry a Millionaire of the same year—a genre of which I’m not very fond—there was something immediately off-kilter in this film, from Flo’s manic singing of “Poison Ivy” in the very scene and everything going forward. Flo sings:

 

                           When he asks for coffee

                           I fill it iodine.

                           He got a poison ivy

                           instead of a clinging vine.

 

     It is clear that she most certainly will have difficulty finding the right man, particularly one who might deal with her fast-talking coarse demeanor and her street savvy behavior. The utter innocent Dot is unfortunately highly influenced by her friend, and when she discovers that her longtime boyfriend Bob has just married a wealthy elderly matron—one of the many inexplicable oddities of this film—she’s ready to join Flo on a quest to find a rich man. This was also intended to be a musical from which, because of the perceived disinterest in musicals, the songs were later cut. Although the songs were retained in the international versions, today it is believed that no copy exists containing Earle Crooker and Sidney D. Mitchell’s original score.

      The girls first begin their journey by joining up as models for the fashion designer who has been pestering Dot, Monsieur LeMaire (Charles Judels) who more fully does fit the stereotype of the pansy. Not only is he a fashion designer, always a pansy character, but gushes with sweet joy at seeing his dress hanging upon Dot’s lean frame. Yet, Darryl F. Zanuck and Arthur Caesar’s script purposely confuses matters by also making Monsieur LeMaire seem to be a womanizer, as he immediately arranges for the two girls to borrow his beautiful dresses for an evening dinner foursome to which he has also invited a close male friend.

       Even in offering up their evening attire he appears to be quite gay, announcing “This one was made for the Princess....and this one the Prince wants to wear.” Still, he insists they immediately take the key to his suite, dress up for the evening and await his and his friend’s arrival.

       Sisses in these early films, of course, were often seemingly interested in the opposite sex, and were sometimes even married. Consider Horace Hardwick’s (Edward Everett Horton) marriage to Madge (Helen Broderick) in Top Hat or, in that same film, dress designer Alberto Beddini’s (Erik Rhodes) attempt to marry Dale Tremont (Ginger Rodgers). And certainly LeMaire has the vast swings of emotional behavior, from a child-like leap for joy when he is pleased to his violent fits of destruction when someone goes against him, suggesting that this particular chipper nattering gay pansy is also prone to conniption fits.

       LeMaire’s verbal expression of his pleasure, moreover, loud shouts of “Yoohoo” match the standard cry of the pansy, comparable with the chorus line members in the 1932 film Tenderfoot of “Whooooo.” The fact that the friend he has invited for dinner, who looks somewhat like him, only speaks throughout the film with shouts of “Yoohoo” further suggests that these two gentlemen are more than casual acquaintances, perhaps long-time companions who simply enjoy toying with young women.

      It doesn’t matter since Flo and Dot, now dressed in stunning gowns, decamp for Havana where they hope to discover far richer suckers. In this case Flo discovers that the wealthy creator of the popular drink Rush, A. J. Smith, is staying at the same hotel, and mistakes a handsome gigolo, also going under that name, as the perfect man to marry Dot, who she has now reconfigured into wealthy widow (she’s sent a telegram declaring that millions of dollars have just been transferred into her account since the death of Dorothy’s husband), all of which further complicates matters.

       The real “Jerry” A. J. Smith (Jack Whiting) is a perfectly nice everyday guy with whom Dot hits it off immediately; yet Flo won’t let that romance even get started in her attempts to link her friend up to the fake she believes is the real McCoy (John Davidson).

 

      Here also we observe things that are never quite explained or even explored more than for a couple of frames. Why does the gigolo who they’re courting, just as he courts them, have a handsome young man stashed back in his hotel room? And why is he also the near perfect fit to a well-cultured, slightly effeminate gay boy who also throws little persnickety fits when he’s crossed?

       More importantly, and even more inexplicable is the question of how and why he knows Monsieur LeMaire—who shows up in Havana to reclaim the stolen dresses and demand payment for the destruction the girls left in their wake. Evidently, they are long-time friends. There is utterly no logic for the plot to suddenly reveal such a strange friendship except to suggest that the fake A. J. Smith is also a gay man who was involved in LeMaire’s circle of friends.

       Del Ruth’s film makes no attempt whatsoever to explain these oddities in the story. And in the end it doesn’t matter since Dot and the real Jerry fall in love, he paying $5,000 for the girl’s damages, while Flo gets engaged to the strangest figure of all in this odd film, the eccentric Colonel Joy (Charles Butterworth) who loves horses and invents a toupee that is cut away in the middle to reveal its wearer’s baldness and a lantern that doesn’t light. The lantern, he explains, is to be kept by your bed so that if a burglar comes into your house you can grab your lantern and sneak up on him. Perhaps his creation sheds light on this film’s many gay mysteries about which we, as viewers, are kept in the dark.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

William A. Wellman | Safe in Hell / 1931

devil’s island

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Jackson and Maude Fulton (screenplay, based on a play by Houston Branch), William A. Wellman (director) Safe in Hell / 1931

 

William A. Wellman continues to surprise us of his directorial breadth and wit, with a fairly new release by Warner Brothers of his long unavailable (almost 80 years) 1931 movie, described when first shown as definitely “Not for Children,” Safe in Hell. Although Wellman had already made some of the most respectable award-winning films, most notably Wings (1927), Beggars of Life (1928), and in the same year when he directed this film and four others, The Public Enemy (1931), Safe in Hell might be described as downright dirty and tawdry. Even the films I’ve named were surely later perceived by folks of the later Production Code as “problematic,” but Safe in Hell would never have been made after the 1934 code regulations and the never-ending efforts to clean up the industry by Joseph Breen.

    Screenwriter Joseph Jackson, co-writing with actress / playwright Maude Fulton, had already penned a couple of films that have made my queer list, including Cole Porter’s Fifty Million Frenchman; and just after Safe In Hell, One Way Passage (1932), also discussed in this volume. That same year, the writer, swimming with two other friends, got caught up in a rip tide in Laguna Beach and drowned.      

     Yet this film goes far beyond any simple gay issues of the day. Gilda Karlson (Dorothy Mackaill), working as a secretary, has already attracted the attentions of her boss, Piet Van Saal (Ralf Harolde), before the movie even begins, his vengeful wife making sure that she is not only fired from her current job but is rejected from other respectable job in New Orleans as well. Forced to work as a prostitute, Gilda she is sent out by her female pimp for a date in the first moments of the film. The man turns out to be Van Saal, attempting to come back for more; but this time Gilda refuses him, tossing a vase in his direction which appears to kill him, before lighting up a cigarette and tossing away the match, unintentionally starting a fire which destroys the building in which their meeting took place.   

 

     Hurrying off back to her flophouse apartment, she discovers that her only true love, the sailor Carl Erickson (Donald Cook) has just returned for shore leave. Having been made a petty officer, he now wants to marry her, but she refuses, confessing what has just happened and the profession in which she is now engaged. Carl at first reacts like nearly all brutal movie men of the period, slapping her face and ready to go further, but hearing the police at the door, suddenly decides instead to help her. She packs a quick suitcase and the two exit through a back window.

      Carl stows the fugitive away on his outbound ship in a large wooden container. By luck, the boat is headed for Tortuga, the Caribbean island noted for its refusal to extradite prisoners, and thereby drawing to its shores some of the meanest of murderers and scoundrels who have almost all absconded with enough money to allow them to remain for the rest of their lives in the squalid, infested island hotel. Carl puts her up in the hotel without seeming to fully realize, as one of the men later comments, Gilda is the only white woman on the island.

      To protect her, the dumb Swede decides to marry Gilda, but is told by the hotel manager that the only minister lives on the other side to where they should travel by car since the centipedes are heavy this time of year. When they reach the place, however, they discover the minister has died, Carl taking out his back-pocket Bible and conducting their own private wedding ceremony, a bit like Tony and Maria in West Side Story of decades later.

       Returning to the hotel, Gilda meets up with other hotel “guests,” she quipping to Carl, who still doesn’t seem to perceive the situation that he is putting her in, “You sure this ain’t the YMCA?”

      But these ain’t young boys either. The miscreants with whom she must deal are all hardened criminals, just waiting in their hot sweaty suits to lay their paws on the pretty lady who has suddenly been set down in their midst.

      Waiting for her to come down from her room the next morning, one by one they turn their rattan chairs toward the staircase, spread open their thighs, and in a brilliant near unison movement—surely at Wellman’s insistency—they slide down in their chairs with legs pushed out as if they were in a porno theater about to unzip their pants to release their cocks.

 

      I’ll let critic/commentator Will McKinley describe the lot from a later event, when Gilda finally does decide to leave her room.

 

“Like boys do, the hotel guests begin trying to impress the new girl by bragging about their exploits on the wrong side of the law. First up is the Cockney-accented Crunch (Ivan F. Simpson), so nicknamed for his propensity to chomp loudly on nuts and spit out the worms.

     ‘He wouldn’t hand over his spondulicks,’ Crunch explains, using a slang term for money. ‘So I had to wallop him over the nebber. And the silly blighter croaked!’

     Next up is Egan (John Wray), who spends most of the film in a rumpled jacket and tie (despite the tropical temps) with a three-day beard on his grizzled gangster puss.

      ‘You know what they call me, lady?’ he asks Gilda, rhetorically. ‘T.N.T. I got an international reputation for safe-blowing that nobody can touch!’

      Egan is interrupted by General Manual Maria Jesus Gomez (Victor Varconi), a pencil-mustached, monocle-wearing, Latin American revolutionary in a military uniform.

     ‘I am the only gentleman here,’ he laughs. ‘As a general of the Revolution, I kill all the presidents! And vice-presidents!’

      Gilda is unimpressed, but that doesn’t discourage Mr. Jones (Charles Middleton) from taking his turn.

       ‘I’m a lawyer; crooked as they make ‘em,’ he says, squinty-eyed and hunched over a champagne glass. ‘I put a police commissioner on the spot, and they took him ‘for a ride.’ The rest of these fellas are all small fry compared to me.’

      Finally, Gilda asks Larson (Gustav van Seyffertitz) the senior member of the gang, about his claim to fame, affectionately calling him ‘dear old Grampa.’

      ‘I burned my ship; unfortunately the passengers and the crew were either drowned or roasted to death,” he says. “I and the cook, we managed to save ourselves. Unfortunately, he met with a little accident afterwards. I collected the insurance for my boat —$80,000— and I hope to live happily ever after.’”

 

     The worst of the island residents, however, doesn’t even participate in this “welcoming” gesture. The island jailer and hangman Mr. Bruno (Morgan Wallace), a portly man so constantly sweaty and oily that to follow in his wake one might be afraid of slipping in the puddles he leaves behind.

       When he does arrive, soon after, describing his official role to Gilda, insisting that despite the island’s lenient extradition policies that law and order is strictly kept in his jails, General Gomez scoffs: “In my country we leave that to the ladies,” Bruno reacting, “Gossip, heh? So they say my jail is worse than my gallows, heh?” Their short dialogue suggests that the real punishment of Bruno’s prison is the sodomy that goes on within.

      General Gomez, in turn, reveals himself to be a gay man with his uncontrollable high squeal of a giggle he lets out now and then. Even when he offers Gilda his own suite, far larger and cooler than her small room, he adds, “I won’t be there”—giggling girlishly—“but occasionally!” Gilda immediately gets the message, imitating his high squeal, “I don’t want you to be lonesome.” She tosses water into his face, filled with “wigglers,” she reports, to keep him company. Later, when Gomez brags about being the only “gentleman” of the group for having killed presidents and vice-presidents, Gilda continues to mock him: “You’re exclusive,” she hints of his sexuality, turning the last word into the standard giggle of film fairies.

 

     The only seemingly decent people on the island are the hotel’s owners, the front desk clerk, bar tender, and cook, Leonie (Nia Mae McKinney) and her husband who serves as porter, Newcastle (Clarence Muse). Unlike almost any other movie of the time, these black figures speak in standard American English even though their lines were originally written in “Negro dialect.” These two performers—McKinney in particular having just starred in King Vidor’s African American musical Hallelujah—had evidently enough clout to refuse to perform their scenes in the derogatory dialect of blacks in Hollywood movies. But Wellman’s biographer adds that it may also have been the director’s decision, who liked to refuse the convenient cliches of the day. McKinney also gets the opportunity to sing “Sleepy Time Down South,” written by Muse, Leon Rene, and Otis Rene, the first performance of what later became a jazz standard. Her performance is truly revelatory, and represents one of the only uplifting moments in the film.

      Meanwhile, our dear filthy “boys,” once rejected by Gilda, spend most of their time simply leering, eventually becoming friends with the girl once she determines she can no longer bear to remain hidden away in her room.

       The true villain of this work, other than Van Saal, is Bruno who intercepts all her letters, containing money, from her beloved Carl, while plotting other ways to get her into his bed. No sooner has she befriended the hotel residents, however, than Van Saal suddenly shows up in her bedroom. He has evidently faked his death and forced his wife to collect on his $50,000 life insurance policy, abandoning her the moment when he receives the check. She reports him for fraud, which explains his arrival in Tortuga.

        For Gilda, suddenly it means her freedom, since she can longer be arrested for killing a man who is still very much alive. Just before she has gone to her room, however, Bruno, pretending to worry about her well-being, hands her a gun for self-protection. She has attempted to refuse it, but he has insisted that she may be in danger.

       At the very moment when Gilda plans to contact Carl and escape her island prison, however, Van Saal tries yet again to force himself on her, this time moving toward outright rape. Gilda pulls out the gun, shoots, and this time truly kills him.

       At the trial, Jones, the former lawyer pleads her case as self-defense, and with all the hotel “guests” testifying on her behalf, it’s clear she will be exonerated.

      But Bruno, taking her aside, reminds her that even if she is found innocent, he will arrest her for possession of a deadly weapon—the one very one he had planted on her. He assures her that the sentence will be six months in his prison camp where, of course, he will provide her with comfortable living quarters in return for sexual favors.

      Trapped again, Gilda rushes out of the room and returns to the courtroom, declaring to the judge her guilt, insisting that she was lying and intentionally killed Van Saal. It is clear that she would rather be found guilty and hang for the killing than to break her vow to Carl.  

     While awaiting her execution, she is startled by Carl’s return. He has found a new job in New Orleans and plans to take Gilda back with him. Fearful that Carl’s return will lead to Bruno finding a way to imprison him, she sends her faithful lover on his way to set up their new home while promising to soon join him, as she marches bravely off to the gallows.

        Once more, Wellman, far more sophisticated than most other directors of the time, presents us with a believable gay character and hints at the gay behavior of prisons; unfortunately, in this case they exist in hell.    

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (January 2024).