Bill Forsyth | Local Hero / 1983

muckin’ together

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Forsyth (screenwriter and director) Local Hero / 1983

 

Scottish director Bill Forsyth has established himself in films such as Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero, and Comfort and Joy, as the creator off somewhat offbeat comic works that leisurely spool out the lives of his characters in a manner that seems, at times, like a kind of surrealist fairy-tale set against a realist backdrop.

      Local Hero, released in 1983, one of his very best, begins within dark towers of downtown Houston in a building owned by Knox Oil as the company board meets, while the CEO, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster), falls into a snore-laden sleep. The board has determined to buy a small village in Scotland, Ferness, to create a large oil refinery.

     Happer, clearly more interested in the stars more than the oil business, is currently being psychologically treated by a hack psychologist whose methods include heavy abuse, which Happer alternately accepts and rejects as the mood strikes him, finally ordering the truly “crazy” psychologist to be “shot down”: “There’s a madman on the roof. You’d better call the police to get some marksmen over here. Shoot him down. Shoot to kill.”

     Happer assigns a purchasing assistant MacIntyre (Peter Reigart) to handle the deal in Scotland on the basis of his Scottish-sounding name. In truth MacIntyre is of Hungarian background (his immigrant parents thinking that MacIntyre sounded American), and he is better negotiating, as he puts it, via telex. But just being asked to Happer’s office is a sign of honor. Happer has little business advice, but is most specific that Mac, while in Scotland, keep an eye on the stars.

     So does the thoroughly American Mac enter into a world he knows little about, a country of savvy survivors as we have seen in a long tradition of Ealing and other comedies such as Whiskey Galore! Meeting up in Aberdeen with a Scottish Knox representative, Danny Oldsen (Peter Capaldi) to drive to Ferness, they accidently hit a rabbit along the way and forced to sit out the night on the highway because of fog. By the time they reach Ferness indeed they might as well have discovered Brigadoon, so different is this world from either of theirs.

     The hotel, so they quickly realize, is run by a clever businessman, Gordon Urquhart (Denis Lawson) and his sexy wife, Stella. Not only does he run the hotel, serve as waiter and head barman, but works off-hours, as Mac and Oldsen soon discover, as the town lawyer and investment counselor. Getting wind of Knox’s proposal, Urquhart, like a wily fox, suggests some disinterest, telling Mac to take a couple of days to acclimate himself to his new location, but immediately springing into a dance upon his bed: “Oh boy, are we going to be rich!”

     Gordon quickly calls meetings with the locals to ask for their faith in him as the middleman—a meeting hilariously held in secret at the local church, the parish run by a former African, who, when Mac and Oldsen coincidently enter the churchyard, is sent off as a decoy:

 

                        Rev. Macpherson: You want to buy my church?

                        Mac: Not as a going concern.

 

     With the two interlopers' backs turned away from the church entrance, we see the village citizens racing from the sanctuary; only Oldsen notices, but is so seemingly incompetent, he does not even mention the event.

     Days of slow haggling follow, as the citizens pretend disinterest while impatiently waiting for Gordon to settle on a price. What they cannot have imagined is that Mac, wandering the town’s beaches, enjoying the wonderful meals cooked up by Stella (including the rabbit, Trudy, whom the two men have turned into a pet), and the general congeniality of the village begins to alter Mac’s perspective, as he falls in love the Scottish way of “muckin’ through,” each villager not only taking on numerous tasks in life, but working together in a communal way. Stars fall, comets come into view, the Northern lights spin out colors of green, purple, and red, all of which Mac dutifully reports back to Happer from a small seaside payphone which is repainted a bright red.

     Oldsen, meanwhile, has fallen in love with a Knox researcher, Marina (Jenny Seagrove), who mistakenly interprets the strangers’ arrival as a response to her proposal to turn the area into an institute for the study of the sea. She, in turn, nearly always sea-bound, seems to be a real-life mermaid, which even further enchants the child-like Oldsen.

     Negotiations continue, Gordon serving up a 42-year-old whiskey to Mac. The Russians arrive in the form of a vodka-bearing sea-captain, Victor (Christopher Rozycki), who regularly visits the town and has invested money in a fund which Gordon oversees. And, in the midst of all these comings and goings, are the plans for a céilhid, a Scottish social gathering, with music and dance.

     Mac has been so taken with the village that, drunk, he offers Gordon to exchange lives, he coming to live in Ferness, with the obviously capable Gordon going to work in Houston for Knox—with only one condition, that he leave behind Stella, with whom Mac has fallen in love.

 

                 MacIntyre: [both men are drunk] Would you leave Stella here with me?

                 Gordon: Sure I will.

                 MacIntyre: You’re a good guy, Gordon.

 

     The scenes of the céilhid, with its rosy cheeked and freckled youngsters playing instruments, its arguing old men, and the punk-tattooed motorcyclist obviously attracted to Oldsen, are some of the best in the film. With his characters hardly speaking, Forsyth presents the absolute charm of the community, its social bonds and its spirited love. Even if the villagers themselves are all too ready to sell out and to abandon their lives, we and Mac realize it would destroy a blessed civilization.

     Fortunately, Gordon soon reports, the beach is owned, on command of ancient decrees, by a sort of pack-rat scavenger, appropriately named Ben Knox, who is not at all ready to leave his paradise. Mac even offers him a series of world-wide beach properties to replace his current home, each of which Ben refuses. Reporting back to Happer, Mac is told to prepare for his bosses’ arrival. His helicopter comes flying in at the very moment that the villagers have begun to descend upon Ben’s doorless hut, which Happer mistakenly interprets as a “greeting party.”

     So does the owner of Knox oil meet the Scottish Knox, who shares with Happer a fascination with all things astronomical. At a one-on-one meeting they get along swimmingly, Happer, by conversation's end, willing to abandon his plans for a huge refinery in order to create an astronomical center in its place. The seemingly hapless Oldsen suggests he add Marina’s Institute for sea study, an idea which Happer quickly seems to embrace. Poor Mac is sent off back to Houston, gently stroking the shells he has collected from the beach in his lonely and soulless apartment. Back in Furness, the telephone ensconced in its small read box rings, but there is no one there any longer to answer it.

     In short, the Furness villagers are saved—even from themselves! But who, one has to ask, is the local hero? Is it Gordon, who has bluffed not only Mac, the entire Knox industry, but, perhaps, even his fellow citizens? Is it Ben, who refuses to give up the world he inhabits? Or even Oldsen, who despite his seeming outsiderness, after all is Scottish and, who along with Marina’s imagination, changes everything? Or is it the now isolated and lost Mac, who fell in love with the very world he was trying to negotiate the destruction of? Perhaps even Happer might be described as saving the village, coming home to a world he has only previously imagined. I suppose, with so many possible heroes, it doesn’t quite matter. The life Furness offered was its own salvation, a world that couldn’t afford to lose itself.

      I love Peter Peter Reigart in this role, an actor who I got to know through his interest in filming my early Paul Auster fiction City of Glass and who had also acted in a Pinter play directed by my friend Carey Perloff. After this production he entered in a long relationship with another of my favorite performers, Bette Midler.

 

Los Angeles, July 26, 2012.

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2012).

Burt Gillett | Shanghaied / 1934

one of the last of the cinema pre-code pansies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Burt Gillett (director) Shanghaied / 1934 [7 minutes]

Even before this cartoon movie begins, as the sailors swabbing the deck sing out, their Captain Pete has “shanghaied" a girl—as well as, we soon discover, a “man,” Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The chorus of sailors sing out about his new acquisition for a few choruses before an obvious pansy, cleaning on an upper deck away from the rest of the crew, sings out as well in his high effeminate voice, dangling a hanky with a limp wrist (voiced by Elvia Allman). The Captain, leans out his window to hit the poor queer on the head with a bottle of wine before he quiets down the entire crew, turning his attention back to his recent captives, each bound up in rope.

      It first appears that he is more interested in Mickey than in Minnie, briefly torturing our favorite rodent, before turning his full attention to Minnie with clearly sexual interest. She screams, while Mickey, magically escaping his ropes, spots a wall trophy of a sword fish, pulling it down to use as a sword.

      For a long while to two engage in a fencing exercise that even Robin Hood might delight in, particularly since the peg-legged Pete has got, quite by accident, the rollers of a chair now attached to his leg, and goes rolling about a bit like a ballerina after every thrust.

 

     The swordfish eventually loses its scales like as if quickly carved up by a waiter, and Mickey is forced to chase after the evil Captain while also being attacked by the entire crew. Eventually, after a great deal of innovative cartoon imagery, is able to link them all on line and send them into the ocean where the sharks seem most interested in the Captain’s exposed and quite excessive derrière, their noses tickling him with screams of terrorized giggles, not so different from the pansy he had previously quieted.

 

      The delight of Burt Gillett’s presentation of the now almost prerequisite pre-code pansy is that there is absolutely no logical excuse for his appearance, particularly in 1934, the year when Joseph Breen declared in his new role of head censor that pansy pictures were now outlawed. As I’ve mentioned earlier, however, cartoons were the last cinematic form to be censored and often survived the cuts that feature films suffered throughout the later 1930s and into the 1950s, since, obviously, the hand-drawn figures were not presented totally as “real” human beings. Tell that to Walt Disney, whose voice evidently was in back of this film’s Mickey.

      What is also quite interesting about this 1934 cartoon is that it resisted almost all racial jokes, even when Captain Pete is completely covered with coal-dust from a stove, he is not converted momentarily to a singing black man, but shakes off the black coat of dust to continue on without the tempting racist commentary. The only real stereotype this film maintains, accordingly, that that of the effeminate homosexual, tolerated in the sailor’s world but obviously not approved of. Actually, given that all the other regular sailors have been strung off to sea, perhaps he is only survivor, along with Mickey and Minnie, to bring the boat home.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).

D. W. Griffith | Judith of Bethulia / 1914

the saving warrior

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. W. Griffith and Frank E. Woods (screenplay, based on the drama by Thomas Bailey Aldrich), D. W. Griffith (director) Judith of Bethulia / 1914

 

The general complexity of D. W. Griffith’s images cannot quite hide the fact that the scenario for his film Judith of Bethulia (1914) is rather straight-forward, despite our recognition that the historical drama is a grotesquerie rare in early US cinema, based as it is on the apocryphal tale from The Book of Judith adapted from the 1896 play, “Judith and the Holofernes” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

     The heavy walls of the city of Bethulia, we are told, stand in the path and protect, as well, Jerusalem. There is not historical evidence of such a city where everyday life as portrayed in the early scenes is beautiful in its very ordinariness.

     Naomi (Mae Marsh) goes to the well, outside the town gates, with other women to fetch a large jug of the precious liquid and is there met by her young lover Nathan (Robert Harron). At the open market inside the gates the rabbi meets with others, various beggars plead for alms (among them a young Dorothy Gish), and a young mother (Lillian Gish) shows off her new baby. Within her home the holy widow, recognized as a spiritual icon throughout the city, Judith (Blanche Sweet) performs her daily devotions with her faithful servant (Kate Bruce) before strolling through the market, blessing the baby and providing alms to the beggars.

    Meanwhile, so the visual narrative reveals, the Assyrians are on the rise as Nebuchodonosor (Nebuchadnezzar who in reality was the King of the Babylonians, not the Assyrians) sends out his Prince Holofernes (Henry B. Walthall) to destroy the cities of the West. They arrive en masse at the very moment that Naomi has returned to the well to fill a second jug of water and Nathan has returned his to reaping of the hay. The workers quickly rush back toward the city gates, Nathan attempting to find and save Naomi who has hidden against the wall of the well. She is taken prisoner, while Nathan is forced with the others in find safety within the city walls.

       Holofernes’ forces lay siege to the city, as Holofernes himself arrives on the battleground pitching a huge tent, wherein he is entertained by his female dancers, headed by a woman (Gertrude Bambrick) who sensuously performs the Dance of the Fishes, which ends each time with her sprawled out before Holofernes’ throne/bed before his attendant sends them off.

       When leaders, one by one, return to report that they cannot make any progress in entering the walled-city, Holofernes grows angry and punishes several of his men as traitors while also torturing some of the captives. Naomi is tied up to a post where she remains throughout most of the film.

 

     Griffith quite stunningly films some of the Assyrian forces’ attempts to climb atop and breach the walls of Bethulia, while also cinematically capturing the impressive looking long haired and bearded Holofernes and his head attendant, a eunuch (J. Jiquel Lanoe) who performs in total “camp” style long before there was any term for it.

       After several other of his soldiers report their inability to breach the city walls, Holofernes determines to wait out the locked-up citizens until starvation and famine take their course. The last of the water is carefully doled out to citizens, as they begin to starve and in total dehydration cry out to the rabbi and city leaders to find a way out of the stalemate. The child the woman has shown off in the earlier scene is now apparently dead. A small group of townsmen, including Nathan, attempt to make a run to the well, but are attacked by the watchful Assyrians and forced to quickly retreat back to safety, some of their group dying in the process.

       Praying and watching her fellow sufferers, Judith also talks with the city leaders, but they have no answers. She determines to take the matter into her own hands, realizing that in doing so she shall have a role in history. Dressing as a startlingly beautiful harem woman, she along with her maid dare to leave the city and seek out Holofernes.

       Because of her beauty, she is immediately led to the Assyrian Prince and he is quickly stunned by her appearance as she lies to him, hinting that she has a way to lead him to Judean mastery. He orders his Eunuch to create a tent for her as well, as she admits to herself that the villain is “noble,” by which she means, presumably, not only is he kinder and more charitable than she had expected, but is attractive to her. Perhaps for the first time in her life since her husband’s death, she is perceived as a good-looking woman, and she clearly is excited by the realization.

      LGBTQ historian Susan Stryker also reminds us that Judith is now herself attired as a kind of transsexual. Whereas before her costume was closer to the sackcloth and ashes, the dress which she dons before her journey, is represented as being in “drag” of a sorts, dressed as a true beauty of the harem, a woman in disguise as surely as Mae West was throughout her life.* She enters, moreover, a world of castration—headed by the transsexual figure portrayed by the head Eunuch, who makes it quite apparent that he both disdains and approves of her “costume” and now transgendered beauty—while she performs a male warrior role in her intention to behead the enemy, both the acts of castration, the Eunuch's and her beheading signify here incidents of de-gendering or the fulfillment of transgender desires.

       Her understandable indecision in carrying through her intentions, accordingly, must be understood in this context, in her realization that she has so highly succeeded in performing the drag role that she has found a loyal suitor, the pulls between her true masculinized self and her performance as a more traditional woman now being played out literally in the battlefield. That despite the temptations, she succeeds in her mission, beheading the intruder and saving her people, is a testament to her commitment to her “real” self as a transgendered being and her religion over the societal lure of heterosexual normalization.

       If the director himself was not entirely aware the pyscho-sexual situation he has playing out in his film, it is quite clear that actor Lanoe perceived precisely what was going on; playing her facilitator, delighting in hooking up the two, even while he recognizes her to be in drag. And Griffith must certainly have known in hiring him that French actor Joseph Jiquel Lanoe, who performed on stage and in over 100 Biograph films, was a gay man. 

       Interestingly, once the central figure of militant heterosexual virility is beheaded, Judith carrying off the head with her, the Assyrian soldiers immediately spin about like so many crazed and confused gay queens, deserting in their rush across the desert to their homeland. In the actual story of Judith, she laid out her own plans, after the beheading, for the destruction of the Assyrian army. In the film, her act of beheading simply creates an immediate vacuum which simultaneously sucks all the enemy forces out of the Israeli world.

       Judith returns to her dourer duds, the city proclaiming her as its hero.

       Judith of Bethulia, accordingly, proves to be one of the most fascinating of serious LGBTQ films, and only one of two US-made films—along with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) (1913), Sidney Drew’s A Florida Enchantment (1914), Urban Gad’s Zapatas Bande (Zapata’s Gang) (1914), Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus (Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate) (1915), Mauritz Stiller’s Vingarne (The Wings) (1916), Ernst Lubitsch’s Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I  Don’t Want to Be a Man) (1918), Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), and Paul Legband and Julius Rhode’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren  (A Man’s Girlfriend) (1919)—of second decade of the 20th century.

 

*In his fascinating discussion of Mae West’s portrayal of herself as a model of a drag queen, Gay theorist Parker Tyler summarizes West’s persona: “Perhaps one ought simply to say that Miss West’s style as a woman fully qualified her—as it always did—to be a Mother Superior of Faggots.”

 

**Even though Judith and Salome are stark opposites, a comparison between the two in relation to their beheading of men to whom they are most attracted should be explored more thoroughly. As Judith’s beheading signifies the salvation of the Israeli world, Salome’s act represents the fall of Herod’s society and the early beginnings of the Christian world.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).