Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Lewis Milestone | The Front Page / 1931

the real news

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bartlett Cormack and Charles Lederer (screenplay based on the stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur), Lewis Milestone (director) The Front Page / 1931

 

I have seen the Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday, the 1940 version of the famed stage play The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur dozens of times, and I have seen two productions of the play itself, difficult to encounter these days in theaters; but I don’t believe until the other day that I’d actually ever seen the 1931 film version. Since I know the play so well, I knew it how very cynical these court house news reporters were, and that their minds (as well as their newspapers) were filled with racist rhetoric and homophobia, but I never realized until I saw this particular rendition of the original just how racist, homophobic, and misogynistic the film truly was. Stereotypical slurs of “colored people,”piccaninnies,” and other racist notions abound, spoken with a sense of absolute entitlement by most of these films characters.


       At one point, the reporters, satirizing the fact that Hildy Johnson (Pat O’Brien) is about to be married to Peggy Grant (Mary Brian) and move in with her mother (Effie Ellsler) in New York City—in His Girl Friday, they’re moving to Albany, presumably from New York City—the Chicago reporters mock the Big Apple as a rube city, accusing all its males as all being “lizzie’s” (another word for “sissies”), as Jimmy Murphy (Walter Catlett) imitates a New Yorker visiting Chicago as an effeminate queer, “Could any of you gentleman tell me where the telegraph station is?” They insist that soon Hildy will be talking just like him. 


     Within their own midst, moreover, is Ray V. Bensinger (Edward Everett Horton), who along with his reporting of crimes and murders, writes poems about the man, Earl Williams (George E. Stone), who is about to be hung. Bensinger is not only a hypochondriac terrified of all germs—

they have nicknamed him “listerine”—but a prissy fellow who, unlike the others, sits at his own desk which he refuses to share with the other males. He cannot stand even the smell of his fellow reporter’s bodies, cigar-smoking habits, and the room in which they are all cooped up in while they await the innocent Williams’ death for communist activism and murder, even though the gentle streetwalker Molly Malloy (Mae Clarke) who has befriended him one cold night knows that he is innocent.


      As several commentators have pointed out there is not a truly caring and decent person in this film, except perhaps for Molly, who jumps to her possible death instead of revealing Earl’s whereabouts—in Bensinger’s roll top desk. Perhaps Peggy is a decent person, although her mother is a monster and we know that marriage to such a woman as Peggy would destroy Hildy’s life, not engage or expand it as he imagines it might.  

     Besides, even though Hildy doesn’t know it, and in fact professes that he hates his newspaper editor Walter Burns (the always dapper Adolphe Menjou) who constantly draws him in to endlessly dangerous events in reportage, he is unknowingly in love with his Walter symbolized by his job, just as Walter, telephoning every few moments throughout the first third of this film to see if Hildy has shown up to the courthouse, cannot live without him and will do anything to stop Hildy from marrying a woman—a gender that the misogynistic Burns cannot abide.


      Throughout this film he robs his reporter of all his money, he kidnaps his mother-in-law-to-be, and lies, cheats, and cajoles Hildy and anyone who might help him escape in order to keep him near, not only because of Hildy’s obvious talent as a reporter, but because of his inability to exist without him.

      Howard Hawks recognized this so perfectly that it’s even hard to give him credit for having had the brilliance to switch Hildy Johnson to a female in His Girl Friday. His genius as a director was to make obvious what is basically coded in the 1931 version of the work, that fact that despite Hildy’s fellow reporter friends’ mockery of any queer behavior, including the mousy, nerdy anarchist Earl Williams, they’re perfectly blind to the love between two men in their very midst, or perhaps can’t imagine such a love since it’s washed over in Hildy’s apparent hate and attempt to return to normalcy by marrying Peggy.

       Walter's way to Hildy’s heart is my complementing, while also correcting, his reporting techniques and pumping him up to the excitement of possibly actually changing the corrupt world around him represented not only by the cynicism of the reporters but even more so by the corrupt governing of Sherriff Peter B. “Pinky” Hartman (Clarence Wilson) and Fred, the Mayor (James Gordon) who have framed Earl as a Commie simply to get reelected, while even trying to hide the pardon the governor sends through the confused by honest messenger.

      Although Walter may actually be married to The Morning Post, his heart belongs to Hildy, and he spends almost the entire movie trying to convince him that he truly loves him and wants the best for him. The subject of this work is not the story of a hanging, government corruption, Earl Williams’ and Molly Malone’s relationship, or even the cynical men who hang about the reporter’s room at the courthouse, but is focused on the attempts of Walter Burns to hold onto Hildy, his unknowing bride.

 

      There is, in fact, a moment when, with his arm around Hildy’s neck Walter tells him how terrible women are, describing them even as murderers, that he momentarily convinces Hildy of his love enough to force the man back to the job, ready to stay through the night (sleeping with the newspaper story becomes akin to sharing a bed with Walter Burns) to write the best story of his life. The trouble is that Hildy, unlike nearly any of the other males, has a conscience and keeps being reminded that the horrors around him do not represent normalcy, something he, like so many

queer men unable to accept who he truly is, believes he desperate desires.

       A moment after this scene Walter’s hired thug returns to report that the taxi he was in with Peggy’s kidnapped mother has been in a terrible accident, and fearful that the mother might have been killed, Hildy again temporarily abandons his relationship with Walter, calling up hospitals to discover if Peggy’s mother has survived. Whenever he encounters Peggy in the flesh, he’s also convinced he wants to leave his old life and become a new man, an insurance salesman or something of the sort. But even she knows he’s lying to himself. And she finally tells him so herself.

 


      Despite the fact that finally Walter almost admits him that he truly loves him, Hildy and, even more importantly the film itself, cannot possibly end as it does in Hawk’s version with the female version of Hildy finally agreeing to stay on and even possibly marry Walter—who promises this time to really go through with it. In films of the day obviously a man could not marry a man even if it was clear he was in love with him, and that love had to be fairly hidden if it wanted to get past the censors even in so-called “pre-code” days.

       In the 1931 version, despite all the attempts to keep him close, Walter seems by film’s end to have lost him as Hildy finally insists to Peggy that he’s leaving with her and actually does, believing that it is truly possible for him to live a “straight” life.


        But never fear, the newspaper chief awards him his personal watch as a wedding gift, calling up the police at the very first train stop that Hildy has robbed him and to arrest the man! We can be sure that Peggy and her mother—who unfortunately seems to survive all they put her through—will travel on to New York City alone, while Walter Burns will retrieve his wayward lover, dragging him back to Chicago to lie down with him in endless reams of newspaper print. Yet we know this is truly where Hildy’s heart is as well.

       As I discuss in my later essay on His Girl Friday, what Hawks did was to actually normalize what originally was a raucously queer-coded cinematic work.

       

Los Angeles, March 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Richard James | General Store / 1998? || New Balls Please / 2004

gay macho

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard James (animator and director) General Store / 1998?

Richard James (animator and director) New Balls Please / 2004 [3 minutes]

 

Since 2006 British animator Richard James has been primarily working as an animator of children’s TV films. But back in 2004, awarded the position of Animator in Residence at Channel 4 and with the support the British Film Institute, James wrote, directed and animated the film New Balls Please (2004), and served as the animator only for The Computer Virus (2004) (directed by Jesse Chambers).

     At around the same time he directed a stop-camera animated work of clay figures titled General Store—although this work is not mentioned in any of the IMDb collations, and shows up only as a video on Vimeo, with no other internet mention that I could discover. The last frame of the short film suggests it might have been made in 1998, perhaps as a project for the University of Wales, Newport, the date I have decided is the only appropriate one without further information.

      Neither of these are outright LGBTQ statements, although the earlier work, General Store is certainly homoerotic in its use of the barrel-chested figure of a Western Cowboy. And the second work definitely plays with notions of thwarted masculinity and counter notions of sexual difference.

      And both charmingly explore male sexuality that challenges and even mocks heteronormative behavior, and the latter is mentioned on several of the Letterboxd-related LGBTQ+ lists. Together they make an interesting paring for discussion.

 

In General Store, a Western cowboy suddenly shows up at the general store, where the clerk immediately greets him (in a definitely British brogue) with a friendly “Can I help you?” The cowboy, obviously the silent type, doesn’t answer, but immediately goes over to check out the knives. He soon speaks, however, again with a British accent, politely responding, “No, just looking,” the gentleness of his voice and the accent putting him immediately at odds with the standard notion of the American cowboy, even if the set has the look of a small Western town.



     A moment or so later, he walks back over to the front counter telling the now bent-over clerk that he would like to buy a shirt, the solicitous store owner responding, “Certainly, any particular size sir? I’ll bring a selection.” He soon brings over a small selection, the cowboy touching one of them, to which the clerk immediately replies, “Nice, that one. Would you like to try it on?” The cowboy answers with a simple, “No,” grabbing up another checked one, the clerk suggesting that there’s a mirror “over there.”      The cowboy puts it up to his chest, the clerk suggesting he try also another one, but again the cowboy answers, “No,” having definitively decided on the first one. The clerk immediately sells him a neck scarf to go with that, on special for $1, the total coming to $5.00. But when the cowboy opens his billfold he finds only $4.


      He puts down the 4 bills, looks out the window at the bank across the street, turns back and tells the clerk to “Wait there.” The cowboy leaves.

      We soon hear a gun go off and a woman scream. The cowboy reenters and hands the clerk another dollar bill, taking up the shirt and scarf and leaving. The cash register rings up the $5.00 sale.


     The credits begin to roll, but are soon interrupted by the return of the cowboy to the general store. Displaying his full chest to the clerk, he gently tells him, “I need a larger size.” A horse whinnies in the distance.

    This a cowboy with whom I could fall in love.

 

*

 

New Balls Please takes on two further macho figures, male tennis players at Wimbledon, where, as the movie begins, the reigning champion Kurt Bruckner is already two sets down to the new teenager, Jorge Romero, from the Dominican Republic. When Romero wins this set as well, Bruckner is so furious he puts a towel over his head, while as the announcer points out, Romero remains so calm, even though it’s his first time out at Wimbledon.



     The handsome teenager carefully unties his long mane of black hair and lets it fall into full form, waving his head to shake it loose, the crowd applauding. The defending champ is clearly agitated; as Romeo takes a drink of water, Bruckner also takes a drink but, in macho style, spitting it out. Even the announcer suggests it unsportsman-like conduct.

 


     Bruckner then takes out a banana, peels it open as he stares at Romero and begins to lick it before sticking it full into his mouth as if sucking cock. He throws the peel onto the court. Romero shakes his long dark locks again as he reties his hair up. Even the announcer suggests they are trying to out-psyche each other.

     Bruckner suddenly pulls off his shirt and throws it to the crowd, the crowd going wild and shouting out his name. Romero looks down at his naval and pulls up his shirt to show his brown hairy chest, lighting going off at the same moment, which leads announcer to declare, “Even the Gods are impressed.” And suddenly the crowd’s chants switch to “Jorge, Jorge.”

 


     Bruckner puts on another shirt and stands, picks up his chair and turns it away from Romero before sitting down again, his face buried in his hands. The hero has lost his charm. Rain begins to fall as if to suggest the tears that might be running down Bruckner’s hidden face.



    Romero zips up his bag and begins to head off to the shower, but quickly turns back seeing his opponent in tears and goes over to him, gently placing his hand upon his back. They head off together for the showers, and the workman quickly take down the net and cover the court to protect it from the upcoming storm. As two Letterboxd commentators argued, “They definitely fucked after this.”

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

 

Giuseppe Patroni Griffi | Il Mare (The Sea) / 1962

if the sea was whisky

by Douglas Messerli

 

If the sea was whisky and I was a diving duck

If the sea was whisky and I was a diving duck

I’d swim to the bottom and don’t know if I’d come up

 

-L. Caston and W. Dixon

 

Giuseppe Patroni Griffi (screenwriter and director) Il Mare (The Sea) / 1962   


    

Almost all of the few dozens of English-language critics who have found their way to view Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s 1962 film The Sea have acclaimed it as a work of genius. The unnamed keeper of the significant film blog Cinema Sojourns begins his long review, “Disconnected and Lost in Capri” by writing:

 

“When did alienation in modern society become a favorite thematic concern in the culture and the arts, particularly in the cinema? Certainly the films of Michelangelo Antonioni addressed the inability of people to connect, feel or relate to each other in a post-industrial age world as early as 1957 in Il Grido. But by the early sixties, it seemed as if every major film director in the world was addressing the topic on some level. A general sense of malaise was in the air as if the modern world was having a counterproductive effect on humanity, creating a sense of futility, amorality or complete apathy. You could see aspects of this reflected in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1961) and Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live (1962). All of these are considered cinematic masterworks of the 20th century but there are also many worthy and lesser-known contributions to the pantheon of alienation cinema and one of the most strikingly is Il Mare (The Sea), the 1963 directorial debut of Giuseppe Patroni Griffi.”

 

     He goes on to say: “It is a remarkably self-assured directorial debut that bears some similarities to Antonioni’s black-and-white trilogy (L’Avventura, La Notte, L’Eclisse) in the way that conventional narrative is replaced by a succinct visual approach to exploring character and setting. It may be too abstract and plotless for some viewers but Griffi embues his film with an underlying compassion and eroticism that is at odds with Antonioni’s more enigmatic and dispassionate approach.”

    That Griffi’s work is also a complex study of a queer gay, perhaps bisexual love tale long before it had become popular to explore this territory so significantly makes it of special interest to LGBTQ-interested moviegoers. But I warn those seeking the thrill of verboten gay love may not find what they are looking for in this film of troubled psyches.

     There is no question that the unnamed visitor to Capri played by Italian actor Umberto Orsini (better known for his role in Luchino Visconti’s 1969 work The Damned, a film also featuring Dirk Bogarde who might well have performed Orsini’s role in this film) is searching for someone to fulfill his sexual longing. He has come to Capri, alas, in the winter season where hardly anyone but a few locals remain on this summer retreat of the rich and famous. We get very few details about the intentions of any of the three major figures of this movie, but we can deduce that the Orsini figure, who the director gradually reveals is an actor (all of Griffi’s figures remain nameless throughout the film so I shall have to designate them in my discussion by assigning them the moniker of the actors who portray them), has come there to meet up with a woman, perhaps his fiancée, who for reasons unknown never shows up.

      In the early days of his visit, we follow the actor as he moves in and out of the few open bars, restaurants, and streets, despondent in his search for something that he clearly is unable to find. Instead of a summer sunny paradise, Capri is cold, rainy, and empty, providing little but the sea, its noted rock formations, its winding streets, and the stark beauty of this film’s cinematographer Ennio Guarnieri’s black-and-white images to entertain the eye. The one exception is a troubled but stunningly handsome young boy, personified by Dino Mele, who the first time we see him is furious that the waiter has served him ice in his drink—which we later come to learn must have been whisky, his favorite way to relieve whatever tortures he has escaped.

     The third time the actor encounters the boy, one night on the street with Mele standing against a wall with a bottle of whisky in his hand, Orsini—bored and obviously sexually starved—steals the bottle from the young man’s grasp leading to a struggle for its contents so intense that you know it cannot be the liquor he desires as much as the body of the boy who holds its container.

      Griffi’s entire work might be described as a grand series of metaphors, where his characters struggle over control for something quite trivial which stands for something associated with it. If there was ever a coded work, The Sea is the exemplar. As the two beautiful men struggle over the bottle, pulling it out of each other’s hands over and over again, which finally results in them pushing and pulling each other’s bodies against the stucco walls, it is apparent that their fairly violent contest expresses their sexual desires. They do not want the bottle but he who holds it, and their violent wrestling does not simply represent a playful tussle but a pantingly desperate attempt to paw one another without entirely giving away their homosexual lust.

     When they move on to Orsini’s hotel room, the game is played even more earnestly as they chase each other around the room and into the bed with the tantalizing bottle serving symbolically as the carrot-on-the stick when we know the real lure is one another’s flesh. Finally their drunken orgy ends with Orsini falling into another kind of the bed, the bathtub where he passes out fully dressed, presumably from the alcohol but metaphorically out of exhaustion for their sexual endeavors.

      [An aside: in fact, probably neither of them is truly drunk from alcohol. Mele, in fact, carefully teaches Orisini how to drink for pleasure without getting drunk, sipping just a small amount of the liquid at a time, as opposed to Orsini’s frenzied gestures to down it whole. Obviously, this is the far-more experienced boy’s way of showing his elder how to enjoy sex, slowly, teasingly eliciting the flavors of the body (both the body of Haigh’s whisky and the body of the other male). This is probably not the first film wherein a bottle of whisky symbolizes a cock.]     


      When the youth inexplicably fills the tub with water it is not simply a gesture, as they pretend the next day, of attempted murder but symbolically represents a wet dream beyond Orsini’s imagination. As he later crawls out of the tub, almost slithering across the floor before pulling off his wet clothes, we cannot help but imagine him saying the next morning: “I was so drunk last night I don’t remember a thing that happened.” But clearly something of sexual significance beyond his imagination has occurred between the two of them.

      One need only note his immediate rush into the streets in search of Mele the next morning. Without saying a word, Griffi and his cinematographer make it apparent that the good-looking stranger to Capri has become obsessed, so desirous of the young boy that, not being able to find him, he rushes up to the only other visitor to this island, the newly arrived wealthy and attractive woman, Françoise Prévost, embracing her and planting a kiss on her lips. Rationally—although Griffi has utterly no intention of maintaining any rational meaning in his work—he may have mistaken her as his missing girlfriend, and hence his apparent embarrassment for his rash act. But anyone who has ever known a deeply closeted gay man who has suddenly discovered who he might really be perceives the act is a deliberate denouncement of his recent aberration, an attempt to regain normalcy as quickly as he can.

     Yet if there is any shred of doubt left in the viewer’s mind that the Orsini figure and Mele, the gorgeous kid, are now homosexually linked, we merely have to open our eyes to Griffi’s manipulation of the camera as the two men share a dinner. While they vaguely discuss, in between long silences, why they have come to Capri, the camera frames them in deep closeups face on or as they turn to talk to one another in side-face, intercutting these images so quickly that the two seem to be almost literally pushing themselves into one another’s cheeks and lips. These carefully constructed, discomfortingly tight shots suggest that their intercourse is far more than simple talk, which in any case tells us absolutely nothing about them, while the other meaning of the word explains everything.

     Into this man-on-man series of frames comes our new Eve, joining them at their table and so interrupting their “conversation” that Mele almost immediately is ready to leave. Prévost, however, clever temptress that she is, sensing the tension and jealousy between them, and knowing that Orsini has abandoned the boy in order to attend to her, turns her focus entirely upon the boy, enticing him—on the basis of Orisini’s insistence that Mele had attempted to drown him the previous evening—to take her along on a murderous adventure.

      The tensions between the trio remind us significantly of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (yet another early 60s queer-related film expressing the alienation of its characters), but also suggests what someone other than Blake Edwards might have been able to accomplish if he had remained truer to Truman Capote’s original in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), particularly in the scene where Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak (in the original closer to a straight stand-in for the gay Capote) rob a dimestore. In Griffi’s far more sophisticated version, the two approach a lone musician, Prévost pretending to be a one-eyed assassin as they pretend to slit the man’s throat and run off with his instrument like two bad children out of Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct. And the scene that follows, where they frolic near a deserted swimming pool where Prévost’s character shoots a round of pretended bullets into the willing and waiting Mele, cannot help but remind one of another trio’s encounter with an abandoned swimming pool in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause.

      For at least one night, she keeps Mele entertained, while she continues by day to lure the man who she recognizes is Mele’s would-be lover, Orsini. But with regard to women, we realize, Orsini is not at all the frenzied man attempting to sweep into love, but an uncertain stalker, a voyeur who follows Prévost’s wanderings through the rain-swept streets of the island town. Aware that he is trailing her, she orchestrates her movements with a handsome elderly man—to whom he later discover she is attempting to sell her summer home—almost in slow motion, creating a ballet out of stops and starts and the opening and closing of umbrellas. If Orsini was impetuously compelled by the whereabouts of the young boy previously, he is now tentatively fascinated by her balletic movements, but almost fearful of joining her in a pas de deux. When he does again approach her, this time at a distance in a bar as opposed to his streetside rough-housing with his young male companion, he is met with her highly emasculating laughter and even outright derision as she tells him to go away and never again try to contact her.

 

     Meanwhile, for Mele his role as sexual mentor has been twisted into a version of longing desire which he realizes, given his companion’s sexual confusion, can never be allayed. A visit to his hotel leads to the clerk’s pretense that Orsini is not in, when in fact he has just heard him speak with him. While Orsini chases after Prévost, Graffi gives Mele an opportunity to perform almost a strip-tease as he bathes his more-than-half nude body in the downpour upon his hotel rooftop. It is almost as if the director were showing us the glory of the sexual partner that Orsini has abandoned. If Orsini refuses to pay attention to the stunning youth, Graffi’s camera will make love to him in front of us. If only Bob Mizer’s jock-strap posing beefcakes of the same period could been half to lovely as Mele appears before this director’s camera, the US might have questioned  the sexuality of half the male population. This is definitely male pin-up territory. Alas, I could find no pictures of that particular scene and am left only with a photo of the boy combing his hair after his affair with Guarnieri’s camera lens.

      Even though Prévost again invites the boy over to her now half-inhabitable villa to create a Basquiat like drawing on its pristine white walls, Mele knows that he can never quite regain the attention of Orsini, and his sadness and even madness is represented by his need now also to sulk through the Caprian streets and follow the couple’s speechless outing in a motorboat. We even fear that the young man might harm himself, so that when he finally meets up with Orsini again one evening on the street, we are almost relieved to see his violent hands-on approach to the man who metaphorically had become his lover.

 

    Here Orsini’s sexual denial is shown in full force, as he no longer toys with bodily contact, but almost beats the boy so badly that Mele begs him not to hurt him, blurting out a message about his knowing that what is being told him is not the truth. Some commentators have interrupted the sudden outburst as suggesting that perhaps Mele has escaped from a Naples mental institution and that his violent swings of behavior suggests that he is mad. Any gay man, however, knows that madness has long been a way that the heterosexual society dismisses homosexual desires.

     And even Orsini knows that his hostile reaction to the boy’s attempt to again make contact has gone too far. He drags the boy to Prévost’s house, bandaging his forehead and issuing a series of commands for the kid to sit up, walk, turn, put on his sweater etc. to prove that the boy is now well enough to be left on his own. But even then, instead of sending Mele off, he forces him to make a call home—wherever that might be—and even then asks if he should accompany the boy back to his hotel. When Mele refuses, and attempts to leave, Orsini runs after him delivering up a bottle of whisky and suggesting that since tomorrow will be sunny he will join him on a boat ride.

     It is clear that despite his attempts to return to sexual normalcy, the Orsini figure cannot quite give up his attraction to the youth.


     As he turns back to the Prévost figure, she suggests, having finally reeled him in, that for the first time in a long while she does not wish to go to bed alone. We have already established her rather banal reasons for her visit to Capri and her feelings of dissociation. Having lived three blissful years with her husband, he has left her; and she has now come to Capri simply to sell their villa.

   Orsini and her final sexual encounter—the only naturalistic presentation of sex in this work—consists mostly of sheet-covered thrusts, as first one of them sits up to be pulled back down, and then other parrots the act. Obviously, it is not a joyful experience for either of them, and when morning arrives, we see Orsini lying alone in bed half-uncovered while Prévost sits in a nearby chair, pretending to sleep as she, now the voyeur, watches her failed lover quietly dress himself and sneak off. As he is about to leave, he discovers that the phone on which he forced Mele to call home was disconnected. The call the boy made was simply a lie to placate him.

     When he returns to the hotel, he requests that a telephone call to be made to Rome, his own home evidently, at 11:00. Meanwhile, the clerk hands him the unopened bottle of whiskey he has given Mele the previous night, which the boy has obviously returned as an expression of his angry regret.

     As if suddenly realizing the error of his presumptions, not only about the boy but possibly about himself, he rushes out to retrieve Mele from the departing ferry for Naples. Even with the disposal of a taxi, he arrives too late, observing the boat sailing off. As he turns back toward the hotel, he also witnesses Prévost also leaving Capri on what appears to be her personal hydroplane. He now is truly alone on Capri. Either he must return to an empty relationship in Rome or haunt the streets where he has finally discovered and lost his true self and love.

      Graffi’s film is an incredible contribution to cinema history in general as well as an amazingly prescient vision of what LGBTQ cinema could become. It is so sad, accordingly, that although I found this film, with English subtitles, on YouTube, it remains for most viewers a basically lost work of art. I could not find a copy of Graffi’s later film, Metti, Una Sera a Cena (1971), a work the Cinema Sojourns commentator describes as “more self-consciously arty and erotic than Il Mare,” but which also deals with gay or bisexual characters. I will, however, continue to keep trying in my attempts to see this work as well.

 

Los Angeles, March 9, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

My Queer Cinema Index [with former World Cinema Review titles]

Films discussed (listed alphabetically by director) [Former Index to World Cinema Review with new titles incorporated] (You may request any ...