Ernst Lubitsch | Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) / 1918

without bounds

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hanns Kräly and Ernst Lubitsch (screenplay), Ernst Lubitsch (director) Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) / 1918

 

It’s hard to imagine a film like Ernst Lubitsch’s I Don’t Want to Be a Man being made in Hollywood until the last couple of decades. While, as I have demonstrated there were numerous films in the first decade of the 20th that dealt with cross-dressing, even pre-code films rarely embraced the various sexualities and generational sexual relationships that Lubitsch did in his 1918 short.

 

      While the film plays it somewhat “safe” in having its popular star Ossi Oswalda perform as the cross-dressing male, once she dons her tuxedo, and enters into the manly fray, the director lets go with nearly every possible sexual “transgression” he can imagine, and all for comic pleasure.

     Even before Ossi’s transformation, the would-be respectable niece of Counsellor Brockmüller (Ferry Sikla) is a proto-feminist determined to be an equal to her male friends by joining in a round or two of poker while chain-smoking, throwing down a glass of toddy or four, and shouting out her windows at the passing male workers to whom she tosses out sweet “treats.” To her governess (Margarete Kupfer) Ossi represents a new generation that is utterly out of control. And Ossi is only too delighted, when her uncle announces that he must travel for period, to imagine a life without bounds.

      What she has not expected is that her uncle has provided her with a new guardian, the seemingly priggish Dr. Kersten (Curt Goetz), who promises to bring her into hand and force her to behave as a proper young lady, upbraiding her bad manners and sending her off to an early bed.

 

    The very next day Ossi is off to the clothiers to have a new (male) suit made for her, and that very evening she is off to the ball. The moment she steps into male freedom she, now he, is immediately ogled by the women and given privileges she might never before have imagined. But she also must now be prepared for the rough and tumble world she will face in being among her “own” kind, as she soon discovers just how difficult it is for a man to choke his neck in a high collar and tie, and how much push and pull is involved in even checking one’s hat and coat.

     Once inside the ballroom, Ossi the male is immediately hounded by dozens of would-be female partners, nearly mauling the new young man in their rush to the dance floor as they spin and turn him round like a top. Suddenly, from across the way, he spots “her” own new guardian attempting to engage a beautiful young lady, and he determines to steal the young woman away from him in her little-girl revenge. 

     Such a striking young male as Ossi immediately succeeds. Kersten furious with his new male rival moves toward him in anger, but before the two can even verbally spar, they turn back to see the young woman with yet another suitor, and they can only laugh at the absurd turn of events.

     In their mutual cuckoldings they share a glass of champagne, another, and another. Kersten offers Ossi a cigar, and before the viewer can even assimilate the situation, the two have become fast friends—so fast, in fact, that, in their sudden stupor, they are drawn to each other’s lips, smooching soon after in quiet homosexual rapport.

 

    Off they go into the night, wearing each other’s coat, as they catch a carriage to….well we never know, but it appears they might be perfectly happy to sleep in each other’s beds. Indeed, quite by accident, that is precisely what happens; since they now have both have fallen asleep, the driver has no choice but to reach into their coat pockets in search of their cards and delivers them up to each other’s residence.

     Shaken awake by a butler in a strange bed, Ossi is terrorized and breaks into tears, the butler telling her to wipe her eyes as if the young man’s appearance in his master’s bed were the most natural thing in the world. It apparently has happened in the past, and Ossi, indeed, does wipe quickly wipe away the tears, hurrying off to his/her own house. 

     So too does Kersten wake up in a strange bed, hardly imagining it to be that of his new charge. As he attempts to sneak out, Ossi, still in male attire, meets him in the hall. He explains his appearance by suggesting that Ossi (that is herself) is his cousin who he has come to visit. Kersten seeks his assurance that he will never speak to Ossi or anyone of the events of the previous evening, to which the young man agrees, and returns to his/her room, brushing out her hidden long locks.

     But now recognizing his location, Kersten is confronted by the governess, delighted he has finally shown up. He goes to awaken Ossi, discovering her still dressed in last night’s tuxedo, and realizes what has truly transpired.

      Oddly, he is not so much embarrassed as delighted, for he can continue his affair with the young man, now his underage young female pupil without any further qualms. Ossi, however, promises that we will have to pay for it, and that she will most certainly have the upper hand.

      It’s hard to say where this film’s sexual sentiments truly lie, for in a short 41 minutes, the work has embraced a libertine feminism, cross-dressing, transgenderism, lesbianism, homosexuality, and a man-child affair without batting an eye. As I have noted elsewhere in this volume, Berlin in the Weimar period was a wild place when it came to sexual identity. And Lubitsch’s film makes no apologies for embracing the whole range of possibilities available, apparently, to everyone.

 

Los Angeles, May 4, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).

Peter de Rome | Double Exposure / 1969

dead end

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter de Rome (director) Double Exposure / 1969

 

A muscular young man (Tom Yourk) in blue jeans and a baby blue T-shirt is walking one of the Fire Island wooden planked trails, passing by a large moderne home, obviously the house of a wealthy Fire Islander. He walks to what appears to be the end of the avenue, the sign reading, “Private. Dead End.” Accordingly, he turns back to look at the house, observing a naked boy standing in a large pane of glass.

 

      He walks past the house again traveling now in the other direction, checking out the house more carefully. On the side of the large structure, at the very top, there a large oval-toped door that appears to go nowhere. The door opens inward, and the same naked figure appears there, standing for a few moments.

      Our young hero, feeling the pull of the alluring man, begins to walk up a gravel path toward the front door of the house, and once more, another door opens, the naked youth appearing before him.     This Peter de Rome film from 1969, Double Exposure, it turns out is a subtle exploration of the Narcissus myth. When the boy enters the home, checking the downstairs interior and finding no one there, he begins walking upstairs to find the boy he’s glimpsed in the window. Suddenly, as he reaches the level of the second floor, he himself becomes the same nude figure he’s seen from the street.

     Strangely, accordingly, he has lured himself into the house, brought his own other being, another “exposure” of his body into his life, which results in his continued loneliness.

     After opening yet another two doors and looking out at where he himself previously walked fully clothed, amazingly he spots himself as he was before.

     From the second floor landing he looks down into the living room below seeing his own image now laying nude on the couch, rolling sexily around as if to entice his upstairs self through his now downstairs nudity, eventually sprouting a semi-erect cock.

     But as the upstairs boy moves down the stairs into the now empty living room space, he finds himself once again fully dressed, appearing as he did before entering the house. Slowly he moves out the front door, down the terraced porch and returns to the wood-planked street, walking quickly back, evidently, to where he had originally begun his voyage into a “dead-end” world where the “other” can never be touched, and where his loneliness remains unassuaged.

     Perhaps in order to find love he must enter a new world in which he might encounter someone who is truly different from himself.

 

Los Angeles, July 27. 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

William Wyler | Dodsworth / 1936

love stopping short of suicide

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Howard (screenplay, based on his play of Sinclair Lewis’ novel), William Wyler (director) Dodsworth / 1936

 

The other morning I decided, somewhat reluctantly, to watch William Wyler’s 1936 satiric look at marriage based on the Sidney Howard play and Sinclair Lewis’ 1929 novel. I do not think Lewis was the great American novelist that the Nobel literary committee seem to have thought he was, and I find most of Wyler’s works to be charming comedies and soap-operas. Although the play did well on stage in 1934, Howard isn’t my idea of a great playwright.

      Nonetheless, I was open to viewing the whole of this (I had previously viewed certain scenes), and I was actually quite delighted, although it is a soap-opera and a simply directed work, not a great one.          But I do wish I had seen this film while I was at work on the book my friend Paul Vangelisti had asked me to write on “marriage.” I think it would have helped to represent a far darker aspect of the vision I expressed in that series of essays, although I certainly did have a lot dark views to offer nonethe less, despite my own long-lasting marriage.

     The fact is that the couple in this work, Sam Dodsworth (Walter Huston) and his wife Fran (Ruth Chatterton), at least at the beginning, even seem a compatible couple, easy with one another, and solid in their devotion. What we do know, and don’t truly blame her for it, is that Fran is utterly bored with life in Zenith, Ohio, where her husband has developed a successful auto works business, and from which, to please his wife, he is now retiring so that they might travel to Europe—representing a kind of late life European tour. Yet it appears that only Sam, despite his fierce Americanism, is the one truly interested in the culture of the countries they visit. Fran is trying to find new love and friends.

     The vain Fran seems primarily interested only in a kind of last fling as she flirts, quite unsuccessfully at first, with Captain Lockert (David Niven), who responds to her but is spurned when he tries to turn it into a sexual romance, and later with the wealthy Viennese Kurt Von Obersdorf (Gregory Gaye), whose mother, the Baroness, finally nixes Fran’s plans for divorce and remarriage to Kurt.

 

     A home-boy at heart, and a true family man, Sam is willing to return to the US to again see his daughter Emily (Kathryn Marlowe) and her new husband Harry (John Howard Payne). And given his wife’s open flirtations, he is willing to give up his wife. Besides, he has met the wonderfully open and knowledgeable Edith Cortright (Mary Astor), who plays the woman who might have been his perfect wife. The truly sophisticated Cortright, obviously a survivor of her own failed marriage, now lives in a small villa in Italy, and introduces the always curious Sam to the joys of European living. But Fran’s desperation in having been rejected by the Von Obersdorf family, demands that the loyal Sam return to his narrow-minded and endlessly selfish wife.

       During the filming, Astor, who had had an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman (and who had kept their extensive correspondence and, apparently, a diary about all her affairs), was currently appearing in the divorce proceedings against Kaufman, during which, I’ve read, she hung out mostly in her studio trailer to escape reporters. Clearly, it was the scandal of the day; I recall Howard’s normally open-minded father tsk-tsking about her behavior while we were watching a production of Meet Me in St. Louis in his Baltimore living room, a reaction that shocked me more than anything she might have done.

 

      Yet Astor and Huston are the true treasures of this film. Huston, channeling Gary Cooper to a certain degree, makes the American “hick” Dodsworth a truly likeable and honest being, as opposed to his affected and snobbish wife. Certainly, one of the funniest lines in all of film history, moreover, comes from Astor, who, when Fran declares herself 35, and dares to say to Edith:

 

  Fran Dodsworth: I hope I look as good as you do when I'm your age.

  Edith Cortright: You're almost sure to, my dear.

 

      That bitchy line might have even come out of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women.

    Despite the soap-opera mechanics of Howard’s script and original play, there is a great deal of humorous wit in the work that comes mainly out of the mouths of Astor and Huston, but also from the confused and befuddled Fran. The final scene will serve as a good example:

 

Fran Dodsworth: Are you going back to that washed-out expatriate in Naples?

Sam Dodsworth: Yes, and when I marry her, I'm going back to doing things.

Fran Dodsworth: Do you think you'll ever get me out of your blood?

Sam Dodsworth: Maybe not, but love has got to stop someplace short of suicide.

[Dodsworth runs to the gangplank and jumps on just as it is lowered away from the ship. The boat whistle sounds]

Steward: But the gentleman will miss the boat!

Fran Dodsworth: [shouting above the boat whistle] HE'S GONE ASHORE! HE'S GONE ASHORE!

 

     Yes, we are now sure that not only has the American rube bolted to live a European life, while the fake sophisticate is now doomed to live out her life in Zenith, but Sam has escaped the deadly bonds of her false loving, and now can truly enjoy his life. It’s an odd redemption for the man who was previously so home-sick for American soil. It’s clear he has become the true expatriate, while Fran has remained the Puritan American, despite her flirtatious and sometimes shocking sexual behavior.

      A bit like George Minafer in Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, Fran Dodsworth gets her comeuppance by simply having to live the rest of her life with the insufferable small-town people whom she has tried to escape.

 

Los Angeles, March 3, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death) / 1969

the professional friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (Love Is Colder Than Death) / 1969

 

Fassbinder's first film, Love Is Colder Than Death, is both a comic work and a series of homages to various French New Wave directors, including Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. But it also, coming as it does two years after Bonnie and Clyde, tips its hat to the American director, Arthur Penn several times. There are moments in this film, a work filled with references to American gangster movies and American-produced objects, where Fassbinder seems to be quoting images and even scenes from Bonnie and Clyde, while simultaneously working against them.

 

    Certainly, the "situation" of the film nicely parallels the Bonnie and Clyde figures. Like Clyde Barrow the hero, Franz Biberkopf (played by Fassbinder himself), is a petty criminal; most of his money, however, comes from pimping his girlfriend, Johanna (Hanna Schygulla). Despite their small-time activities, moreover, it appears that they have caught the attention of the "Syndicate," who want Franz to join them. Although his is refusal ends with his being beaten, he remains determined that he wants to be free, to work for himself.

     Among the others who the Syndicate is attempting to recruit is a knock-out beauty of a man, impeccably dressed in a suit, Bruno (Ulli Lommel). As Fassbinder's camera focuses intensely for what seems like several minutes upon his image—the closest thing possible to a cinematic "swoon"—we quickly recognize that Franz has fallen in love. As the men bed down for the night, Franz drops his blankets immediately next to the prone man. Yet hardly any communication occurs between the two, except a kind of weak friendship, in which Franz calls Bruno "Kid," and invites him, when he is released, to share his and Johanna's flat in Munich.

     In these early scenes, indeed, not much is said, but the entire context of this gangster film is established. In what may appear, at first, to be ridiculously bad acting, Franz punches out one of the thugs—without touching him! Fassbinder plays out the scene almost in Kabuki style, and the violence portrayed throughout the film is consistently presented as something occurring off screen. We witness only the gun going to the head, never the slug. The gunfire of Bruno’s later murders sounds like it comes from another room. In short, this is a violent film with hardly any violence. Fassbinder has perhaps made us even more aware of the coldness of their acts by presenting them as theatrical tropes instead of realist events.

     Similarly, the love between the two men is never represented by any sexual or even sensual act. Indeed, the two seldom even touch. Yet the way both men observe and relate to Johanna, one can easily perceive that any love in the room is between the two men. At one point, when Johanna, laughs at a few caresses Bruno has proffered her, Franz slaps her face. Her confusion for his act is answered as simply as it might be: "He is my friend." In short, just as Fassbinder has removed all the realism surrounding violence in this quite violent story, so too has he erased any physical representations of love in what is quite clearly a homosexual romance.

     In fact, Fassbinder goes even further in that respect by slowly revealing that Bruno has not come as a real friend, but, having given into the Syndicate's demands, has come as "a professional friend" to involve Franz in a series of escalating crimes and, finally, to kill him.

 

    The crimes they undertake, however, are once again insignificant or even meaningless. Their first "caper" might as well have been undertaken by the characters of Breakfast at Tiffany's instead of a crime movie. All three approach a shop clerk selling sunglasses, riddling her with questions that confuse her just enough that they can each slip a pair of glasses into their pockets.

     A trip to a gun-selling cobbler results in their acquisition of guns (real and fake) and ends with the cobbler's death.

     Their third "heist" is the pocketing of a few bottles and packages from a grocery store!

     Their next action, however, is brutal: Bruno shoots the Turk who has threatened Franz's life. The additional murder of the waitress, moreover, reveals to us just how cold runs Bruno's blood.

      Even though all the shots have come from Bruno, Franz is later arrested and kept in jail overnight. But here too, Fassbinder, sucks all the drama from the event, as the detective asks him over and over where he was at a certain time, and who he was with. The police seem as ineffective as Franz is as a criminal.

     Their final foray into crime is a planned bank robbery. By this time, however, Johanna has grown so jealous of Bruno that she calls the police. At the very same moment, men from the Syndicate are preparing to kill Franz, sitting in the get-away-car, and, as the police close in on Bruno (who is armed, incidentally, with a dummy machine gun instead of the real thing), the men from the mob take off. The police shoot Bruno, and, in the only true sign of the depths of his love, Franz pulls out a gun threatening them as he clumsily collects Bruno's body.

     Even the final chase is unlike any other in the genre. Once he discovers that Bruno is, indeed, dead, he stops to toss away the body, speeding ahead, while the police, preoccupied with the body, seem to abandon all else. Love is indeed cold, made even colder by Johanna's admission that she had called the police. Suddenly recognizing that he has been betrayed by everyone, Franz spits out the word "whore," suggesting that their relationship has also fallen dead.

 

Los Angeles, January 8, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2011) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).