Ken Russell | Valentino / 1977

an orange just out of reach

Ken Russell and Mardik Martin (screenplay, based on Valentino, an Intimate Exposé of the Sheik by Chaw Mank and Brad Steifer), Ken Russell (director) Valentino / 1977

 

The director who never missed the opportunity to take his motion pictures quite literally “into hysteria” and who didn’t mind exaggerating or making up history to get them there tried terribly hard to whip up vague rumors and banal facts in Valentino, but this time, alas, without success. As Janet Maslin puts it in her The New York Times review:

“Valentino is Mr. Russell's least disturbing movie since The Boy Friend: That should come as a relief to his distractors and as a slight disappointment to those who respect and appreciate his abrasive energy. To a large extent, the film's relative ordinariness is attributable to Valentino's. For all of his glamour, he was a bland figure, more of a star than he was an actor, and Mr. Russell's best films have been about artists, such as Henri Gaudier Brzeska in Savage Messiah and Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers, whose lives were governed by their unruly talent. Valentino's greatest dream was to leave Hollywood and became an orange grower, so there isn't room for the grandiose ambition that animated Tommy.”

    That doesn’t mean that Russell doesn’t try his best to boil the pot by presenting ancillary figures such as Vaslav Nijinsky (performed by Royal Ballet dancer Anthony Dowell) who together with Valentino (Rudolf Nureyev) make a wonderful dancing duo as they tango across the floor before Nijinsky breaks off into breath-taking double reverse spins and pirouettes which is all meant to hint that Rudy had special rapport with the men.

    But females clearly are the forces who control Valentino’s life, as he is fed not by his special dance lessons to the likes of Nijinsky, but by his taxi dancer chauffeuring of elderly women who drop by Billie Streeter’s (Linda Thorson) club to dance off with the Italian beauty. One of his customers is the Chilean socialite Bianca de Saulles, wife of wealthy football player and business man John de Saulles (Robin Clarke), who here is represented as a mobster who’s currently seeing Valentino’s boss and latter dancing partner, Streeter (in real life suffragist and creator of the “Joan Walt,” “The Joan Sawyer Maxixe,” and the “Aeroplane Waltz,” Joan Sawyer).

       Although the movie hints that Valentino and de Saulles may be having an affair, it also implies that nothing truly happens between the dancer and the mobster’s wife except for his boiling up a good bowl of al dente spaghetti and paying loving attention to her young boy before testifying, after Bianca shoots her husband dead, about Streeter and Jack de Saulles’ affair. In short, the movie tries to have it both ways, centering the story upon the strong women who ruled his life, while at the same time suggesting Valentino seldom engaged in heterosexual sex and didn’t consummate his relationships with either of his wives. He seldom gets a chance after the Nijinsky hookup to be in the same room with another man.

     Like Nijinsky, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is thrown in just so that the film can call up the name of another scandalous star and that Valentino can get a chance to meet “Mr. Fatty’s” girlfriend for the evening, Jean Acker (Carol Kane), in reality a lesbian who was also one of Nazimova’s lovers, but in this case is simply shop girl turned movie star overnight, impressing Rudy enough by her lavish lifestyle—mocked in this film by her ordering up a huge bowl of French fries topped with ketchup—to encourage him to give up dancing for the movies so that he can buy his dreamed of orange grove and help out his dying mother. Although the director and writer wash over the fact of Acker’s bi-sexuality, they use of the occasion to toss in the first of many pink powder puffs that will mock the hero to his grave by mentioning that she has locked him out of their apartment on their wedding night—the truth evidently.

   Since Valentino’s women are the Scheherazades of this tale, Russell trots in Alla Nazimova (Leslie Caron) for a queenly lesbian-drag visit to Rudy’s funeral accompanied by a whole bevy of sapphic beauties in which she rhapsodizes over her memories of him in her film Camille. It was, in fact, that film as I argue above, and her designer Rambova’s handling of him in Monsier Beaucaire that actually helped to cultivate the “pink puff” myth and to ruin the career that another of the storytellers—the only human being outside of Valentino’s later manager George Melford (Don Fellows), screenwriter June Mathis (Felicity Kendal), who may have also loved Valentino but used him more as an ordinary lunch ticket instead of way to bring attention to herself.

       It was Mathis, as I note elsewhere, who gave Valentino his first chance to act in The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, developing the figure of the exotic lover that would make The Sheik and Blood and Sand his best films. And it is she who bails him out of the jail cell where he lands up for trying to marry Natacha Rambova before his divorce from Acker had taken the required cooling off period of one year. Locked up on their wedding night in a California jail cell, this marriage also wasn’t consummated in the usual manner.. I’ll come back to the jail in which he and Rambova were locked up in a moment.

 

    For we cannot ignore the entry into this funerary travesty of Natacha Rambova (Michelle Phillips), Nazimova’s favorite lover and the greatest fraud of the film—at least as the way Russell tells it. She enters to retell of her great love of Valentino, which seems to have consisted mostly of throwing bones to tell a future that was meant to allow her to manipulate the actor into helping make her the director, designer, and the star of his movies; but she goes home with Nazimova. Convincing the dumb yokel that he could express himself only through poetry based on Omar Khayyam and live a spiritual world which she alone inhabited, she convinced him to turn down any role that he might have been able to logically inhabit, taking him off into her notion of an effete world of artfilm that that neither she nor Nazimova had yet been fully able to create.

     Russell manages to visualize a wonderful metaphor for their “spiritualized” sexuality by pulling them into a desert tent that the Sheik was meant to inhabit, and showing off both his star’s sexual treasures, Phillips stripping naked with Nureyev following her lead to create a fabulous photo shoot where we even get a brief glimpse of the Russian Rudy’s jewels and Phillips tits, without any sex involved, Phillips dressing and running off the minute Valentino was ready for at least a stab at sexual intercourse.

    Maybe if the poor boy had had some more males like Nijinsky thrown his way, he might at least have been a little less tense. But the men of Russell’s film are all brutal, conniving beasts like Hollywood directors and producers Rex Ingram, Jesse Lasky (Huntz Hall), and Sidney Olcott (John Justin), the xenophobic and homophobic Navy boxer Rory O’Neill (Peter Vaughn), and a gang of cynical newsmen straight out of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page.

       These jackals, in fact, are even worse than the overwrought nightmare scene in the prison where Valentino is kept—without bail money from Lasky or any other of the figures who’d grown wealthy off him—to be sexually harassed and taunted by a hot and sweaty homo-hating prison guard and a toothless masturbating fellow prisoner who with others corner the actor forcing him without latrine privileges to piss in his own pants. Truly, it’s not that much different from what his directors and producers did to him every day. If Valentino was a pansy, he never even had an opportunity to explore it.

      Instead, the macho Italian stupidly fought a stand-in for the over-the-hill reporter who had created the “pink powder puff” story. He won the bout, but as I note above lost his life to gastric ulcers resulting in sepsis aggravated surely by the bout and his celebratory drinking spree. He died in a hospital not alone in his mansion as this movie suggests, but I’ll give Russell credit for his last gasp of dramatic overkill. And, as Maslin observes, the ridiculous dance-a-thon-boxing match shows the Russian Rudy is at his best:

    

“He is at his most stunning as he tangoes in a dimly lit nightclub of the film, and fighting for his life in a noisy, crowded area one wall of which hangs a tattered American flag.”

     Nureyev is beautiful to watch since his every movement is an act of grace. But the lines Russell and Mardik Martin give him and all the others to speak were created in Palookaland. This film is not even the usual chlorinated biopic, but a reeking halfway house between homage and a desperate search for any gossipy stink. When all quiets down and the women and brutes leave, however, we realize there is not even a sniff of perfume or talcum powder to be found here, but only the smell of an orange just out of reach, ripening in the sun.

 

Los Angeles, May 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Ernst Lubitsch | Monte Carlo / 1930

beyond the blue horizon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ernest Vajda and Hans Müller-Einigen (screenplay, based loosely on the fiction by Booth Tarkington and the play by Booth Tarkington and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland), Ernst Lubitsch (director) Monte Carlo / 1930

 

In 1930 Ernest Vajda and Hans Müller-Einigen readapted the Booth Tarkington story to create a new version of Monsieur Beaucaire, directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch which, if not precisely an LGBTQ film, certainly leans deeply into its territory in manner that reveals its original film's roots.

   This musical comedy starring the intrepid Jeanette MacDonald, a woman who never saw a sentimental picture that she couldn’t hum, is about to marry the Duke Otto Von Liebenheim who, if Lubitsch (Claud Allister) were a pure Hollywood thoroughbred would have turned into a full-fledged fruit of the sissy-boy type despite the fact that Otto is utterly insistent upon marrying Countess Helene Mara (MacDonald) despite the fact that she has turned him down countless times. This time she leaves before the wedding even gets started under a rainy sky with her maid Bertha (ZaSu Pitts) heading off “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” (music whipped up by Richard A. Whiting and W. Franke Harling, with lyrics by Leo Robin) where all the happy peasants sing out their souls as they reap their wheat while calling out to passing trains.

     With her last 10,000 francs she suddenly gets the whim to visit Monte Carlo where she is certain with her luck that she can quickly turn her it into millions and live happily ever after. What she doesn’t know is that she has something more powerful than cash, a beauty that so captivates the male species that before she can even slip into the casino, ladies’ man Count Rudolph Falliere (Jack Buchanan) has attempted to introduce himself several times, winning only a gentle stroke of his head for good luck.

      It seems to have worked, but when he turns away to call for a dinner reservation, her luck fails her and the Countess loses everything. What is a poor girl now to do, since she’s already rented out of the full floor of the grandest hotel in Monte Carlo and hired a butler, chauffeur, and hairdresser to boot?

 

     Thinking the Count to be simply a common masher she basically ignores him until he telephones her in the middle of the night, allowing them to perform the film’s popular duet "Always in All Ways." He may wow her by night, but by day he seems not to have a chance until he overhears another gentleman sitting along the Strand also humming the number.

      The gentleman’s name is Paul (John Roche) who at first appears to know so many intimate details about the Countess that one might suppose he were her lover until Rudy and his friend Armand (Tyler Brooke) uncover the fact that he is her barber, the situation of which so delights the womanizing Rudy that he sings a ballad (“Trimmin the Women”) to the sissy brotherhood who are permitted to reap all the benefits that come with the company of beautiful women without the consequences of knowing what to do with them.

       Although he has absolutely no barbering skills, Rudy gets Paul to introduce him as a substitute and before he can even soothe the headache of the tensed-up countess, now threatened by the hotel management for her non-payment after she has fired her butler and chauffeur, assigning their tasks as well to her new hairdresser, who she calls Paul, unable, she declares to bear the name of Rudolph, hinting that Valentino may not be the kind of barber she wants to run his hands through her hair.

      In the meantime, Otto, her permanent fiancé, has followed her to Monte Carlo and she admits to him that she run out of money and is finally willing to marry him for his money only. Otto is such a loser that he is overjoyed that she has been so honest and, fortunately, he has so much money the whole affair will be a pleasure. He clearly wants the Countess as an expected acquisition rather than a bedmate, further leaving the road open from Rudy / Paul.

        But now that she’s been honest with Otto, so too must she tell Paul since she can’t pay him for all of his work, announcing that she must let him go. In response, he simply insists that he will gamble, and since he never loses (his method is that when standing near a redhead he bets on black, and when standing near a brunette he bets on red. If the girl is a blonde he asks her name).

       So sure is he of his winning, that the two spend a beautiful evening on the town together, dining out and falling in love. He returns later to hand her his winnings, actually taken from his private stash, seemingly convincing her of necessity of keeping him permanently around.

      But once more by morning he seems to have lost the bout, as she throws the money back into his face, and sends him off, realizing the impossibility of her actually marrying a hairdresser. She realizes her mistake, of course, the minute after he has left and spends of the rest of the day calling around to all the hair salons to find him, only by the accident of his overhearing a conversation in a salon where he is getting his hair cut for the opera finally resulting in bringing to her suite. There she commands him to cut her hair, which he—having utterly no intention of clumsily clipping her golden locks—insists he will do so only so after having given her the best haircut ever all the women of Monte Carlo, she will rush to his door.

       She refuses the cut, mussing her hair into a pile of frizz with the intention to telling everyone what he has done. She arrives late to the opera, newly coiffed, to be told the plot by Otto, before noticing that Paul/Rudy sits in a nearby loge where he seems to be pointing out the elements of the story in which the character Lady Mary refuses to have anything to do with Beaucaire the barber, only to discover that he is, in fact, a Duke.

       After the opera, she meets up with Paul, now Rudy, to beg his forgiveness, realizing that, as in the opera, he is true royalty. He pauses, with the expectation that like the Duke de Chartres he too may dismiss her attempts to make up for her haughty behavior. But as this Rudy has explained earlier in the film, he does not like unhappy endings.

       If Buchanan is no Rudolph Valentino for the eyes, his Rudy is surely more virile and the movie a hundred times more charming in its robust comic moments. And Lubitsch, as always, has carefully inserted sly but friendly innuendos of queer behavior in the characters of Otto and Paul, while simultaneously cutting Valentino down to size. In this director’s world of comings and goings—the door being perhaps his major metaphor—by 1930 the sheik was clearly on his way out.

 

Los Angeles, May 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Sidney Olcott | Monsieur Beaucaire / 1924

the powdered mannequin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Forrest Halsey (scenario, based on the fiction by Booth Tarkington and the play by Tarkington and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland), Sidney Olcott (director) Monsieur Beaucaire / 1924

 

Some blame Sidney Olcott’s direction of this 1924 film on its box-office failure and the fact that most of the characters seem trapped into the centers of the frames with vague action at its edges or nothing important going on. But we might as well point to the plot in which, except for a couple of sword fights for which the central character—Louis Philippe de Bourbon, Duke de Chartres, Prince of the Blood, First Peer of France, Governor of Dauphine, Knight of the Golden Fleece, Grand Commander of the Knights of Malta, Commander of the Saint Esprit, of the Order of Notre Dame, of Mount Carmel, of St. Lazarus in Jerusalem (Rudolph Valentino)—endlessly longs for, nothing else much happens except for endless introductions and long conversations that end nowhere. The director had already produced several dozens of quite decent films, including just the year previous the charming Marion Davies vehicle Little Old New York. Most actually blame Valentino’s wife Natacha Rambova, who oversaw the art direction and costuming of this movie, for her constant intrusions into Olcott’s territory, and one suspects that may indeed have been the problem. The costumes seem to be what this film is most about, along with the sets standing in a blur in the background expect for the ballroom scenes.

     In short, this is a costume drama without the characters being fully enable to enter into their clothing. What drama exists is focused primarily in the body of Valentino, whose handsome and highly powered white face remains at the center of most of the frames when either Princess Henriette (Bebe Daniels), Madame Pompadour (Paulette Duvall) or Lady Mary (Doris Kenyon) aren’t scolding him.           That body is certainly worth wide-eyed attention, particularly in the early scenes where an older person of lower rank who has worked in the court forever is given the sacred duty of dressing the Count, which events and some of the endless conversations keep postponing so that we can worship the thin, but nonetheless virile Valentino’s naked torso for some long time. It is perhaps one of the gayest moments (in both senses of that word) of entire film, where even the postponement of dressing turns into an almost campy moment of delight in the Latin Lover’s physique.

       As a gay man, I loved it. But I can well sympathize with the heterosexual men gnawing on their gums in impatience as the Count, after shaving, is powered, pawed, and fawned upon for no other purpose but to take the nasty Henriette to the Madame’s chamber in order to apologize for her impropriety of the day before.

       Although King Louis XV (Lowell Sherman) has commanded Henriette to become the Duke’s wife, she has told the Duke to his face that she wants nothing to do with him, believing him not even to be a man, with his reputation, evidently, as a courtier. Finally, pulling on his shirt, he takes the Princess to the Queen, but to no avail, since she even further evokes horror in her responses, refuses to properly apologize, and takes a short moment of conversation with the Duke that he believes to be a sexual “rendezvous,” but which turns out only to be another jab to his male pride.

 

      The Duke of Chartres has obviously no intentions of trying to tame this shrew. Can we blame the poor boy for taking off as soon as he can to England, where he pretends he is the French Ambassador’s barber. After all, everyone in the male service of Louis knows that the Duke has dared to shave himself. He must be good at it.

        Alas, unlike the demon barber of Fleet Street, we never get to see Monsieur Beaucaire as he now calls himself, shave anyone other than his friend Miropoix (Oswald Yorke), who lets him play with his whiskers only because some friends have searching for the Duke, forcing Beaucaire to prove himself as being able to play out his new identity. And as soon as he’s finished, he’s off to the park where he witnesses the Duke of Winterset (Ian Maclaren), the villain of the piece, his partner in crime Badger (Frank Shannon) and the beauty of Bath, Lady Mary (Doris Kenyon) out for a stroll. He dares, as a mere commoner, to even approach her, but it clear she will have nothing but the best of the upper class.

        Eventually he catches Winterset cheating at cards, and blackmails him into introducing him as royalty, the Duke of Chateaurien (the Duke of Nowhere) at the ball that very evening. He attends in the most darling white short heavily-brocaded waistcoat with leggings you’ve ever seen! And when Badger, just to test him, asks whether all the French women are similar to one the Duke of Chartres refuses to marry, Beaucaire describes the Duke as a scurvy man, but slaps Badger in the face with his pure white glove to challenge him—for the very first time—to a swordfight.

       In this world of proper manners, frankly, there isn’t much else for a man to do that might bring him pleasure. He wins, of course, stabbing Badger in the shoulder, and returning to properly court Lady Marly Carlisle, to whom, as a lover of roses, he becomes a true Rosenkavalier. The only problem is that we never see anything but the swords, no bodies, even as lovely as that of Valentino, behind them.

       Things between of two of them go swimmingly, allowing him to dress in a waistcoat of florals and fleur-de-lis which I can only imagine to be red—this film bringing out the true fashionista in me—for dinner with Mary. The truly scurvy Winterset, meanwhile, plans an attack of several of his henchmen on Beaucaire the moment he leaves the dinner. Once more he fights them off quite forcefully, although he is clearly no Douglas Fairbanks, mostly circling his opponents rather than leaping onto the parapets in order to fell them. But he kills at least two before himself being wounded.

        At the very moment his friends come to his side to save him with Lady Mary pleading for his well-being, Winterset reveals that the man she has come to save is really only a barber. Appalled she scurries away in her horsecab as quickly as she can, leaving her Rosenkavalier to fend for himself or die. So much for true love in this unhappy saga.

       Beaucaire mends, pondering the fact that he truly doesn’t love the role of cavalier and misses the straightforward dismissals of Henriette. But upon discovering that it is the Saturday Assembly, he determines to attend in order to return things to order. The only problem is that Winterset has put an army of men around the place so that he will find no entry.

        No fear, Beaucaire dresses in the cloak of a great lady and attends, all the male eyes darting immediately to the strange woman with a fan in front of her face. He enters the chamber and retires to a back room, to where Molyneux eventually escorts Lady Mary, who is once more offended by the presence of the barber. Westminster and Badger also discover his intrusion and are ready for another row with the man now claiming to be the Duke of the Blood, a title they claim he has stolen.

 

      At that moment the French Ambassador himself appears with a messenger bearing a decree that the Duke has been forgiven and may return safely to France. To their shock the messenger hugs and kisses the barber! As they call out for his true name, the Ambassador finally unmasks the imposter barber with the full name and credentials I have cited above. Mary attempts to beg his forgiveness, but he merely thanks her for helping him to realize that the woman he truly loves, Henriette, would have married him even if he were a lackey, as long as he were a virile man, which he has proven to be.

      The Duke returns to France, asks Henriette’s forgiveness, and receives her love and promise to marry.

      Here, finally, we get the true Valentino, a mere mannequin with a pretty face in a wig, no impetuous gaucho, kidnapping sheik, or even a passionate bull fighter. Americans may be utterly fascinated by royalty but they can never come to love them. Valentino had lost his mojo two years prior to his death. Is it any wonder that he felt he now needed to fight for his lost honor?

      In this film Valentino is indeed quite pretty, but is as powerful merely as a powder-puff, a man forced to return to his proper position in society in drag. One can only offer up a toast to Rambova for knowing just how to utterly emasculate this macho Hollywood creation while the rough Italian dancer probably thought he was creating great art.

 

 

Los Angeles, May 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

J. J. Sedelmaier | The Ambiguously Gay Duo: It Takes Two to Tango / 1996 [TV animation]

grab me so we can support each other

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Smigel (screenplay), J. J. Sedelmaier (director) The Ambiguously Gay Duo: It Takes Two to Tango / 1996 [TV animation]

The first episode of The Ambiguously Gay Duo was shown on The Dana Carvey Show on March 19, 1996. That show’s executive producer, Robert Smigel was seeking comic cartoons in order to distinguish their show from Saturday Night Live.

   Writer Dino Stamatopoulos argued for a parody of the Wallace and Gromit series wherein the implication would be that the dog was providing oral sex to the human, but Smigel realized that such a cartoon series would be nearly impossible to get clearance from ABC. Borrowing instead from the idea of super heroes such as Batman and Robin, about which there had been long speculation (based, in part. on Fredric Wertham’s now dismissed book of 1954, Seduction of the Innocent) that the title character and his protégé were a homosexual couple, Smigel determined to create another superhero duo who everyone suspected were gay except perhaps for the couple themselves. As Smigel noted in an interview with The Daily Beast that the cartoon series was basically concerned with an “obsession with sexuality,” funny because both homophobes and LBGTQ+ individuals were determined to find out if the couple were gay, making it a “sport and titillation. “The point of the cartoon was that it doesn’t matter whether the superheroes have sex or not,” arguing that given the amount of progress made in the LGBTQ+ since the cartoon series, he would not write such a work today.

     I would argue that it truly does matter, since these “gay” superheroes would alter the entire notion of what being a macho savior of the society might mean, something the cartoonists themselves began to realize shortly after, introducing gay figures into the mainstream cartoon world. Whether or not the original Batman and Robin figures were gay, today they are joyfully perceived as being precisely that, and the significance of their relationship has been important to thousands of young boys and men.

      But perhaps, even more importantly, the series of two totally affectionate men running around in blue tights and outsized yellow cod-pieces was far more fun than Superman—even if we might imagine a gay relationship between Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen, the later of whom was actually played by a gay man, and despite the fact that the character Kent plays as the alternate persona to Superman was based on other often-perceived bisexual males as represented in the literary and cinematic figures  The Mark of Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel (see my essays on both of those films and film series). The very fact that Ace and Gary couple “dabbled in photography,” that Gary often seemed, at heart, to be a mad interior decorator, and that Ace was constantly putting his hand to Gary’s ass brought smiles and giggles from most open-minded viewers. This “ambiguously gay” couple, constantly curious why people stared at them oddly for their own seemingly normative behavior, were far more enjoyable as a couple that Batman and Robin might ever have been.

     In this very first episode Bighead (the mastermind of the many villains presented in this series, and the one most serious obsessed with Ace and Gary’s sexuality) has created a formula that when introduced into the Metroville water supply, will destroy most of the inhabits, evidently vaporizing them as he demonstrates on his pet “ratling.”

     Even Bighead’s thuggish assistants debate whether or not the duo, whom Bighead claims can no longer stop them, are gay, one seeing them as possibly being gay, the other arguing that he’s crazy. Bighead, of course, believes they are truly gay.

     But in the meantime, the Police Commissioner has tracked down Bighead and contacts the dynamic duo, in the midst of a workout which shows Gay without a shirt, as they promise not to let him down.

 

     Back at Bighead’s quarters, his two thugs continue to debate about the sexuality of the duo, frustrating Bighead who clearly has larger matters on his larger than normal head.

     Speeding in their penis-shaped Duocar to Bighead’s place, the couple arrive, grabbing up the test tube which contains the dangerous formula, and knocking out the scientist’s thugs. Gary catches up the tube mid-air, Ace congratulating his friend by placing his hand a couple of times on his butt. The famed deadpan lines are uttered in this episode for the first time:

 

                    Ace [patting Gary on the buttocks]: Good job, friend-of-friends!

                    Villains/Bystanders [gasps, and ghastly stares]

                    Ace: What's everybody looking at?

                    Villains/Bystanders in unison: NOTHING!

 

The scene is repeated numerous times throughout the series.

     Yet, at the last moment, Bighead manages to hook them both up with forklifts and hold them over his “vaporizing solution.” There seems to be no way out, until Ace suggests Gary grab him so “we cannot support each other,” as they thrust their bodies into one another, and join each other in what appears to be fascinating head-on kamasutra sexual position. As the two hang, hugging together midway, Ace wonders, once more what they are all looking at, to which the stock reply is once more, “Nothing,” the announcer suggesting we tune in next week to find out what happens.

      If nothing else, we surely know that these men are in a position that no heterosexual males might every permit themselves to enter, a union of male support. In this case we simply have to assume that it is Ace and Gary’s solution to how to escape, not an unusual position at all for gay men and women throughout history.

      

 

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).