Douglas Messerli | Physical Bodies: The Cinematic Work of Bob Mizer [introduction]

physical bodies: the cinematic work of bob mizer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beginning in 1942, Robert Henry Mizer, better known as Bob Mizer, began to make photographs and films of musical male models, describing his work as representing body building and matters relating to the male physique. And by 1945 he had established his renowned Athletic Model Guild (AMG), that paid hundreds of young male amateurs, many of them over the years becoming movie stars or other celebrities, which he feature in his magazine Physique Pictorial. Over the years he made more than 3,000 short and feature films posing as works about muscular development but in fact quite clearly developing the US version, in a highly restricted era, of male gay porno pictures and films.

 

    In order to escape censorship—although he was targeted several times by governmental officials and imprisoned on at least two occasions—his models of the 1950s and 1960s wore small posing straps which hid their genitals while revealing everything else including their buttocks which were on heavy display throughout his works. Models spent a great deal of type posing as body builders, and in most of his early works the models were able to make physical contact only through wrestling and other forms of athletic like combat.

     Soon a substantial number of other photographs had begun creating such “beefcake” like photographs and movies, among them Alonzo Hanagan (Lon of New York), Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Douglas Juleff (Douglas of Detroit), Don Whitman of the Western Photograph Guild in Denver, Russ Warner in Oakland, and Dave Martin in San Francisco.

     For a hungry homosexual audience who could not easily get hold of the far more revealing male and boy pornography of Europe, Mizer and these other photographs (to whom Mizer often loaned out models) offered a kind of sanitized version of male images which, given the dearth of more revelatory material, helped to satisfy the sexual urges of thousands of gay and bisexual men during these decades. Only in the 1970s were Mizer and others able to show full male nudity, but even then he limited their sexual activity to kissing, wrestling, cuddling, and rubbing, generally refusing to permit his models to enter into full sexual acts. In a sense, it was a bit like burlesque, giving his audiences a big glimpse of what they desired without providing then with the actual sexual engagement, and some argue, it was all the more arousing for that very reason.

     His influence was immense, impacting noted artists such as Bruce Yonemoto, Karen Finley, and Vaginal Davis, all of whom wrote on his work, and even blue chips artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hockney. Among his early models were Tab Hunter, Sal Mineo, Glenn Corbett, Dennis Cole, and Joe Dalessandro, among others. Some went on to become noted porn stars.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Bob Mizer | Tijuana Bandit / 1964

just below the border

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter director) Tijuana Bandit / 1964

Tijuana Bandit of 1964, represents a return to Bob Mizer’s standard narrative pattern of filmmaking, after he explored various more complex narrative structures which spoofed large-budget Hollywood filmmaking.

     In this film, it’s back to the boys who run into trouble, switch positions, and eventually wrestle their troubles away.

     Two US innocent students, exploring the Mexican border city of Tijuana, hook up with a local guy suggesting a nice club they might enjoy. If, at first, they seem to reject his solicitations, they eventually walk right into his trap. Before they even know it, he’s taken out a gun, forces them to walk to a private location, and demands they strip—even, when they still resist, their underwear. Doesn’t everyone wear a posing strap beneath their undies?

     In typical Mizer fashion, when the bandit bends down to grab their billfolds out of their discarded pants, one of the boys grabs the gun from his hand and turns the tables, forcing their bandito friend to follow suit, the second boy helping him speed the strip.

     But once he has peeled down to his posing strap, he manages to grab the gun back. And since they’re all now suitably undressed, he forgets the money and forces them to march on down to the beach. With a little anticipation, we can only imagine what might be next.

     Of course, they charge at him and the three end up in a serious wrestling match in the sandy mud, showing off their buttocks and crotches quite nicely to those who haven’t been paying attention to the plot, providing them with what they were looking for in any Mizer movie: beefcake.

     And here they get plenty of it as they pull him into lock between them, pounding his well-developed pectorals before they stand him up and together walk him further down the beach into the setting sun to....well that’s where imagination is so important in these cinematic pre-porn days.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Claudius Pan | X comme amour (X as in Love) / 2018

mud babies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claudius Pan (screenwriter and director) X comme amour (X as in Love) / 2018 [28 minutes]

 

X as In Love stars Antoine Héraly as the regional native Antoine and Xavier Prieur as Xavier who left that French region with his family 15 years previously. It’s now the summer of 2018, and Xavier, traveling with friends, has taken a day off to return to the farm where his childhood friend Antoine lived.

 

   In the summer of 2003, as children Xavier recalls, between watching E.T. and Goonies, they spent long days together playing in the fields and local stream, mostly covering themselves with mud where they imagined themselves as something akin to tribal primitives.

    Indeed, as two boys deeply in love, exploring sex, and terrified of their own feelings for one another, they must have seemed to themselves as outsiders, wild beings who found it difficult to fit into the provincial culture in which they lived, a world in which Antoine, for example, was beaten by his father for having put on some of his mother’s lipstick.

     Xavier remembers Antoine’s mother herself as being a kind of outsider, a woman who drank heavily and on occasion danced with other men at the local bar.

     In this threnody for the lost love of his youth, Xavier, obviously not totally happy and fed up with aspects of his contemporary life, reimagines his friend as a kind of twinkish, half adult, half child version of the boy Antoine who has miraculously remained on the farm, and with whom he spends a day of remembering and reexperiencing their childhood rituals as he runs through the wheat, swims in the stream, and even masturbates with his first love. Somehow in the process he and their innocent lost love is imaginatively restored.

     And by film’s end he is able to visit the cemetery where evidently Antonine’s body now lies. One can only wonder, of course, why or how Antoine died. But now, for a second at least, they miraculously reach out to invisibly touch each other over time, the last moment when the adult will ever be able to retrace and regain any of the remarkable childlike moments of that long-ago year.

      Claudius Pan’s short film is certainly far too artsy for its simple message, and the music, composed by Pan, swells up with a seriousness that would do-in even many a gay feature movie; but it’s still a lovely film to look at, and the boys are pretty enough that one wishes they didn’t have to plaster over their golden bodies over with mud in order to prove their ceremonial love.

    

Los Angeles, June 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Ralph Ceder | The Soilers / 1923

the celluloid fairy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Conklin and H. M. Walker (screenplay), Ralph Ceder (director) The Soilers / 1923

 

The 1923 silent western The Spoilers directed by Lambert Hillyer was an enormous hit, remade in 1930 with Gary Cooper playing the hero and in 1942 with John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Marlene Dietrich playing the leads. In the 1923 version, the cast included Milton Sills, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Noah Beery, Sr.

 

   The original plot, based on a novel by Rex Beach, is somewhat complicated, but boils down to a simple matter of claim jumping in the Alaskan gold fields, in particular a wealthy mine called the Midas, originally claimed by Roy Glennister and his partner Dexter, but illegally taken from them through the auspices of a crooked state judge and the Nome, Alaska attorney, both of whom are paid nicely by Alex McNamara for their evil doings. Meanwhile the judge’s niece, Cherry Malotte (Nilsson) has become attracted to McNamara, but when she perceives his evil doings, switches her love to Glennister, who is such an innocent that he cannot even bring himself to allow a gunfight to be waged in her presence, particularly with Malotte being part of the judge’s family. Soon after the Duke appears in blackface, later in Dietrich’s feather boa, and after in half drag. But we’ll speak of that at another time.

     Only after he is jailed and freed on the sly by Malotte does he seek revenge, fighting it out in the local saloon and, of course, winning back his property and the hand of Malotte.  

      I describe this only because that same year, Stan Laurel starred in a parodic version of this film, The Soilers, a kind of Saturday Night Live-like satirical skit. Directed by Ralph Ceder for the Hal Roach Studios, this version stars Laurel as Bob Canister (in the Glennister role) and James Finlayson as Smacknamara (as the McNamara villain). Canister’s sweetheart, Helen Chesty, in this rendition making only a brief appearance, is played by Ena Gregory.

     In this case the director allows his central hero to get down to business soon after the mine is stolen from him and Dexter by Smacknamara and his gang, meeting up with him again in his offices above the local saloon and demanding go full fisticuffs.

     The humor of this scene depends on the fact that neither of the wranglers are the typical macho types represented by Cooper, Wayne, or Scott, but are themselves weaklings, trying to best one another with a seemingly endless series of embraces as they destroy the contents of Smacknamara’s office before spilling downstairs into the saloon.

      Neither one can get the better of the other as they pointlessly struggle, biting one another’s arms, slinging pots and other pieces of furniture instead of pies in the face, and finally ending it all it a ridiculous pillow fight. Their battle, in short, appears less as a western-like donnybrook and more like the postures of a dance or even a kind of absurd series of sexual couplings as time and again they reach out to get hold off one another, flailing their arms into mid-air before pulling their adversary to the ground once again, turning and tumbling each over the other as in a slightly berserk wrestling match. As artists such as Thomas Eakins, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Robert Longo have long made clear, visually there is little difference between two males intensely fighting and two males rolling in sexual ecstasy across their bed.

     Ceder underlines this rather homoerotic tussle with the comings and goings of a film stereotype of a campy sissy boy in cowboy drag, who evidently works as Smacknamara’s secretary. Swishing in and out the door to gather up documents, sometimes hidden away under the bodies of the brawlers, he appears to be oblivious to their goings-on, as if somehow such queer behavior was so natural that it was beneath notice.

     Soon after he re-enters to reach up for a shirt remaining amidst the pandemonium of papers, carefully dons it, and tucks it into his tight denims before straightening his cowboy hat and primping for a few moments before the mirror. The fighters pausing until he leaves to resume their own activities, as if he has indeed caught them in an untoward act.

      Downstairs, on the other hand, the patrons literally ignore their physical efforts, and when Laurel finally wins by the accidental spillage from a high shelf of several bottles upon Smacknamara’s now dizzy noggin, he enters the street with his shirt half torn off as if imitating Marlon Brando after having been beaten up behind the shipyards of On the Waterfront, announcing to cowboys about to enter the chaos-riven joint that he has “won.”

     They appear to be equally unimpressed as those within and quickly walk around him as if he was a blathering madman.

      On the balcony upstairs, however, the effeminate office clerk, now dressed up as if ready for a night on the town, looks down at him while batting his eyes as if telegramming his love and admiration while putting forward his hands as if about to play patty-cake, shouting “My hero!”

   

      Canister looks his way only to dismiss his advances, to which the campy cowboy replies by picking up a potted plant and dropping it upon the battler’s head, knocking him out just as Canister had Smacknamara. One might almost expect this celluloid fairy to suddenly swoop down and scoop up the body, but the local garbage cleaners accomplish a far more rapid removal of the remains.

 

Los Angeles, September 26, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).

Charles Bryant | Salomé / 1923

a truly gay salomé

by Douglas Messerli

 

Oscar Wilde (writer), Charles Bryant (director) Salomé / 1923

When I first saw that the Alla Nazimova-produced Salomé, directed by her then husband, Charles Bryant, was included on several lists of LGBTQ films of the 1920s, I chortled. I knew the opera well, and wondered how any film, even if  religiously based on the Oscar Wilde one-act play in which Herod, the Tetrarch of Judea’s (Mitchell Lewis in this case) lust for his daughter and Salomé’s (played by Nazimova) even more passionate necrophiliac romance with Jokaanan, the prophet based on John the Baptist, could possibly offer anything for the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transsexual community except perhaps for its harsh focus on a misogynistic world in which a young, willful and oversexed teenager is murdered by her almost equally licentious father. 

 

     Yes, I knew that Nazimova herself was alleged (actually quite well documented) to be bisexual, with a strong preference for women—among her supposed lesbian friends were Eva Le Gallienne, director Dorothy Arzner, anarchist Emma Goldman, Greta Garbo’s girlfriend Mercedes de Acosta, and the set and costume designer of the film, Natacha Rambova, described at the time as her lover. Bryant, who divorced soon after the release of Salomé, was alleged to be her “lavender” husband. But did that matter, particularly since she was dancing for the masturbatory pleasure of her horrible step-father Herod hoping to attain the head of Jokaanan so that she might kiss his ruby lips and even run her hands through his beautiful raven-colored hair. Certainly, if my operatic experiences might be indicative, he wasn’t someone with whom a gay man may take delight, particularly when laid out on a silver platter.

     Rumor had it that several of Herod’s court were males in female drag and that Nazimova herself had ordered that the soldiers, guards, and pages consist of gay or bisexual men in honor of Wilde. 

     One has to ask, however, who would ever know, particularly given that this 1923 film was shot at a time when most male actors married for propriety’s sake and there was no Scotty Bowers (who I write about elsewhere for having bedded most of male gay Hollywood—apparently enough individuals to fill up a Cecil DeMille epic—and connected up dozens of lesbian actors with bed-time partners) to spill it all it a book such as his Full Service. Nazimova and her cast were all before his time. And, moreover, I hadn’t yet seen the movie!

     Now that I have witnessed this fantastical two-set extravaganza I will certainly admit that I’ve changed my mind.

     Let us start with the outlandish set designed by Rambova, based on the drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that accompanied the printed edition of Wilde’s play. This was clearly intended as the art-film of its day, and the sets and costumes—many especially created for Rambova in Paris—cost more than $350,000, an outrageous price at the time. Most of these creations are a bit like surreal versions of what the blogger for “Garbo Laughs” describes as art-deco meets Dr. Seuss. Aren’t the entries to most empty wells, in which Jokaanan is imprisoned, filigreed with metal flowers in the shape of a birdcage? Doesn’t every young teenage girl wear Christmas-tree lights in her hair to dazzle her suitors (a strange display described by some fashion connoisseurs as a “dandelion headdress”) while attired in a black almost see-through blouse and a black upper-thigh-length skirt that is so scant that when she prepares to dance she must put on a veil or two instead of taking them off?

 

     The long frazzle-haired Herodias (Rose Dione)—reminding one a little of Bette Midler in the picture Ruthless People before her makeover in the basement of her would-be kidnappers—wears a pair of floral-patterned pedal pushers that looks like something from a early 1960s work-out tape.

      And doesn’t every Captain of Guard like the handsome bare-chested Narraboth (Earl Schenck, who throughout his career performed in more than 60 movies)—paint his nipples and place around his neck a large necklace made up of transparent pop-it-like beads? Certainly, in Rambova’s world all men (except the Hebrew visitors) wear a kind of metallic jock-strap that some critics politely describe as loin cloths, but certainly reveal far more of the male anatomy that any cloth-like covering of the penis might.

      Yet so-far I’ve just described something that any LGBTQ person might recognize as camp. We still have the basically heterosexual threesome—with Herod in one corner, Salomé in the center, and the well-hidden prophet below—to slosh through along with the archaic intertitles.

       It does appear that at the dinner table Herodias is making love to a transsexual (woman dressed as a male) next to her. But does that make this a gay-friendly film?

 

       It certainly does if the love-sick Narraboth, pining away for his chance to kiss Herod’s daughter, and his “friend” the page of Herodias (Arthur Jasmine)—a relationship mentioned later in the work by Salomé—have their way.  Throughout the long scene in which Salomé attempts to cajole Narraboth to give her the keys to Jokaanan’s cell, the male couple recoil mostly by holding onto one another while entwining their hands with, at one point, the page even briefly stroking the Captain’s beautifully painted tits. If Narraboth is ready to kill himself over Salomé’s dismissal of him, he is also willing to stroke the flesh of his “friend” every chance he gets.

      And then there’s Jokaanan, himself, not at all another burly prophet out of my opera encounters, but a gaunt beauty (British-born actor and former opera singer Nigel De Brulier) who is actually draped in what I would describe as a loose loin-cloth that seems ready to fall off at any moment from his thin hips. How I wish I’d witnessed him in the opera-house before his blasphemous intertitle ravings describing the woman so mad about him that she’s willing to die as the whore of Babylon. When he insists that she go to the desert to seek out the Son of God, Salomé is so hot-to-trot that she asks “Is he as good looking as you?” He doesn’t answer.

 

       Clearly the beautiful prophet wants nothing to do with women folk, but still awes his own executioner, Naaman (Frederick Peters) so much that instead of raising up his sword, he first bows to him, getting down on his knees as if we were about to provide Jokaanan with a blow-job.

        The well-muscled guards in blond-dipped hairdos seem at any moment ready to lunge out against the young daughter of Herod for even daring to demand they open their male treasure chest. And even when it comes time for Salomé to kiss the lips of her would-be lover’s severed head, Nazimova thankfully keeps it under wraps. The normative heterosexual lovers real or imagined in this work all end up badly.

        Perhaps not every male in this piece is gay or bisexual, nor is every woman outside of Salomé ready to kiss the lesbian transsexual next to her, but I’d guess that most of this pulsating cast set against the completely artificed world they inhabit, might give it a go.

        Unfortunately, after this box-office bomb, Nazimova never made another movie.

       But it’s little wonder that this film in the past few decades has made the rounds along with James Sibley Watson’s and Melville Webber’s Lot in Sodom at a number of LGBTQ festivals.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and Queer Cinema Blog (September 2020).