Ira Sachs | Lady / 1993

eve’s apple pie

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominque Dibbell (screenplay/performer), Ira Sachs (director) Lady / 1993

 

I have to say that I was truly offended by the IMDb teaser for Ira Sachs 1993 28-minute film about Dominique Dibell: “Camp portrait of a performer. Is she a woman playing a gay man playing a women?”

     I think these are questions that might only have been asked in the early 1990s, a time far less open to various gender trajectories that it pretended to be. It was, after all, still struggling with the issues of AIDS and the terrifying blacklash that the gay community had suffered throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and certainly had little time to devote to issues of transvestitism of transgender behavior.

     Without delimiting the possibilities, I’d simply describe the intelligent, quite beautiful Dibbell in her red wig as a gay man who openly behaves as a transvestite, in love with gay men, such as her Dwayne, or even straight men who love transvestites, but can’t deal with them without the attempting to control their behavior, as she explains to the camera and her best friend who lovingly pulls the truth of her own sadness from her, awarding her a beautiful Indian “sari.”

     He is so loving and open about his love for this lady that we wish Dibbell could more fully express her own appreciations, although she does admit that she loves it. But that is part of her unstated despondency, her inability to “go out” to the bars, her refusal to be controlled by her lover Dwayne, the confusion in a society that demands definitions, that requires a determination and full expression about love.

      Dibbell is also attracted to women in a kind of notion of a lesbian relationship, but realizes the impossibility of such a deep love. As she herself recognizes, she keeps herself and her lovers far away, purposely, in her real indefiniteness of who she actually is. At one point in front of Sach’s omnipresent but yet respectful camera—at one point near a breakdown, Sachs suggests that he and his cameraman will simply leave to see her to revisit her the next day, as she falls into a necessary sleep—she says that she could have “wept,” her gay friend suggesting that perhaps she should weep, she responding quite intelligently: “I could weep. But I wept. I wept already today,” one of the most beautiful admissions of confusion and grief that still attempts to distance the self from the act of sexual desire. As the two cuddle up in true friendship, she talks about her dog Lulu, and how much she loves her.

      Her friend Lavinia suggests they have to go out more, Dibbell responding that she’s not about to go to Miami with him, the man she perceives as a jetsetter. He suggests, the Limelight, the Roxy, we could “go to that other place that does just disco. A mixed club. We could go and have fun.” It’s so touching in how he tries to get her to come out of her surface of depression.

      Dibbell may be a true lady, even something of a princess, but she does lie to herself, in some of the last segments expressing her position quite clearly and openly as a sort of prayer, set against the music of Grieg’s Per Gynt: “Please god, make my desire tiny. Make it small. Don’t take it away from me, God, but make it small so that no one will see it, especially she God, who is my object of desire.”

      At the end of the film, when she’s asked if she’s seeing anyone now, she reveals herself even more fully. “No, she responds. No. I have these certain people I tend to keep gravitating backwards towards. And I do mean backwards. Well you know when you’re positive, then people…it becomes a whole big issue. …I’d really like someone who would just commit with me for the future and let that be whatever it would be.”

    “I have a prayer for the future,” she declares. “And that is that there will be no more shame prayers for all the little children. I got news for you. That is, you ain’t got nothing on me that I didn’t know already. Oh, I’m a big perve, from way back. I’m soiled. I’m a victim of sexual humiliation many times over. …And I’m a homosexual. I’m a homosexual. I’m a homosexual. And I’m sick up to here with it. So I declare from this day forward that I will swallow my sweet tooth towards whatever decay it may lead. …Which means when a friend brings over an apple pie, goddammit I’m going to eat it. Which means I haven’t been to the dentist for three years, and I may need a filing. I don’t think I’ve said it any plainer, Ira.!”

     This is no sexually confused performer, no camp actor here. Dibbell has expressed the deep pushes and pulls of a gender conflicted life in a world that is not yet willing to accept it. She knows who she is, who she has been, and terrifying what is even in store for her, now inflicted with AIDS. But she isn’t playing out a camp role. She presents herself, after all, in complete honesty, despite the camera’s constant presence. This true lady is one of the most honest figures, I feel, of that impossible decade.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

 

James W. Horne | Red Noses / 1932

getting naked

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screenplay), James W. Horne (director) Red Noses / 1932

 

Hal Roach Studios, known for their male comedy figures, duos, and other groupings such as Laurel and Hardy, the Our Gang series, Charley Chase, and a number of Harold Lloyd films, decided in 1931 to pair up female actors Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd in what became the first of “The Girlfriends” series, 17 short films in all. When Pitts left the Studio, they paired Todd up with Patsy Kelly for another 21 more short films until Todd’s death in December 1935.

      While many filmgoers adore these series of female comedies, praising the comic timing particularly of Pitts and Todd, praising their comic timing and their abilities to play off of one another, I frankly find these works, as Jenni Olson has commented, not as funny as they could be; and in large part the slapstick athleticism of the works, performed mostly by Pitts in the first series and Kelly in the second 21 films, are often simply as corny as the Studio’s early pie-throwing reelers.

 

  Although the “girlfriends” live together presumably as working roommates, several of these films, particularly after lesbian actor Patsy Kelly teamed up with Todd, suggest far more than a simple feminine friendship. And their alternate shifts from affection to mutual bitchery hint at a kind of permanent relationship, backed up notably in works such as Red Noses by the fact that they share a bed and seldom resist a chance to put their hands on one another.

     Just as interestingly, several of the male cast extras, such as the office secretary played in Red Noses as a snippy gay man by Bobby Burns, have homosexual overtones as well.

     In this film, the girls are in bed together simply because have terrible colds, already having used up an entire pile of hankies on their now red noses. But their boss, business man Wilfred Lucas is furious about their absence. Evidently, he has planned a crucial meeting for that day at which the women were to have served as stenographers of perhaps just eye candy for a new client. “They have no right” to be sick he proclaims to the male secretary, demand that he call them back and order them to work even “if they have appendicitis and four broken legs.” 

     All the two can accomplish through the phone call however are a series of further sneezes and wheezes. Accordingly, the executive determines that he will play for a Turkish bath which promises to relieve them of their colds within one hour.

     The Nature Health Institute to where he sends them, home to “Pyramid Mud Baths and Face Packs,” has very little in common with a Turkish bath and is far more similar to female hair salon. Yet from the beginning they encounter a series of semi-tortures, witnessing first a woman who has just collapsed from treatment #37 before they are put into small rooms curtained off so that they might get undressed.

 

    Zasu is the most reticent, particularly when a young pretty girl, after telling her to get naked, proceeds to watch. Soon after the specialists, Dr. Payson (Blanche Payson) and a physical therapist (Betty Danko) show up, Amazon-like women who seem to enjoy pummeling, pulling, vibrating, and shaking up their bodies. Inexplicably Zasu is hefted up onto a bucking Branco-like contraption that appears to be trying to have sex with her instead developing her thighs or torso. Thelma is seated on a vibrating chair that goes out of whack, turning her already quite curvaceous body into what Zazu describes “just like a bunch of jelly.”

      Together they’re put on a tortuous treadmill that Payson keeps speeding up and slowing down with the results of the women grabbing each other and spilling in piles of bruised flesh. As Dave Lord Heath writes in his review of this short film:

 

“What a wild ride of innuendo for 1932! The amount of sexy slapstick in this film is off the charts.

…The sexual nature of this film is undeniable and has to be seen to be believed. Once in the Turkish bath, our heroines can't go a few scenes without being asked to shed off their clothes. The first explicit naughty bit of business in the film occurs during the first undressing scene when Zasu pats Thelma on the rear, asking coyly if that's her ("I saw it sticking out there [through the curtain]," says Zasu). This brief moment makes the seemingly innocent entrance of T&Z at the start of the film (not just sharing a bed, but laying down with their bottoms pressed against each other) a lot less innocent!”

 

   Soon after, Zasu and Thelma, trying to escape, can’t even find their clothing, which leads Thelma to drape herself in a blanket and Zasu to steal a man’s suit from a nearby tailor, going into male drag as she and her friend slide down a laundry chute to walk home, one as a kind of ethereal Greek goddess, the other as her male companion. Their colds, however, seem to have disappeared and they’ve been promised a vacation by their boss.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.

Akira Kurosawa | 醉いどれ天使 (Yoidore tenshi) (Drunken Angel) / 1948, USA 1959

tough love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Akira Kurosawa and Keinosuke Uegusa (screenplay), Akira Kurosawa (director) 醉いどれ天使 (Yoidore tenshi) (Drunken Angel) / 1948, USA 1959

Set beside an evil looking, clearly polluted bog in a Tokyo black-market slum, Drunken Angel is one of the darkest of Kurosawa’s early films, often described as a kind of film noir. But here little of the gangster (yakuza) world is mysterious or shrouded in the confusions and twists of plot so apparent in American film noirs such as The Big Sleep or Out of the Past. Kurosawa’s hoodlums are known by everyone, their activities quite-openly portrayed. The locals bow before their yakuza leaders, allowing them permission as well free flowers, drinks, and other tokens of their admiration. The only question for Kurosawa is why? Why this absurd obeisance is permitted? Why the yakuza remain so loyal to the organization even when their lives are on the line, or as Kurosawa himself put it: “Exactly what sort of people are they? What is the obligation that supports their organization? What is the individual psychological makeup of the gang members, and what is the violence of which they are so proud?”      The particular focus of The Drunken Angel is Matsunaga, the new head of this polluted locale, brilliantly played by the always ready-to-spring angry young man, Toshirō Mifune. So stunning is Mifune’s performance that, as Kurosawa describes it, he transformed the entire film, unbalancing the original focus of the alcoholic doctor who was to be the moral center of the work. Whether just sitting, dancing, violently reacting, or fighting, Mifune dominates the screen in way that only Brando can. But unlike Brando’s earthly, slightly feminine sexuality, Mifune is a kind a haggard, skeleton version of male sexuality, a man, even the angry doctor admits, who has the attention of all the women—and his male lackeys. Even the doctor seems attracted to Matsunaga, discovering that his new patient—having come to him to have a bullet removed from his hand—is also suffering from tuberculosis, clearly a common disease in this mosquito-ridden hellhole. Although Matsunago may outwardly seem diffident to his possible disease and eventual death, Doctor Sanada (Takashi Shimura) recognizes in him aspects of his own youth, the mistaken decisions of a young man who secretly is afraid of death and still has not completely hardened his heart.

 

    For Sanada there is no appeasing of his patients, no quiet assurances, only outright statements of Matsunaga’s stupidity and bluff. Sanada knows his territory, and has no sufferance for the half-lies and appeasements of more successful doctors, which he also knows will have no effect on the rough-hewn toughs he must face. Time and again throughout The Drunken Angel, Sanada and Matsunaga go at it with fists and flying objects. Their disgust with one another is as palpable as their eventual love. In this world of masculine (and one might add, feminine) stereotypes Sanada demands impossible absolutes: “no alcohol, no women,” while he himself visits nearly every bar in the territory, flirting with the accessible women: “Fall in love for someone like me,” he consuls a woman behind the bar who later tries to lure Matsunaga into the country, “I may be scrubby but you get free medical care.” Sanada is also hiding a young woman in his office-home who serves him as a kind of nurse, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), the former lover of the now-imprisoned former gang boss, Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto). Miyo, who has suffered abuse and VD from her former lover, is terrified of Okada’s release, but is also still drawn to the yakuza, a fact that equally angers Sanada, who mutters (in one of his numerous cynical asides) “Martyrdom is out of style.” Later he puts it more bluntly: “He tormented you, made you sick, and then deserted you like a puppy. And you still wag your tail and follow him.”

     After confirming Matsunaga’s diagnosis, the doctor goes out of his way, even endangering his life, to convince Matsunaga to reform, to follow his medical regimens so that he might survive. And for a brief time, it appears he might be almost be succeeding in changing the surly young tough—that is until Okada returns. Forced to match wits with the former gang head, Matsunaga returns drunken to his dancehall hang-out, introducing his own girlfriend to Okada, and attempting to match the former abandonment of his dances—this time to the incredible satire of a US Harlem-like jazz piece, “Jungle Boogie” sung and brilliantly danced by Shizuko Kasagi, lyrics by Kurosawa himself—which ends with Matsunaga hemorrhaging and spitting up blood. As he is taken away, and the doctor is called, it is clear that Okada, perceiving the sickness of his rival, is about to return to power. 

    The intimate scene that follows, in which Sanada visits his patient in the apartment where Matsunaga has lived with his fickle mistress, is one of the most touching in the movie, as the gangster, lying in a fever upon the bed, is watched over by his “angel,” who in clumsy curiosity opens the woman’s jewel box, smells her perfume, and plays with her shadow-puppets, as the director reveals this gruff and forbidding lector as still a very human man, curious, if nothing else, to know what it might be like to be Matsunaga’s lover. And I am not the only viewer who might describe Sanada’s attempt to care for and reform Matsunaga as representing a kind of queer love, a love returned, in kind, by the ailing yakuza, who gives up his life to protect the doctor. In his “film Odyssey,” Robert Taylor muses:

 

“What if our bachelor Sanada is really in love with Matsunga? …And Kurosawa does some very interesting things with the doctor’s character that hint toward homosexuality. He’s single and, though he warns others to stay away from his live-in nurse, shows no affection for her in a way other than paternal. He jokes with a good looking bartender that she should marry him, and then bursts out laughing before he can even finish the thought.”

 

     Later, the same music box is opened by Nanae, as she attempts to collect her jewels, along with her dresses, shoes, and other attire in her escape from her love-nest with Matsunaga—who is now an outcast both from the society (for his contractible disease) and from his gangland world. Like Miyo before him, Matsunaga now has nowhere to go but to the doctor’s house.

     Yet that very move further ostracizes him from his Yakuza crime associates and further endangers Miyo’s life as Matsunaga’s former lackeys recognize her as Okada’s former lover. When Okada and his men finally arrive to claim her, the doctor once again fearlessly stands his ground, refusing to allow them access. But when Matsunaga hears that he intends, the next day, to call for the police, he is determined, despite his illness, to warn the head boss, with whom he feels he still has some personal influence.

     As he arrives at the gangster compound, however, he accidently overhears the gangland boss explaining why he has not yet abandoned him: he is planning to use Matsunaga as a pawn if gang-war erupts. The news sends Matsunaga into a further spin, now recognizing that he is not only an outsider to life, but an outsider to the outsiders. He has no longer any connections of the living, and determines to murder Okada.

     Kurosawa intentionally plays out that attempted murder in a long series of melodramatic fight scenes as each corners his enemy ready for the final plunge of the knife, before beginning again and again, and finally ending in a kind of comic pratfall of the two as they slip upon a can of paint in the hallway, one by one attempting to grasp their way to safety through the slippery substance. It is almost as if the director were exploring all the conventions of Hollywood murders in a few clips. But just as one is ready to begin laughing, Okado puts the knife in Matsunaga’s back, ending his life.

     As Taylor reminds us, that in the original script, the director had for Sanada paying for Matsunga’s funeral and truck his coffin through gangland territory to demonstrate that Matsunga was loved by someone. But the censors refused to permit that soap opera-ish ending, very similar, in fact, to what happens in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life of a decade later, 1959, the same year in which Kurosawa’s film was finally released in the US.

     At film’s censored end, Sanada has no patience with sentiment or excuses. The world is what it is, and he is determined, despite the stupidity of groups like the Yakuza to destroy the vermin that plague these Tokyo citizens, whether they be bacterial or human filth. His youngest patient comes to tell him that he owes her a “sweet,” her newest x-ray revealing that she is now free of TB. If he has lost Matsunaga, his tough love has saved yet another life.

Los Angeles, April 16, 2012 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review.

Alexander Hall | Little Miss Marker / 1934

bad girls like me can’t pray

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Lipman, Sam Hellman, Gladys Lehman (screenplay, based on a story by Damon Runyon), Alexander Hall (director) Little Miss Marker / 1934

 

As in Lady for a Day and Pocketful of Miracles, the Damon Runyon story on which Little Miss Marker was based centers around a bookie, a showgirl, and the various thugs and roughs associated with the New York betting gangsters. In this case, however, the central character, Sorrowful Jones (Adolphe Menjou) is simply a bookie, instead of the head boss. The showgirl, Bangles Carson (Dorothy Dell), is also a much tougher doll whose relationship to the head man, Big Steve Halloway (Charles Bickford) is more that of a kept woman as opposed to the hardworking singer-dancer, Queenie-Missouri Martin, in Capra’s films.

     It hardly matters since the characters they play are so similar, the two leads, Sorrowful and Bangles, acting out a bickering relationship destined for the marriage altar. In this case, however, there is a third woman, the appealing child, Marthy Jane (Shirley Temple), left by a desperate gambling father as a marker for his bet on Dream Prince, a losing horse.

      Once Marthy (immediately dubbed “Little Miss Marker”) enters the scene, one can feel a dense layer of sugar coat the teeth. Fortunately, the writers, Lipman, Hellman, and Lehman, along with director Hall, whipped up a story that when faced head-on tastes more like a jigger of gin thrown down the gullet. For despite the cuteness of this human marker, as Marthy cajoles, scolds, and cries in her struggle for the affections of Sorrowful, all else is delightedly perverse. We might start by examining why the stingy Sorrowful has taken her as a marker in the first place, particularly given his natural curmudgeonly contrariness. It is clear from the moment that he lifts her into his arms, ostensibly in an attempt to hand her back to her father, that he is as smitten with her as if she were a dame of his own age. Sorrowful quickly assigns her to the care of his two comic stooges, Sore Toe and Canvas Back, who remind us also of the two dumb brothers in Lady for a Day. Their hilarious interpretation of Sorrowful’s instruction to “mind” her ends in their retrieval of a barber shop sign (which she perceives as a gigantic peppermint) and result in her temporary loss.

      When her father does not return to collect—we soon discover that he has killed himself— she is found again, this time by a young Black janitor, and returned to Sorrowful at Holloway’s club just a Bangles is warbling out a song of painful feminine woe. So begins a relationship of the young girl with Sorrowful that on the surface may seem utterly cuddly and charming, ending in a complete alteration of his life, but just out of the radar of the common viewer is a tale of abduction and child endangerment that might almost be read as pedophile’s fairytale—the last word being one that is repeated throughout.*

      Quickly removing the big boss, Halloway, from the scene, writers and director hunker down to focus on the catfight between women, old and young, for Sorrowful’s heart. Marthy has the advantage: she’s cute and sweet and, as everyone knows, no adult actor on screen can match the appeal of a child or puppy. And who could resist Temple’s tearful pleading:

 

                           Sorrowful: What’s the matter now?

                           Marker: You don’t like me!

                           Sorrowful: You always cry when somebody doesn’t

                                              like you?

                           Marker: Yes!

                           Sorrowful: Well, you got a lot of crying to do. Now go to

                                              sleep.

                           Marker: My mommy used to read to me about King Arthur

                                         every night before I went to sleep.

                           Sorrowful: Now, Marky, be reasonable.

                           Marker: I won’t!

                           Sorrowful: All right, all right.

 

     Obviously, she wins the fight and with it his heart. At the other end of the spectrum is Bangles, secretly in love with Sorrowful as well:

 

                           Bangles: [about Marky] Well, you can’t leave her here.

                           Sorrowful: Afraid of the cops?

                           Bangles: No, I’m afraid of the kid. I don’t want her here. I’m

                                          not going sappy over her!

     Both she and Sorrowful are soon as sappy as everyone in the audience, she purchasing a wardrobe of clothing for the child and, with Sorrowful, throwing a party of absurd proportions and questionable merit, with their whole underworld crew dressed like knights of the round table in the hope that they can restore the innate “niceness” of their little princess, who—influenced by their conceptions of themselves and their world—now describes herself as “a bad girl who can’t pray.” Enter her Dream Prince, a horse who they are intending to drug and, in so doing, kill the very next day. Enter also the jealous Halloway, having been clued in by Bangles’ maid of his girl’s growing attention to Sorrowful, and, suddenly, the consequences of their indecent behavior become all too obvious. The horse, who hates the boss, rears, tossing the object now of everyone’s love to the floor and into a coma. 

      She needs a transfusion so the doctors proclaim, but it has been made clear already, now verified by tests, that none of them have the right blood. Beyond all reason, it turns out, Big Steve Halloway alone has “good blood,” saving the day and reviving their stolen princess, as well as redeeming his pride and life. Now, presumably, as usually happens in Damon Runyonland, everything will turn out just swell: Sorrowful and Bangles will marry and keep their ill-gotten gains. But what are they going to tell her about her real father? Does it really matter in a world so corrupt?  

 

*The long scene where Sorrowful seems to be making up a chair as her bed ends in the child entering his own bed. We must presume that Sorrowful sits out the night in the chair. In a later scene, Bangles falls to sleep in bed with the child. Throughout, every male character lifts and holds her in numerous manners in an attempt to guess her weight. In short, almost everyone in the film holds and embraces this self-proclaimed “bad girl.”

     Director Hall, evidently, actually abused the young actor, telling Temple that her mother had been kidnapped in order to invoke her tears.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2012