Dave Wilson | Canteen Boy / 1994 [TV (SNL) episode]

bed bugs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Sandler and others (screenplay), Dave Wilson (director) Canteen Boy / 1994 [TV (SNL) episode]

 

It is hard to know what possessed performer Adam Sandler and whoever else worked with him on him on the script to create a story about an extremely naïve scout-camper, strange even to his fellow campers, who is found to be sexually attractive by his scoutmaster Mr. Armstrong, who basically attempts to sexually molest him on a camping trip—the skit presented, moreover, on Valentine’s day when actor Adam Sandler appeared on the show with his then-wife Kim Bassinger.

 

    I am well known to verbally strike out about our society’s now long-time hysteria about all child-adult sexuality, and I have often spoken out about the painful back-breaking bends theater and film has had made to be politically correct. But surely even I, had I been in New York and been able to contribute any comments about the planned February 12, 1994 skit, might have wondered whether all involved had just gone mad.

     Baldwin has long been known as a risk-taker in his roles, and I have always longed to drool upon the actor’s quite hairy chest, fully featured in this skit. But there are and have always been normative limits, as much as I like to flaunt them.

     Howard and I happened to be watching Saturday Night Live on television that evening, and witnessed, accordingly, the original version, now very difficult to find, although I did discover one isolate source.

     In sum, Canteen Boy—an already established SNL character—is “got a problematic situation going on, as he is terrorized by a wooden owl they’ve put up presumably to keep other creatures away. The other boys and their scoutmaster Mr. Armstrong (Baldwin), have been telling the kind of tall-tales that is presumably at the heart of all boy camping lore, whether the boys are in scouts or a church camp.

     A fellow scout (Chris Farley) is now ready, once Canteen Boy has returned to their circle, to tell a very scary story. “Once upon a time there was a moron who always had a canteen wrapped around his neck.”

     Canteen Boy (Sandler) answers that he thinks he’s heard this story before.

     “It was a dark and stormy night, and this moron went into the woods. And this bear came and ripped his head off, just because he looked so stupid.”

     Canteen Boy’s response is that of a child: “You want to see something really scarry, look in the mirror,” but he is quickly shut up by Farley’s bullying and the laughs of the other boys.

     The Scoutmaster demands that they lay off Canteen Boy, ordering them to hike back to their tents to “hit the hay” demanding, however, that Canteen Boy stay behind.

    Armstrong observes that the pour scout gets a lot of ribbing from the other boys, as Canteen Boy insists it comes with the territory: “Sticks and stones….”

      In the very next moment, the Scoutmaster is praising the wonders of nature, puts his arm around the young scout and moves in for a kiss on the cheek, as Sandler’s character grimaces in distress.

     “Sorry, Canteen Boy, my beard is scratchy, isn’t it?”

     “No harm done,” answers the forbearing idiot.

     “My beard is scratchy, Canteen Boy, but it gives good backrubs.”

     A second later, the Scoutmaster has ripped open his shirt, declaring his shirt fell off.

     “That’s a quick fix, Mr. Armstrong, just put it back on.”

     Hugging him close again, he asks if Canteen Boy likes wine, who insists that he prefers the purified water right out of his canteen. But like an impatient seducer Armstrong off to get them a little wine.

     “All right, a little drop wouldn’t kill me, I guess.”

    Suddenly in his bathrobe, the Scoutmaster is back with the wine, which, oh so surprisingly! He immediately spills on Canteen Boy’s sleeping bag which he has swirled around him for further protection.

      “You’d better share mine. It’s extra large.”

      He agrees, until his own dries off.

      Pulling open his bathrobe to again reveal his chest, he asks Canteen boy to rub some bug repellent on his chest.

      Canteen Boy, quite wisely, suggests that since it’s February, all the bugs have gone done south to hibernate.

       “Humor me, Canteen Boy.”

     At that moment, on our late-night televisions, we witness Sandler, somewhat resisting but nonetheless still rubbing the sexy actor’s hairy chest, an idiotic grin on his face. Although Sander since 2003 has been married and now has two daughters, given all the suggestive gay roles he’s played, one can only suspect that perhaps he might have somehow enjoyed the naughty cinematic task.

       After further discussion, Armstrong suggests they just lie there at look at the stars as he dives in for another kiss. An instant later the Scoutmaster is sucking the scout’s fingers as he asks whether or not the scout knows how to play “Truth or Dare,” that game that now seems to be de rigueur of all gay encounters.

       “Ah, refresh me.”

       “You choose between telling a secret…or doing a dare.”

      Canteen Boy pauses. “All right, dare.”

       Armstrong whispers his dare into the scout’s ear, Sandler’s eyes growing wider every second. “You know what, Mr. Armstrong, let’s start off with the truth.”

       “You want truth, Canteen boy,” begins Baldwin’s character as we see under the sleeping bag wiggling his body in the removal of a recognized article of clothing. “You know what I hate underpants.”

       “I think if you’re worried about bugs, underpants would be your last line of defense.”

        Pulling his shorts out from beneath the bag, Armstrong announces, “Problem solved!”

        As they both turn toward a sideways position, Canteen Boy yells out, “What the hell is that?”

        But we know that they’ve now gone about as far as they can go with this truly daring cartoon as possible.

       “I don’t know, it must have been a bed bug.”

       “That was pretty big for being a bed bug.”

        “Okay. It wasn’t a bed bug.”

       “Let’s go back to saying it was a bed bug.”

       Fortunately for the skit, Mr. Armstrong just as quickly falls to sleep on Canteen Boy’s shoulder, obviously having consumed to much wine behind the scenes that, in the end, he’s not up to the task.

       So it ends when the morning arrives and Canteen Boy is saved from sexual violation. “No harm done,” proclaims the scout, as the Scoutmaster runs off to make them a pile of breakfast.

      As it was established in previous episodes, Canteen Boy can summon up snakes, which does immediately, so that when the Scoutmaster reappears, dozens of snakes descend upon the laughing aggressor, shouting out “Canteen Boy, you rascal.”

      It should come as no surprise that there was immediate and immense negative reaction to the skit, many attacking the SNL offering as being both homophobic and as trivializing pedophilia.

      On December 1994, when Baldwin again appeared on Saturday Night Live he half-apologized but pointed out that, after all, both he and Sander were full adults—which of course anyone with even a smidgeon of sexual smarts realizes is quite clearly beside the point since Sandler was playing an idiot child scout and Baldwin the adult ready to take advantage of the boy’s strange innocence.

      Today, all but a few of the remaining tapes and DVD’s are preceded by the absurd fiction the SNL company was forced to tack on to the skit in both written form and narrative reading of the text:

 

      “The following sketch, ‘Canteen Boy,’ is based on actual events. It tells the story of Canteen Boy, a highly intelligent 27 year-old who still lives with his mother, and, who despite his age, remains active in scouting. Certain elements of Canteen Boy’s story, such as his ability to summon snakes, has been added for dramatic effect.”

 

     If that ironic statement resolves any problems you may have with this actually quite hilarious skit, I have a lovely bridge to sell you at a very reasonable price.

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Unknown director | Made by Britain / 2020 [travel advertisement]

the untold stories

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown director (Outloud Ad Agency) Made by Britian / 2020 [1.30 minutes]

 

For their 2020 Centenary year, British airways created an “all Brits are wonderful” ad, filled with children, blacks, lesbians, gays, and a transexual. The ad also carried a brief film appearance by David Bowie and a speaking role for Olivia Colman.

    It begins with a simple theme, “We love you Britain,” continuing on “with all your different views on the world” (spoken by the transsexual), a little person adding, “and with different stories to tell.” A handsome young man of color being hugged by his parents adds, “maybe it’s your big heart.” “The sense of style,” continues a woman dressed in and accessorized by everything in leopard skin, followed by a child carrying a “Winnie-the-Pooh” dog. A black man moves forward in the plane commenting, “The way you pick yourself up when things get tough,” only to be met with a loud bang on his forehead as a woman’s suitcase bams into him, she continuing “and dust yourself off. Sorry.” A woman alone forwards the narrative, “Where you follow your own path,” as another black man continues, “Where you tell it like it is,” an all-too-cute young girl reassuring us, “Politely of course.”

     A woman turns to the camera responding, “Where you’ve led revolutions,” one of two gay men continuing the beat, “of all kinds.” It continues with a few more pleasantries, attempting to damper the revolutions, but suggesting that they all quietly make history.

     This is most definitely what one might describe as a “feel good” advertisement, only somehow it treats almost everyone on that plane to wherever as a kind of pokéman figure being punched back into his or her own slot, not at all making me feel good. Evidently there was no time for anyone’s different story.

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Terence Davies | The Deep Blue Sea / 2011, USA 2012

pleasure, passion, lust

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence Davies (screenplay, based on the play by Terence Rattigan), Terence Davies (director) The Deep Blue Sea / 2011, USA 2012

 

Although director Terence Davies admits to some admiration for David Lean’s Brief Encounter, with nods to it in his new film, The Deep Blue Sea, I would argue that the two are utterly different in approach and impact. Certainly both films are stories of illicit love affairs in Postwar England, a time when such behavior was not only—to use the language of the day—“frowned upon,” but was actually scandalous, particularly for the upper class, to which the heroine of Davies’ work belongs. And both films end with their couples parting company, leaving, especially their women, lonely and romantically “devastated.” But whereas Lean’s heroine does not engage in sex and has little to show for her “romantic slip,” Lady Hester Collyer (the radiant Rachel Weisz) of The Deep Blue Sex is a woman of passion whose only link with her lover, Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), is sex. While the suburban housewife of Brief Encounter is a meek and shy lover, Hester, as her Scarlet Letter-first name implies, is not only sexually active, but is a passionate woman determined, despite the mores of the day, to engage her whole being in sexuality. Like D. H. Lawrence’s male figures or the exceptional Lady Chatterley, Hester—as opposed to the advice of her dreadful mother-in-law—is willing to commit herself wholeheartedly to passion, or, as her husband, Sir William Collyer describes it, lust. At the end of the day (and the movie), unlike the regretful Laura of Lean’s work, Hester is fully aware of what she has had and what she will now miss. Finally, Davies’ work, unlike Lean’s tepid black and white teashop drama, is a richly dark, color rendering of a cheap rooming house and backstreet bar which Hester has replaced from her beautiful but deadly boring manor house life.

     That is not to say she is any happier than Laura at film’s end. If anything, Laura will go on living as the faithful wife and mother, while Laura will face, perhaps, poverty and sexual deprivation. At least Hester knows who she is. Her only real failure in life is her attempted suicide at the film’s beginning, an event which catapults her into the haunting loneliness she must face at the end.

     As opposed to Rattigan’s chatty and somewhat musty melodrama, Davies (with the expressed permission of the Rattigan estate) plunges the audience into the midst of Hester’s life through its presentation of a woman so unhappy with her lot that she is determined to die. Not only does she feed herself her numerous barbiturates, Hester turns on the gas full-blast as she sits patiently down to face her end. Her busybody landlady, Mrs. Elton (Ann Mitchell) and medically knowledgeable neighbor, however, come to the rescue, saving her life. It is the aftermath and her retrieval of a suicide note to her lover, which he later discovers, that does her in.

     Having long ago left her libido-less husband, the boring Judge Collyer (played by the excellent actor, Simon Russell Beale), Hester has taken up with a dashing former pilot, Freddie, who, as she herself later explains, has no life beyond 1940, the dark days of the war in which he and friends lived out daring adventures every day. Like millions of World War II men, Freddie never got “over” the war, not because of its horrors, but because of the deep bonding between men that the war encouraged. Although Freddie is clearly a handsomely potent heterosexual on the outside and, apparently, an excellent lover, he has no “feeling” for women, no emotional way to truly relate to Hester, something she has recognized from the very beginning of their relationship yet is at the heart of her sorrow: he can never reach the depths of her emotional commitment.

      Far more sensitive, if almost asexual, is her wealthy husband. He would never go off golfing and forget his wife’s birthday, which Freddie has. He might never brutally scream at her for seeking out culture, for desiring to engage her mind as well as her body. But then, William, would prefer sleeping—as his mother and father clearly did—in separate beds. He is the kind of man, the son of the kind of woman, who, as Davies recently comically described in a Los Angeles Times interview, knows exactly how to spoon up soup: employing the spoon in the direction away from the diner, into the center of the bowl, instead of from the center toward oneself (as a Cambridge attendee of Davies’ movies explained to him). The action of the disavowal of self is symbolic, one might argue, and is at the heart of their loveless relationship: Sir Collyer has no self from which to love, while Hester would devour life—certainly a dangerous position to be in after the self-sacrifice and destruction of war-torn London, an image of which Davies leaves the viewer at film’s close.

     The problem with Hester is that she is a sensualist at a time when the society as a whole has been diminished, individuals transformed from living, breathing humans into somewhat frightened prescribers of the principles of life. Passion, as Hester’s mother-in-law has proclaimed, is a dangerous thing. Even her flowers, which Hester is passionate about, give her only pleasure, as if that were the best one might expect from life. As the Page’s landlady puts it, “Love is about wiping your lover’s ass,” of being there day after day, not worth killing oneself!

     In his own way, Hester’s Freddie is also willing to take chances, determined as he is to return to work as a test pilot as soon as he becomes sober again. Yet his adventure is one that excludes others except those of his same sex.  As both the homosexual author Rattigan and the homosexual filmmaker Davies make clear, this kind of heterosexual might as well be gay when it comes to a woman wanting more than sex.* He is dead to emotions, unable to sustain a real relationship. And in that sense, although he may be a wonderful lover in bed, he has almost as sexless in life as Sir Collyer!

     Here, unlike Lean’s hysterically loyal Laura, Hester, in the penultimate scene of Davies’ beautiful film, has—again as Lawrence might have put it—“come through,” boldly pulling open the curtains as she stands determinedly looking out to the street, facing forward to the future without either of her former lovers.

 

*It has long been argued by several critics that most of Rattigan’s heterosexual plots were, in fact, coded autobiographical homosexual experiences of his own life. That is particularly the case with The Deep Blue Sea for which there was some evidence of earlier, autobiographical and homosexual figures in two early drafts which a few other saw before they disappeared.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2012

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (April 2012).

 

G. W. Pabst | Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl) / 1929

sweet sixteeen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rudolf Leonhard (screenplay, based on the fiction by Margarete Böhme), G. W. Pabst (director) Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl) / 1929

 

The second of two cinematic collaborations between actor Louise Brooks and German director G. W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl was released the same year as the previous film, the masterpiece Pandora’s Box. Superficially, the works seem to cover similar territory, since both portray the difficulties of a woman in Weimar Republic Berlin who works as a prostitute and aspires to financial independence through the help of wealthy men.

       Yet the two films couldn’t be more different. While in Pandora’s Box Lulu is utterly manipulative and is always out for pleasure, enjoying and sharing in a world of bisexual sex, Brooks’ Thymian Henning is a sixteen-year-old innocent who remains passive even after she bares a child, is tortured in a home for wayward girls, works as a prostitute, and marries a count. Lulu makes terrible things happen to others and herself, while Thymian is the one to whom bad things happen until, with the help of an inheritance from her cowardly father Robert (Josef Rovenský)  and the later guidance of her dead husband’s father, the elder Count Osdorff (Arnold Korff), she takes control of her own life, promoting love instead of the hypocritical bourgeoise notions of moral value practiced by her own family and so many others of the Berlin world into which she is born.

      The film itself begins with a seemingly inexplicable event, particularly to a young girl just turning 16, the day in which family and would-be admirers—actually men like Meinert, her father’s assistant, and the family friend Count Nicolas Osdorff frothing at the mouth to take sexual advantage of the young woman coming of age—have gathered to celebrate her birthday. As if out of nowhere, a family housekeeper, Elisabeth (Sybille Schmitz) appears with bags packed about to leave. Thymian is astonished by the event and tries to get her father and the elderly aunt to explain, but to no avail.

      Celebrations continue nonetheless as she is presented with a diary and other gifts. Count Nicolas gifts her with a necklace, the family crown hanging from it, while Meinert surreptitiously scribbling in the pristine pages of what is meant contain a young girls life story a time that evening for Thymian to meet him downstairs in the pharmacy where he works for her father.

      As if those events—the sudden departure of the only female friend of the house, the desecration of her personal book of life, along with the adult refusals to explain events—were not enough, a gurney suddenly appears in the house containing Elisabeth’s now dead body. As the young girl races upstairs to get an explanation about what has happened to her beloved friend, she discovers her own father with his arm around the neck of the new housekeeper Meta (Franziska Kinz) who has just arrived to replace Elisabeth. We understand why the young girl suddenly faints and is taken off to bed.

      She shows up, nonetheless, to the nefarious downstairs meeting with Meinert more out of curiosity than anything else since he has promised that he explain all these events than any other purpose; surely she cannot conceive that he will take advantage of her own innocence and her feverish condition to basically rape her.

      As adults we can piece the facts together. Elisabeth has become pregnant with Robert Henning’s child and has been, accordingly, forced out of the home to prevent shame. She, in turn, has committed suicide by jumping into the river. Hypocritical letch that he is, Henning has lost no time in courting the new servant. 

       And suddenly in the next frame, Thymian herself now pregnant, has just borne Meinert’s child. The family, perfect bourgeoise judges, have gathered to resolve the situation. Despite the girl’s refusal to name the father, they break open her diary to discover the truth, insisting that Meinert must now marry the girl, a demand to which he might have acquiesced but she refuses, stating simply that she does not love him.

      The family decision is harsh and unthinkable for any civilized society which they pretend to represent: the child is sent away to a midwife and the girl to what is basically a reformatory school where she is put under the militaristic strictures of the head matron (Valeska Gert) and her brutal male assistant (Andrews Engelmann). The faces of the individual characters upon which Pabst’s camera focuses with horrific fascination, particularly the males, might have been stolen from the pages of the great Weimar photographer August Sander’s People of the 20th Century.

      Censored, released, recalled, and censored again before its final 1929 Berlin release, Pabst’s film even today is not perceived to be entirely the one he originally made. So we will never know whether or not the original had included more openly sexual scenes. But we still can observe subtle references to LGBTQ behavior, particularly in the reformatory school where, for example, as Thymian first sits at the dinner table where the girls are forced to sip their thin broth in unison, the rhythms tapped out by the matron with a pointing stick, as the girl next to her rubs her leg up again Thymian’s and when the girl turns to her in response she gives a sexually-sly wink.

   As the girls ready for bed soon after—again after being marched into the dormitory—the matron with a gong and mallet begins a steady beat as the girls, having pulled off their dresses, are forced into a regimen of exercises in their underwear, the gong beating ever faster and faster, demanding as Pabst’s camera moves in closer to her face expressing what appears to be an ecstatic orgasm.

      These scenes, along with the ever-watchful eyes of the male assistant focused on his pubescent charges, creates an eerie world of perverted sexual desire.

       Horrified by her experiences, Thymian thinks about writing to her father but instead writes to the Count for help in escaping her situation. What she cannot know is that Count has been  disowned by his father for his complete incompetence in any line of employment his father has arranged for him. And when the Count visits the Henning family, he discovers that Thymian’s father has now married the manipulative Meta, who herself is expecting a baby. The aunt leaves with a picture of Thymian she has stolen from the family’s photo collection, a picture not even missed by Henning or his new wife. Thymian has been forgotten at home. Absence is throughout this work a major theme from Elisabeth’s sudden departure from the house and from life, to Thymian’s absence of virginity and soon after homelife, to the Count’s later absenting himself from existence.

         The young Count does visit Thymian, granted only a few moments to confer with her, but enough time to receive his promise to meet up later that night.

        When the lights have been turned out, Thymian’s schoolmate Erika (Edith Meinhard), the girl with the previous inviting wink, visits Thymian’s bed with the intent to escape with her. When the matron, spying on the girls enters, all the girls, sitting in one another’s bed rush to their own; she catches Erika however and attempts to confiscate Thymian’s diary, which she refuses to give up. A pitch battle ensures, with the diary being tossed among the girls with the matron grabbing for it in various locations. Thymian escapes to a nearby window, desperately attempting to open it without success, but meanwhile the girls toss the diary back to her, the matron following with Erika grabbing at her to keep the elder woman away from her friend. As she pulls the evil woman closer to the floor, the other girls join in, finally the male assistant entering in an attempt to end the tumult. Yet he too is pummeled by the girls as Erik pulls off a key among the many strapped to the matron’s waist. The girls escape to join up with the Count.

    Having escaped their jailers, Erika reports that she has a place to go, inviting Thymian to join her. But Thymian is determined to find her baby, the count and her friend moving off in the other direction, but not before Erika writes down the address to where she can be found in her friend’s precious diary.

     As Thymian makes her way to the midwife’s apartment, we see a small coffin being brought down the same stairs which Thymian climbs to knock on the midwife’s door. She is told, as he might have imagined, that the child has just died, its body taken away. Thymian rushes to follow the coffin, but finds the bearer has escaped into the crowds. Completely despondent, hungry, tired, and dizzied by the series of recent events, the girl falls into a near faint beside a hot dog vendor. The vendor’s woman customers spot Thymian and ask after her health, the girl coming to enough to show them the address Erika has written down in her diary. The vendor is only too happy to take her to the location.

      Erika’s safe haven turns out to be a low-class house of prostitution, overseen by a protective and fairly loving overweight woman; the count seems to have already established permanent residence in the place, and Erika is now decked out in a proper dress, a glass of champagne in her hand, her other arm around a man’s neck.

      Thymian and the hot dog vendor are both greeted graciously. Obviously the vendor is a regular, while the girl is immediately brought into their midst, handed a glass of champagne, and soon after awarded a beautiful new dress by the Madame in charge.

      Before the night is over, tizzy from the champagne, Thymian has been bedded with a man who by the next morning she has forgotten. Again her innocence seems overwhelmingly present, as she refuses even the payment that the Madame offers her. It does not take much or even a long time for the women of the house and their loving protector to insinuate themselves into Thymian’s life and make her feel at home as a prostitute.

      Here again, it appears that the scenes the censors must have cut were not only the obvious heterosexual encounters, inherent in the story and visual images that remain, but the now subtly signaled lesbian relationships, left in fragments by a couple of women dancing among the groups of men and women, and at one point, Pabst’s obvious suggestion of lesbian behavior through a glimpse of two heeled women with the flounces of their dresses showing obviously engaged in dance. Had he simply shown two women dancing, we might have explained it away as it given the fact that there not enough men in the room; but by framing this cut away from their bodies, the film points to the act instead of merely representing it as something commonplace.

      Throughout, the Count appears to be perceived less as a customer—after all he has no money—than as the house eunuch, beloved by all the women whose company he sometimes shares in the bed, but also—without specific indication—perhaps the house homosexual for customers on the search for such refined activities.

     But unlike the increasingly dangerous and finally deadly experiences of Lulu, Thymian’s experiences with prostitution appear to be basically uneventful and benign. Two major incidents stand out it what otherwise appears to be a newfound home that, providing love, gives these girls a better life than the reformatory school trying through hate to redeem them.

      At one grand evening, when another of the house’s regulars, Dr. Vitalis (Kurt Gerron) feels down and out, Thymian suggests a raffle to cheer him up. Offering up their own names (and services) the girls sell wrapped envelopes to the customers of restaurant where everyone seems to be celebrating, including Thymian’s father, his wife Meta, and the now owner of the pharmacy Meinert, the trio out of their once-in-a-year visit to the high-life of the city.

       After some partying, Thymian spot them just as they do her, the girl unable to push her way through the crowds to greet them as Meta attempts to hurry her husband away, she realizing, perhaps, that she has been bought like a prostitute by Robert just as Thymian is offering herself to other men. Yet Meta is convinced, like so many women of her world, that she represents moral righteousness, while they all see women like Thymian as wanton whores. The distance between them is, as Pabst shows us, in reality only a few feet, but is miles away in the manner in which the other kind of woman hides away in a house like the Henning home, convincing their “customers” that they have made a moral decision to marry them.

      Observing the encounter Vitalis suggests that now they are both forever “lost,” providing the title of this work.

      Soon after, Thymian’s father Henning dies, and a letter requests the young girl to attend the reading of the will since she has been named the sole heir. We know that Meinert now controls Henning’s finances, but he is evidently willing to pay a large sum for the house and apothecary which will go to Thymian.

      Her friends imagine for themselves new lives, and suggest that having come into wealth, Thymian should now present herself as a new woman, marrying her off to the Count, who after all, long ago promised the girl his heart through the necklace she still wears. He is now planning for a completely new life involving, it appears, a reconceiving of the brothel in which they now live, since his plans seem to involve a source of future income as well.

       At being handed her new fortune, however, Thymian discovers that her much hated step-mother and her half-sisters are now being sent to the street by Meinert, who has plans of his own for the house, perhaps even, he might imagine, involving Thymian who is now dressed as a stylish society woman.

      She will have nothing to do with him, and seeing what is about to happen to the children who are tangentially of her own blood, she hands the money over the little girl and her mother Meta, the woman she has so long hated. Her act resonates; and act of loving kindness within a film that has shown hardly any other figure of being capable.

      Her news upon her return to her friends, amazes them, but even more greatly shocks her now husband Count Osdorff who in a moment when the others are turned away simply leaps through open window to his death. In witnessing this brilliant scene of sudden absence, one cannot but be reminded of a similar scene in Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida and the real life event when dancer Freddie Herko leapt through a Greenwich Village window before friends.

 

     At the Count’s funeral, the father who had disowned the son stands at a distance noting Thymian’s gentle toss of a flower upon his casket. Meeting her, he begs for the opportunity to correct the error of his ways, offering her his own protection as a father-in-law.

      So, it appears, Thymian’s life is truly redeemed as we see her vacationing at a beach with Count Osdorff, the elder. There he encounters his two elderly female cousins to whom he introduces his daughter-in-law, who they immediately take up as friend, putting her in charge of one of their pet projects, the support of a school for wayward girls—inevitably the same place where her family had installed her a few years previous.

       She attends the meeting at the institution, the male assistant immediately recognizing her, as she listens to the prattle of the well-meaning but desperately misled women who make up the board. When they bring in Erika, who they have now caught, demanding that she be punished for escaping as a lesson to the other girls, the former innocent finally speaks out, appalled by Osdorff’s cousin’s assertions that this is a well-meaning institution, while taking Erika in arm and pulling her away from the place, the elderly Count expressing the film’s final message as he follows: "A little more love and no-one would be lost in this world!"

       Pabst’s film was not well-received in Germany, a film so thoroughly censored only a few months before the increased pressures of Hitler’s rule. Critics found Margarete Böhme’s cautious outrage to be outdated and Brook’s acting to be underwhelming. Sound films were appearing simultaneously, and perhaps Pabst’s work seemed outdated for that very reason. The movie was not shown in the US until the 1950s and only then with further censorious cuts.

      Only now can we recognize this work, along with Pandora’s Box, as representing one of the great moments of silent film history. Numerous images and scenes from this film are among motion picture history’s very best.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).