Martin McDonagh | Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri / 2017

redeeming hate

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin McDonagh (screenwriter and director) Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri / 2017

 

I must admit, as I move into writing about Martin McDonagh’s 2017 film, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, that I am most definitely not a McDonagh fan. His films and plays generally have the cynicism of Coen brothers, without their stunning abilities to tell stories. Read my nearly outraged review of his In Bruges in My Year 2011.

      Both play with broad caricatures, but the Coens are clearly better at casting. But this time McDonagh has been lucky with a kind-of Coen figure, Joel Coen’s brilliant wife, Frances McDormand, who totally encompasses every figure she has ever played (I’ve seen her perform with the Wooster Group at least 4 or 5 times). In McDonagh’s new work, she plays a kind of Medusa named Mildred, whose heart has seemingly turned to stone with the death of her daughter, who was raped while dying. Along with that event and an ex-husband who has spent years abusing her, Mildred no longer has any patience for the men in her life, particularly when one of the members of the Ebbing, Missouri police force, a deputy named Dixon (Sam Rockwell), is also a racist who clearly enjoys in beating up young black boys.

      The well-liked local police chief, Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) has almost let the search for her daughter’s killer become a cold case. It’s not that he hasn’t tried, but simply that no one locally has been a DNA match, and Mildred has been left alone to nurse her pain with utterly no one to help except her kind-hearted son, Robbie (the always charming Lucas Hedges).

      From the very start of McDonagh’s new film, he makes it clear that in the intense period since the murder was first reported, Mildred has become a kind of local volcano, ready to blow the entire community away in order to bring some necessary changes to her lovely rural village.

      But the fact is that Mildred is not only explosive, but beneath her hard stare, her rough-hewn eyes and nose, is a fiercely intelligent being who can fight it out with the best of them. She has given up her soul so that in this small bigoted and patriarchally controlled village she might survive. What she perhaps really needs is an ally or soulmate like Marge Gunderson of the Coens’ Fargo (a character also played by McDormand) But she surely won’t find one in Ebbing, particularly after she hits upon the idea of renting three billboards just outside of town upon which she places three proactive messages, dark black upon blood-red: “Raped While Dying”; “And Still No Arrests?”; “How Come, Chief Willoughby?”

     Yes, as The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis observes, this is her way of reawakening the search and, simultaneously, relieving some of her deeply felt sorrow. But it’s not a popular action in a small town that knows nearly everything about everyone, including the fact that the well-meaning Willoughby is not only a loving husband and father, a man who also, incidentally, is attempting to reign-in his equally angry assistant, Dixon, but also is dying of cancer. The townies take out their anger at Mildred by bullying her son at school and various other modes of intimidation, including a Sadomasochist dentist, a slightly mad former soldier evidently living in Idaho, and Dixon himself, who nearly kills the young man who has rented the billboards, and who also attempts, spurred on by his evil mother, to burn down the billboards.

     McDonagh’s script is all a little pat, with even the police chief coming to her rescue to pay for the billboard’s second month, and a friendly black boy showing up at her door with a duplicate pair of the billboard messages after Dixon has burned them down. And, as Dargis makes clear, the writer-director does not always know what to cut from his own all-to-clever and convenient plot, mixing comedy and horror with equal blends, as if he were simply brewing up a new cup of coffee.

Mildred is a horror, surely, particularly in the mind-throttling society in which she lives, but McDonagh almost turns her into a monster, allowing his character to hurtle Molotov cocktails into the police station and almost killing Dixon, who, although fired, has returned late at night to pick up a letter Willoughby has left him after killing himself.

      Everyone in this small town seems to be just at the edge of sanity, with all of them so deeply hurt that one might even imagine this is the story of so many small American communities being destroyed by the opioid crisis and lack of jobs. Well, Midwest America has always been a paradisal world in which innocent people are tortured and destroyed. Even the urbane Truman Capote knew that; after all, he had grown up in the deeply dark American South. I spent much of my early life drawing those very connections, and they’re still there today. Small town American towns simply ain’t always nice.

 

    Fortunately, McDormand saves the day. One scene, in particular, reveals her ability to suck in all her hate and come through as an almost charming and, at instants, as a quite visually beautiful woman. Sitting at a local steak house with a dwarf, Peter Dinklage (McDonagh seems to have a “thing” about little people, featuring a scene in his In Bruges as well), she observes her ex-husband (John Hawkes) arriving with his current 19-year-old girlfriend. When her dinner, interrupted by her former husband, turns sour, she picks up a bottle of wine and walks steadily to the banquette in the back of the restaurant; she has already showed herself as a truly violent being, and we half-expect that she is about to break the contents of that bottle over her ex’s head. His clueless and nearly brainless girlfriend, Penelope (Samara Weaving) suddenly admits that her comment, “Hate only begets hate,” was something she had stolen from an article in an essay on “Polio,” which turns out to have been an article about “Polo.” Slowly, as the camera pulls away from this ditz of a being, McDormand carefully puts down the bottle of wine next to her insufferable ex-husband, and commands him to be nice to her, as if relinquishing any rights to her former anger about their relationship. He is now the one in hell, tied to a mindless girl that will surely allow him no satisfaction except in bed.

      Whether or not such hate as both she and Dixon share can be redeemed, McDonagh fails to answer, as the two speed off to perhaps kill a man who they believe guilty of rape, even if he has not been the one to have killed and raped Mildred’s daughter. Both have second thoughts, and we can only hope that the voyage they are taking is a kind of short road trip that will salve their mutual angers, allowing them to return home with a new acceptance of life as it is, a kind of aborted Odyssey. In the end, despite McDonagh’s constant insertion of comic elements into his work, I believe that Two Billboards is a kind of redemptive blood tragedy.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2017).

David Scala | Engaged / 2019

the frustrations and imperfections of marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Scala (screenwriter and director) Engaged / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

There they are: Darren (Daniel K. Isaac) and Elliot (Ryan Jamaal Swain) in a romantic and expensive restaurant, flan having just been served for dessert. It’s time for Darren to get truly romantic and he starts on a clearly rehearsed speech about how much he’s enjoyed their years together, and how, despite talking about moving and changing careers, the more he thinks about their lives and where they’re heading is…..A busybody server interrupts to ask if they want more water.

     Darren sneaks the ring case out of his pocket, perhaps more for courage than anything else. He continues but as he gets to the last phrase, “Elliot,” a woman at a nearby table jumps up in joy. “Yes, yes of course!” she yells out. She’s just had marriage proposed to her.

      Several diners applaud, and even Elliot responds, “How cute is that!”

      But still Darren attempts to soldier on. “I was just wondering if you….”

      In the next room another woman leaps up to her feet, “I do! I do!”

      It’s as if in this romantic restaurant a disease is spreading fast. Still Darren starts again, “What I was trying to say….” This time a male waiter screams out that he’s been waiting his whole life for Lucia, a fellow waiter.

     For Darren, it’s just too much. How can he be the fourth man to ask someone to marry him in the same room?

    With his best female friend, Lara (Victoria Meade) Darren tries to talk about the situation, suggesting Elliot didn’t even notice what he was trying to do. But the friend argues that he still might have proposed. It’s not like he got cold feet—or as she continues to patter on, did he? “Well, you know how you can get. You know, you have to make big decision and suddenly all the possibilities start going through your head….” After all he brought the ring, she reminds, six months ago.

     Darren insists he loves his partner, and wonders why she might even imagine that he wouldn’t want to get married.

     Soon after, Darren makes lunch reservations to try the proposal all over again. But just as suddenly Elliot receives a call from his sister Kayla (Candace Maxwell) who reminds her brother that she has an engagement party that very day. Elliot insists they’ll just have to change their plans, and what’s more Darren will have to join him—even though Darren is not at all comfortable at such events.

    That party is, indeed, a true disaster, with everything supper cute, with “him” and “hers” posted around the room and a big game that Darren will have to participate in, a version of “The Newlywed Game,” wherein couples have to guess what other might like or do or in the future want. Darren is least comfortable in such a public space. “It’s not that big of a deal,” Elliot assures him.

 

   But it is a big deal. First of all, each couple, gets blue or pink leis to wear. That means Darren is forced to wear pink. We’ll start with the ladies. But seeing Darren there, she changes to the color, “We’ll start with pink.”

     In the first two rounds Darren guesses correctly; he remembers where they had their first date and Elliot agrees that it is Darren who want “kids more.” But the third question, “Where is your dream wedding destination,” results in his and Elliot’s downfall: Darren posits “Upstate,” while Elliot shouts out “Punta Cana!” a tourist destination in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps if they’d had the chance to talk about it, Elliot might have been able to share his preference for a touristy spot. It stands to reason that Darren might seek out a quieter spot.

     If up until now things have been relatively light in this comedy, they now grow a bit more serious. Elliot feels that at least they were in the spotlight as a couple, but Darren wonders why it has to be so humiliating.

     It now becomes clear to Darren that Elliot has perfectly well known that he’s been just about to ask the question, and has been amazed that Darren hasn’t yet gone through with it. What’s holding him back, he asks, just as had Darren’s female friend.

     And if that isn’t bad enough, Darren has accidently ingested some nuts, to which he’s deadly allergic. Out comes the EpiPen, and he is saved.

     As they walk home, however, Darren choses to go see his friend Lara, just to clear his head, resulting perhaps in one of the best scenes in this short film.

      To Lara he finally explains why such events such as the party so upset him. “I came out when I was 17, right, but I feel like I still have to come out all the time. Like at the grocery some little lady says, ‘You’re going to make some lucky lady happy one day.’ Or the guy at the deli asks if the flowers I’m buying are for my girlfriend. …And even though it’s nothing I hide, I feel like I’m always micro-coming out over and over again.”

      “Just tell them you’re gay,” Lara blithely replies.

      “It’s not about that. It’s one think to make small talk about the weather or something. But this is, this is….”

       “Different?”

       “Personal,” he spits out. “People are always talking about me, or looking at me weirdly on the street.”

       The insensitive Lara, declares, “So that’s why you don’t want to get married!” Basically, she argues, he’s afraid of being the center of attention, which, of course, he will before and during the wedding ceremony.

        Finally, Darren justifiably goes on the offensive. “I’m sorry that if you decide to get married, everything would already be figured out. All the little details. You’d wear a white dress and he’d wear a black tux. And all the bridesmaids would be on one side and the groomsmen on the other.”

       But finally, he admits his real fear: “Just because I want it to be perfect.”

       “But it’s not supposed to be perfect,” Lara responds.

     Before, I go any further, however, I need to make authorial intrusion just to you that Darren’s speech really rang true for me. Our society is understandably heterosexually primed, and gay men, lesbians, trans-individuals, and perhaps mostly bisexuals find themselves always on the outside attempting to explain themselves, to express their preferences, are asked to declare what they do in bed in order the justify their difference.

       Even this film, moreover, seems to have made some presumptions that I don’t quite comprehend. Why is it Darren’s role to ask Elliot to marry him? Can’t Elliot ask Darren? For a man who doesn’t like playing standard roles, why is Darren being asked by writer/director David Scala to play one? Is it an issue of age, of financial stability (after all, he bought those expensive rings), of who first suggested that they live together? I don’t understand the roles this otherwise comic film is forcing upon one character over the other.

       Lara rightfully argues that marriage is about commitment, who you want to be with for the rest of your life, not with who you walk with down the aisle.

      Darren leaves her more than little angry and, perhaps, confused. He returns home to an empty apartment, emailing Elliot to discover he’s gone to the deli. To end this conundrum, Darren returns, rings in hand, walks toward the deli, standing in the middle of the street to greet the returning Elliot, finally ready to pop the question or be killed by a passing car. Perhaps he has decided to leave things to fate.

       Yet my questions, important ones I believe, and Darren’s frustrations have not been resolved.

For the record, when Howard and I after 40 some years decided to get married, if I remember correctly, after the Supreme Court had found same-sex marriages to be legal, we both asked one another at about the same moment. I truly believe had either of said, no I don’t need the state’s authority, it wouldn’t have mattered. We’d be where we are now after having lived 55 years together. We determined to get married as unpretentiously as possible, in the Beverly Hills courthouse with two straight friends, married to one another, as our witnesses. I bought the 10 cent plastic rings. We took our friends and one another to nice after-the-wedding luncheon and went home. Did we have eggs that night?

     Today, I might have answered “no” to our shared question. The government has no power to give or take anything about our love away, and marriage for members of the LGBTQ+ community has, in my estimation, become all too necessary, bringing forth just the tensions that this poor character, Darren, has brought up. Howard and I married each other on February 4, 1970, the night we first met; or at least by the end of that week when I moved in with all my books. We just didn’t call it that in those days. In 2013 the government gave us a document agreeing with our earlier decision.

     I also came out at 17. And if a taxi driver ever asked me, as one did Darren, where he might pick up some hot ladies, I’d simply reply, “I’ll have to ask my husband” (or before we married, “my gay companion”). If an old lady, god bless her, had told me in my younger days that I might make some lady happy, I believe I might have answered, “My mother used to think that same thing.”

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

     

Julian Dieterich | Hedon / 2019

long night’s journey into pleasure

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julian Dieterich (screenwriter and director) Hedon / 2019 [20 minutes]

 

For a student film, German director Julian Dieterich’s Hedon is a truly audacious work, going places that surely no young US student filmmaker might have imagined exploring.

    Fynn (Saladin Dellers) works at the local swimming pool as the kind a janitor who, except for his good looks, one might never notice. We see him in the early scenes of the movie wiping down the lockers late in the afternoon, presumably after everyone has left the pool, where an automatic pool cleaner is also moving back and forth under the waters.

     When he finishes work, he seems to be returning home to his apartment, a motel-like balconied structure, whose apartment doorways open onto the shared walkway. There, at the other end, he observes a young man, whose name we later discover is Tom (David Hugo Schmitz) arguing with his mother about his intent on going out for the night. He walks away from him and storms by Fynn, as the two have quickly make eye contact.

     Fynn now knocks on the door in front of which he stands, met by a long-haired tattooed figure, David (Tanju Bilir) who queries his intentions, but eventually lets him in. In that apartment Fynn engages in sex with David and other young man, an act that strangely appears to have been previously televised, the other boy seemingly watching the tape, as if playing an imaginary video with its images of their past sexual encounters.

     Has Fynn previously visited the same sexual den with which their sexual acts have been filmed? If so, it simply ads another level of excitement to their soon-to-be sexual engagement, as if they were, all three, narcissi looking at themselves in the mirror of their own past to further arouse themselves into an erotic present.

   The hot threesome ends with them in bed, the other boy and David passed out, as Fynn removes David’s arm stretched across his chest, dresses and drives off for yet another sexual adventure.

 

     Despite the raw sex Fynn has just experienced, he seems to be seeking some sort of sensualist experience he has not yet found. As he drives, almost drugged in his sexual frenzy, he almost hits a group of teenagers, braking just a few feet from where they stand in the middle of street. Angry about his almost hitting him, they shake his car and toss grenades of water and filth across it. Yet he notices, briefly, that the beautiful Tom is among them, smiling at the coincidence of meeting up again with the mysterious Fynn.

      This time, in what we now realize is a mad hedonistic search for pleasure, Fynn has met up with a handsome middle-aged man Gregor (Peter Kotthaus), whose central living room features a tank of Siamese Fighting Fish, which transfix Fynn before he settles into an equally violent biting and fucking frenzy with Gregor, after which the man himself suggests that Fynn immediately leave.

 

     As Fynn leaves Gregor to return to his car, he discovers Tom standing next to it in wait. Tom asks him, in one the few spoken lines of this film, “Are you always nearly running people over?” But even this line dialogue is a joke. As Fynn goes to get into his car, Tom joins him.

       Tom lays his head upon his lap, and finally turning over begins to engage in fellatio with Fynn, but quickly pulls away, clearly wanting more from him. The two move into a kissing clinch, but this time Fynn pulls away, exhausted, one might imagine, from his other encounters, but also in an attempt to release the younger boy from his unsatiated passions. He orders Tom out of the car, and Tom, after a long pause, finally does open the door and gets out. Tears fall from Fynn’s eyes, an expression of his own loss and suffering or perhaps for his inability to express anything else to the beautiful boy but through sex.

       Immediately, however, Tom pulls off his shirt, and gets into the back seat, Fynn soon joining him for a truly hot fuck which seems to end with both of them ejaculating.

     Just as suddenly, Fynn begins fucking the boy again, this with his hands in a strangulation hold, what is described as autoerotic asphyxiation, but coming so very close to actually chocking the boy as Fynn yet again ejaculates, that Tom can only grab at the door to open it in order to regain his breath. Sex and death have finally almost become one and the same in this sexual moment.

 

      The final scene is the automatic pool cleaner, Fynn obviously having stumbled back to work in the early morning light.

       One troubled commentator reprimanded the director for not explaining why Fynn has undertaken his night voyage to find what all the Mubi, IMDb, and other listings describe as a “long lost emotion.” To me that is not an issue. Fynn, at least for this endlessly long night, is a pure hedonist, desperately in the pursuit of self-indulgent pleasure, a world of the night that lies outside of his endlessly meaningless job and related life.

       My question is simply how? Even in my younger days, when I visited the bars nearly every night, engaging in sex sometimes twice a day, I never in one night ejaculated four times, which is what Fynn appears to accomplish. As realistically as this sensual fuck fest is portrayed, it seems more of a sexual fantasy than a real-life experience. It appears as if the janitor were attempting to even abandon his own body in his search of a satisfaction he can either never attain or maintain long enough for him to fully recognize it as pleasure. It is an act of dangerous self-destruction, putting himself and others in harm’s way for the purpose of simply feeling a sensation he’s never before experienced. And in this respect, Dieterich’s 20-minute fantasy is almost an abridged gay version of Nagisa Ōshima’s 1965 primarily heterosexual film, Pleasures of the Flesh.

     I truly wonder what the reaction was to this film by Dieterich’s teachers at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg in Potsdam. Did they see beyond its radical thematic just how beautiful of a work of art it was?

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Scott Sidney | Madame Behave / 1925

polyamorous porpoises

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. McGrew Willis (scenario, based on Madame Lucy by Jean Arlette), Scott Sidney (director) Madame Behave / 1925

 

Julian Eltinge had become a huge success a decade earlier on Broadway for his performances in The Fascinating Window (Liberty Theater, 1911), which ran only 56 performances in New York but toured the US to great success; The Crinoline Girl (Knickerbocker Theatre, 1914); and Cousin Lucy (George M. Cohan’s Theatre, 1915), all which were made into the shorter films reviewed in my earlier volume of My Queer Cinema.

        In 1918, after appearing in those films, Eltinge returned to Broadway touring with the vaudeville group, “The Julian Eltinge Players,” appearing at New York City’s Palace Theatre, where he was paid one of the highest salaries in show business at $3,500 a week.

      In most of these works Eltinge did not perform as a male imitating a woman, but simply in female attire, often surprising his audiences at performance’s end by pulling of his wig, in the style of the various versions of Victor/Victoria, to reveal his true gender. So successful were his female impersonations that he was invited to perform before the British King Edward VII.

      In 1914, he performed on film in a version of his stage role in The Crinoline Girl, apparently a lost film. But Eltinge’s film career truly began in 1915 when he played a cameo role in How Molly Malone Made Good. In 1917 he had a double success in Donald Crisp’s two films of that year, The Clever Mrs. Carfax and The Countess Charming, the latter in which he played as both a male and female.

      By 1920, the impersonator was living as a wealthy man in the lavish southern California mansion Villa Capistrano. He appeared in 1920 in the film An Adventuress (The Isle of Love in the US), co-starring Rudolph Valentino, reviewed above. And in 1925, just a few years before the US national crackdown on public crossdressing performances—purportedly to deter homosexuality, although the vaudeville, stage, and film performances of crossdressing stars were not attended exclusively by homosexuals nor did they advocate homosexual behavior.

       As I have observed previously, offstage Eltinge, even if he may have been a gay man, purportedly created a super-masculine facade in order to deflect rumors of homosexuality, leading the Chicago Tribune drama critic of the day, Percy Hammond to describe him as “ambisextrous.” Milton Berle, who briefly worked with Eltinge, believed he was a gay man.

       Perhaps his best films were his last, Madame Behave, directed by Scott Sidney in 1925, and, in the same year, The Fascinating Woman, evidently a lost film, whose director we do not know.

        Like so many show business figures, Eltinge lost most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and by the 1930s with the closure of live drag theater and a significant change in film interests, his career quickly declined. In February 1941, while performing at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in New York City, he became ill, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage 10 days later.

      Sidney’s film Madame Behave fortunately leaves behind a marvelous testament to Eltinge’s comedic and crossdressing talents. This film, moreover, retains most of its humor even today.

      If the plot, like almost all such comedic drag performances, represents basic farce, a mad confusion of who desires who and which one is hiding from which other, all made even more dizzying since even the gender of the various lovers is uncertain, the performances, in this case by Eltinge as Jack Mitchell and Madame Brown, his roommate Dick Corwin (David James), his elderly male pursuers, Seth Corwin (Lionel Belmore) and Henry Jasper (Jack Duffy), and Jack and Dick’s girlfriends, who suddenly find themselves both attracted to the Madame Brown, Ann Pennington (Gwen Townley) and Laura Barnes (Evelyn Francisco), as well as the boy’s hilarious black servant, Creosote (Tom Wilson).

      Any attempt to actually describe the plot would simply confuse the reader who has not witnessed the hilarious goings on, so I shall just outline the basic situation by explaining that Jack and Dick, the later who has already wasted an inheritance and the former who works as an architect who has sold a design but not yet been paid, find themselves at the mercy of their landlord Jasper, who plans to throw them and their servant friend out of their comfortable apartment by the end of the day.

 

      Dick can surely ask his rich uncle for a loan, but it so happens that his uncle Seth is also appearing in court that day for having crashed into their landlord’s Mercedes some time earlier. The two men, Seth Corwin and Henry Jasper have long been enemies who habitually describe one another in terms of a mix of alliterative animal and human behavior (“babbling beaver,” “menacing monkey,” “bloated baboon,” and the like) before challenging one another to fisticuffs.

     In this case the only evidence of the crime exists in Jasper’s “garrulous gorilla-like” (my own words) garbles of the incident. Although an unknown woman has observed the crash, neither of the gentlemen know of her whereabouts, forcing the judge to postpone the hearing until they find the woman to testify.

   Corwin’s lawyer tells his client that he must seek out the woman’s whereabouts immediately and marry her, thus making sure that she cannot testify against him. In order to get the loan for his rent, Dick promises his uncle that we will deliver up the missing woman as soon as possible, handing over the money to his roommate to return back to the apartment and pay the “barking blister beetle” Jasper their late rent.

   When Jasper gets wind of Corwin’s intention to find and marry the missing witness, he vows to do the same, and the race is on.

   Coincidentally, Jack’s girlfriend Gwen is under the care of Corwin and living in his mansion along with her friend, Dick’s girlfriend Laura. Corwin, who doesn’t think much of his nephew’s penniless roommate Jack, has promised Gwen in marriage to the wealthy sissy-boy Percy Fairweather (Stanhope Wheatcroft), demanding that Gwen get engaged to him that very afternoon.

   Sizing up the situation, Jack feels his has no choice—particularly when Percy offers Gwen a pearl necklace—but to take the rent money and buy Gwen a ring so they might be married.

   In the meantime, Jasper has thrown the boys out of their rooms, leaving the packed bags and numerous unpackable possessions in the hall under the protection of Creosote. Fortunately, the woman who lives across the hall, who has been having her own marital problems and is determined to leave her apartment for a week or so, offers her abode to the boys until things get settled, leaving Creosote to drag all the bags and sundry possessions into her apartment.

 

       Having noted Jack’s attentions to his charge, Seth Corwin orders the boy to be banned from entering the mansion. When Jack returns with the ring, accordingly, he finds the Corwin butler blocking all the entrances. Forced to climb up the trellis in order to reach Gwen’s room, Jack is spotted by old man Corwin who quickly reports to the police that he is being robbed, the entire police brigade, believing it is a “second story man” who has plagued the neighborhood, chase him down as, on the run, Jack leads them back to his own apartment only to find that he and Dick have been locked out of their rooms.

        Fortunately, Creosote sees him as the police move in, pulling him into the neighbor’s rooms and demanding that Jack hide himself by donning the owner’s wig and one of her dresses. After a ridiculous series of Jack pulling off and putting on his drag costume, the police arrive and go in search of his whereabouts. Jack realizes that he’s now destined to remain dressed as a woman, particularly when, after having followed the cops both Corwin the younger and elder show up, Jack’s roommate introducing his new female friend as none other than the Madame Brown, the witness to the accident he has promised to produce.       

    Discovering what Jack has done with the rent money, Dick takes the ring and sells it to his uncle in order to pay the rent. But even before he can do that the landlord Jasper also shows up, and the entire gang returns to the Corwin mansion, Seth introducing the beautiful wild woman as his future wife, Madame Brown taking such a liking to his young female guests that she cannot help but profusely kiss them both—the girls, if momentarily being a bit taken aback, finally determining that they love the female attention. Just at that moment Jasper shows up, leading obviously to an endless chase of Madame Brown / Jack throughout the mansion and its lawns for the rest of movie, along with regular partying, dancing the Charleston to Creosote’s piano renditions, and generally flirting and making out with everyone in the house including Percy.

      The film ends with everybody in somebody else’s arms, including Jasper and Corwin, who  team up to do battle the neighbor’s returning husband who mistakenly believes that Madame Brown is his own wife. Jasper and Corwin become fast friends, hugging one another before returning to their alliterative name-calling.

       But the version that remains on file in the Library of Congress is evidently incomplete, and in the original, so the script declares, they speed off to be married—although, as in Mozart’s Così fan tutti, we are not quite sure who marries who, since this film along the way has hinted at male homosexuality, lesbian attraction, and made apparent that everyone except for Dick (Jack’s long- time roommate, which puts the two also in a strange relationship given their ages) who has fallen for the female incarnation of Madame Brown. Polyamorphism is evidently nearly everyone’s choice. Surely, with the exception of Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920), this is the wildest LGBTQ-themed work of cinema up until G. W. Pabst’s Lulu of 1929.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 19, 2022)