by Douglas
Messerli
Bob Mizer
(director) The Jewel Thief / c. 1959
In the manner of his late 1950s Cecile B. DeMille dramas, beefcake director Bob Mizer’s The Jewel Thief plays out the splendor of his muscular boys’ bodies in a drama based on a version of the 1954 film drama Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.
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One of the boys notices the act, and when the
thief attempts to blame the jewel’s disappearance on another of his fellow
slave boys, they come to his rescue, tying up the evil robber, bounding him up
with ropes of pearls, and beating him off with various S&M intended
necklaces. This is pure camp, some many years before Susan Sontag’s essay on “Notes
on Camp” of 1964.
Frankly, I’ll take the beaded beating any day over the essay which I have always felt didn’t truly explain the remarkable phenomenon that became known as “camp” theater. She came to it too late, while Mizer had been there for several decades.
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The more I watch early Bob Mizer films, the
more I am in awe of these crude picture’s attempt to create gay narratives before
anyone else even imagined them. These were not at all about sex, so to speak.
Yes, the boys readily pulled off the villain’s posing strap before beating him,
but no one was hurt or even particularly sexually aroused in the process. And
there was not a penis in sight! This was all done for the pure fun of what a
gay narrative that in 1963 Jack Smith would parody in Flaming Creatures.
Yet, we have to admit that the more literally-minded Mizer got there first.
Mizer’s butt-naked boys lolled all over
the place, and even the villain—you can almost hear him in this silent
film—cries out “O spank me please!”
Los Angeles,
February 13, 2025
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).
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