Paul Morrissey | Women in Revolt / 1971

fits and starts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Morrissey (screenwriter and director) Women in Revolt / 1971

 

Although the credits read that even the cinematography for this film was the work of Morrissey, some sources argue that Jackie Curtis refused to be part of the film if Andy Warhol was not behind the camera, making it the last film that Warhol actually shot.

    And in many senses this work is far less muddled and muddy than some of Morrissey’s works. And indeed it is far more fun and funnier than other works by Morrissey of the times such as Lonesome Cowboys (1968), Trash (1970), Flesh for Frankenstein (1973), and Blood for Dracula (1974). Women in Revolt is an open satire of various women’s liberation movements, but feminists need have no near, for the real focus of its satire is not on women themselves but the three transsexual women of this work, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn, who “get liberated” not for the sake of any real intellectual search for societal equality with males, but for their own special passions and desires which, in Candy’s case means becoming a movie star without any specific talent, in Holly’s mind about finding more men upon whom she might leap upon to have sex, and in Jackie’s desire to discover if she’s really a lesbian or a “woman” attracted to men, in this instance capable of even having a baby.

      When the film opened as a celebrity preview in New York, a group of women carrying protest signs demonstrated outside the cinema against the film, believing it was anti-women’s liberation. When Candy Darling heard of it, she responded:  "Who do these dykes think they are anyway? Well, I just hope they all read Vincent Canby's review in today's Times. He said I look like a cross between Kim Novak and Pat Nixon. It's true – I do have Pat Nixon's nose."

      Close friends—who share the love of Max (Michael Sklar), a live-in gay man “housewife” who is evidently interested in transsexual women—use the women’s cause PIGS (Politically Involved Girls) mostly to raise money from the wealthy Mrs. Fitzpatrick (Sean O’Meara) and the Park Avenue socialite Candy who begins the film in an affair with her brother with whom she becomes bored. In deleted scenes the incestuous couple are seen intensely kissing.

      At the center of this movement is Jackie who has been waiting for Holly to get home, but Holly as stopped off in the apartment of a man, Marty (Martin Kove) who, despite her repeated claims that she no longer wants anything to do with men, insists that she’s “all mine,” abusing her every time she attempts to escape his embraces, much to her delight. He finally drives her to Jackie’s apartment who’s furious that Holly has dragged along a man, who attempts to get entry to the house by asking to use the bathroom; after much ado, Jackie finally throws him out, the two girls standing with their backs to the door to prevent his further entry. As they begin to get “down to business,” Jackie discussing the usefulness of involving Candy and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, she, Holly, and Max leap onto the floor for an endless round of kissing and licking every available orifice.

      Later, at a group meeting, Holly’s nymphomaniac behavior continues as Jackie attempts to energize her disciples, one who keeps talking about the time her father raped her, and another who encourages her to speak her piece. And soon after, talking to Mrs. Fitzpatrick about an elderly w

oman who left all her money to a dog, she attempts to convince the elderly dowager to spend her wealth for their cause.

      The old lady, however, seems far more tempted to give it to a young man who has taken a shower and enters the room in a bathrobe, which in the outtakes she removes to see what’s inside. But fortunately, as she takes out her checkbook she falls in a seeming coughing fit leaving her entire book of checks to Jackie and, so Jackie claims, her cause.

      Candy is not at all interested in the women’s cause, but merely in promoting her career. But after a proper scolding from her patrician father (Maurice Braddell) for wanting to be an actress, she decides to join PIGS, but quickly moves off to discover an agent who shows her the way to “stardom” through the use of his casting couch. Late in the film, we see the successful Candy having become a star through playing in stage and film roles where she simply walks through without a line but is declared a new discovery by directors each of whom with she quickly shares a bed, who, in turn, star her again in just such empty roles which result of a long list of unmemorable movies in which she starred, and a short list of major movies in which she played an extra. Indeed, the entire wonderful last scene with Candy and a journalist (Jonathan Kramer),  might be seen as a wonderful satire of Candy’s own career, who played a bit part, for example, in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute the same year of Women in Revolt.

   Much of this film might be described as a good natured satire of its transgender actors. After Jackie spends all the PIGS money to pay for sex with Mr. America, Johnny Minute (Johnny Kemper), Holly becomes an alcoholic, attempting to help Bowery bums stand apparently so that she might fall upon them and encourage them into sexual acts.

      The scene with Jackie and Johnny Minute his truly hilarious as it turns out that his regular sexual activity consists only of women and men who suck him off. Jackie pays and does engage in oral sex but insists that it’s hardly satisfying. “So now I fucked a cock. I mean that can’t be why a million girls run out and commit suicide.” She wonders whether he doesn’t ever truly fuck anybody, and pays him more to make him prove it.

      Her “struggle” for liberation ends, quite miraculously, with a bawling baby in a crib and her slurping on a beer can while talking to her mother: “What do you mean I’m not fit… Don’t start on this Lillian Hellman shit….”

       If the film is hilarious, it is so only by fits and starts. For much of the time, as in many a Morrissey film, the actors look off into space in a slightly drugged out manner, as if possibly dreaming up their next lines. But when it works, Women in Revolt is the closest to the Theatre of the Ridiculous that Morrissey ever gets, even though Warhol helped create the theatrical form through his earlier screenwriter, Ronald Tavel.

       Given Jackie’s witty asides, Candy’s imitations of the everyone from a waspy New Englander to Theda Bara, Jean Harlow, and Marilyn Monroe, and Holly’s magnetic draw to every man who crosses her path, I’ll take this film any day over even the beauteous humps of Joe Dalessandro’s butt in Flesh.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).