Douglas Messerli | Five Short Films by Peter De Rome / 2021

five short films by peter de rome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Born in 1924 in Juan-les-Pins, Côte d'Azur, France, Peter de Rome grew up in England, serving in the Royal Air Force in World War II. Returning to civilian life, he acted for a while with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre before becoming a publicist for J. Arthur Rank, then Alexander Korda, and finally with David O. Selnick with he worked on The Third Man in 1949 in Vienna.

     In 1956, after working with Selznick on Indiscretion of an American Wife in Rome, he emigrated to the US where he soon became Tiffany & Company as a salesman. He left that job in 1963 work in the Civil Rights Movement in the US south with his friend Madeleine Sherwood.

   Returning to New York he began a series of erotic shorts, the most notable of which were written between 1970-1972. In 1974, de Rome made his first of two feature films, Adam and Yves, followed in 1976 with his most ambitious work, The Destroying Angel, based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe.

    With the advent of HIV and AIDS in the early 1980s, de Rome ceased making films, particularly since his works had represented the open sexuality of the 1960s and 70s. He died in 2014 in Kent, England.

    The five films here, all from 1972, as well as The Second Coming of the same year which I review elsewhere in this volume, represent some of his most important achievements in short film-making, although a couple of these also hint at the less coherent works he did throughout his career.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).