Peter de Rome | Prometheus / 1972

the end of innocence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter de Rome (director) Prometheus / 1972

 

Arguably Peter de Rome’s 1972 film Prometheus is one of the first “on the shelf”—as opposed to “under the counter”—so-called art films to represent group sex that moves uncomfortably close to a sadomasochistic gang rape.

    Of course, there had been gay hardcore films such as Cycle Studs (1970), a film Rupert Smith suggests was hailed by gay magazines such as OutRage as the gay equivalent of Birth of a Nation; and in 1971 J. Brian’s Seven In a Barn featured group sex that today, given its contingent of young gay blond men, looks almost innocent. Moreover, in the same year as Prometheus, Fred Halsted’s LA Plays Itself was released. Despite its many pretty nature scenes, Halsted’s introduction of Asian music, and the film’s collation of innocent-seeming crotch shots, however, there was no question that Halsted’s film was pure hardcore, whereas the far more bodily focused and sexually variant Prometheus was described as an erotic film, along with de Rome’s grittier Underground and far more sexually deviant The Second Coming of the same year.

     Perhaps it is time to reevaluate what precisely is the difference between porno and works such de Rome’s “erotic” or “art films.” Cleaver Patterson, writing in DVD Review, argues that a film such as Prometheus finds its “pornographic base level.”  

      I will not attempt to consider those issues here, but certainly the differences have something to do with how the director uses the camera, how the narrative proceeds (there are no bad-acting gay boys commenting on the look and feel of their own or one another’s cocks in de Rome’s works), and with constructions of meaning attached to the movie. Even if one argues that Prometheus is pure porn, a synopsis (this from Mubi site) that incorporates the Greek myth which the film’s title calls up, takes the work in different directions:

 

“Prometheus arrives in New York and earns the wrath of Zeus. He’s manacled to the floor and tormented by the Furies until Hercules, on his thirteenth labour, appears to break the chains and carry away the cruelly treated Prometheus, unbound.”

     Unlike any of the “hardcore porno works” of its time, The Erotic Films of Peter de Rome played venues like Manhattan’s long-gone Lincoln Art Theatre.

     Like both Underground and, particularly, The Second Coming, moreover, there is something almost business-like or perhaps we might describe it was “inevitable” and “pre-determined’ about Prometheus. There are no coy meetups in de Rome’s film, no naked pans running around in nature or randy boys just waiting to be picked up as in Peter Berlin’s introductory come-ons.

     The god of this 21-minute sexcapade, Robert Rikas (of Moulage, 1971) arrives by bus in New York City’s Port Authority, hits the street, and is almost immediately spotted by cartel-like scouts, who seeing Rikas dressed in his Captain America-like tight T-shirt strut down 42nd Street, call up their boss, coax Bobby into their car, and whisk him off for a sexual encounter he’s unlikely to ever forget.

     Robert is taken to a high rise, sent up in an elevator, and shoved into a darkened apartment which has clearly been prepared for his arrival. He is immediately spread eagle upon the pine floor and tied up as Zeus invites in a series of boys to have their way with him.

    The sexual apostolates include Larry Burns, Paul Eden, Bobby Powell, Giulio Sorrentino, Tony Williams, and Tom Yourk.

      The first leather jacketed young man immediately proves his dominance by placing his boot on our Prometheus’ cock and balls, the music (in the original score by Alexander Scriabin, in the version I watched by Augustin Bousfield) quickly becoming agitated and dramatic. Just as suddenly, the man, standing over the Prometheus’ body, takes off his own clothes, straddles him, and moves down to fuck the heaving, writhing man under his control.

      Zeus brings in another apostolate, a young black man who strips before he even moves toward the tied-up body, pushing his black dick into Prometheus’ mouth, while the leather number continues to pull and manipulate the captured man’s cock.

      A third young boy is introduced to the orgy, who also strips before moving forward, pulling finally away his strapped sandals before sticking his toes into Prometheus’s mouth. And almost as suddenly Zeus brings in a long-haired lad who joins in the fun or torture, depending upon how you interpret the rather interactive pulls on cocks and greedy acceptance of genitalia in all his orifices that the punished young man “endures.”

     The new hairy boy introduces a whip with which he teases Prometheus’ chest, gradually winding its leather strips around his balls as he takes the man’s cock into his mouth. Others disappear and reappear, providing new stimulation just at the moment you might think Prometheus might be able to engage in sex with a single entity.

      Strangely, for all of the film’s specificity, the sensuous images, bathed in dramatic lighting, seem almost out of Rembrandt paintings, the sex itself being presented as a kind of blur. It’s not that we don’t observe the genitals, the open body orifices, or even the occasional appearance of lust on recipient’s face; but this sexual engagement, unlike those that take place general in natural light in most porno films, here are artificially lit, played out almost as theater instead in the flesh and blood. And on the large screen I can imagine that the artifice of the works is even more apparent.

      The four men finally untie Prometheus and turn him over for an anal inspection of his body, beginning with a hand moving deeply into the penitent’s ass. He is then thoroughly fucked by the black man as the others watch.

    The others quickly leap upon him as if to get their share, an action repeated by the camera several times as if it stands for the definitive gang rape which Prometheus is clearly suffering. Eventually, as they turn him over to his frontside again, we see evidence of all their ejaculate.

    The film starts to repeat scenes from the beginning, almost as it has become of collection of favorite sex scenes, or perhaps mirrors Prometheus’ own immediate memories of the entire affair.

     In bursts Hercules, the binding magically unwinding. He lifts up the man, and in a manner that can only call to mind the various pietàs we have in the works of the early US filmmakers such as Curtis Harrington and Kenneth Anger, clearly linking it to those early coming out films, he displays the body as he carries him off with love and pity.

 

Los Angeles, December 11, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).