Chuck Jones | Hare Conditioned / 1945

chaos in costume

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tedd Pierce (screenplay), Charles M. Jones (director), Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Basil Davidovich, Lloyd Vaughan, and Bob Cannon (animation) Hare Conditioned / 1945

 

This 1945 Bugs Bunny cartoon, only the second in the Looney toons series, begins with Bugs leaping around a stage prop in an all air-conditioned display of one of Stacy’s (read Macy’s) Department Store window camp setting is revealed to be on display in the "Stacy's Department Store. After closing time, Bugs retires to have a well-earned carrot.

      The store manager appears and informs Bugs that since the summer sale's over, he is being transferred to another department, which Bugs puzzles over (“tax-ealdormen”). In short, the store manager is planning to stuff and show his former live rabbit.

      Finally, the manager’s attentions are made clear as we rush into a long Bugs routine where, alternately, the villain manager and Bugs chase one another through Stacy’s, at one point, Bugs, confusing the villain with a kiss and an appearance as a young woman interested in footwear.

      Guns change hands, and the two, actor Dave Barry gives a good imitation of Harold Peary’s radio character of The Great Gildersneeze as rabbit and villain go running through the various departments of Stacy’s (little boys, Turkish Baths, costume, sports). both finally jumping, in cartoon fashion, off the roof of the building, in this case Bugs just barely winning the battle of wit and fortitude.

     If Hare Conditioned is certainly not the most entertaining of the Bugs Bunny Looney Toons, it certain demonstrates the series flexibility.

 

Los Angeles, May 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2025).

 

Dean Slotary | The Absolution of Anthony / 1997

 

finding the right man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dean Slotary (screenwriter and director) The Absolution of Anthony / 1997

 

A young, unhappy gay boy of 16, Anthony (Joe Quintero) simply does not know how to explore the sexual world in which he had become defined. He spends most afternoons and evenings in bed

randomly calling up men to demand that they share their love for him and desire for his body.

     Needless to say, this doesn’t work very successfully, especially when his unknowing uncle with whom he lives constantly attempts to regain control of the phone.

    Out on the streets for a few hours, Anthony discovers a seeming local homophobic basketball player Joe (Gary Cohen) who seems to be willing to test the waters.

     Meanwhile, the local priest, Father Carson (Victor Garber), knowing of the boy’s torment, offers to talk with him at any time.

     Obviously, Anthony’s mode of communication, hand on crotch while demanding that the other person on the phone tell him that he wants him, doesn’t achieve his goals, as he tries another unknown and finally the priest himself, who is forced to hang up.

     But suddenly Anthony awakens with a new sense of possibility, as he rises early, seeks out the basketball court and meets up with the kid who is willing to have sex with him.

     This is not a great movie, but is an intense exploration of a self in the making, a young man who is attempting to absolve himself from his intense demons.

 

Los Angeles, June 1 (2025)

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).

      

John Waters | Serial Mom / 1994

 

THE PERFECT HOUSEWIFE

 

John Waters (screenwriter and director) Serial Mom / 1994

 

This black satirical comedy is, in some respects also a true horror film in the sense that this every day, perfect mom, Beverly Sutphin (Kathleen Turner) surrounded by her already somewhat maladjusted family Misty (Ricki Lake), Chip (Matthew Lillard), and her husband dentist Eugene (Sam Waterston), is on the verge of the perfection of Towson, Maryland suburban life, but on the side functions as a serial killer, knocking off the people who get under her skin. The first of these, after a series of pornographic calls and notes to neighbor Dottie Hinkle (Mink Stole), is the high school math teacher Mr. Stubbins, after he condemns Chip's obsession with horror films at a PTA meeting.

     Through a complete sense of guilelessness and duplicity, Beverly not only keeps the detectives Pike (Scott Wesley Morgan) and Gracey (Walt MacPherson), somewhat off her trail, but upon discovering that the young Carl, supposedly her daughter Misty’s boyfriend, is also dating a blond bimbo, kills him off in the men’s room with a fire poker just purchased by her neighbor.

     Eugene himself becomes so curious about the complex behavior of his wife that he investigates her nightly reading material, supposedly about birds, only to discover that Beverly had been communicating directly with the serial killer of the late 1970s, Ted Bundy.

      In the midst of one meal, Beverly simply leaves, leading the family to suspect that she is out to get Chip’s friend Scotty, who has mentioned to his friends that he finds Beverly a suspicious figure.

     In fact, it is his parents Ralph and Betty Sterner, she is after, mostly because of Ralph’s insistence for a dental appointment with Eugene on the morning she and her husband were to have gone bird-watching.

     She chooses a scissors to kill Betty and pushes an air conditioner upon the head of Ralph when he has presumed he has escaped.

     The other family members rushes to the constantly masturbating Scotty to find him midst arousal, but safe nonetheless. 

     Police follow the Sutphins to church that Sunday as Beverly is named as the prime suspect in the Sterners' murders. The service abruptly ends when everyone flees in panic after Beverly sneezes; in the confusion, Beverly escapes as police attempt to arrest her, she hiding in the video store in which Chip in employed.

     When a customer, who has refused to rewind a tape, refuses to pay the dollar fee and berates Beverly’s son, Beverly follows and fatally hits her over the head with a leg of lamb (a reference to a famous Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode).

     Scotty witnesses the act, a bit unbelievably, and Beverly is on the chase again, following him into a heavy metal bar featuring a lesbian trio. Eventually she joins him on the stage where she immolates him.

     Re-arrested, we have now entered director’s Waters canny realization the such horrific deeds lead not to shunning but to celebrity.

      No one in this film behaves as if those citizens killed meant anything (for the most part they are also despicable people), and her son and daughter are not involved in selling memorabilia, and other objects, as the crowd files into the October courthouse.

      The lawyer plans to plead insanity, but Beverly quickly fires him and defends herself, with her guiles and lies—with which through the film she has revealed—convincing the jury members that she is utterly innocent.

      A movie starring Suzanne Somers is already in her plans, and Somers appears as another distraction to any truth. Yet all this while, Beverly has been furious over the fact that one jury member, #8 (Patty Hearst) is wearing white shoes after labor day, and while she uncomfortably poses with Somers, she sneaks off to do in the juror. The juror’s body is uncovered in the midst of photographs, and Beverly, who seems uncomfortable with Somers, gives her a knowing link: perhaps she is next. Yet it is also hinted that Beverly is back in police custody.  

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer blog (June 2025).

John Farrow | The Big Clock / 1946

the big clock

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jonathan Latimer (screenplay based on Kenneth Fearing’s fiction The Big Clock), John Farrow (director) / 1946

 

The Big Clock is another of the wonderful noirs which appear to be all about the heterosexual affairs of its lead villain, but is actually about hidden attractions to his staff members and others of his magazine Crimeways.

       The lead actor, in this case, is George Stroud, happily married and with a young son, but with some home problems since he has never been given time for a honeymoon, which his wife wants to celebrate in West Virginia. Stroud had finally purchased the tickets and the date set, except that his series is going hot, and the company owner, villain Earl Janoth is not about to lose his greatest writer to a honeymoon. Ultimately he fires Stroud, who finally accepts the situation. All would still be well if it were not for the fact that Janoth’s mistress is determined to enter into the situation, get Stroud drunk and then quickly ditch him as Janoth returns. Janoth sees a man leave, but doesn’t recognize him in the dark light.  

     Now attempting to make it up with his wife who has already bolted to Wheeling, Stroud is again forced to call off the honeymoon when Janoth calls him up to use his team of writers as researchers to discover what will be an innocent man. Knowing that he is the real “criminal,” George has no choice but return to work to help in saving an innocent.

        The night with Janoth’s mistress Pauline York has involved several bars, searches for a green clock, and an eccentric painter, Elsa Lancaster. Stroud must pretend to appear to lead the investigation diligently while preventing the truth to come out and reveal him as the culprit (although he himself is innocent as well). soon after, however, he discovers himself in a further dilemma and he uncovers the fact that Janoth’s mistress has been murdered.

        As Janoth’s goons and the local police force close down the large headquarters containing a big clock in its midst, Stroud is forced up into the fine workings of the clock where one of the suspects, Janoth’s masseur (Henry Morgan), attempts to check him out. Stroud is forced to kill him and also arranges for the elevator to be open without any insides.

         Eventually, Stroud, and a false cop, gets another Janoth favorite, Steve Hagen (George Macready) to almost admit to the crime, but when the real murderer Janoth says they will get him the best lawyer possible, Hagen refuses to further serve as Janoth’s cover Janoth runs for the open elevator to his death.

      By this time Stroud’s wife (Maureen O’Sullivan) has returned to become involved and the honeymoon is restored by film’s end.

 

 

         Not only is it quite apparent that Janoth is truly committed to his men, not Pauline York; but it becomes apparent that she is a mere trophy who has gotten in his way. Janoth incidentally is performed by the great gay actor and director Charles Laughton.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2025).

Joseph Mawra | Chained Girls / 1965

 

trash talk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Mawra (screenplay and director), Chained Girls / 1965

 

Melissa Sky, writing in Bright Lights Film Journal captures the tone of Joseph Mawra’s unenlightened lesbian pulp from of 1965, Chained Girls: “Lesbians have their variations from one group to another. There are those women who are cultured and refined who sneak away to some dirty bar in order to find a trampish-looking woman to make love to. Some women break up homes, forsake children for the love of another woman. Then there are the teenage lesbian or baby butch. They roam the big city streets in large gangs assaulting everyone who falls within their path. Some of the weapons they use run the gamut of fists, lead pipes, chains. Many of these girls eventually end up as drug addicts, alcoholics, and prostitutes . . . Regardless of what the lesbian does or where she goes, her life is a very difficult one. She, like her male counterpart, leads a very lonely and despairing life.”

      Sky finds much of this amusing, but the misogynist babble about how the queer world, in this case lesbianism, is a terribly sick one in which dykes run wild and brutal over their meeker femme lovers, its statements, which increase as time passes, about their need for a cure, and their general misinformed mockery of lesbian and gay sexuality strikes too close to home for someone like me, born in 1947.

     Sky makes clear how Mawra got away with this mumble-jumble at a fairly innovative juncture in the presentation of queer sexuality: “One of the ways authors and filmmakers of this conservative era avoided obscenity charges when dealing with homosexual subject matter was to couch their exploration of sexual deviance in scientific terms. Chained Girls writer-director Joseph Mawra uses this tactic, creating a film that is part pseudo-documentary and part pure pornography. Hence quotes from Freud and serious statistics compiled from medical journals are liberally interspersed with gratuitous shots of topless women rolling around on top of each other. The film’s stated purpose is to define the lesbian for the general public, for both “preventative education” (“Only through understanding the facts can we keep lesbianism from becoming a serious social problem”), and, more to the point, sheer titillation. Chained Girls begins by asking in an authoritative male voiceover, ‘Who and what is a lesbian? Is lesbianism a disease or a natural occurrence? Is lesbianism reserved for only a few people, or is it a common happening? How do lesbians live? Are they happy with their lives?’”

      At one point quoting the high suicide rate of lesbians—likely caused by such attitudes that he espouses—one wants to cry out for the outrageous lies he is telling us.

 

Los Angeles, May 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Film (May 2025).