Richard Lester | The Ritz / 1976

a farce with notes

 by Douglas Messerli

 

Terence McNally (screenplay, based on his play), Richard Lester (director) The Ritz / 1976

 

What do you do with a film like The Ritz, particularly as it appears in movie form fast after its own Broadway success and the far-sweeter and more honest 1975 comedy shot in the gay bathhouse Continental on which The Ritz is probably based, Saturday Night at the Baths? Clearly, it is of interest to LGBTQ audiences. The playwright and screenwriter Terence McNally is not only openly gay (having had relationships with fellow playwright Edward Albee and actor and director Robert Drivas before marrying producer Tom Kirdahy) but has had a long record of writing serious gay works, along with his early attention to the AIDS epidemic. I attended the theater production of The Ritz with my husband Howard at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre and later saw the film when it was first released. I saw it again yesterday, just to test my original impressions with how I might react to it 44 years later. Chalk it up to senility, but strangely this third time ‘round I liked it somewhat better.

      Yet what to do about a work that treats everything and everyone with which and whom it comes in contact like a vaudeville stereotype—including homosexuals, gay baths, gay bath patrons, Italians, Puerto Rican women, overweight men, men who are attracted to and chase (“chubby chasers”) overweight men, Jews, transvestites, muscle-men, detectives, men with high voices, heterosexuals, theater producers, go-go boys, and the city of Cleveland.   

                                           

     Furthermore, although the film features some of the best comedians imaginable—Jack Weston, Kaye Ballard, and Jerry Stiller for starters—except for Treat Williams, the go-go boys Tiger and Duff played by John Everson and Christopher J. Brown, and Rita Moreno(1) the movie, most strangely since it supposedly occurs in a gay bathhouse filled with men determined to visually attract the members of their own sex, is stuffed with some of the least attractive actors to post their faces, bellies, and butts upon the silver screen. Perhaps the fact that the three major comedians are portraying heterosexuals might comically explain that fact except that the Ritz Baths seem also to be a major attraction to the least attractive men in town, including other excellent thespians like F. Murray Abraham and Paul B. Price.

     Moreno, playing the washed-up would-be musical actress Goggie Gomez, moreover, speaks Spanglish as if she had studied with the Spanish-born guitarist and former wife of Xavier Cugat, Charo; and Williams playing Detective Michael Brick inexplicably speaks like a squeaky voiced Baby June (“my body developed but my voice didn’t develop with it”), renders them both quite sexless, particularly since Moreno is mistaken for a transvestite, while detective Williams is totally improbable as a “dick.” In short, for a hidden retreat of forbidden lust and queer passion, The Ritz is without a sexual groan stirring in the house.

     With this film’s director Richard Lester(2) at the helm it might have been wonderful to see what chaos the Beatles, playing the four straight intruders, might have imposed upon this gay haven—I can just imagine Ringo playing the discombobulated singer Googie with a Scouse accent; George subbing for Weston’s character, Gaetano Proclo, the Beatle dubbed as “the quiet one” forced to switch type to become a loud and rambunctious interloper; John playing the Mafia-involved Garbage King Carmine Vespucci, the Jerry Stiller figure who has put out Proclo’s death warrant; with Paul playing the high-voiced pretty boy Brick; and I am sure Brian Epstein might have been more than happy to take over Murray’s role as Chris, desperately seeking sexual contact with anyone is this god-forsaken den of inequity(3); isn’t this perhaps something like what playwright Joe Orton imagined for his script of a third Beatle’s flick?(4)

      You get the idea. The only way I can even talk about McNally and Lester’s work is in terms the farce it desires to become. Surely, the playwright originally imagined his work to be a Feydeau-like sex romp with people spinning in and out of beds, hiding, sometimes en masse under them, and mistaking everyone for someone else of which they were either desirous or terrified.

      To clue you in to what has to be an utterly convoluted plot, because of his increasing mafia business dealings Carmine Vespucci (Stiller), on orders from his dying father, has ordered his brother-in-law, Gaetano Proclo (Weston) to be murdered because of his unknowing interference with the family’s plans. In an attempt to escape the contract on his life, Proclo jumps into the first taxi he can hail, demanding to be taken somewhere where he can never be found. It just happens that the taxi is owned by Vespucci and family and the driver has been told to take Proclo to the Ritz, a gay bathhouse.(5) This is where first time detective Michael Brick comes in or is supposed to have been already been waiting to be discovered with Proclo in his bed by Vespucci so that, it stands to reason in heterosexual heaven, the man could not be blamed for killing a brother-in-law found in the arms of a gay man.

      But a funny thing happens on the way to this forum(6) as none of the participants perform according to script, the local songstress Googie mistaking Proclo—who has taken the name of Vespucci as a cover—for a famous producer who might give her a job in the bus-and-truck tour of Oklahoma!; Brick mistakes Proclo for his employer Vespucci; and the local bath denizen, the chubby chaser Claude Perkins mistakes him for the heavyset gay man he’s been looking for his all of his life—and coincidentally he has, in fact, found the man he was looking for since Claude, serving long ago in the army with Proclo as a young man, even then tried to lure him into bed. The three, each in their own way, chase after the doomed man. As the love-starved denizen of The Ritz, Chris (Murray), describes the absurd situation: “It’s just beginner’s luck.”

      In between and amidst this hither and thither racing up and down floors, in and out of rooms (including the notorious steam room), Googie performs her hilariously malapropic and maladroit Broadway musical numbers(7); Chris calls out for love, at one point shouting that Joe Namath is in “room number----,” his own room obviously(8), which proves to Proclo that this truly is not a gay bath; and Claude decides to enter the talent contest, demanding that Proclo and Chris join him in a lip-sync performance of a song by The Andrews Sisters, a contest which they indisputably win!

       Too bad Proclo is such a dim wit that it took him what seems like half of the movie to realize that not only has he mistakenly chosen to hide out in a gay bath, but that the shocking things he can’t believe he’s encountering are all actually quite fun.

       By film’s end the real Vespucci and Proclo’s wife Vivian (Ballard) have joined the frolics at The Ritz, eventually unraveling the yarn of absurd events, with Vivian, realizing how her brother has tricked her husband into a false instance of in flagrante delicto threatening to reveal how Vespucci has raked off the profits of a local bingo game if he doesn’t cancel the contract for Proclo’s life. Even if no one will admit it, all seemed to have learned that life is a bit more exciting at The Ritz than in New Jersey or Cleveland to which the straight folks are sentenced to return. 

      The “siren-voiced”(8) Brick gets the girl, the goofy Googie after he reveals that he has an uncle who is a theater producer, and off they go down the yellow brick road of utter perdition without knowing that it was Brick’s uncle who fired Googie from all of her previous musical gigs. 

 

notes

(1) Just because of her role of Anita in the film version of West Side Story Moreno will always remain beautiful to me.

(2) In case you were born after the Beatles two movies, you may not know that Richard Lester was the director of both

A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965).

(3) In Christopher Münch’s film The Hours and the Times (1991), the director hints that Brian Epstein, the gay manager of the Beatles, who traveled with John Lennon to Barcelona on holiday in 1963, may have engaged or attempted to engage Lennon in sex. See my review above.

(4) In 1967 English playwright Joe Orton was asked to write a script for The Beatles’ third film. by then Orton had become a celebrated playwright in the London theatre. The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein thought he might be the perfect writer for a Beatles film, and Paul McCartney had previously invested £1,000 in Orton’s other play Loot. The resulting script was titled Up Against It. Orton met with Shenson and began writing the script. He also met McCartney and Epstein on the day before Christmas, and a contract was drawn up, which allowed Orton to buy back the script rights if it were rejected. Orton delivered an initial draft in February. He expected it to be rejected, which it was, noting in his diary that “the boys, in my script, have been caught in-flagrante, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison and committed adultery.” This script is referenced in Stephen Frear’s film on Orton Prick up Your Ears (1987). See my review above.

(5) Any upstanding gay boy in New York in the 1960s and 1970s knew that nearly all the gay bars and clubs were Mafia owned.

(6) Richard Lester directed the film version of Stephen Sondheim A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), starring Zero Mostel, Jack Gilford, and Phil Silvers, with a cameo appearance by Buster Keaton.

(7) Among Googie’s numbers is a song from West Side Story. You can imagine what she does to her Cole Porter songs she sings.

(8) As a card-carrying gay boy in New You in 1969, I was told by many friends that Namath was a regular patron of gay establishments such as Julius’ and other such bars.

(9) By putting this phrase in quotations I am suggesting that my statement is ironic, the opposite of what it seems to be saying. Such linguistic usages are often used in gay camp talk.

 

Los Angeles, December 14, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

Eloy de la Iglesia | Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures) / 1977

the right to be what we are

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rafael Sánchez Campo, Eloy de la Iglesia, and Gonzalo Goicoechea (screenplay), Eloy de la Iglesia (director) Los placeres ocultos (Hidden Pleasures) / 1977

 

Gay Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia is one of the most important of LGBTQ directors of the 1970s and 80s, of the stature of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Luchino Visconti. De la Iglesia’s works are far more politically concerned than either Fassbinder’s or Visconti’s, and his subjects in his gay trio of films in the early 1970s, Los placeres ocultos, El diputado, and El sacerdote and in quinqui and films of adolescent street delinquents in the 1980s (Navajeros, Colegas, El pico, and El pico 2) seem far more psychologically and narratively complex and nuanced than many of Fassbinder’s works. The later de la Iglesia films are often compared to the 1960s films of Pier Paolo Pasolini and to the earlier Mexican based film by Luis Buñuel Los olvidados (1950).

     Certainly, de la Iglesia does not have the rich textures and images of Visconti, nor did he have the resources of the incredible acting team with whom Fassbinder regularly worked, and his his output as not as monumental as Fassbinder’s oeuvre. For 15 years after La Estanquera de vallecas in 1987, de la Iglesia stopped making films as he struggled with heroin addiction before making his last work Los novios bulgaros in 2003. But his importance as a gay, communist activist, and filmmaker, particularly in the early post-Franco days, is extraordinarily significant even while it has been basically ignored by many in the film world. De la Iglesia made it possible for a director such as his fellow countryman Pedro Almodóvar to come into being in the late 1980s, the very period when de la Iglesia grew silent.

     Perhaps the first Spanish film to deal head-on with homosexuality, Hidden Pleasures centers upon a handsome middle-aged closeted gay man Eduardo (Simón Andreu) who picks up barrio school boys such as Nes (Ángel Pardo), who work the streets at night to pick up money for their personal expenses and families. Apparently, he has been stalking another schoolboy, Miguel (Tony Fuentes) whom, one day, he “accidentally” encounters outside a motorbike shop, with the boy eagerly eyeing the bikes through the window.

       Given his position as head of a major bank, Eduardo quickly arranges for the boy to be hired by his former protégé Raúl (Antonio Corencia), now an adult gay man who, unlike Eduardo, is involved as a gay activist who attends liberation meetings, to whose invitations Eduardo repeatedly rejects.

    Gradually discovering that Miguel is heterosexual with a girlfriend Carmen (Beatriz Rossat), Eduardo, nonetheless, becomes nearly infatuated with the boy and attempts to keep him close to him by offering him a regular job in his apartment to type up a manuscript upon which he is supposedly working. He also takes him to a gay bar, which Eduardo finds to be fun (“fags always make me laugh”) and in response to that attitude, takes him instead to a straight pick-up bar where they bring home two prostitutes, Eduardo paying more attention to the sounds of his young friend with a girl in his bedroom than he does to his own female partner, who he pays extra to declare their sex (which never happens) was pleasurable.

      Soon, Eduardo has also bought Miguel the motorbike in the window, and when Miguel returns home with it, the local boys who gather round naturally presume Miguel has provided plenty of sex for the gift.

      Things are made even more complex given the fact that a married woman, Rosa (Charo López), has long been regularly inviting the boy to her house to help with “plumbing problems,” keeping him as a kind secret lover who weekly satisfies the sexual needs which obviously her husband cannot.

       As Eduardo grows more and more obsessed with Miguel—and simultaneously is sexually frustrated by the situation—Miguel comes increasingly to admire the man who almost inexplicably has chosen to help the willing and hardworking young man, who refuses the alternatives chosen by many of his neighborhood classmates. Indeed, we observe that gradually Miguel has turned his patron/mentor, perhaps unknowingly to Eduardo, into a father figure.

       Meanwhile, Eduardo’s elderly mother grows ill, confessing on her deathbed to her son that she has long known he was “different” and pleading with him not to remain alone. Eduardo’s brother Ignacio (Germán Cobos), also an executive in the bank, knows of his brother’s homosexuality, and is willing to ignore it as long as it does not become obvious to any of his business associates.

       Finally, Eduardo, unable to control himself any longer, confesses his love to Miguel, expressing his guilt for having long lured him into the situations, jobs, and other involvements in hoping to seduce him. Understandably angered with what he learns and crushed by the fact that he has lost his fantasy father, the boy leaves Eduardo, vowing never to return.

     Eduardo has no choice but to turn back to his old patterns, jacking off boys in public lavatories, sucking off boys in movie theaters, and picking up Nes on the street one night. But this time, mostly in anger for his many months of rejection and Eduardo’s preference for Miguel, Nes has planned with his hustler friends to rob and loot Eduardo’s apartment, beating him before they leave.

    Hearing of the beating, Miguel quickly returns to Eduardo, after beating Nes severely for his treatment of the banker. Eduardo promises to accept the boy as a heterosexual without attempting to ask for any sexual involvement and even encourages Miguel to introduce him to Carmen, the three of them playing out a different kind of family unit as they party and travel on short day trips together, offering the older man, for the first time in his life, a sort of replacement family unit.

      What no one might have imagined is the anger and ultimate determination to revenge the loss of her Sunday lover by Rosa, who first comes to Eduardo in his bank office, pleading for him to release Miguel so that he might return to her. And when Eduardo righteously refuses to involve himself in that way in Miguel’s life, she plots with Nes and his gang for Miguel’s fall.

       Together they spread the rumor throughout the barrio that Miguel is gay, and she personally visits Carmen’s father, convincing him that his daughter’s boyfriend is queer. Nes and the others cut the tires of Miguel's motorbike and, soon after, while the other’s hold Miguel, he beats the boy severely.

       Without anything and cast as an outsider, Miguel feels justifiably punished and abused for having done nothing but love Carmen and appreciate the largesse of his older friend. What he now learns is a bitter lesson that every decision one makes in one’s life has consequences, whether one’s actions were well-intended or not. And in anger the boy shows up to the bank lobby, meeting up with Eduardo and appearing to accost him, shouting and insulting the boss in front of his employees by insisting that he preys on young boys as a homosexual.

       For both man and boy, the worst that can happen has. And the film, which surely might have already disappointed LGBTQ audiences for its presentation—yet again, centered on the abuse or failure of gay life as well as presenting its audiences mostly with heterosexual love scenes instead of gay action—superficially appears to be yet another well-intended film that displays the failures of gay life. Indeed, many commentators have described de la Iglesia’s work as a sort of more pallid Death in Venice.

       But, in fact, those comparisons, I’d argue are mistaken. Unlike Gustav von Aschenbach, Eduardo makes his interests and eventually his desires for his Tadzio quite known, and accepts the consequences. At least a couple of times along the way, moreover, when first Miguel and later Carmen confront him about his sexuality—Miguel asking if there were a shot he might take to cure his homosexuality, even if it cost him everything he had, wouldn’t he immediately take it?

    Eduardo answers quite straightforwardly: “I wouldn’t take it even if it was free. When I was your age I would’ve paid anything. It hurts to realize that you look at other things than most boys. Or when sexy women on the screen don’t turn you on. Or when you’re ashamed of last night’s dream. You suffer a lot. …We all have a right to be what we are. And nobody has the right to change us.”

     And it is at that point that he promises Miguel that “Rest assured, I’ll never try anything with you. I don’t have the right to change you.”

      Eduardo’s statement may not be the positive cry for equal rights that his friend Raúl might propose; but it certainly sounds something close to a manifesto for gay rights, particularly in Spain in 1977, with the old Franco fascists still attempting to regain their control of the country.

      The original working title of the film was La acera de enfrente, which means literally, “the other side of the street,” a pejorative expression for “homosexual.” The title, perceived as far too controversial, was changed upon release, but even then the picture was initially banned by the Spanish censors. When it was finally released the critics, opposing censorship one year after Franco’s death gave it mostly positive, if hardly gay-friendly reviews—El Pueblo, for example, observing that the film focuses on “the sad problem of homosexuality, but with little scandal.” Far more importantly, gay liberationists gathered in the streets for massive pro-demonstrations on the film’s opening night, de la Iglesia commenting, “It was the first time a Spanish gay group came out in public, with its banners and presenting its demands.”

      And finally, unlike von Aschenbach, Eduardo does not die in Madrid or even suffer in silence for the public revelation of his sexuality. The film ends with Eduardo back in his apartment. There is a knock at the door, and he goes to it cautiously, first peeking out of the peep-hole. Suddenly, his face expresses great joy as the screen goes black.

     We can only imagine that such a look of pleasure can be provided through the reappearance of Miguel. But if it is Miguel, we have to ask, for what reason has he returned? Is he simply ready to resume his chaste friendship with Eduardo, and what might or can their relationship now entail? Or has Miguel accepted, far more problematic if so, the role to which he has been assigned, a faggot who is willing, now without any alternatives, to begin a sexual relationship with the older man? Surely that could not be among the writer’s intentions. Yet, we have to imagine all the alternatives, or at least we are encouraged to. Of course, those possibilities say more about us than about any character in the film.

      In any event, this film does not end in a gay death. Both Eduardo and Miguel are permitted go on to define their own lives in whatever manner that they are afforded. If nothing else, we can say that Hidden Pleasures ends with nearly endless potentialities, pleasure appearing where you might least might have expected it.

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Cain Thompson | Coming Out / 2015

different

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cain Thompson (screenwriter and director) Coming Out / 2015 [11 minutes]

 

Since the millennium a new genre has risen to which I have increasing hostility. These films usually begin as pretend gay narratives based on the coming out genre. The most common of these deal with a young man, locked in an all-gay world, in which he is finally determined to come out as straight.

     One can understand the writer’s and director’s good intentions in short films such as Different (2004) and Straight Out (2011), that by reversing the world order regarding sexuality, these creators imagine straight folk, put into the same conditions that LGBTQ people experience every day, presumably might witness the hypocrisy of attempting to demand gender and sexual norms.

     However, since these films are seen primarily in gay film festivals, one has to wonder how many heterosexuals actually get the chance to experience these straight dystopias. Moreover, the presumption in these films is that nearly all is focused on the choice of the other, the desire for gender, which is not at all the full vision of either the heterosexual or the homosexual worlds. Attraction to the same sex is only one small (if highly important) aspect of gay behavior and desire. Accordingly, in their simplistic dystopian fantasies, these “reversal” films are just as stereotypical, in some respects, as heterosexual films have been regarding LGBT behavior.

     Even so, I wasn’t quite prepared for the game-playing involved in Australian director Cain Thompson’s 2015 film Coming Out, which purposely leads its gay audiences astray into totally heterosexual territory, and does not at all belong in the list of LGBTQ films, even if it pretends to do so.

    In this ruse, Thompson presents an absolutely horrific family, who take delight daily evidently—father Keith Agius), mother (Sanda Eldridge), sister and her boyfriend, and even our so-called “hero’s” girlfriend—in homophobic statements and humor.

    The central figure, Blain (Cain Thompson) is a hirsute, handsome construction worker who appears to be spending early after-work hours with another man, arousing the curiosity and even wrath of his girlfriend. Even the man with whom he delightfully meets each afternoon wonders

when Blain is going to tell is family.

     Thompson has readied us, accordingly, for the usual encounter, for which his family even seems prepared. When Blain begins his “serious discussion,” one of them even jokes that he’s going to tell us that he’s gay, as if this homophobic cluster of losers have also been watching the dozens of gay-coming out movies I have suffered through.

    Blain isn’t gay, however, but is a dancer, not a stripper either, not a pop background terpsichorean, but an actual modern ballet-trained dancer—"like Billy Elliot” (referring to the 2000 Stephen Daldry film) one of his family member chimes up, but not gay!

     I can only say that I truly resented this wolf-in-sheep’s clothing kind of movie, which uses the gay community as a come-on for what really is and by film’s end remains a rather homophobic statement. And presumably, now that Blain’s admitted his discretions to his slack-witted family, he can go back to bed with his girlfriend and fuck her into heaven, perhaps even sharing his family’s lame gay jokes.

     The best one can say about this movie is that perhaps Blain has learned something in the process about what it means to be labelled as “different.”

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).