William Dieterle | Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern: Das Schecksal eines Menschen (Ludwig II, King of Bavaria: One Man’s Fate) / 1930

a world of fantasies

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Dieterle and  Charlotte Hagenbruch (screenplay), William Dieterle (director) Ludwig der Zweite, König von Bayern: Das Schecksal eines Menschen (Ludwig II, King of Bavaria: One Man’s Fate) / 1930

 

The life of Ludwig II, the King of Bavaria from 1845-1886 has long fascinated writers and filmmakers for its whirlpool mixture of music, architecture, and madness, three of the most important elements of all great filmmaking. Add to that the vortex of Ludwig’s homosexuality and the subject becomes irresistible. Beyond the film under discussion there was a previous 1920 work directed by Rolf Raffé, Das Schweigen am Starnbergersee (the Silence at the Starnberg Lake), the famed 1973 version, Ludwig by Luchino Visconti—which I discuss at length in the volume which includes the early 1970s—Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Ludwig – Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König (Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King) of 1972, and Peter Sehr and Marie Noëlle’s 2012 film Ludwig II.

     The best of these, Visconti’s failed masterwork, focuses quite understandably upon Ludwig’s relationship with his brilliant cousin, Elisabeth of Austria, on Ludwig’s major financing of Richard Wagner’s operas, and the sexual scandal regarding Wagner, Cosima von Bülow, and Wagner's conductor Hans von Bülow brought upon the Bavarian society, along with an extravagant portrayal of Ludwig’s homosexuality. Visconti does not ignore Ludwig’s castle-making and certainly dramatizes his last years of what one might describe as “castle” as opposed to “house” arrest, but obviously the other two aspects of his almost mythical life far outweigh his fairytale castle-making.

     William Dieterle’s 1930 version, on the other hand, foregoes nearly all mention of Wagner—Wagner becomes a brief matter of interest only upon the announcement of his death—and only briefly introduces Elisabeth (Trude von Molo). In fact, the film brushes aside the major portion of Ludwig’s life, focusing primarily on his late attempts to continue building his castles and the financial duress of the country leading to his psychiatrist Bernhard von Gudden’s (played by Theodor Loos) claim of Ludwig’s madness, his home imprisonment, and the strange incident of his and von Gudden’s death in the shallow waters of the Starnberg Lake, except for the latter, the least fascinating aspects of the “mad” King’s oracular life.

     For all that, Dieterle’s work (with Dieterle himself helming his film in the role of Ludwig) is oddly affecting. By the time this film gets its full wind, Ludwig has encountered enough difficulties along with his life-long hatred of public events and day-to-day governing, to justify some of the bizarre behavior we witness. Desperate to continue his building projects, indeed defining his life, now that his music-loving days are over, in terms of his construction projects, Ludwig nonetheless cannot be bothered to meet with bankers and other noted figures who might have loaned him the money. His life has become increasingly isolate, as, almost like a child, he takes tea with the imaginary reincarnations of the French King Louis XIV and Marie-Thérèse of Austria, dining at a small table between their two portraits hidden behind matching curtains.

     Wearing long sable robes, he speaks to a nonexistent mass gathering of his dreams. And when he is not checking out the construction of his palaces or perusing architectural renderings of the dream buildings, he gathers around him his male Greek statues.

     The film in a remarkably honest portrayal of his sexuality—for 1930—lays Ludwig out on a divan as he holds up a naked Greek athlete, asking his assistant to pose in a position similar to the statue while he conjures up a homosexual orgy for the white and black statuary which topple down upon one another in a grand pictorial montage of a male-on-male fuck-fest. For one grand moment we observe a look of absolute pleasure on his usually worried face before he regains his consciousness of where his imagination has carried him, smashing one of the statures to the floor in frustration and anger over his own temporarily openly expressed desires.

     With the exception of the pornographic Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly of 1920 and the other pornographic films I discuss, this scene is perhaps the most overt depiction of gay sex to date.

   Strangely, however, critics have written about only in hushed terms such as that expressed, for example, by Peter Hourigan in his essay “King Ludwig II of Bavaria: Representations in the Cinema 1920–1986” in Senses of Cinema:

 

“There is also, as the opening title promises, a deeper understanding of his personality, even if some aspects cannot be explored in depth. There is a telling scene, hinting at his homosexuality. The King receives a consignment of classical statues, Greek studies of male nudes. One is of an athlete standing, another depicts two naked wrestlers. As Ludwig admires them, a cut suggests he is also thinking how his manservant would look in the same stance as one of the athletes. It is a well-handled, discreet scene, but when Ludwig smashes one of the statues, we can certainly read that as suggesting he feels tormented by his sexuality.”

 

     Yet Dieterle’s representation, just as in his hand-holding prisoners in Geschlecht in Fesseln (Sex in Chains) of two years earlier, is anything but discreet in its radical representation of male physical contact. Unlike the more coded kissing scene in William A. Wellman’s Wings there is no other manner in which to interpret the scene, the figures obviously not preparing for war or appearing in an aerial dance in Ludwig’s imagination. Here, they are quite obviously bowing to their sexual desires.

      And despite all his fantasies, the frank expression of his sexuality, and the constant reckonings of reality made by the endless government assistants and royals surrounding him, Dieterle’s Ludwig is portrayed quite sympathetically, a man loved by his people despite his hermit-like existence and being hated by the conservative forces of the establishment. The decision to declare him insane is presented as a backstage and backstabbing plot, with a sniveling servant-spy who is so detestable that he might have appeared in an early 20th century theater or film melodrama. When even his faithful friend Paul, historically presumed to possibly be one of his numerous male lovers, can no longer convince the governmental authorities, he has no choice but to bow out as the noose slowly is tightened around Ludwig’s neck.

      Even when he is told what is happening, Ludwig refuses to flee, attempting to stand his ground, at first besting the small cadre of those who would oust him with the locals and his personal guards protecting their King against the attempted coup.

      Eventually, of course, the authoritarians, clearly dismissive of his major contributions to the worlds of music and architecture, win the day, putting up wire fencing around all the Starnberg Castle windows, removing all door handles and replacing them with locks, and drilling spy holes into the walls in a manner that is so horrific that even when Ludwig begins to show signs of true madness, we feel for him while hating the others.

      In one terribly frightening scene he discovers that his image in the mirror, unlike Narcissus, is behaving in manner entirely opposed to his own feelings and expression of them. The man in the mirror, in this case, suddenly has developed a mind of his own, a troubling reality that Ludwig cannot permit if he is to retain his last vestiges of sanity. He finds it ultimately soothing when, as reaches out for the image, it too touches his hand almost as in reassurance.

     The final scenes where he goes on an evening stroll with von Gudden when both were found drowned in the shallow waters of the lake, attempts to provide a logic to the mysterious facts by von Gudden gently commenting on his own role regarding Ludwig’s insanity and the former King’s justifiable anger during which he pulls the psychiatrist into the waters and holds him under, after which during the strenuous effort, he himself suffers a heart attack, himself falling into the waters.

      Most historians, however, have long suspected that others killed him, murdering the physiatrist as well in order to cover up just what happened in the manner in which this film has concocted events.

      In the end, if this Ludwig is not the most interesting of Kings, the film implies that events conspired against the impossible dream, as they must in most societies where visionaries meet up with small-minded and selfish politicians. Royalty was already a dying breed. As one commoner says to another in a Bierstube near the end of the film: “If they wanted to declare all kings insane on those grounds, soon there wouldn’t be any left.”

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022). 

David Butler | Just Imagine / 1930

 coding just for fun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson (book, music, and lyrics), David Butler (director) Just Imagine / 1930

 

As we can observe from his 1953 Doris Day film Calamity Jane, director David Butler had a way of coding his films that not only contradicted the surface plot but at times even “frustrated” it, slowing it down as it spiraled into its own logic that then would suddenly snap back into the ordinary heterosexual frame in which the film was embedded.

    But in his film of two decades earlier, he and his cowriters Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, Ray Henderson inexplicably created a far more complex LGBTQ coded work in Just Imagine (1930) that, along with the various genres it employed, resulted in a movie that on one level was a blatantly corny heterosexual musical love comedy with one foot still in vaudeville, while on another level functioning as a rather sophisticated story of a series of rather campy male same-sex relationships that, dominating the center of the work, still had be jettisoned by the movie’s end so that it might fulfill the predictable expectations of its overriding frame.

       I’ve always argued that not all coding was completely intentional. Sometimes certain ramifications of the story, jokes implanted in the script, and just the dream myths that films generate take over the writing and direction and move things in ways that the creators might never have imagined. Yet in this quite imaginative film the script seems to hint that most of the coded elements were not at all accidental. In fact, it appears that some of the coding of LGBTQ elements were accomplished just for the fun of it.

      Perhaps it would help if—like the doubling of the film’s story and images itself—I describe the narrative of this work twice, the first being the plot that the general audience might perceive and the second a more experienced, openly gay, or even prurient viewer might recognize. Neither reading is superior to the other, and indeed, the general reading was necessary for any box office success and certainly required given the moral codes of the day, even if in 1930 the Hays Code, proposed in 1927, had not yet come into full effect.

     I have to say that even my ordinary plot description in this case is going to sound rather extraordinary. For Just Imagine is a sci-fi film made in 1930, that begins in 1880 with a brief prologue that establishes the grace and quietude of New York City of that day. In the very next scene, however, the film projects a vision of that city in 1980 that, if at times laughable, is fairly convincing in its representation of a world where the tenement houses have morphed into 250-story buildings, connected by suspension bridges and multi-lane elevated roads. In this vision, however, the skies—much like those imagined in Clyde Cook’s What’s the World Coming To? (1926)—filled with planes, blimps, and other flying vehicles, have basically replaced Ford’s automobiles, in which the movie takes some pleasure.

     In this world men and women are married only by permission by the government marriage tribunal, and children purchased like items from a vending machine. The central figures of this film, J-21 (John Garrick), an airline pilot, and his girlfriend LN-18 (Maureen O’Sullivan, who later played Jane in the Tarzan films and was Mia Farrow’s mother) have just had their marital application declined, the judge instead accepting the application of the self-centered but apparently financially more secure newspaper man, MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson). Although the judge will make a final decision some months in the future, J-21 is now told that he can have no further contact with the woman he loves.

      His bachelor roommate RT-42 (Frank Albertson) and his girlfriend D-6 (Marjorie White), who works as a nurse for a famous doctor, invite the saddened J-21 to join them as observers of a new experiment her boss is conducting by attempting to revive a man from 1930 who was struck by lightning while playing golf and killed. The operation is successful, and suddenly the man from the past—in the film also a “act” from the past represented by the popular vaudeville performer El Brendel who had made famous the stock figure of the Swedish immigrant hick—is unleashed upon the movie forcing us to also suffer his definitely dated jokes, which evidently were still popular in 1930 (in interviews Butler recounts that at the film’s premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles audiences laughed from several moments at his repeated insistence that he like the “old fashioned” way of producing babies and were enchanted with his vaudeville skit “The Romance of Elmer Stremingway” in which a young Swedish yokel wants to marry a local Swedish girl named Fanny consisting of El Brendel quickly donning and removing a series of hats as he plays out the narrative) but have not survived the passage of time.

     Once this vintage character is brought back to life, however, the doctor utterly ignores him, the poor fool having no one to care for him in a strange new world into which he’s awakened. J-21 and friend RT-42, taking pity on him, invite him to come and live in their apartment, taking him first on a trip through the city in which they explain to him and to the audience the new realities of the visionary world of 1980.

    They begin by explaining that instead of names, every now living being is given a number; without such a number, the dislocated man takes on the name Single O (although pondering the humorous possibility, given our perspective, of taking on the name Double O). On their tour of the town, he discovers much of which we’ve already gleaned about the modes of transportation and the production of children, and new information revealing that all meals are ingested through pills and that, although Prohibition is still very much in effect, you can get quite drunk on pills that simulate the experience of alcohol, a stimulant to which Single O quickly becomes addicted.

     Still in a funk about losing the love of his life, J-21 decides to make an illegal visit to LN-18, who apparently shares an apartment—still very much in the 1930s sleek Art Deco design—with D-6. Pretending to be ill, LN-18 bows out of a theater event with her new fiancé MT-3 and her father, while D-6 acts as her nurse. The minute the men have left the room, their lovers J-21 and RT-42 sneak into the highrise, kiss, and sing the movie’s major song, “(I Am the Words) You Are the Melody” by Buddy G. DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson (together and separately the composers of major popular songs such as  April Showers," "Button Up Your Overcoat," "Look for the Silver Lining," "California, Here I Come," [DeSylva]; "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree," and "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” [Brown]; and “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” and “Five Foot Too” [Ray Henderson]):

 

                  I am only the words, you are the melody

                  And we need the two together to make love.

                  Tell me what the words are without a melody,

                  They are like the earth without a sun above.

      The loving man, J-21, who sings this song to his loved one brings out the tears even from his dear friend, RT-42. The couple, so perfect together, cannot join in marriage evidently in the world of 1980.

       Suddenly, suspicious of his fiancée, MT-3 returns early, the girls forced quickly to hide their gentleman callers. It almost works, but for the fact that the boys’ new friend Single O, who they have left behind outside, somehow in his drunken state scales the towers and appears on their terrace to ask to where his new friends have gotten up to. J-21 appears to challenge his girlfriend’s suitor at the very moment that RT-42 falls out of the Murphy bed in which he’s been hidden. Evidently, his criminal act of visiting the woman to whom the state has declined his relationship may result in some severe punishment; but instead of calling for the police, MT-3 forces his future wife to tell J-21 to go away and never return, thus breaking off the relationship through the words of LN-18 herself.

      The trio of friends now heads on home, but J-21, deeply depressed, insists he must take a short walk to deal with his suffering. Despondently looking out over the river, J-21 is suddenly brought back to real life by the presence of a young man, B-36 (Mischa Auer) who, recognizing the young man’s depression suggests he has a cure for it: his employer is planning a secret voyage which may solve all his problems. J-21 joins the interloper on his sufferings to visit the renowned scientist Z-4 (Hobart Bosworth) who tells him of his plans for a voyage to Mars for which J-21, given his feelings of despair and his experience as a pilot, seems to be the perfect man to travel to the red planet and bring back news of any life there—that is if he survives the voyage and his encounters on the mysterious planet. The voyage there and back will take almost the same amount of time that he has between the marriage tribunal’s final decision, and if he succeeds, he will suddenly become one of the most famous men on earth, surely worthy of marriage with his missing “melody,” LN-18. Believing, as the cliche goes, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain, he agrees, and in only 7 days will be flying to Mars.

      When he shares his news with RT-42, his friend, with whom he has been pals since childhood, insists on joining him and, with Single O to look after their bachelor pad, and after permission from Z-4, the duo are about to travel, celebrating what might be there last night on earth. Having sworn his squadron friends to silence until after the ship thrusts off, the two give their goodbyes to their male companions and sing their squadron drinking song performed, astonishingly, a bit like a Busby Berkeley cinematic production using a crane camera, but in this case instead involving showgirls replacing them with small single-shot bottles of alcohol manipulated into geometric patterns through the pilot’s hands, arms, and other body parts, a work not easily forgotten.

      He leaves a letter explaining his secret plans for LN-18, making her promise that she will not open it until 4:00 a.m., the time of his take off. But she, moving the clock ahead, reads it and races off in her plane to plead with him to stay. She reaches his rocket seconds before it lifts off into space.

      Once in the air, the two men realize that they have a stowaway aboard, Single O, who has mistaken their destination for a visit to Ma, instead of Mars, and thinking they’re simply off to see their mothers, since he prefers the old-fashioned ways of doing things, has joined them. His doubts about the trip are now all too late.

       A month or so later their arrive on Mars to be met by beautiful half-clad chorus girls like ones missing in the earlier all-male Berkeley-like choreographed number—although these chorines dance more in the manner of the Denishawn (named after the modern dance choreographers Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn) than Berkeley or even Hermes Pan, Fred Astaire’s dancing collaborator—an apparent Queen Loo Loo (Joyzelle Joyner, who portrayed the lesbian temptress in Cecile DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross, 1932) and her consort Loko (Ivan Linow). Loo Loo attempts to explain to J-21 and his friends something they cannot yet comprehend; but what they do quickly discover is that her consort Loko has taken a shining to Single O, and while she goes off with J-21 Loko takes away RT-42 and Single O for a bath, something, particularly with several of the females in attendance, that makes them shy.

      But no sooner have festivities begun than a ruckus occurs, and the visitors are taken away to a similar space with seemingly the very same people, but this time treated like prisoners instead of esteemed travelers from another planet. Even the previously smitten Loko treats Single O with hostility, and soon all three a trundled off to a jail cell where they are kept for several weeks, J-21 despairing of being able to return in time even if they could reach the rocket and successfully launch it back to earth.

     Gradually he perceives what Loo Loo was attempting to tell him on first meeting. They are now the prisoners of Boo Boo and Boko, the evil twins of the friendly pair. Indeed J-21 begins to realize, everyone on Mars is a twin, one good and one evil. This fact is brought home with Loko breaks into their cell to help them escape, giving special attention to his friend Single O. But midway he is discovered by Boko who knocks him out and immobilizes J-21 and RT-42. Only Single O survives the blows, being dragged back and forth between Loko and Boko until he finally determines to carry off his two friends by himself to the hidden rocket, fending off the evil Boko in a push-and-pull match that finally ends when he realizes that the ear and heart are the Martians’ point of weakness, the word and melody of which J-21 has sung being the clue in how to subdue the awful Boko—in his case by pulling and pounding on both which renders him immobile.

      The trio escape back to earth arriving just on time for J-21, as now a famous astronaut, to rightfully claim his prize, LN-18. Things are momentarily held up, however, since it appears they have no evidence that they have actually travelled to Mars—which can only remind us of the fanatical beliefs of many that Apollo missions to the Moon were stage events that did not truly occur. Luckily Single O has brought back the best evidence he possibly could have, Boko, over who he now has control. So everything ends up happily as J-21 and LN-18 are declared legally married.

   So why is such a preposterous tale included in My Queer Cinema and could such a patently heterosexual plot truly be coded? Better to ask why would it be coded, what could have possessed four presumably cis-male heterosexuals to even want to insinuate that something else was going on in their rather rag-tag and often simply corny sci-fi musical love comedy?

     I have simply no answer for that. There doesn’t seem to have been a secret text whose remnants have somehow made their way into the final product. And the four rather clever creators of music and cinema could not have been simply carried away by the mythos of such a preposterous story. Sometimes, you just have to suspect that such men simply what to challenge or shake up the authorities. Although not yet mandatory, as it would become in 1934, the Hays Code had laid out the territory, based on the basic principal that:

 

           1.No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral

           standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the

           audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-

           doing, evil, or sin. 2. Correct standards of life, subject

           only to the requirements of drama and entertainment,

           shall be presented. 3. Law-divine, natural or human-shall

           not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its

           violation (Lev 87).”

 

    Vulgarity, sex, murder, obscenity, profanity and religion had fairly precise ways that they were to be represented. When shooting a murder scene, it was imperative that, “the technique of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation [and] brutal killings are not be to presented in detail.” In the case of sex, it was deemed that the “sanctity of the institution of marriage.….shall be upheld.” Scenes of passion, seduction, excessive kissing and even sexual relationships between different races were forbidden. Homosexuality of any kind was banned, in part, because of the clause concerning the sanctity of marriage.

     Yet Butler, DeSylva, Brown, and Henderson clearly did code their work. Let us begun with what I’ve already stated concerning the condition of the Martian world, that everything, good and bad, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual (as we shall soon more explicitly see), and lawfulness and lawlessness has its twin; it is a world of twins, doubles, or mirrors.

     I have already written in several previous essays of the importance of the double, the mirror, and twin in LGBTQ cinema previously (see my essays, for example, “Conflicted Selves” on The Student of Prague (1913), Norman McLaren’s Narcissus (1983) and my several writings of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the double is represented in the man and his portrait.

     But even before the characters of Just Imagine move to Mars, this film is structured according to a series of doublings: two males, J-21 and RT-42, are matched with two females, LN-18 and D-6, pairings which you might well expect in a heterosexual work. As the songwriters argue, when it comes to love things come in two, the “words and the melody.” So too, might we argue are the 1880s wed to the 1980s, as Garrick sings in his only song, he likes old-fashioned things like his “old-fashioned” girl LN-18.

      Things, however, also pair off in other ways that you might not expect. Clearly the two boys, J-21 and RT-42 are a bit more than simply good pals who share a bachelor pad.  The scene in which RT-42 listens to the sad song J-21 sings to his would-be lover, show him with more than a little sympathy for his buddy. He almost visually gushes with admiration. It appears he is more moved by the song than even Maureen O’Sullivan is able to project or her character express. Later, when RT-42 hears of his friend’s plan to travel to Mars he hardly lets a moment pass before he’s busy arguing for an opportunity to join him:

          

               RT-42: You’re not going anyplace without me.

                            We’ve been pals, real pals ever since

                            we were kids together. There’s no reason

                            why we should stop now.

    To me, in a world where marriage is arranged by a tribunal, those words sound more like an “old fashioned” relationship to me. As the blogger of the site “Ramblings of a Grown Up Kid” [named Alan] observes: “The scene is played with so much enthusiasm that it actually comes across as a little bit gay.” He adds, “But then, there are numerous scenes in which the boyishly attractive Frank Albertson seems to swoon over his roommate J, even in the presence of his spirited and spunky girlfriend D,” a reference to the scene I describe above of RT-42’s tearing at listening to the musical rendition of his friend’s romantic plight.

      J-21’s almost immediate response suggests that the scene is even a little bit more than gay: “All right, we’ll go together.”

      Moreover, when I hear two passing bachelors almost immediately ready to share their apartment with a man brought back to life from the 1930s, who is now all but homeless, my ears prick up. These sophisticated air pilots are not the kind who simply invite the new boy in town simply to crash on their living room couch. And as we will soon see in Mars, this same man assigns himself the name Single O, which literally defines him as an unmarried man, a loner, or even a person devoted to celibacy—or to translate into LGBTQ language, not of “the marrying kind,” a gay man. As Ella Fitzgerald crooned in Johnny Mercer’s song of that title:

 

                               Single-o, all the way

                               Rain or shine

                               Gonna stay single-o

                               'Til you're mine

 

                               Like the peach, at the top of the tree

                               Gonna stay single-o

                               'Til it's me

 

      Single O, moreover, as we quickly perceive is himself a fast learner. Seeing J’s problems with his girlfriend, Single O comments: “So women are still causing problems. You’d think in 50 years they could have found a good substitute for them.” to which RT responds, “Come on, let’s go home.”

      It is not accidental surely, given what we observe of J-21 and RT-42’s relationship that half of one equals the other.

      In the very next scene, moreover, our writers take the gay sexual bead-dropping just a bit further as we see the lonely J looking over the river, a broodingly dark figure suddenly approaching him. Their conversation is fraught with the language of a gay cruising, in which one attempts to pick-up and take home the other. First the stranger suggests that or his friend appears to be “heartbroken,” which when J-21 asks, “How did you know all of this?” he answers. “Your youth tells me. You were going to end it all, weren’t you?”

     “No, I wasn’t, but it’s not a bad idea.”

   You’re just the man I’m looking for,” responds the stranger, B-36. “I can give you your heart’s desire.”

      “Who are you?”

      “What does this matter? I can solve your problems.”

      He continues, “It’s worth a chance isn’t it? Come.”

      And our innocent friend simply follows as if hypnotized by the tall dark-eyed man, who later on in the movie—when D-6 jumps into his arms in celebration of the arrival home of J-21 and RT-42 from their voyage—makes it quite apparent that he cannot abide women.

      This scene, of course, is an invitation not for sex but to join Dr. Z-4’s voyage to Mars. But certainly the writers might have used a far less melodramatic and sexually weighted language to tempt him into the mad scientist’s lair. Once more, DeSylva and his partners seem to be suggesting another reality than what we are presented on the surface.

      Even J-21 and RT-42’s high-flying cohorts seem, from the evidence of their favorite drinking song, to be a bit more than jolly in their readiness to embrace their fellow men, reminding me a little of the song the sailors on leave sing in the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Cesar! (2016):

                    We’ll drink to soldiers and drink to sailors

 

                    We’ll drink to butchers and even tailors

                    And while we’re drinking we’ll keep

                        on thinking

                    Of individuals to keep on drinking

 

                    Come on and drink

                    sarsaparilla or ink.

     Once again they see things in pairs. And the fact that they play out a kind of all male version of Busby Berkeley-like scene, using the liquor miniatures a bit like the chorus girls as they whisk them offstage and on with sleight of hand, J-21 eventually crawling hands and knees down the table in the bower of their raised hands, adds to the campy delight of this scene.

      And of course, this trip does lead to a truly perverse world of double images, in which people and events are never what they seem to be.

      Right off from the start when the group meets Queen Loo Loo she seems to be luring them in with her long fingers, but suddenly in the midst of her gestures screams out “Boo Boo,” scaring them half to death. When she calls what I have described as the King or her Consort Loko—who may simply be her head guard since his position in the court is not fully established—everyone realizes quite quickly that he has taken a hands-on interest in Single O, literally stroking his cheeks, rubbing his head and smiling intently with delight. As I mentioned earlier, this man from the 1930s is no slow learner but gleans the situation immediately, almost giggling with delight to his friends, “She’s [pointing at Loo Loo] not the queen, he is!”

      As Loko drags him away to the baths, he demands R-42 stick with him. The two, as I mentioned above, are simply too conventional to undress in front of the women but seem to have no problem whatsoever disrobing under the eyes of the drooling Loko.

     Yet all the good times in store for them, promising to include the sexual, disappear once they are kidnapped by the idol-loving violent twin society. Much like the Moloch of Fitz Lang’s great Metropolis, the women here seem happy to give themselves up to a vast beast to whom they willingly feed themselves, leaping upon his open palms as if waiting to be eaten alive.

     As in other contemporary musicals with LGBTQ subthemes, Stage Mother and Myrt and Marge, both from 1933, female sacrifice was represented quite literally, whether you were traveling across the US, performing on the Broadway stage, or even living on Mars.

      Who knows, our boys may have been next. But at least if they’d been able to stay on with Loo Loo and Loko they might have received some pleasure in return, but here in the evil mirror, they are locked away in a world that is closer to an S&M fantasy than a gentle family sci-fi musical which Just Imagine pretends to be. Once Loko returns to try to save them, for Single O there is no turning back; even if the boys have been knocked out he’ll bring life back to them. As he gamely tries to lift the two men and drag them to safety and back to the rocket, he proclaims what has to be one of the most obviously gay camp lines of all time: “Don’t worry boys, I get you up. And if I can’t get you up I’ll lay down with you.” Can you imagine that the brilliant wordsmiths DeSylva and Brown weren’t aware of such puns they’d bothered to write?

       By finally capturing and bringing back Boko, Single O finally has got his man, but instead of being controlled by him as he might have been by Loko, he is now in control. Having passed out of the looking glass, J-21 and RT-42 have no choice but to return to “normalcy.” Yet the writers still hint of further perversions, as Single O is introduced to his bearded elderly grandson, another male who he can now dangle upon his knee with glee. Ridiculous as it is, El Brendel not only gets the last laugh but in this upside-down world of the future becomes the movie’s hero.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).