Vincent Pieper | Voll Schwul (So Gay) / 2015

seeing red

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vincent Pieper (director) Voll Schwul (So Gay) / 2015 [13 minutes]

 

You have to think of German director Vincent Pieper’s short film 2015 So Gay as an attempt to imitate something like a Joe Orton play, where everyone is on the edge of insanity and yet perfectly comfortable at being there.

     Kim (Niklas Marc Heinecke) is a young man whose father Werner (Erick Schäffler) knows that he is gay, but doesn’t want his son to reveal it to his apparently dying mother Annette (Ulrike Johannson). The whisky drinking mother is certain that in a couple of months she’ll be dead; why can’t Kim wait just a little longer before coming out, Werner muses as the two share the chore of washing up the dinner dishes.

     Meanwhile, Kim is insistent about letting his mother know before her death, having already lent her his film Billy Elliott to watch, and trying to explain to her that Billy is gay; she insists that he is not, and when he reminds her that he wears a tutu, she responds that it is simply more comfortable. Indeed, there is some question in the movie wherein his best friend is gay, but not necessarily the boy dancer himself.

     But here the issue doesn’t truly matter, because Annette sees the world the way she wants to, planning with excitement her own death, with a coffin and buffet already in place in the back yard.

       Kim, determined to come out, finally agrees to his mother’s request to meet his “girlfriend,” inviting his boyfriend (Brian Sommer) to dinner the very next night.

      The boyfriend, Milan, however, in cahoots with Werner, shows up at his door in drag, calling himself Hermione, all of which makes it all the challenging for Kim to come out to his mother.

        In a moment of frustration, Kim steals one of Hermoine’s false breasts.

     Annette, however, openly receives the quite obvious drag impersonator, showing her around the place and giving her a special view her coffin, which looks suspiciously like the one in which her mother was buried when her parents died in an automobile accident some years ago.

      Yes, Werner recalls that terrible accident, remarking that it took a great deal of work to “patch” the couple back together, forcing us to realize that he works as an undertaker.

       And soon after, “Hermione” also recognizes the rings that Kim’s parents are wearing as being his own parents rings. When Kim quietly confronts his father about the subject, he admits that he doesn’t like to let things to waste, not in the least apologetic. Does Kim really want to go through with the rigamarole of coming out this evening, he enquires. Kim does, and furthermore if his father attempts to prevent it, he will tell his mother about the rings, which doesn’t seem to phase Werner in the least.

        “What I really want to tell you is,” begins Kim, his mother interrupting, with the speculation “that I wouldn’t have a problem if Hermione gets cancer again.” Obviously, Hermoine has explained her missing breast as the result of cancer.

      After Hermoine finally insists that the rings belonged to her father and mother, Kim goes madly forward with determination: “She isn’t a woman. I am gay.”

       With hardly a beat, his mother responds: “You’re only saying this because you want that Billy Elliot to be gay.” And regarding the stolen ring, Annette tells Kim’s “girlfriend” that she can have hers. One might imagine that might settle things.

     But this little absurdist comedy continues as Hermione pulls off her wig and declares that she will report the robbery of her parents’ jewelry (and their coffin) to the police, Werner arguing, “It might be too late for that!”

     As Milan kicks off his shoes, Annette wonders if those aren’t her shoes, what’s left of Hermoine arguing “No, they were my mother’s,” Werner adding, “Yes, like the rest of your clothes,” as he viciously laughs.

      Milan throws down the ring, speaking out the words, “You sick fuck!” as he angrily exits the house.

      Werner passes the ring back to his wife, explaining that most of the clothes were going off to Africa, as if that were a justification for his having stolen them and keeping them all these years.

       “I’ve been thinking,” the mother finally intrudes upon their momentary silence, “Gay, I don’t care. But not because of this guy. He’s insulting! With Billy, Billy Elliot I can understand. He had a nice boyfriend.”

     Many of comments about this film appended to this film on YouTube were nearly as absurd as the film itself. Several commentators, even after seeing the film more than once, could still make no sense of it. Some were out outraged that the father showed no remorse for the theft of Milan’s parents’ jewelry, and that Kim did not stand up for his boyfriend and attempt to “save their relationship.”

      It is difficult for many people today, apparently to think outside of a simple realist plot centered on self-described moral principles. In Pieper’s black-comic reality, there is no standard morality or when if exists it comes in terms of a bourgeoise satire, as Annette’s final comments reveal. This is, quite fortunately, not real life; but at moments one wonders whether it might be better if it were. Perhaps this crazy family sees “reality” much more clearly than the nice tidy coming out and gay “happy-ever-after” marriage tales I’ve been watching in so many queer shorts. After all, coming out seldom resolves anything, and gay men getting married is only the beginning of a journey that will surely, still in most societies, be fairly difficult.

     I think a better translation of the German title, incidentally, would be “so queer,” allowing all the significance of that word in English.

     

Los Angeles, August 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).     

Victor Saville | First a Girl / 1935

 pure pretense: or, the woman who pretends she is a man who pretends he is a woman who gets her man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marjorie Gaffney (screenplay, based on the film by Reinhold Schünzel), Victor Saville (director)

First a Girl / 1935

 

If Reinhold Schünzel’s Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria) was in 1933 a rather spritely film of gender disorientation which, despite its basically innocent plot was predictably banned under Nazi rule, by 1935 when Victor Saville decided to adapt the film for British audiences as First a Girl, it had grown into a trivial, anti-LGBTQ Busby Berkeley-like musical extravaganza. Here was the kind of musical film to which you could take your granny in order to make her feel absolutely naughty and up-to-date without her hardly producing so much as a blush.

      Saville’s film is absolutely no LGBTQ lark; but then, for that matter, nor was Blake Edwards’ 1982 adaptation which somehow inexplicably had a large following among gays during its  Broadway production in 1995 which ran for 734 performances. At least in Blake’s work the man who dreams up Victoria’s existence, Todd, is a gay man.

      In both Schünzel’s and Saville’s version he a heterosexual who clears the route for his drag friend Victoria/Billy/Elizbeth (Jessie Matthews) to fall in love with Robert (Griffith Jones) by himself courting Princess Mironoff (Anna Lee).

      The major amusement of the version of the work centers around just how difficult it is for someone of one gender to imitate, let alone try to “become” the “other.” No easy transitions at all in Saville’s world. Most of the humor derives from Victoria’s / Billy’s inability to do the manly things that might be expected of a drag queen out of costume: you know, smoke an outrageously long and strong cigar, drink down four double whiskeys in quick succession, and change from a woman pretending to be a man into female attire in a dressing room containing a strong man donning a wig, mustache, and other “manly” accoutrements, and a foolish comedian whose partners consist of geese. Sorry, but even Cary Grant might have difficulty living up to these “proofs.” I’m speaking metaphorically, of course.

      What’s even worse is that, unlike the German version in which Anton Walbrook as Robert at least first seemed quite intrigued by Victoria as a male, Jones’ Robert, although first finding her—before he discovers the performer’s “true” identity—to be “adorable,” quickly takes on the smug British disdain of all things sexually “excessive,” reporting “I dislike men who make marvelous girls.”

       And he spends an inordinate amount of the film trying to prove that Victoria the noted drag queen is really a woman so that he might explain away his first momentary attraction to her, when what the audience really would like to know is how possibly might he have ever been attracted to the arch “bitch” of a character, Princess Mironoff, who in part, is responsible for poor Elizabeth’s losing her job as a dress-box carrier in the first place.

       There are few nicely comic moments as when Victor (Sonnie Hale) first proposes the idea to Elizabeth of becoming a male drag queen:

 

Elizabeth:

I'm not going. I can't do it.

Victor:

Do what?

Elizabeth:

I can't be a man all my life!

Victor:

But you'll have time off. And you can knit and knit to your heart's content...

Elizabeth:

But think what you're asking me!

Victor:

[gazes upward as he quotes] "There's a tide in the affairs of men"—[descending temporarily to earth]—and women—"if taken at the flood, leads on to fortune..."

Elizabeth:

Tides go out—don't they?

Victor:

This'll be a spring one! [Takes her by the shoulders] We'll carry everything before us. I'll never leave you—and I'll never let you down.

 

     Imagine what it is for those who have no choice being a man when they feel compelled to be a woman, which is, in the end, what “Toddy” feels in the US Victor/Victoria stage musical. I should imagine that knitting and knitting was certainly not what he had in mind.

     And there is a wonderful comic moment with the drunk Victor—carrying an even drunker Victoria / Elizabeth / Billy into “his” room—has difficulty in directing the body through the door. Putting the tuxedo-suited “man” for the floor for a moment before, with great effort he bends down to crunch up the body into his arms suddenly observed by a stately female hotel patron who surely must wonder what bodily activity these two late night males are performing.

     But most of the film is simply devoted to allowing the toothsome but rather talented Jessie Matthews sing out musical hall songs in high register allowing her to prove how marvelous it all is by her pretending to be a man singing a woman’s song. A sizeable chorus backs her up with mirrors all alternately dressed in Spanish mantillas and male attire.

    In the kitschy late film song, she sings in a bird cage while rocking high in the air on a rocking wooden perch before being lowered to the bottom of the cage in order to sink into a feather-lined clam shell. At the end, Sonnie Hale gets to repeat the whole thing in drag, while falling and flailing about in a manner that is absolutely offensive to any real drag performer while assuring the heterosexual audience presumably that everything is in good fun.

   Elizabeth drives off with Robert to some imaginary bungalow, while Victor settles in with the Princess bitch whose nastiness is redeemed by her love of such a Shakespeare quoting fool as he is. I am sure the director and script writers where perfectly happy for there not being so much as even a “panze” remaining in sight.

      I can’t say that we might even think of this work now as being “gay friendly.”

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

                 

 

Stephen Roberts | Star of Midnight / 1935

without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard J. Green and Edward Kaufman (screenplay, based on the book by Arthur Somers Roche), Stephen Roberts (director) Star of Midnight / 1935

 

Hot on the trail of MGM’s successful comedy-mystery of 1934, RKO Pictures released a kind of follow up, this again starring William Powell, this time playing Clay “Dal” Dalzell, but with Ginger Rogers replacing his Nora Charles partner, Myrna Loy. Although the transformation is not entirely successful, Rogers as Donna Mantin certainly gives it a good try, working rather nicely when trading wit and clever comebacks with Clay. In this film, she is not yet his wife but has every intention of marrying him.

     Indeed, throughout most of the film, Clay spends much of his time eluding the grips of Ms. Mantin, who keeps popping up in his posh art deco apartment at hours of day and night and often when least expected out of doors, a place which it is hard to imagine that she has been.

     As the future Mrs. Dalzell, Mantin takes care of Clay the moment his real caretaker, his constantly worried butler Horace Swayne (Gene Lockhart)—who just a couple of years earlier might have had a few more effeminate characteristics and fussed over his “master” even a bit more attentively—bows out of sight. With the pansies banned, however, Swayne is bemused and at times even makes nice with and joins in the machinations of Mantin.

     What the two, Mantin and Clay, have in common other than a strong appetite for all sorts of alcoholic beverages I haven’t a clue; at one point, Mantin intimates that she is very wealthy, although Clay, employed as a lawyer doesn’t exactly appear to be in financial trouble.

      If nothing else, she’s certainly determined, having already planted her marriage plans in the major newspaper through gossip columnist Tommy Tennant (Russell Hopton), a story Clay immediately squelches. But that doesn’t stop her from involving Clay in another of her plots, asking that he find a way to get back letters she’s written to a local mobster, Jim Kinland (Paul Kelly). Quite inexplicably Clay just happens to have a copy of a cancelled check signed by Kinland which suggests that the gang leader has not properly been paying his income tax, so he’s able to retrieve the letters, which she later admits, belong not her but a close friend. 

      Meanwhile, all of Clay’s friends are under the mistaken impression, much as with Nick Charles, that he is really a detective since in the past he has solved some interesting police cases. Accordingly, an old friend of his shows up from Chicago, Tim Winthrop (Leslie Fenton) seeking help in tracking down his ex-girlfriend, Alice, who has disappeared. Refusing to become involved, Clay invites Winthrop along for a midnight showing of a now popular musical performance starring Mary Smith, a singer/dancer who wears a mask while performing, who has become the hottest ticket in town, the “star of midnight.”

       It is during the performance when Clay gets word of Kinland’s readiness to meet, and so he leaves the show midway, while in his absence perhaps the most important event of the film takes place without us getting even witness it, since Robert’s camera has trotted along with Clay to see Kinland.

      Evidently, in mid-performance Tim recognizes Mary Smith, despite her mask, as being Alice and screams out her name. Terrified by the recognition, Mary finishes her number and abandons the stage never to be seen again, the musical forced to close down and her fans leaving the theater in wonderment.

     Tim, startled by the turn of events, returns to Clay’s apartment, but when the columnist Tommy Tennant shows up at his door, Clay hides Tim in his bedroom. After some introductory chit-chat, Tennant suddenly begins to explain that he knows the “truth” about Mary Smith. At that very moment, however, Clay’s bedroom door is opened from wherein a gun shoots Tennant dead and grazes Clay in the hip, the gun tossed back into the living room, where Clay reaches for it, manages to stand, and checks out his bedroom, finding his friend Tim missing with his window wide open.

     If I already seem to be running out breath and verbs in describing the plot, I have to report that what I’ve expressed so far is simply the surface of such a labyrinthine plot that at several moments in the movie even Clay gives up his search for answers between drinks. I won’t even bother to attempt to describe the entire story, at least at this point. Let’s just say, before you can blink Mantin has returned and the police are called in to investigate Tennant’s murder, for which Clay himself is now a suspect.

       Luckily the writers have kept in enough encounters between Mantin and Clay to hold our attention for a while, but alas even the most attentive of whodunit addicts couldn’t have come up with a solution as convoluted as that created by the usually brilliant writer Howard J. Green and his associate Edward Kaufman.

       Let’s just say, that in the midst of our confusion, Clay, much as Nick does in The Thin Man, invites everyone for a get-together, although this time with a hitch. He tells all his suspects that he’s found Mary Smith in a Washington Square Apartment, but asks them to meet him back at his own apartment to where he is immediately taking her. His presumption is, for some reason, that all the innocents will rush to his apartment, while the guilty party will hurry off to the other address to kill them him and Mary off before they can reveal the truth.

     That truth involves yet another woman with whom Clay once had an affair, Jerry Classon (Vivien Oakland), who since their long-ago liaison has had dozens of boyfriends and handful of husbands, the current one of whom is Robert Classon (Ralph Morgan). Among her ex-boyfriends, it turns out, is a murdered man and another man under arrest for his murder, whose lawyer just happens to be Jerry’s current husband Robert. The missing Mary, formerly Alice, we discover blames her father’s downfall on one of them and has been manhandled by the other, going incognito for no other reason that she doesn’t want to have to testify in court with regard to either of these monsters.

     Meanwhile, back at the house where Clay hasn’t really found Mary, but plays a record of her singing from another room, his friend Tim shows up, desperate to find his Alice. A strange woman also appears, gun in hand and ready to shoot both Clay and Ms. Mantin dead if they don’t immediately reveal Mary’s whereabouts. Fortunately, Police Inspector Doremus has also decided to attend the wrong address, saving Clay’s life by shooting the strange female intruder dead.

     And who is this strange woman? Why, of course, Robert Classon, dressed totally in drag and wearing a complete latex head piece—just like the one Robin Williams wore years later in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)—to match his other female apparel. He is, so the logic goes, out to kill both of his current wife’s former lovers for reasons for which I haven’t a clue. Why he dresses as a woman I have no clue. And why, near the very end of the film, when poor Tim is about to leave empty-handed, Clay tells him that he has found Mary/Alice who is waiting for him at the police station, I haven’t a clue, particularly given Clay’s explanation of how he found her address apparently through her bank accounts—since earlier in the story, the theater director makes a point of telling us that she demanded to paid only in cash. In fact, there so many open holes in this movie of which I haven’t a clue that I might be tempted to start up the process to solve the mystery all over again.

      Why do we never see Mary? Might she have actually been Robert Classon? Might Clay be lying to his best friend, having never tracked down his Alice, our mysterious Mary. Did Alice, in fact, ever exist? These are all absurd questions obviously. The film has declared that the mystery has been solved without resolving the clues.

     Moreover, by film’s end, we discover that without our even knowing it Clay and Donna Mantin have finally married, she calling her father to tell him she’s staying overnight in Clay’s bed. So despite the sudden appearance of a seemingly LGBTQ scene, a drag queen dragged into the story for no reason than the writers thought it might be fun, Star of Midnight proves itself to be a solid heterosexual story after all. The LGBTQ figure, Classon momentarily at least appearing as a transsexual man, has justifiably been done away with. And Breen has won another battle in his war against queers. 

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

 

Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster | Mary’s Little Lamb / 1935

applauding percy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shamus Culhane and Al Eugster (animators), Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster (director) Mary’s Little Lamb / 1935

 

Animators Shamus Culhane and Al Eugster, in particular, were pernicious in their apparently near-homophobic attitudes toward effeminate male figures and gay men in general. Not only were their part of a larger team of Ub Iwerks cartoonists that worked on the Flip the Frog sequence Soda Squirt which I describe above, but in 1935 inked the nursey rhyme-inspired animated short Mary’s Little Lamb which satirized not only the idea of a lamb—the true hero of this cartoon skit—for following Mary, clearly a rule-abiding teacher’s pet (she plays the piano for a couple of the last day of school performances, including the teacher’s strange gyrations) but for desiring to go to school, where the poor students serve merely as bobble-heads to the teacher’s empty-headed antics. It is only the lamb (voiced by Jack Mercer) that shows any humility and embarrassment for the perverse classroom antics—he blushes twice—and Mary’s little lamb not only gives the best of the musical/dancing performances but ultimately gets the better of the straw-headed authoritarian by transferring all the coal-dust it has acquired in hiding in the school’s coal stove onto the teacher and, in what surely might be interpreted as a racist ending, turning the schoolteacher black, one of many cartoon comedies’ depictions of blackface performers.

      Just as obscene, moreover, is their capricious introduction into the school performances of another of the schoolteacher’s student “pets,” Little Percy, who saunters out like a swish and proceeds for 37 seconds, an eternity in cartoon time, to wave and flutter his hands about in the air, to curtsey and bow and generally turn his effeminate manners into a dance so engaging that even the cows, peeking in through the windows, swish up a short dance and the students at his meaningless performance’s end, all dip and dive in imitation of his pansy manners.

     This is an incredibly strange put down of an effeminate young boy given the fact that it means the animators had to spend long hours in drawing hundreds of images simply to bring him to life in a scene that even if one thought mocking youthful effeminacy were absolutely hilarious isn’t actually very funny after the first few seconds. If you can ignore its mean intentions, Percy’s hand dance is rather rhythmically charming, a bit like a conductor becoming the focus of the score he is leading which others to perform, in this case the cows and the final mockery of his fellow students.

     It almost appears, given their work here and in the earlier Flip the Frog film, that these two animators are obsessed by effeminate males and homosexuality in general. One wonders why both of these married men—Eugster married to his wife “Chick” (Hazel) for 61 years, and Culhane married 4 times, having two sons with his third wife, Maxine Marx (daughter of Chico)—were so utterly fixated on “sissies.”

    Soon after this work Culhane, who also went by the first name of Jimmy, served as the lead animator for the Walt Disney production of the animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), which became a seminal work for the gay British codebreaker and computer creator Alan Turing, who near his death told friends that he always imagined himself as Snow White, falling into the sleep called death to someday be awakened by Prince Charming, which now we might imagine as disguised in the mask of the not-so-always-charming computer industry which he imagined and longed for. Even later, working for the Walter Lantz company, Culhane helmed the group that created the ground-breaking Woody Woodpecker cartoon The Barber of Seville (1944). Eugster also worked on Snow White and was one of the creators of one of my favorite cartoon figures, Felix the Cat. It is simply inexplicable, accordingly, that these two brilliant creators so utterly enraged by the gay sissy stereotype that they would devote so many sketches to their creation and mockery.

     As Harvey Fierstein commented in the film The Celluloid Closet, he actually likes these sissy portrayals, suggesting that it’s better to portray gays in some form than in none. And we all know that it was the drag queens and transsexual figures who were at the center of the 1969 Stonewall Riots which helped to transform LGBTQ politics providing a new openness and sexual acceptance.

      An elderly figure interviewed in Albert J. Bressan’s important film of 1977, Gay USA commented on cross-dressers and the effeminate gay figures of his day on the anniversary of the first Stonewall march:  “There were always those among us who stood out as being what people describe as outrageously gay. We’d always say “So and so was not for ‘streetwear.’ You couldn’t be seen walking with them down the street. They’ve always been there and,” he admits, “gave us cover. We could stand on the side and say that’s what a gay person looks like. But today we can join them, march with them, and hold hands.”

     Ironically, the standard gay cry of “woo-woo” and applause his fellow students grant Percy at the end of his fluttering hand dance may be truly deserved if not genuine in the minds of the creators of this cartoon. Imitation is, just perhaps, one of the highest of compliments from this perspective, and the entire classroom’s imitation of Little Percy is just maybe the answer to the bigotry with which the same cartoon may have been created.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster | Sinbad the Sailor / 1935

oh hi-de-ho!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ub Iwerks, Stephen Bosustow, Shamus Culhane, Al Eugster, Ed Love, Grim Natwick, Irven Spence, Mary Tebb, and Bernard Wolf (animators), Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster (directors) Sinbad the Sailor / 1935

 

Sailing quietly on the serene seas, Sinbad the sailor suddenly spots a group of pirates singing and dancing a shanty. This short cartoon almost repeats parts of the 1932 Disney Silly Symphony work, King Neptune, with a quick switch of the frame to a lone queer with rouged cheeks, orange hair, and large hoop earrings, echoing their chorus of “Yo-ho-de-hi-de-ho!” Several knives are tossed at him, pinning him to the doorway, just as the Hays Code might have, but somehow didn’t. Although, just as in most of the “Panze” films of the first part of the 1930s, this crooner appears without any engagement with the rest of the characters and is bullied for singing his rendition of the pirate song.

    For the next 6 1/2 minutes Sinbad spots the pirate ship just as they spot Sinbad. The pirates shoot cannon balls at the approaching ship, which the world sailor easily bats back at them. But recognizing that he is outnumbered, he attempts to sail in the opposite direction, the pirates catching up with him, dropping anchor and engaging in hand-to-hand battle.

    When the pirate captain finds himself alone, he picks up a cannon ball, and mows Sinbad’s crew down like bowling pins, forcing the famous sailor to walk the plank.     

     Sinbad almost drowns, but he is saved by his famous parrot, and he is able to swim ashore a deserted island which he imagines inhabited by dancing hula girls, introduced, one suspects, to make it clear that Sinbad is a decent heterosexual.

     On this same island he discovers the pirates busy digging hole for the stolen treasure, and climbing a tree to observe them, Sinbad throws a cocoanut first at one and then at another, tricking them to believe they are slugging their own compatriots, which leads briefly to a brawl.

     Eventually, however, an angry ape who eats from the same tree, tosses him to the ground revealing his existence, once again, to the pirates, who tie him up to a tree. The tree is actually the leg of a giant, fire-breathing roc, who, unable to shake off Sinbad from his leg, takes his vengeance on the pirates before he flies away with Sinbad still attached.

    Once again, the parrot saves him by untying his friend, the gigantic bird dropping both our favorite sailor and the treasure with which he has also absconded.

     Sinbad activates a parachute hidden away in his turban and lands safely on the open treasure chest, enjoying his victory with the parrot until they discover the cigars they have begun to smoke are the inferior kind, as in a joke, exploding in their faces.

    I basically agree with a commentator on Letterboxd who goes under the name of Cinemasurf: “Maybe it was the pipe, or the very large pirate trying to relieve ‘Sinbad’ of his ship of treasure, but I just kept thinking this was a ‘Popeye’ cartoon only without any spinach!      

    UCLA has nicely restored this 1935 film with funds from ASIFA-Hollywood.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).