Matteo Pilati and Alessandro Guida | Maschile singolare (Mascarpone) / 2021

the gay divorcée, or let the sunshine in

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Paternò Raddusa, Matteo Pilati, and Alessandro Guida (screenplay), Matteo Pilati and Alessandro Guida (directors) Maschile singolare (Mascarpone) / 2021

 

One has to give Masculine Singular—the literal and I’d argue preferable translation of this Italian work—credit for arguing that the source of a gay romantic-comedy in 2021 can be a divorce rather than an endless search to find true love. Contrary to the evidence of hundreds of queer short and feature films whose characters—since the epidemic of AIDS and the possibility of gay marriage— are generally portrayed desperately seeking a boyfriend, girlfriend, or just true love, a break-up of a relationship can actually be liberating, and learning how to live with oneself and defining one own’s life might be perceived to be a positive thing. In short, directors (and co-writers with Giuseppe Paternò Raddusa) seem to recognize a time before queer films all imitated heterosexual cinematic fantasies.

     Not that the idea comes easily to the handsome Antonio (Giancarlo Commare), who, although trained as an architect, has spent the last 12 years of his young life (he’s now about 30), playing a trophy wife and household pet to Lorenzo (Carlo Calderone), whose profession is kept vague except to make it clear that he makes a good salary.

     In the first moments of this film, beautiful Antonio wakes up after apparently a luxuriously fulfilling night to find his bed-partner missing. But unlike the dread of many another gay film whose hero finds the person with whom he has just had sex has suddenly left, our hero isn’t all perturbed. His hubby has simply gone off to work, leaving him all day to go to the gym, where’s he’s ogled and hit upon by a handsome man who suggests that early in the day is the best time to visit the gym since there are only tired old men and an occasional trophy wife in attendance. “Which one are you?” he jokingly asks, Antonio responding quite seriously by flashing his wedding ring.

   The afternoon for Antonio is spent cooking and whipping up a special treat for his hubby: tiramisu, made incidentally with lady fingers, coffee, liqueur, and mascarpone cheese topped with chocolate powder, hence the English-language name of the movie, Mascarpone. Antonio makes his own lady fingers, although he is not yet convinced that making your own cheese, as his grandmother did, is absolutely necessary.

   Home from work early, Lorenzo looks exhausted and chides his lover for constantly baking up sweets. This special concoction, however, has been chosen by Antonio because he has already heard the sadness in Lorenzo’s voice earlier in a phone call.

    What he doesn’t realize is that his companion’s sadness is not about work, but about his life with Antonio. He is tired of their shallow existence and for more than a year has been seeing another man, Enrico. In short, he suddenly demands that his husband leave his house, although he’s perfectly nice about it in suggesting he will help pay for his rent if he can find a reasonably-priced room in Rome.

     Antonio is, in fact, a product of the happy-ever-after films that have generally been de rigueur since the awful demise of so many gay boys of AIDS who had lived wildly sexual independent lives, those “unhappy single men” also portrayed in the dramatic versions of a great many contemporary queer movies. Accordingly, our hero spends perhaps far too much of this otherwise charming and witty film whining about his suddenly single condition. Fortunately, he has a bestie female friend (an old-school fag-hag) Cristina (Michela Giraud), who has now found he own boyfriend in the laughable but loyal fool Paolo (Albert Paradossi) who becomes the butt of the gay boys’ jokes. And she, in turn, provides support as he goes on the search for a new room, finally finding one with a true old-fashioned bohemian and sexual slut, Denis (Eduardo Valdarnini), who may also be a semi-prostitute and drug seller who works from the pleasant place he has inherited from his aunt.

    It’s clear from the start that he likes Antonio, but the rent is a bit steep at 200 euro a week. Antonio, however, still hasn’t assimilated the fact that his move is a permanent thing, imagining that in a week or two, a month at most Lorenzo will want him back. But although even Lorenzo finds 800 euro a month a high price to pay, he’s willing to pay it just to allow Enrico to replace Antonio in his bed.

    Fortunately, the slightly effeminate Denis, who walks around day and night in a dressing robe when he isn’t nude, takes a special liking to his new roommate, introducing him to his friend Luca, a baker who owns a small pastry shop and is seeking an new apprentice; that he just happens to be the man who seemingly propositioned Antonio in the gym seems to have slipped Luca’s memory, and fortunately does not become part of the plot except that we know that at least our boy’s new boss finds him attractive.

    Antonio, moreover, even though he somewhat resents his role as apprentice—which means simply following the rote rules of bread-baking, sweeping-up floors of spilled flour, and layering cakes with frosting—is surprisingly capable and even obedient. If nothing else, it’s clear he prefers baking to designing buildings.

     Denis, moreover, also takes the boy under his wing, suggesting that instead of bemoaning his now empty life that, as critic Steven Warner observed in his Online review, “inspires the aimless young lad to ‘find his light’ before becoming engulfed by yet another lover’s shadow.”

     Quite humorously but with sufficient doses of sexual allure, Antonio gradually begins to explore the world of Grindr, competing with Denis in the apartment space with the stream of handsome young Roman studs who find their way to his bedroom. And at one point, now that Antonio is no longer averse to pulling down his pants and has removed what he earlier described to Denis as the cobwebs in his ass, pastry chef and apprentice suddenly discover they have the hots for each other and in a few moments of quiet in the kitchen meet up in a truly hot scene of sex. And even if his first threesome is an absolute failure, a later reincarnation of the sexual trio seems quite delightful when shared with Luca and Denis.

   Several critics, inevitably, found these numerous one-night stands and Denis’ flamboyant life “sad” or “unfortunate,” but I suggest they have simply forgotten the fun that open sex used to be before we had to worry every moment about whether or not we were infecting our bodies with something that might quickly lead to death. Denis keeps screaming out about the abundance of condoms around the house in case his younger charge might have forgotten to protect himself, but basically the formerly regretful and fretful loyalist rediscovers his mojo in being something of a sexual maverick to the current trend of seeking out a mate for life; even with a cute young man, Eugenio (Vittorio Magazzù), appears to want to settle down with him, when the boy doesn’t answer his next day texts for several days, Antonio politely shows him the now revolving door.

     Just as importantly, Antonio appears to have made a career choice, joining a pastry baking class with a famed chef Orsola (Barbara Chichiarelli) who instead of encouraging his vague pleasure in sweets helps to install in him the realization of him just how much hard work it takes to follow the strict rules of rolling out and patting up dough, layering cakes, and depending upon the timer for the oven instead of the instincts of the eye and heart.

     In short, our hero discovers just how liberating and intense it is to live a single life defined by attempting to attain what one really wants. If the film was a bit weighed down previously by Antonio’s societally defined needs, it becomes almost buoyant when he begins to explore what he personally desires. That is until he meets Thomas (Lorenzo Adorni), a perfectly beautiful photo-journalist with whom Antonio has great sex in bed who suggests Antonio join him in his home of Milan filled with the perks of a foundation-provided mansion, pool, and surrounding garden that looks like a forest. In fact, Thomas seems to be the perfect mate for Antonio, and our handsome baker almost takes the bait, aggravating Luca, who suddenly appears surprisingly possessive about his former “apprentice,” (spoiler: in the 2024 cinematic follow up this work, Mascarpone: The Rainbow Cake, we discover that their may have been more between Luca and Antonio than imagined in the first film).

     So too does our previously fun-loving friend begin to ignore the wise observations of Denis, and even begins to dismiss the restrictions put upon by his learnèd pastry chef. We fear he is falling back into the shadows of a Milan moon instead of coming out into its famed golden light of the Roman sun.

    You can’t blame the writers/directors for staging a kind of deus ex machina with the sudden death, off-stage, of Denis, who suffers the crash of a car into his meagre bike, and the appearance, just as unexpected, of a mother who appears to care less about her son’s death than finding where he kept his money; after all, it costs a lot for her to rent such a space, she proclaims, making it suddenly clear that Denis needed the money he made from sex and drugs just to keep a roof over his head, offering up some of that space to Antonio for far less than what it might cost. Just maybe Denis has lied to protect the innocent.

     That sad event, Luca’s shared grieving for the loss of his friend, and the continued council of Cristina forces Antonio to explain to his potential new husband that he knows he might be happy with Thomas but he is not yet ready to give up what he has just begun to discover, including the fact that homemade mascarpone really does taste better.

   He passes the grueling test of the pastry chef and runs into a once again frowning Lorenzo, who having been handed the same quick goodbye from Enrico that he once awarded Antonio, suggests his former “lover come back.” But this Antonio is no longer a fool ready to return to his role as a houseboy. He politely gives Lorenzo a quick kiss and, as Dionne Warwick so succinctly suggests, “walks on by.” This is, after all, at heart a comedy of self-discovery, not an old-fashioned rom-com which ends up at the altar with a societal or institutionalized definition of the rest of one’s life.

 

Los Angeles, September 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).  

George King | The Crimes of Stephen Hawke / 1936

nasty, common people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Celestin, Frederick Hayward, H. F. Maltby, Tod Slaughter, and Paul White (screenplay), George King (director) The Crimes of Stephen Hawke / 1936

 

The third is a series of collaborations between George King and the British horror star Tod Slaughter, following Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn (1935) and Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936), The Crimes of Stephen Hawke was one of the many films made to fulfill the quota of homemade products that the British Government had required of the film industry, in part as a response to the glut of the US films monopolizing the movie theaters of England.

    It begins in one of the strangest manners imaginable, with the Music Hall duo of Flotsam and Jetsam, consisting of the Anglo-Australian team of Bentley Collingwood Hilliam and Malcolm McEachern—precursors of Michael Swann and Donald Flanders—who perform witty songs with rhymed couplets about the daily news. Following this “skit” is a character figure, Mr. Henry Hopkins who has been selling “cats meat for 50 years,” with somewhat bawdy jokes such as that about an elderly woman who absolutely loved pussies. The final act is by the actor of the film, Tod Slaughter who discusses the numerous crimes he has committed in the past—on stage of course.

     Then begins the film proper which is about a mean-spirited moneylender, Stephen Hawke (Slaughter) who in the very first scene is already up to no good. As Mark Davis Walsh describes it: “He’s casing the mansion of rich nobleman Lord Trelawny with an eye to a heist. But skulking under the radar isn’t really in his special set of skills and he’s spotted by the old goat’s annoying adolescent son.”

     Confronted with the unpleasant Little Lord Fauntleroy who immediately informs him “My father doesn’t keep a garden for nasty, common people like you to look at,” Hawke, obviously offended, lures the nasty boy to him by asking not if the boy might like some candy or to see a magic trick, but “Have you ever seen a Paradoxical Tarradidilum?” It works perfectly, as the child comes forward and the monstrous Hawke crushes him to death. And so we learn immediately in this film of no deep secrets that Hawke is the notorious “Spine Breaker,” with hands so strong that they leave red marks as a signature upon the several bodies he squashes to death.

      Hawke returns his standard pair of spectacles to his face, crawls into the carriage that his dear friend—perhaps his only true friend or maybe even somewhat more than that—the one-legged, one-eyed, hunched-back coachman/servant Nathaniel (Ben Soutten) has held waiting for him, and rushes back to his town, irritated that he was unable to carry through with his “business deal.”

      Had the movie kept up the campy humor of these first scenes, it might have been truly a gem. But nearly everything else after, alas, becomes far too tame and obvious. Now that we know the identity of the monster, we need only sit back and await until the others of this busy story find out.

      First up is his lovely daughter Julia (Marjorie Taylor). We quickly discern that she’s not his real daughter which, thank heaven, removes her from the possibility of having inherited insanity (a bit like Mortimer Brewster’s necessary discovery that he’s not really a Brewster in Arsenic and old Lace). Why he has adopted her—one of the few kindly actions of his entire life—and why he has remained so very devoted to her is never explained, one of the very few questions of this tale that is never answered. She shows up as his office and, unable to find him in, goes next door to the offices of his good friend, the shipping magnate Joshua Trimble (DJ Williams), who respects and admires Hawke for his past willingness to loan his company money, which since he still survives he obviously paid back quickly.

     His son and partner Matthew (Eric Portman), moreover, is in love with Julia and she with him, despite the fact that as one of the Letterboxd commentators notes, “Portman with a mustache and effeminately curly hair wearing tights... makes me wish he was in more period pieces. Gainsborough, where were you when we (the gays) needed you?” He’s actually wearing high breeches of the 18th century, not tights, but he is indeed the most beautiful figure in this film, and throughout his tepid love scenes with Julia (Taylor)—particularly when he has determined to track down and kill her father, deciding to end his relationship with Julia forever—Portman barely attempts to disguise the fact that, in real life, he was homosexual.

     The very night after doing away with the young boy, moreover, Hawke has arranged a special ball for his daughter, inviting several wealthy people, including Lord Brickhaven (George M. Slater) and his renowned emerald ring. Did I say, invited? Let me correct that, he has demanded the appearance of Brickhaven, despite his plans to be elsewhere, insisting his coachman find a way to get him there. At the party, we learn that other than her constant dancing partner, Julia has another man, Miles Archer (Gerald Barry), the chief of police, interested in marrying her; or, as a friend of Hawke’s insists, is determined to marry her. Hawke makes it clear, such a marriage would be permitted over his dead body.

      It surely is no surprise that Brickhaven dies of a crushed spine at the party, his emerald having gone missing, with his coachman declaring to the guests the murderer is the host himself. Everyone is predictably incredulous.

      Only Joshua Trimble is highly disturbed that the “Spine Breaker” must be someone of their own set to have been able to access the Lord at Hawke’s party, and he confronts his friend the very next day. Hawke, however, having just received a new piece of sculptor, sits toying with it, not at all interested in Trimble’s worries. When Trimble reminds his friend that the coachman had called him the “Spine Breaker,” Hawke breaks the marble sculpture’s head off, forcing the shipper to declare “Your hands! They have sinews of steel.” Trimble now recognizes the truth, carefully backing out of Hawke’s office, and losing his life for his knowledge when he is crushed to death in his bed the very next night.

     Fortunately, he has expressed his suspicions to Matthew, and Matthew now confronts the ogre with the fact that his father had left some secret information to be read only after his burial, information his son has hidden on his father’s dead body. When Hawke shows up to steal even from the corpse that evening, he finds what at first appears to be ghost of his dead friend, actually Matthew rising up to declare he now has the proof he needed, and giving him the opportunity to run before he hunts him down.

     It is at this point that Matthew abandons Julia, as he chases after her father to bring him to justice for his father’s murder. And the rest of the story focuses on a far different vision of Hawke, a terrified man trying to outrun his nemesis, a man who would prefer to spend time in prison for a minor act of thievery than to have to face his younger foe. Although Matthew tracks him down to an inn far out of London and even follows him back toward London, the track goes cold when Hawkes is imprisoned, and all believe him now to be dead.

     In the meantime, the police chief Archer has beaten a confession out of Brickhaven’s coachman and confronts Julia with her father’s guilt. He will save Hawke from imprisonment only if she agrees to marry him. What’s a girl to do when her lover is trying to murder her beloved father and the other reveals him to be a monster but promises, nonetheless, to save him? Obviously, she chooses family devotion over any moral principles.

     But when Hawke gets word that she is now marrying Archer, he finds a way to escape and threatens to destroy not only Archer but anyone who dares to stand in his way. Matthew also returns in shock that his beloved Julia has allowed herself to be blackmailed by Archer.

      Frankly, it is difficult to see what Matthew sees in the girl. She’s certainly no beauty and even knowing the truth will have nothing to do with her former finance as long as he is determined to seek revenge. But even Matthew is willing to overlook certain matters about her father. As he puts it: “Julia, Julia, my darling, listen to me. I know that he's the notorious 'Spine-Breaker' and he ought to be dead a hundred times but I also know that his death cannot bring my father back to life. But alive or dead it cannot alter my love for you.” Is there any man of principal left in this motion picture?

      Hawke’s return at least lets him chew a little longer on the scenery, giving it some last gripping moments before he crushes the rest of the story’s spine. The last we see of him before he falls to his death is on a crenelated corner of his mansion’s roof, lobbing whole bricks at his pursuers.

      Below, near death, he is comforted by his daughter, who having discovered he is not her real father, still embraces him with love. But it is the cry of despair of his servant Nathaniel and his final kiss that truly surprises us: clearly there was more going on in their many nights together than we might have ever imagined.

      Back at the broadcasting studio where this all began, the music hall-like performers are all asleep. Is the director suggesting that the rest of us might have already joined them or, at least will now be given permission to do so?

      This film can’t be described as a truly gay film, but in its campy, over-the-top performances and its somewhat perverted declarations of love, it most definitely is a queer work. And naturally these 1930’s works by King and the later Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s, which have been tagged the “cinema of excess” created problems for both British and particularly later US censors.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

David Hand | Three Little Wolves / 1936

seduced by bo peep

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Cottrell, Joe Grant, and Bob Kuwahara (screenplay), Norm Ferguson, Fred Moore, Eric Larson, and Bill Roberts (animation), David Hand (director) Three Little Wolves / 1936

 

Disney’s second episode in the lives of the Three Little Pigs focuses, in a much more serious mode, with allegorical apparatus, on the Three Live Wolves and their father The Big Bad Wolf.

     In the beginning of this 9-minute adventure, The Big Bad Wolf is teaching his boys, in a heavy German accent, selected words about the parts of the pig and how good they are to eat. The little wolfies are no better in minding their daddy, however, than are Practical Pig’s brethren in taking heed of his advice, and they quickly break up their lesson of pork parts with a slew of sling shots sent to their daddy’s crown and bottom, singing that favorite ditty “Who’s Afraid of the Big Wolf” to their own father.

     Meanwhile, Practical Pig is once again at work, this time building a large contraption he calls the “Wolf Pacifier,” a machine to punish Bad Wolves who try to eat him and fellow brothers, Fifer and Fiddler. Just as in The Big Bad Wolf the other two pigs make fun of his new project, blowing the horn he’s left in the woods as a call for help against the wolf. This time he comes running, but warns them, “Someday the Wolf will get you and then you’ll be a fix. You’ll the blow the horn and I won’t come. I’ll think it’s one of your tricks.”

      They giggle, blow the horn once more, and scurry off into the forest.

      This time Bad Wolf and his pups play out another drag drama, as the Wolf dresses up as Little Bo Peep, truly in tears over her lost sheep, who turn out to be the three little wolves in sheep’s clothing. The naïve little pigs chase them all the way back to the wolves’ cave, as Bo Beep follows, entering behind them, locking the door, and swallowing the key.

      As if in total remonstrance of the new Production Code Administration’s proclamations the Disney artists provide Fifer and Fiddler with dirty minds as they turn dark red, presuming Bo Beep’s motives have to do with sex.

       The Wolf wastes no time, however, turning back into himself and, along with his young ones, stuffing the pigs into a roasting pan with apples and turnips. In the previous chase the pigs have attempted to blow the horn, but when Practical Pig finally hears it, just as he warned, he believes the call to have been in jest and goes back to work.

     By this time the little wolves have the horn and one of the cubs blows it. Now suddenly knowing what’s at stake, the pigs respond “That’s a sissy blow”—surely another poke at Breen and his decree against even mentioning pansies in film. The challenge, of course, is taken up by the Bad Wolf himself, as he blows magnificently, finally bringing their brother to the rescue.

     Practical Pig arrives with his new cart, pretending to be an Italian grocer selling fresh tomatoes. When The Big Bad Wolf shouts out, “Why let me have it!” Practical pig awards him a face full of ripe tomatoes, inducing the Wolf to chase him into his new contraption. There, through endless Rube Goldberg-like devices, he tortures the Wolf, finally tar and feathering him and sending him off into space in a canon, the little wolves racing off to find him.

      The Three Little Pigs end the piece patriotically, Fifer on flute, Fiddler playing a drum, a Practical Pig waving a white flag, the Wolf’s Bo Peep bloomers.

       As Geoffrey Cocks in his 2004 book The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust has argued, along with others, this Disney cartoon also contains a pre-war message to Germany and the US alliances in Europe. Although I rarely rely on Wikipedia for my sources, their entry on this film nicely summarizes the short film’s allegorical statements:

 

“While Disney produced the sequels in order to capitalize on the success of the Three Little Pigs as characters, this film in particular was also a symbolic message about the threatening danger of European fascism, and can be seen as an indication of the levels of fear and patriotism it aroused in the American populace. In the opening scene, the Big Bad Wolf is instructing his three rowdy wolf pups in "German", pointing to a chart of pork cuts and saying "Ist das nicht ein Sausage Meat", etc., reinforcing the interpretation that he is a stand-in for Adolf Hitler.

      While the hapless Fifer and Fiddler have their naval garb, musical instruments, and professed bravado—a possible critique of European military allies who were unable to stop Hitler's advances—their confidence cannot save them from being trussed and on the verge of being deposited in the oven by the time that Practical Pig comes to their rescue. Practical Pig, the industrious "American" brother, in workman's overalls, relies on the "Italian" character for distraction, and while the Wolf is focused on his free sample of tomatoes, he is pulled into an elaborate mechanical contraption, which points to the idea that technological superiority is the secret to winning the impending war. At one point, while receiving the mechanized pummeling from the machine, the Wolf's hair is parted and slicked down the center, producing a brief resemblance to Hitler.”

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

 

Mark Sandrich | Follow the Fleet / 1936

facing the music

by Douglas Messerli

 

Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor (screenplay, with dialogue by Lew Lipton, based on the Shore Leave by Hubert Osborne), Mark Sandrich (director) Follow the Fleet / 1936

 

After two of the most brilliant dance films of all time, The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers inexplicably took on a film which stripped Astaire of his elegant tuxedo and ties and his hilarious associates such as Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Helen Broderick, and Erik Rhodes, and plopped him down as a lowly sailor struggling throughout the work to get back on shore. While writers Allan Scott and Dwight Taylor has previously created remarkable farces of wit, suddenly they turned their attention to creating stale gags and a plot that took them in far too many different directions without any significant results except for the lovely, out of place, last number, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” Those words indeed seem to best summarize Astaire and Rogers position in this ineffectual musical in which the dancing duo basically took second billing.

     I love and respect Randolph Scott as an actor, but if anybody had suggested that he might be the star of a musical in which he was named Bilge Smith (when I first saw this film as a youth, I hadn’t really gotten to know Scott’s work and life yet) I would have laughed. That the lovely Harriet Hilliard—the future Harriet Nelson—would be the star of any movie is something that perhaps even she would have found incredible, particularly given that the major song assigned this later all-American perfect mother was “Get Thee Behind Me Satan.” I wouldn’t have imagined that Harriet Nelson, or that her character in Follow the Fleet, Connie Martin, even knew Satan, let alone might deign to talk with him.

     And despite the fact that the two previous Rogers and Astaire dance-a-thons has been filled with gay jokes and camp humor while Joseph Breen and his Production Code thugs were tromping around Hollywood in full force, in Follow the Fleet it appears the Hays Board had caught with the writers Scott and Taylor to make it clear they would no longer permit such carryings on, which perhaps “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” one of Irving Berlin’s oddest works (although later brilliantly sung by Ella Fitzgerald) commemorates.

      Any LGBTQ crumbs left in this basically humorless film were given to Astaire, a man throughout his career basically kept free from any gay association.* But his one suggestive comic line is at least worth repeating.

      As his character Bake Baker enters the Paradise Dancing Club, he pays entry for himself and sailor friends but buys only one 25-cent ticket for himself, the cashier querying him: “Don'tcha friends dance?” Bake responding, “Nah. They're underage. I hold 'em on my lap.”

      Bilge Smith (Scott) gets to pretend he’s not the marrying kind, telling Connie, at this early moment a spinsterish-looking schoolmarm who asks him about the pretty girls he seems to be ogling: “I never given them a tumble sister. Women don’t interest me.” But, in fact, that same year, despite in 12-year on and off relationship with Cary Grant, Scott did marry Marion duPont whom he divorced in 1939.

     And in Follow the Fleet he follows Connie Martin home, Satan having won the battle, and courts the sailor-loving divorcee, Mrs. Iris Manning (Astrid Allwyn), which makes up most of the “plot,” such as it is. “Bilgy” is totally happy with Connie until she mentions that she owns a ship he might command when he leaves the navy, adding in the stipulation of marriage. In this highly sexist comedy, Smith immediately finds a reason to leave and picks up Manning on the street, leaving the poor desolate Connie behind to believe that he’ll drop in the moment the Fleet returns to San Francisco. He returns, alas, to Manning, leaving poor Connie ready to sell the ship she’s just salvaged and run back to her small former home town.

      The secondary couple of this film, Sherry Martin (Rogers) and Bake (Astaire) are already old news before the opening credits, being a former dancing duo who both are eager to join up again, with Bake especially wanting to get married and settle down. Most the of the film consists of the various ways that Bake and the Navy purposely-unintentionally keep the two apart, Bake by his attempt to control Sherry’s career—which may have been somewhat autobiographical given Astaire’s control over his own and his dancing partners’ performances and Rogers’ own attempts to move on to other dramatic roles such as the one she would hook the very next year in Stage Door, playing opposite Katherine Hepburn and Lucille Ball, the latter a minor figure in Follow the Fleet, who gets another fine comic moment. When a sailor tries to put the make on her, she responds: “Tell me, little boy, did you get a whistle or baseball bat with that suit?”

     Although Rogers gets a couple of good lines—telling her brilliant sister how to play dumb in order to get a man, “It takes a lot a brains to be dumb.”—and is awarded the opportunity to hiccup her way through one of her renditions of “Let Yourself Go,” the biggest comic scene involves the only other instance of gay humor.

      In an attempt to raise some cash, Bake offers to teach his fellow sailors how to dance. After demonstrating the basic maneuvers, he breaks them up into “dames” and “partners,” the sailors pairing off until a visiting quintet of Army brass catch the action and attempt to “break in” on the sailors’ dance mates, ending in a free-for-all chaos.

     The rest of this film, fortunately, is all dance, representing several pre-Fosse loose-limbed and even purposely clumsy-looking moves that demonstrate both Rogers’ and Astaire’s roots in modern dance, as opposed to simply vaudeville and music hall hoofing or even in ballroom struts. And, yes, finally there is one of the couple’s very best numbers, wherein we can even see the fine metal-mesh of Rogers’ dress hit Astaire across the shins, like a just punishment for their mutual failures. Seldom has an American dance number begun so darkly, as both he and she are about to commit suicide, only the discovery of one another forcing them to stop in their tracks. Like a Houdini, Astaire mesmerizes Rogers with his hands into the rhythms of a song that demands, despite the “trouble ahead,” to, “face the music and dance.”

      That somewhat cynical attitude was perhaps all Hollywood could do in 1936, given the cultural wars the US had declared on the movies.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

  

*There is still no evidence that Astaire was gay or engaged in any homosexual relationship. He worked very closely with his co-choreographer Hermes Pan, however, the two dancing all the routines together in long rehearsals, the casts and crew of the works he did with Astaire describing him as Astaire’s “other.” Pan was a closeted homosexual. Other than Astaire, Pan was also close friends with Diego Rivera and Rita Hayworth.