Louis Malle | Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) / 1958

the death of romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noël Calef, Louis Malle and Roger Nimier (screenplay), Louis Malle (director), Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) / 1958

 

Louis Malle’s wonderful first feature film, Elevator to the Gallows, is actually two movies in one. First, it is a tale of adultery and murder in the manner of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity of 14 years earlier—although the later film is far more romantically engaged, I would argue, than Wilder’s more manipulative couple, who also murder for the money. In the Malle film, moreover, the murderous couple is simply far more appealing (even though they never meet within the confines of the film itself); and, at moments, we root for them despite their transgressions, particularly when the murderer, Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) is accidentally trapped in an office elevator for the weekend; and the Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau)—the wife of the murdered capitalist—begins a frantic search for her missing lover. It is Florence’s desperate night-time street-walking, accompanied by improvised modal compositions that dominate the film, that creates the film’s sense of romantic moodiness.

      It’s clear, moreover, as Malle has explained that this part of the film is grounded in his two favorite directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson. As Malle himself notes in an interview with Philip French:

 

                   The irony is, I was really split between my tremendous

                   admiration for Bresson and the temptation to make a

                   Hitchcock-like film. So there’s something about Elevator

                   that goes from one to the other.

     Particularly in the scenes in the elevator, where the former military hero, Tavernier attempts to find a way of escape, after it has closed down for the weekend, we are reminded of Bresson’s Un condamné à mort (Malle had worked with Bresson on that film)—while the street scenes, shot mostly with only the ambient street light remind one us of a Hitchcock world somewhat akin to that of The Wrong Man, The Lodger, and even bits of Rebecca. So dark were Malle’s scenes that the studio executives originally demanded he reshoot them, despite their dreamy perfection.

      Yet Malle injects into these scenes something far more edgy than anything Hitchcock might have imagined, not only by using the remarkable jazz score—truly innovative, as Davis created the music to screen images in a single long night—but through the madness and purposelessness of Florence’s wanderings. If at first there’s something sinuous and sexy about Moreau’s stroll, it soon becomes a walk of a madwoman, with Florence muttering to herself, winding up with her desperate march becoming more and more pointless and unpredictable, given the fact that she will soon be arrested. And all this is made even more poignant since she has thought she has witnessed Julien driving off with another woman in his convertible earlier in the evening, actually the couple in his stolen car.

        These elements of the film gradually take it out of its film noir genre, and begin to push the movie in another direction that seems closer to the French New Wave. Moreover, the second, younger couple, steals the murderer’s car and temporarily takes on the identities of Mr. and Mrs. Tavernier before, finally, murdering a German couple in an outlying motel, which reminds us of something right out of Godard. But, of course, Godard had not yet made Breathless or Band of Outsiders in 1957, when Malle was filming. Here, just as in Breathless everything seems gratuitous and unexpected. Like Belmondo and Seberg the young man, Louis (Georges Poujouly) and juvenile florist’s assistant, Véronique (Yori Bertin) seem wild and unhinged, moving without premeditation from one crime to another until, pretending a romantic ending, they determine to take their own lives—and yet even fail at that.

     Louis’ appropriation of Tavernier’s identity and silly bragging about his experiences in Algeria demonstrate his own lack of self and his fears for his future. His murdering of the German couple, more importantly, seems entirely without purpose, except perhaps for the Benckers’ recognition that he and Véronique are youthful frauds.

     On the other hand, symbolically, the murder of the Benckers makes all the sense in the world, for, in shooting them, Louis is killing off the past.

     This second film within the film, accordingly, seems more like a nouvelle vague movie than many of the films of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette after it. Malle, as he himself explains, did not like joining groups, and he was never a reviewer for or associated with the French film magazine, Cahiers du cinema, home to most of the group’s filmmakers. Moreover, few of his other films, except perhaps for Zazie dans le Métro, represent such an abandonment of logic (although one could surely point to his earlier student movie Crazéologie of 1954, based on the French Absurdist theater). And even Malle’s younger brother Vincent admits Malle was, in many ways, connected to the New Wave.

     In Elevator to the Gallows, however, it seems more apparent, over time, that the two elements of this film are purposely in conflict with each other. If the murderous lovers kill to allow themselves a new future, the second pair of murderers are trying, as I note above, to destroy the past. Yet we all know that fate will not permit the older couple to relive their lives, and as the film ends, both realize that, as Florence says, they will be given “no more ageing,”  that their past acts have terminated their futures. If Louis and Véronique are given similar prison sentences (in the strangely chauvinist French logic, Tavernier will get only 10 years for the actual murder, while Florence will probably serve 20, neither of them, despite the US title, going to the gallows), the younger couple can perhaps truly begin new lives after. If Louis can convince the jury, moreover, that his own life was threatened (the German was pointing what looked like a gun at him), perhaps he and his girlfriend might even get off with lighter sentences. And, in that sense, youth, in this movie, have truly killed off the old and its notions of romance. Indeed, the pictures from Julien and Florence’s romance (remaining on Tavernier’s mini-camera) determine their guilt, while somewhat exonerating the younger, more brutal, couple.

       Despite planning out almost every moment of their crime beforehand, the older, romantically-linked couple end up more tortured and punished than the younger couple who acted out their murder with a spontaneous meaninglessness.

      Throughout the film, as critics such as Terrence Rafferty (and even Malle himself) have noted, the director goes out of his way to show a city that, if not futuristic, is at least modern—unlike most of the real Paris we all know and love. The moderne motel was so different from anything Paris had to offer that Malle and his crew had to travel to Normandy to film those scenes. Clearly in this 24 year-old director’s vision, the new inevitably wins out over the old, unpredictability over the predictable film tropes; mightn’t one even add, perhaps, Bresson wins out over Hitchcock?

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2016).

William E. Jones | The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography / 1998

fulfilling the capitalist demand for sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

William E. Jones (director) The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography / 1998 

 

Over the years, in Massillon (1991), V.O (2006), Tearoom (2007), Pyschic Driving (2014), Rejected (2017), and several other works, American artist and filmmaker William E. Jones has taken found material and recontextualized the images to create a mongrel kind of documentary that becomes what he describes as a visual essay.

     One of his earliest, The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography, from 1998, however, is not one of his most successful of such ventures. There is no doubt the rise of gay porno in eastern European countries—centered most particularly in Prague, Budapest, and Moscow—did, as he claims, mirror the fall of communism.

     Taking images from gay films made mostly in Moscow, Jones shows us the formerly Soviet youths, inexperienced with gay porno, as they peer into the camera sometimes longingly, quizzically, and often dismissively, but definitely unlike the Western porno stars going about their sexual activities as if alone or with their partners in a room with no one looking. These fresh youths stare out at us, at least in Jones’ images, they are interviewed, often through a translator, while the director checks them out like they were prize animals or slaves up for auction, their mouths opened and explored with greedy adult fingers, the camera running down their bodies—although Jones takes images focusing mostly on the faces, in reality the camera in the full pornographic scenes here depicted roamed their buttocks (the fingers equally exploring their asses), and ending up with their erect penises either self-masturbated or sucked by the older men—while asking them questions regarding their experience with gay sex, their attitudes about being featured in gay porn, and their preferred sexual preferences (masturbating, fucking, sucking, being fucked, or involving more kinky activities).

     Almost always these young boys claim they have never before had gay sex but are willing to engage in it if they are sufficiently paid, that they are willing to masturbate and be fellated, but being straight are not open to sucking or being fucked. But, if the price is right, they are willing to go there as well.

     Given the cheaper cost of a gay body in Eastern Europe and the fact that many of these young men and even far younger boys not put on display in Jones’ collation, have run away from home or been kicked out for their homosexuality, they are what can only be described as a bargain, their directors almost drooling at the fact that suddenly they and their camera readily have available all this youthful flesh to sell to waiting customers in the West, particularly to German and Scandinavian admirers—and, of course, those like myself and Jones (the director worked for a while in a Los Angeles video store) in the US.

     As Jones observes: “When poor white people suddenly found themselves treated the way people who are not white have always been treated, they took this to be an outrageous humiliation. The result was a recrudescence of racist, nationalist politics.”

     As the director notes, it is not accidental that their bodies are often posed with props such a portraits of Vladimir Lenin or a book by Leonid Brezhnev or dressed in Soviet and post-soviet military clothing.

     Their stares, he argues, reveal the “atmosphere of coercion” that pervades these tapes. But, at the same time, it is also clear that some see it as a far superior way to survive than the hard work of their parents in factories and sometimes even forced labor. Some of these young men clearly willingly played along with their porno handlers deriving pleasure from the filmed sexual acts.

     Yet, ultimately, Jones’ brief essay does not go deep enough. His particular selection of portraits were taken primarily from one source which also usually displayed these boys pissing and being masturbated by a heavy-set man. But there were dozens of pornographers, as commentator Mike Kennedy points out in his brief reaction to this film on Letterboxd, including William Higgins, the several local pornographers described in Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy, Not Angels but Angels (1994), Body without Soul (1996), and Mandragora (1997), and the far slicker and more westernized companies such as CzechBoys, Bel Ami, and Lucas Entertainment, where the boys, appearing to enjoy a multitude of sexual encounters, behaved much like Western porn stars.

     It is not that Jones’ conclusions are wrong, but the examples he has chosen represent just a very small part of a radical shift in the values, social, religious, and sexual, that occurred with the rise of Brezhnev and the fall of the Soviet regime. Directors like Wrodecki and Robin Campillo in Eastern Boys (2013), moreover, explore the same territory far more comprehensively, and I would argue, demand a deeper emotional response.

    Yes, these Eastern boys suffered their interviews and their porn shoots for the sake, primarily, of money in order to survive, yet as Kennedy perceptively argues:

 

“The interview tapes, which could also be edited together and used as filler or sold separately, are little different from the interview tapes that US porn directors like Dirk Yates were filming with US marines in San Diego prior to them shooting gay sex scenes. The performers all say that they are gay-for-pay and inexperienced in homosexual sex and are doing it for the money. While some or all of those things are probably true for some/most of these men, this is also what the American market wanted to hear (or what the producers thought they wanted to hear).”

 

     And these boys, in the end, are not so different from the amateur boys of Jones’ essay, some strongly representing their passivity in having to endure being masturbated by a gay man, a few behaving somewhat defiantly, and yet others young marines quite obviously enjoying the whole thing—as long as they were paid.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Gay Cinema blog (October 2025).

Jeremy Feight | Spa Night / 2025

frustration

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeremy Feight (screenwriter and director) Spa Night / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

Kell (Jeremy Feight) is evidently having difficulties with his relationship and, in an attempt to resolve some of his anger and tensions, seeks out an evening of relief in an expensive Manhattan spa.

     Unlike the grungy bathhouses of gay lore, where, despite the druthers of the management as in Andrew Ahn’s Los Angeles spa in the 2016 film of the same name, sex regularly goes on or, in other such institutions, is permitted and even expected, here the employees astutely attend to their clients.

    In Kell’s case, he encounters three men, two boyfriends (Christian Duran and Wyatt Fenner) to whom he is apparently not at all attracted, and one grossly overweight man (Anthony Holiday) in whom he unexpectedly seems quite interested, director Jeremy Feight’s camera focusing for several moments on the perspiration rolling down his massive body.

      But just when that attraction might perceivably result in some action, a spa employee enters, reminding Kell that it is now time to immerse his body in an icy pool, the period of the immersion timed to a precise moment when his shivering body is pulled out.

     In the showers he again encounters the heavyweight, the two prepared, at least, to engage in mutual masturbation. But at that very moment, the two boyfriends, clearly attracted as a duo to Kell, enter, spoiling his sexual pleasure.

     As Kell exits the spa, he witnesses the beefy man walking off with a short woman and the two boyfriends almost dancing off hand-in-hand down the street. Kell calls up his former lover, having evidently rethought their relationship.

     What this movie has to offer regarding LGBTQ+ entertainment, insight, or excellent filmmaking, let alone why it was included in a series of short films heralded as “original” or “innovative” in the 2025 Newfest series, I have no idea. Frankly I found US director Jeremy Feight’s little film rather repellent.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

 

Alan Clarke | Penda's Fen / 1974 [BBC TV movie]

going native

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Rudkin (screenwriter), Alan Clarke (director) Penda's Fen / 1974 [BBC TV movie]

 

There are few characters in LGBTQ movies who begin their films as unpleasant and almost loathsome as Stephen Franklin (Spencer Banks) in Alan Clarke’s 1974 TV film Penda’s Fen. The son of the local vicar, is as Patrick Dahl, writing in Screen Slate, avers: 

 

“…a prig from Worcestershire as insufferable and piteous as any precocious adolescent one might encounter in an arthouse theater or free lecture. He clings to a world of philosophical certainties that soothe the burden of youth while the adults around him patiently indulge his pedantry in the hope that a more understanding human will emerge on the other side of puberty. In school and at home, he loudly rejects what he sees as a decline in both English morality and heterodoxy in Christian thought. When a local writer voices support for striking workers against expanding corporations, Stephen claims that he’s happy the writer and his wife are unable to conceive. The young man is a deeply unpleasant figure, with none of the telltale charms or good looks that prepare an audience for a character’s imminent absolution.”

 

    Even his religious parents, the Reverend J. Franklin (John Atkinson) and his wife (Georgine Anderson) had hoped that by 18th birthday, which is approaching, that he might have grown out of his unremitting surety and utter blindness to human frailty. But rather, it seems to have gotten worse as the young smug man argues in debate that “We must stand up for our Aryan and Christian past.” His parents have also agreed to tell him something even more important, that their son is adopted, but they are fearful, given his utter blindness to reality, that it might make the situation even worse and that perhaps he might blame them for their long silence.

    The film begins with a rather lovely scene, however, Stephen listening to Sir Edward Elgar’s masterwork Gerontius, a work central to this film and whose entire composition and history is recited in order to link the numerous different strands of this film’s multitude of concerns. At the moment, however, his father is a work on his Sunday sermon, and when his mother enters his room to ask him to turn the music down, Stephen acts as if she were a demon of sorts, coldly eyeing her as he takes the record off the turntable, puts it way, and mutters: “Don’t worry mother, you’ve absolutely ruined it.”

      But there are far worse demons that have begun to bother Stephen, despite his unshakeable faith. And at night he confronts them, slowly and gradually coming to perceive through his private school confrontations with rugby, from which he is excluded along with the general fraternity of his classmates, that he is attracted to the male body, at one moment imagining stoking the face of a naked classmate who bullies him. He is particularly fond the hunky milkman, Joel (Ron Smerczak) whom he runs to greet each morning, even if Joel generally dismisses the young man for his junior military uniform and his clueless behavior.

     Even the refuge he takes in Gerontius, as revealed in the wonderful 1971 Decca recording by Benjamin Britten, hits jarring notes in its confrontation with the Angel (sung by Yvonne Minton), who in Stephen’s private struggle between what he believes to good and evil, shows up in some of his daily hallucinations.

    Increasingly, the certitude with which Stephen faces his world begins to erode through his long religious dialogues with his wise and fair-minded father, his real-life encounters with the local writer, Arne (Ian Hogg)—whom, as Dahl mentions above, he so vicerferously and rudely dismissed for supporting union strikers—and a roadside accident with Joel and his milk truck in which the rude provincial, worried about the boy’s spill from his bicycle, picks him up and momentarily checks him out as he steadies him with his hands, Stephen slowly moving his own hands down over the man’s body.

     The very landscape—in which strange things often seem to happen such as a severe burning of a young school student on a late-night outing with his friends, and which is filled with place names such as Pinvin, calling up Pendar, names after the pre-Roman king (d. 655)—begins in his mind to call out to him in pagan terms. At one point he witnesses, presumably in a hallucination, a modern dressed group of individuals willingly offering up their hands, and even those of their children to be cut off in full devotion to their mysterious leader.

     As the boy is forced each day to begin to realize his homosexuality, he gradually starts to discover all of his old actions and values as meaningless against the pull of raw desire and love, feelings he can only associate with the devil and the pagan past still alive in the hills near his home. Even playing the organ, as he does in church, seems to spilt open the earth as if pulling him into the pits of hell. Christ begs him to be released from the cross.

     Yet in that very process, Stephen slowly begins to discover a new humanity within, roots to a past over which he has no control. His parents determine to reveal that he is not their birth child, which further sends him into an emotional distress that is relieved only when he meets up in his visions with Elgar himself, an old man now resentful of his own embracement of England’s imperious past and his rude behavior, particularly when a young girl who has long practiced for the special event sings one of his songs, only to have him shout out “Stop, stop, stop! You’ve ruined by birthday!”—the girl rushing off in tears to never sing another note again. Elgar’s memory of a life not so well lived can only remind the young Stephen of his own reaction to his mother that we’ve witnessed earlier in the film.

     Finally, in his busy imagination Stephen is confronted by the visage of his own parents, evidently Jews who died in the concentration camps, who beg him to return with them, presumably his own guilt for not fully embracing his own birth identity. But he rejects them, as well as the present England with which he no longer can fully identify, linking himself instead to the roots of the civilization, its pagan past, Pendar handing over the kingdom to the young, confused Stephen who can no longer believe in all the values he has previously held in such high esteem.    

     If Rudkin’s script (one of the screenwriters, incidentally, of François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451) reaches for a vision that is far too broad, attempting to embrace aspects of everything from Elgar’s music, mystical encounters between angels and demons, and issues of British imperialism and its continuation if the provincial worlds of its everyday citizens, to a young man’s confrontation with his own queerness, paganism, and social injustice, still Penda’s Fen is a remarkable film just for having so openly dealt with homosexuality at a time when few British films dared to confront the issue except through innuendo (Douglas Hickox’s rendition of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane from 1970 and Ron Peck’s Nighthawks of 1978 being some of the few exceptions), and one of the rarest of LGBTQ pictures in which the hero ends—in this character’s case and even more remarkable event—as a fairly happy and well-adjusted individual. All one can say is that the influence of those ancient Druids and Celts is amazing.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

 

Harold Pinter | Butley / 1974

the day everything falls apart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Simon Gray (screenplay, based on his stage play), Harold Pinter (director) Butley / 1974

 

The 1974 film Butley was directed by the great playwright Harold Pinter, based on Simon Gray’s play from 1971; distributed under producer Ely Landau’s American Film Theatre series, it was released in the US in 1974 and in the United Kingdom in 1976.

     This work is certainly not very cinematic; except for a scene in Butley’s house, a trip through the underground, and couple of passing automobiles outside of the college where Ben Butley teaches, the action is restricted to his unkempt college office, which he shares with his current lover, Joey Keyston (Richard O’Callagham), a former student who is now part of the faculty, and hoping for a promotion. Joey is apparently teaching Blake, while his mentor is an Eliot scholar as a peeling photograph in the corner of the room hints.

      But despite the highly theatrically-based film, it is a wonder to watch simply because of Alan Bates’ remarkable performance as he paces the room, snarling, dismissing, pouncing on his various prey—his lover, several of his students, fellow faculty members, and Joey’s friend, a publisher, Reg Nuttall (Michael Byrne), with whom Joey has just spent a long weekend and, as Butley gradually discovers, is about to leave Ben for a new relationship.

      In many respects, Butley necessarily reminds one of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a work wherein Butley alone combines the “get the guest” behavior of both Martha and George. The claustrophobic college setting, the witty and devastatingly destructive dialogue, and even Bates’ obvious joy—expressed in a wide variety of subtle and not so subtle smiles and smirks—in insinuating and terrifying his visitors and the trapped Joey—who is foiled in his plan to escape to the library, which has temporarily closed for repairs—definitely calls up Albee’s work. Like that unhappy couple, Butley is clearly a heavy drinker who is attempting to recover from a dreadful hangover. Finally, however, he is far more self-destructive than even Martha and George, spewing out hate that turns on him to reveal a deep self-hatred such that, by work’s end, represents a kind of self-immolation, particularly when the wife from whom he is separated, Anne (Susan Engel), shows up to announce that she intends to marry Butley’s arch-enemy who he describes as the most boring man in England

     Butley simply intimidates his students by refusing to see them for tutorials, that is all but two, a feisty new student, Miss Heasman (Georgina Hale)—who insists on meeting with him despite his several attempts to send her away—and a young man, Mr. Gardner (Simon Rouse), in whom he has taken a special interest, encouraging him to drop his course with his colleague Edna Shaft (the wonderful Jessica Tandy), who shows up at regular intervals to complain about Butley’s behavior.

     Most of the browbeating is saved for Joey, a man he knows well enough that he can play against deep weaknesses and what he describes as a “vile toadying” behavior. At moments Joey bravely fights back; having already heard of Anne’s divorce intentions, he attempts to save his news about Reg for another day. But it appears that the only one whom Butley cannot intimidate is Reg, the “other” man in Joey’s life who Butley calls Ted and who he insists is the son of a Leeds butcher; in fact, it turns out, Reg’s father was a math professor.

      As I mentioned, by film’s end the lacerating attacks have left him, perhaps intentionally, utterly alone, along with heavy bruises and a hacking cough that sounds like tuberculosis, his long, jet black hair, hanging from his head as if it were a crown of thorns. If in all his machinations he has attempted to flay those who might help him, he has been severely psychologically whipped, without a soul to turn to, and without even a cross on which to hang himself.

      If Gray’s script is never truly transcendent in its insights, Bates’ quite brilliant portrayal of its hero, along with Pinter’s insightful directing, lift this angry young drama into a toweringly dramatic work that stands out from others of its day.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2017).