Ben Lewis | She Raised Me / 2025

family ties

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ben Lewis (screenwriter and director) She Raised Me / 2025 [14 minutes]

 

We’re introduced to the rather sleazy Louie (Ben Lewis) in the very first scene of this film, when he tells a young teenager in a restaurant that he is so amazed and pleased that the young, good-looking skinny kid (Denny McAulifee) has chosen him as his lover. Yet, almost immediately he hints it’s time for the kid to leave as Louie’s current boyfriend, the truly handsome Xander (Zane Phillips) slips into the booth without noticing that his seat may be warmed up in his absence.

   Xander, to be fair, has other things on his mind. His mother keeps calling him, and he has committed to visiting her again for his upcoming birthday, although it’s quite clear that they have a rather contentious and complex relationship. He begs his boyfriend Louie to join him on his visit home where he will get a chance to meet her.

    Louie, a would-be-playwright, attempts to worm his way out of the meeting, wondering why this early in their relationship he is being taken home to Xander’s mother, while, of course, wondering also how he is now going to tell his hunk that he’s ready to dunk him for the skinny teen. Nonetheless, after some heavy pleading, he agrees. But even at the doorway to what appears to be the mansion in which Xander grew up, he consuls his boyfriend that he can still bow out if he’s not up to the encounter, suggesting that he is not really willing to support him in facing the ogre.

    The minute they enter the house, we hear the voice of the monster mother (Rosie O’Donnell’s) greeting her son home. She’s in the kitchen with her assistant (Wendy Benson-Landes) making lunch.

     As the camera reveals his mother, most of the film’s audience members surely suck in their breaths a bit in shock as they quickly come to perceive the total absurdity of this little comic farce, now ready for nearly anything that Canadian director Lewis throws our way: the mother, we discover, is a famous puppet named Marilyn Muff, known to children everywhere we are quickly convince, who has now become a sort of gay icon, just like Rosie.

     If we expected Louie to be completely taken aback, well he is in fact, but not for the reasons we might expect. Marilyn Muff apparently was his favorite childhood figure, whom he idolized, demanding his parents gift him with the notorious Marilyn Muff doll; but only his sister was awarded this prize, boys, so his parents argued, were not permitted to desire such things.

    In short, he gets along quite wonderfully with the mother without even bothering to wonder if someone on a string might not necessarily tie up her beautiful son in knots. Within minutes Louis is sharing a glass of wine with Marilyn while he recounts his childhood admiration and even suggests that he has a role for her in one of his plays which might be perfect to a retired film and TV star.

    Xander is almost unable to believe that his ridiculous puppet mother, who has never been there for him as we has growing up—how could she possibly feel any human empathy for him when she is simply a cartoonish figure who shouts out motherly platitudes?

    The point is that Louis, as Xander later puts it, is like nearly every other “fag,” finding his diva in this case in a thing with strings attached.

   In an interview with Joey Moser in The Contending, the author explains the metaphor of this short movie, reiterating that for him Rosie O’Donnell was one of his brassy favorites:   

   

 “When I was thinking what the movie was truly about, it’s really about loving the social relationship between young, queer kids and their divas. I don’t think anyone can claim to have raised more queen millennials than Rosie, especially given the platform she had with her show and how she brought us Broadway shows. She exposed a lot of queer culture to kids all over the world, and even though she wasn’t out, it was very queer-coded. Her show was such a safe space for so many kids, including myself. Rosie was the dream person to voice Marilyn–I never thought in a million years that she’d say yes.”

 

    Now suddenly the affable Xander becomes a kind of toxic gay guy who, having felt pushed aside as a child in respect to his mother’s career, is suffering meltdown after meltdown. The very fact that Louie so idolizes his puppet mother, given he’s so metaphorically tied up to her apron strings, is something that he can hardly suffer.

    And soon after, in the car as they head back home he is furious with his boyfriend for being yet another diva-stricken queer who has utterly no empathy with his feelings of having to stake out a new life free of her entanglements.

     What I haven’t even mentioned, moreover, is that Mrs. Muff is a Muppet-like puppet, who embodies an entirely different level of adoration in young adults who are of Louie’s (Lewis’) and Xander’s (Phillips’) age. “Before Rosie, I was a diehard Muppet kid,” Lewis explains in his interview with Moser.

      Is it any wonder that when Louie senses that his boyfriend is not at all about to allow him to revisit his mother, that he feels he has no choice in such a dark comic fantasy world but to kill off the perfect human companion, eviscerate his body and hack it up, burying it in bags a bit like the villain of Hitchcock’s Rear Window just so that he can get Marilyn to read his script.

     All right, he suffers for a while in a drunken stupor, but he soon comes out of it and speeds on off to Marilyn Muff’s mansion.

     From page one, she’s ready to rewrite his play for him, mentioning, when he brings up the fact that he hasn’t seen her son for some time, that he must just be in one of his funks but surely he’s okay since he’s been using her credit cards as usual, and called to say he was hiding out in the woods.

     I can’t wait for the revenge of the zombie gay hunk in part two of this “ridiculous theater”-like gay horror farce.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Alfred J. Goulding | A Chump at Oxford / 1939, released 1940

 paradise lost, paradise regained

by Douglas Messerli

Charley Rogers, Felix Adler, and Harry Langdon (screenplay), Alfred J. Goulding (director) A Chump at Oxford / 1939, released 1940

 

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s A Chump at Oxford, completed in 1939, but released in 1940 seems like a feature made up of parts, which it truly is, three films in one, originally released as a 20-minute featurette that had nothing to do with the main plot of Laurel and Hardy’s experiences at Oxford.

      In the first part Stan and Ollie hitchhike, apparently over a long route, on their way to the employment office where the two utterly broke friends are looking for any job they can get. Overhearing a conversation from a client seeking a maid and butler for that evening’s dinner, Ollie leaps at the chance to get his friend once more into female drag playing the role of Agnes, a figure to whom Stan introduced us in their 1930 film, Another Fine Mess.

     Sent to the Vandeveer home, the two cause general chaos with their insufferable manners and actions. At one point Agnes spills a complete tray of hors d’oeuvres which all the guests have previously rejected—perhaps because she offers them individually by hand instead of presenting on the tray where they are all set out—onto the lap of the hostess, scooping them up off the employer’s dress and putting them back onto the tray upon which Mr. Vandeveer (James Finlayson) accidently sits.

     After calling the guests to dinner in a “come-and-get-it” manner, Ollie seats all the men on one side and the women at the other of the dinner table; when told to correct the seating, he conducts a long series of musical chair-like maneuvers which results only in all the men being seated on the opposite side and the women on the other.

      When asked to serve the salad without dressing, Agnes retreats momentarily to the kitchen, reappearing with the salad bowl, she wearing her underclothes only. Watching her blithely serve the lettuce leaves, again by hand, Mr. Vandeveer also disappears for a moment, only to return with a rifle aimed at both the butler and maid’s behind.

       The second episode finds them working as street cleaners, again quite ineptly. During a lunch break the two attempt to figure out why they cannot get ahead in their careers and realize the problem is they never had an education and are just too dumb to improve themselves. At that very moment a bank robber attempts to escape out of the door in front of which they sit, tripping over Stan’s tossed away banana peel. The two attempt to help him to his feet, but trip themselves along with the robber once again, rising up just in time for the arrival of the police who hail them for having apprehended the villain. As a reward, the head of the bank grants them their wish for an education, sending them to the very best school in the world, so he attests, Oxford.

       The Americans arrive at Oxford dressed, unwittingly, in Eton College outfits, immediately encouraging the snobby Oxford boys to provide them with a series of mean initiation pranks. The

students (Gerald Rogers, Victor Kendall, Gerald Fielding, and Peter Cushing) begin by sending the two newbies into the campus maze, where, as they carry their suitcases and heavy trunk, the two become trapped. Exhausted they sit down on a bench for a snooze while another of the Oxford boys (Eddie Borden), dressed as a ghost, sticks his hand through the bushes to provide Stan and later Ollie a third hand. If nothing else, the skit which involves a great deal of touching and hand holding by and with the foreign male body part is rather homoerotic.

       By morning, they are led out of the maze only to be sent to the Dean’s office where the quartet have gathered to pretend they are college officials while the real dean is away at a lecture. The nasty Oxford boys offer the Dean’s own quarters as Stan and Ollie’s new rooms. And by the time the Dean has returned, they have consumed most of his liquor and turned his sleeping quarters into chaos.

      When the Dean finally returns and discovers the mess, he becomes outraged as the duo become increasingly convinced that his reaction is yet another Oxford razz, a prank played upon the innocents. Meanwhile the perpetrators have snuck back into the outer office to watch the results of their evil-doings and are soon discovered by the Dean, who perceives that the American duo were convinced that they were the real school officials.

      The Dean accordingly expels their leader and sends Stan and Ollie off to their real quarters, where the lackey Meredith (Forrester Harvey) awaits his new masters. Meredith is shocked to see in Stan the spitting image of his former master, Lord Paddington, who was the university sports hero and a genius who even Einstein is seeking to meet. Paddington, he explains, was looking out the open window when the raised portion fell back upon his head rendering him without memory and, evidently, without any of his former prowess and intelligence.

     The boys see this as yet another instance of Oxford humor. But soon a large group of students has gathered in revenge for what the expelled leader claims was Stan and Ollie’s snitching, a crime worthy of defenestration. As the group marches upon Laurel and Hardy’s room, Stan leans out of the window, precisely as Paddington had several years earlier, the raised portion falling back just as before upon Stan’s head. As Stan, momentarily stunned, stumbles back into the room he reawakens as Paddington, confused by all the hubbub and the presence of a large stupid fat man in his quarters.

      Paddington, also regaining his strength and the signal of his rising anger with wiggling ears, tosses the students, one by one, out of the window along with his old friend.

      The role of Paddington allowed Laurel to return for a few moments on screen to his native British accent and to act in a manner that we never observed before or after, as a rather conceited, critical, and prissy Britisher who, having hired Ollie as his manservant, calls him “fatty,” demands he hand him his daily addendum which sits a few inches from his reach, and puts off meeting Einstein until the middle of the week. But when he taunts Ollie for being stupid and having a double chin, “Fatty” quits, determining to abandon Paddington/Stan and return to the US.

      Paddington’s fellow students come by outside to cheer his athletic achievements and, going to the window once more to hear their acclaim, he leans out as before the upper half crashing down upon his skull to return him to his former stupid self.

      As Ollie storms in to shout out a few further barbs against Paddington, a worried Stan wonders if he is really leaving without his old pal. Seeing what has happened, Ollie comes rushing over to hug his dear friend come back into his life.

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).

Alexander Hall | The Amazing Mr. Williams / 1939

detecting love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dwight Taylor, Sy Bartlett, and Richard Maibaum (screenplay, based on a story by Sy Bartlett), Alexander Hall (director) The Amazing Mr. Williams / 1939

 

In his 1939 film, Alexander Hall uses the metaphor of a man being married to his job quite literally, the frustrated young bride-to-be—if she can ever get her hands around the man for more than two minutes—Maxine Carroll (Joan Blondell) declares she’s through with Police Investigator Kenny Williams (Melvyn Douglas), handing him over to the man she declares to be his true bride, Captain McGovern (Clarence Kolb).

    And throughout most the film, indeed, it appears that Kenny is more fascinated by the crime sites he’s regularly called to than anything a woman may have to offer him.

     His love relationship with his Captain, however, is on and off again, as Kenny keeps attempting to placate Maxine, at a point early in the film by bringing the criminal, Buck Moseby (Edward Brophy), who he’s scheduled to deliver to a state prison along with him to a date, including dragging him and Maxine’s roommate Effie (Ruth Donnelly) along as a pretend companion to Moseby through amusement park rides and a final dinner at a nearby dance club, where the now savvy police arrest the criminal—who’s just once again tried to escape—along Kenny himself.

     To punish his metaphorical lover, McGovern determines to require him take on the job he’s suggested for another lieutenant: to catch a murderer who kills off women by lumping them over the head. Kenny has argued that all they need to do is dress up one of the policeman in drag and let him walk the dangerous streets where the murderer is likely to lurk.

      Against his will, Kenny is forced to undertake the task, despite his obvious moustache (covered up by a hat vail). The detective looks ridiculous, but the ruse eventually works, but not before everyone gets so worried about him for not calling in that even Maxine goes on the search, finding him in a dark alley just before she herself nearly becomes the next victim, while allowing her always “late on the scene” lover to nab the scab and finally slip out of his dress.

      They almost make up and actually plan to go through with the wedding officiated by the mayor, where Maxine works as his secretary, just across the window-view of the police headquarters. But needing help with a new bank robbery in which a guard was killed, Kenny’s demanding police-Captain wife tricks him into returning to the squad by having another detective lure him into helping to solve the case by missing all the obvious bits of evidence. Before you know it, Kenny has once again seemingly solved the case and found the robber through tracking down his son through a dropped coloring book in which, mysteriously, the boy has put beards on all the figures to be colored in, including Snow White. Freud might suggest that the young boy will certainly grow up being, as he evidences, so terrified of women that he turns them all into bearded men, loving the feel of whiskers.

      Obviously, he arrives late to the wedding which, so Maxine, insists will now never take place since it’s clear that he is truly married to the Captain and his sleuthing. And indeed, given the dirty tricks McGovern keeps using to prevent him from marrying Maxine and to retain him at his side, we too begin to wonder whether there might not be some truth to the metaphor. Just like the journalists in The Front Page are wed to their newspapers or, better yet, like Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’ remake His Girl Friday is emotionally married to her editor Walter Burns, so Kenny seems to be in a permanent relationship not only with the job but with man in charge of his employment who lives in all-male world where women simply don’t exist.

      In Hall’s The Amazing Mr. Williams there is nothing visually homoerotic about the McGovern-Kenny Williams universe; the love McGovern feels for his underling lies totally in the way in which Kenny’s brain works, in the amazing powers of his ratiocination that is completely different from those of his peers. You might almost describe it as a special way of thinking, a “queer” vision in his ability to track down a killer through the classrooms of children coloring pictures in their books. And wouldn’t you know, the crook’s kid just happens to be the cutest boy in the class, which is how we know his dad to be innocent despite the amazing deductive powers of Detective Williams.

      Finally, on his way once more to deliver up a criminal to the jails of justice, Kenny observes, quite by accident, that the man’s coat still holds the residue of gun powder, suggesting the murderer has used his shoulder as a prop to kill the guard. There were, so it appears, two men involved, just as the convicted man has argued all along, that he was forced into participating in the robbery.

      Kenny is different from all the others in yet another way: he has a conscience. Despite the fact that it may get him 10 years in prison as well, he and his human “package” get off the train at the very next stop to go back and seek out the true murderer-bank thief.

      This the time the only way to track him down, so it appears, is through his consumption of alcohol, an expensive brand, a half-empty bottle of which was found along with other items in the convicted man’s car trunk. With the cops now on the detective’s track as well, he has to take a chance in involving his own girlfriend Maxine since he’s now truly “wanted” by his fellow cops.

      Despite his series of clever ruses, letting the police think that he’ll meet up at the local drugstore with Maxine while he actually visits her apartment the minute they run off, he is caught and handcuffed—although he puts on the handcuffs himself suggesting to his neighborhood friends that the real criminal is his fellow detective, who come to his aid when the other resists.

     But in the meanwhile, having tracked the purchases of the special liquor consumed by likely suspects, Maxine visits the apartment of the real killer’s mol, gets a look at her and overhears their plans to attend the horseraces. When she identifies the woman in the crowd, allowing Kenny to swoop down upon the true criminal—trampled to death by the horses as they round the track—she is made a deputy detective, having been bitten by the lure of unsolved situations herself.

      The two can finally be married since they now share the same queer profession. And the film almost convinces us of the possibility of their living happily ever after, except that just as they are about to leap into bed, the Captain puts out a call...this time for all deputy detectives, a siren call that Maxine now can simply not resist.

      We observe the policemen huddled nearby giggling. It’s obviously been a lure to once more separate the heterosexual couple. Perhaps the Captain is just getting in one more dig on his favorite detective, or maybe he’s gone “straight,” or, more likely, he’s jealous of her for almost bedding down with the man with whom he’s truly in love, and in revenge has taken her away from him.

      This film has been described as a screwball comedy, which it is if you comprehend its relationship with other such screwball works as Bringing Up Baby and My Favorite Wife.

      I might add that the story behind the screenplay of this work was written by Ukrainian-born Sy Bartlett who went on the write some of Hollywood’s major war stories and other psychologically-charged portraits such as 13 Rue Madeleine, Twelve O'Clock High, The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, Beloved Infidel, Cape Fear (the 1962 version), and Che!, several of them starring Gregory Peck.

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

 

Dick Rickard | The Practical Pig / 1939 [animated film]

everybody lies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Clemmons and Dick Rickard (screenplay), Preston Blair, Ollie Johnston, John Lounsbery, and Frank Thomas (animators), Dick Rickard (director) The Practical Pig / 1939 [animated film]

 

As the years passed after the original “Three Little Pigs” cartoon in 1934, The Big Bad Wolf, it’s clear that the Hays censorship committee was beginning to affect the animated world as well as that of feature movies. Between 1934 and the end of the decade, not only did the animators cease the Wolf’s drag appearances, but dropped the pansy affections of the first work, choosing safer costume choices for the last in the series, this 1939 film, The Practical Pig.  It is as if the dangerous drag queen of a “fairy Goldilocks” had reverted to a populist favorite like Bette Midler’s Dolores DeLago in a cheap hotel lounge act, portrayed in their human representation of the mythological Mermaid.

     Yet in 1939 once more Fifer and Fiddler Pig make fun of their brother’s busy obsession with the Wolf. As he hammers together a new lie detector to trap the Wolf, the lazy duo decide to go swimming. Practical Pig warns them, just has he has in the past, “Don’t go swimming, do you hear? The pond ain’t safe, the Wolf is near.”

     They giggle and rush off to the nearest swimming hole, donning their swimming trunks. And there, of course, is the Wolf in wait. He quickly dons his mermaid outfit, pulls out his harp, and sings, through Billy Bletcher’s fairly convincing rendition of Mae West’s “Frankie and Johnny,” as they swim up to the calypso with sexual anticipation.

      In seconds, he’s trapped them in a net, put them in bag, and brought the porkers home for his mean and hungry Three Little Wolves. The kids, grabbing up cleavers move into carve up their dinners, but their father insists that first he must get the cause of his previous failures, The Practical Pig. Writing up a letter supposedly by Practical’s brothers, he goes off to deliver it, demanding in the meantime that the boys leave the other two pigs alone.

      As disobedient of the Wolf dad as are Fifer and Fiddler of their brother, the Three Little Wolves have the pigs in a platter to which they’ve added potatoes and other vegetables ready to toss into the oven.

       The Wolf appears as a messenger boy at Practical’s door, leaving a message under it upon which he blows so hard to carry into the house that Practical is not fooled for a moment. Pulling a lever, The Wolf is dropped into a chair and pulled into the house where he, now hooked up to the grand Lie Detector is asked questions, each time the lie resulting in increasingly painful punishments, from soap in the mouth to a serious mechanical spanking.

       The Two Little Pigs, meanwhile, have been put into a pork pie and are almost about to be shoved into the oven, when The Three Little Wolves realize they’ve forgotten the pepper. The pepper producing, as one might suspect, a gigantic double sneeze which splatter the contents of the pie upon the Wolves and frees the Pigs who run off home.

       The torture of lying continues for their father, who finally breaks down and admits where they’re holding Practical’s brothers. Practical prepares to run off to save them, but they come rushing in at that very moment. Miffed by their disobedience he backs them into the Lie Detector seats, reminding them he had told them not to go swimming.

       Fifer and Fiddler fib, declaring they never went swimming, as the machine turns them over and spanks their pork butts red. Practical, speaking like thousands of parents before him, insists, “Remember, this hurts me more than it hurts you,” another part of the machine grabbing him up to provide a proper spanking for his false truism—suggesting, perhaps, that everyone lies. 

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Dick Rickard | Ferdinand the Bull / 1938 [animated film]

the bull who liked poseys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Munro Leaf, Robert Lawson and Vernon Stallings (writers), Milt Kahl, Hamilton Luske, Bill Stokes, John Bradbury, Bernard Garbutt, Ward Kimball, Jack Campbell, Stan Quachenbush, and Don Lusk (animators), Dick Rickard (director) Ferdinand the Bull / 1938 [animated film]

 

Walt Disney’s wonderful short cartoon of 1938 features a bull, Ferdinand, who unlike all of the other bulls (read boys) has no interest at all in running, jumping, and butting heads together, but, as narrator Don Wilson tells us, prefers to sit under a cork tree and smell the flowers.

     In short, Ferdinand is “different,” so different that even his understanding mother, with the bovine female voice of Walt Disney, suggests “Now Ferdinand, why don’t you play with all the other little bulls and butt your head?” Ferdinand simply prefers to stay where he is and smell the daisies.

      As the bulls age, Ferdinand grows into the biggest and more fearsome looking of them, but still prefers his oak tree retreat and the pleasure of sniffing in the floral odors, while all the other  bulls hope they might get chosen to participate in the bull fights in Madrid. And one day a committee of bullring indeed visits the farm where Ferdinand lives.

      The other bulls show off their macho, but still don’t impress the committee, while Ferdinand returns to his tree and flowers with utterly no desire to participate in the Madrid fights. However, at that very moment as he sits, a bee stings him on the rump, sending Ferdinand on a crazy run, speeding down the pasture while tearing apart everything in sight, the perfect bull, so the terrorized committee members all agree.

      Off poor Ferdinand goes to Madrid, where the bullfight parade begins with banderilleros, picadors, and the matador entering the ring in succession, enchanting the crowd. A female admirer tosses her posey to the matador, who now awaits Ferdinand to enter to that he can play with him before he shoves his sword into his heart.

     But the shy bull is afraid to enter, finally being coaxed in only by the posey in the matador’s hand. He goes to it and, as usual, smells it, refusing to do anything else, no matter how the matador screams, pleas, and entreats him. Tearing off his own shirt in frustration, Ferdinand licks the tattoo on the center of his chest, a Daisy.

      So Ferdinand is sent back to his pasture and the flowers that grow under his favorite tree. What Disney doesn’t tell us is that Ferdinand’s fey demeanor has obviously saved his life.

      The animated work was highly popular, winning the 1938 Oscar for Best Short Subject, and was shown every year in Sweden as a Christmas Eve special from 1959 to the early 1980s. Indeed, the work has a great deal of similarities with another Christmas special about an animal different from the others of his kind, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, also often cited as a gay film that influenced generations of children.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).