William Nolan and Walter Lantz | Going to Blazes / 1933 [animated cartoon]

the dancing pansy firehouse assistant

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ray Abrams, Fred Avery, Cecil Surry, Jack Carr and Don Williams (animators), William Nolan and Walter Lantz (directors) Going to Blazes / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

The Bill Nolan animated cartoon from 1933, Going to Blazes, appeared to me, upon several visits, to be yet another quite obvious example of the 1930s pictures’ fascination with queers which they depicted as pansies. In fact, this 7-and-a-half-minute cartoon features one of the longest presentations of a dancing sissy in film history, a fireman, dressed in high boots, whipping up a storm of loony hand flaps and other fruity gestures.*

     Who would have thought that for some readers it might have been coded? Apparently, the writer of the Wikipedia entry has severe problems in recognizing a “real” woman, even in cartoon form, from the drag “imposters,” describing the dancing panze as a “firewoman,” which not only obliterates most of the film’s attempts of humor for the first third of the movie, but fails explain why the mischievous babe is so intent on attacking the figure that in the process he axes the fire hose or why, later, the fairy is so expendable that he’s sent twice down a manhole, from which, on the first occasion, he escapes to utter in a falsetto voice, with hands on hips (the stock emblem of a pansy) “You ole meanie!”—the only line of full dialogue in this cartoon.

     I assure you that this was animators Ray Abrams, Fred Avery, Cecil Surry, Jack Carr, and Don Williams’ depiction of an irrepressible dancing queen, not a “firewoman,” who, as the Wikipedia writer proposes, has “mental problems.”

     In fact, the rest of the film, which features a laughing fire raging out of control, and Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit’s attempts to dowse the flames while faced with an out-of-control fire hydrant and the continued nasty actions of the baby snookums, is not near as humorous. So incompetent is Oswald, in fact, that you almost side with the sneaky fire, who tickles the toes of a heavy sleeper and threatens the female figure who Oswald clumsily attempts, and finally manages to save, he awarded, in the end, with her kiss. She, I assure you, is a cartoon woman.

     Although almost all sources state that the work was directed by Walter Lantz and William Nolan, a couple of seemingly informed commentaries insist that Nolan was the lone director, but that the production, as a Walter Lantz product, demanded his name be co-listed.  

 

*The title obviously suggests a fire that is out of control, or a situation that has gotten out of hand, which clearly is the case with out “dancing queer.” In the urban meaning, a “blaze” is also a male that everyone loves and instantly falls in love with, but also a person who is heavily under the influence of marijuana. I don’t know if that latter meaning of the word was common, however, in the 1930s.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Fokke Baarssen | Missed / 2018

meeting with a ghost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Keith Armonaitis (screenplay), Fokke Baarssen (director) Missed / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

This short work, directed by Dutch filmmaker Fokke Baarssen is a subtle piece about the rude, loud and crude politics of our day, and how it effects people on a very personal level.

    Graham (James Kacey), a young man in his late 20s or early 30s has made an appointment in a California desert truck stop with his estranged father, whom he has evidently not seen for four years.

     He waits alone for a while, wondering whether his father will show, the waitress Doris (Jennifer Lynn O’Hara) trying a couple of times to get an order out of him as he explains he’s waiting for someone.

     The father (Sean Kane) finally appears, a grizzled gray bearded man wearing a red MAGA hat. He hardly gets in the room before disparaging his son, demanding to know what he thinks is so important that he has attempted to set up the meeting. He suggests that Graham is not tough enough to even deal with the way things are in “God’s country,” presumably how he perceives where he now lives. Graham reminds him that he was born and raised in New Jersey.

   Apparently some of the distance between them has to do with the fact that he had left is the boy’s mother years earlier. Moreover, he had not attended his son’s wedding, and rudely treated his partner, Robin, at the mother’s funeral.

     Indeed, the father goes full attack on his son yet again in front of the waitress, presuming that she might stand as a supportive witness to the fact that his son doesn’t have what it takes to live a good American life and has refused contact with him for years.

     What we quickly discern is that Robin is a male and that Graham is gay. Moreover, when the father asks if he’s still with Robin, Graham demurs, suggesting, at least to his disinterested father that the couple has since broken up.

     When the son attempts to explain that in attending the funeral with his companion, he wasn’t trying to demonstrate anything to anyone, that he was there out of respect for the mother, and that the father’s behavior was not simply a situation for taking a stand, but was crude and impolite. The wounds have clearly not healed.

      Graham’s father agrees that the world is no longer polite without seeming to comprehend that he has been far more than cruel so far in their meeting. He complains that when entering, he held the door open for two young girls, without receiving even a thanks.

      Graham wonders whether he held the door open out of politeness or the need to be thanked. And so it continues; there clearly is no possible rapport between them. The father comments that his son can’t even bother to take off his cap.

      Anyone with empathy might, at this point suspect, particularly when for a second Graham touches his beanie cap, that there might be a reason for it remaining on his head. But the father, grabbing up his own hat, not only advertising his political position but challenging anyone who might disagree, asks for the coffee he has ordered to go, rejecting out of hand any further communication with his son.        

      Graham reacts with the reminder that he has always been good at turning his back on anyone with he might disagree, presumably meaning his mother and not just him.

      As the father challenges him yet once more, the boy falls into a coughing fit; we recognize something the insensitive father, who even makes fun of his son’s weakness, cannot sense, that Graham is ill.

      Finally, realizing that nothing has changed and there can be no communication between the two, Graham himself stands, ready to leave.

      But now the father is even more ready to challenge and ridicule the boy, following him out of the restaurant and, for a moment, grabbing him as if to pull him back to face his diatribe.

 

      This time Graham falls to his knees in a heavy coughing fit, the father finally realizing that something’s wrong without being able to even slightly explain it. He does offer to help his son up, but the boy rejects it and moves off to his car.

      The father stands alone for a moment, wondering what the call for a meeting has been all about.

But meanwhile Doris has found a small pamphlet that Graham has left behind and brings it out to the older man. We now read it’s title, “The Dying Process, A Family’s Guide to Hospice,” clearly meant for his father’s perusal. But, as apparently has occurred regularly with this angry, stubborn, and unthinking man, the opportunity to communicate has again been missed, lost to the world that harbors no room for opinions other than his own.

        Fokke Baarssen’s camera shifts now to observe Graham in his car, in full tears, his hat pulled off, revealing his bald head—probably from radiation treatments.

        His son clearly is sick with something like cancer, and is near death. This film does not explain the cause of the young man’s illness.

       Perhaps it may be a complication of AIDS that was not caught quickly enough, and, if so, we might even conjecture that Robin has also suffered from the disease and died, which would explain why Graham makes no attempt to dissuade his father from his presumption that the married couple has broken up. And yes, people still die of AIDS. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2019, the year after this film was released, 6,228 people, mostly male and gay, died of AIDS in the US and its territories, the lowest it had since the epidemic began. But before we might congratulate ourselves, since that year is has significantly risen. In 2022 it had reached 19,310 deaths among adults and adolescents with diagnosed HIV in the US and its 6 territories.*

       In many respects, this work is not even about politics, however. There simply is no talking with people who believe in their own righteousness and will not listen to anyone who holds values outside of their own.

      If Graham is soon to die, however, his father is a howling ghost. When a man no longer has any empathy with others, he is already dead inside.

 

*Tragically, 2,976 individuals died of the various terrorist attacks on 9/11 in 2001. Every year, we commemorate that day for those who died in those horrific events. Yet, we seem almost oblivious as a culture of the 6,228-19, 310 of our citizens dying each year of a disease for which we still have no known cure, even if we are close to a cure and have drugs that save many of those infected with HIV.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

 

Werner Herzog | Stroszek / 1977

road’s end

by Douglas Messerli

 

Werner Herzog (screenwriter and director) Stroszek / 1977

 

A bit like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Werner Herzog’s Stroszek begins with its central figure, Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S.) being released from prison. And like the Fassbinder character Franz Biberkopf, Stroszek is a slightly dim-witted alcoholic who would like to get a new start in life, but is somewhat stymied in that transformation because of his relationship with a prostitute.

     The prostitute of Stroszek, Eva (Eva Mattes), is controlled by two violent pimps, who abuse not only the girl, but her customers as well. When the slow-mined Stroszek invites her to come live with him in the apartment that has been looked after in his absence by an elderly neighbor, Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz), the two roughs come looking for Stroszek as well.

     Again like Biberkopf, Stroszek has little to offer in the way of vocational skills; the little money he makes is from playing a glockenspiel and accordion in the courtyards of housing complexes, relying on the good will of their denizens.

     Scheitz, however, has been invited to come to the US to live with his nephew in Wisconsin, and after both Stroszek and Eva are beaten, they determine to join him, the nephew assuring them employment as mechanic and waitress. Accordingly, the unlikely trio of idiot, whore, and elderly eccentric join up for a road trip through the mad American heartland.

     The Wisconsin these people visit is not the lovely farmland dotted with lakes and green hills, but a flat rustbelt wasteland, what is described as “Railroad Flats,” whose major reason for existence is the railroad tracks and cars that dominate its landscape.

     Pre-made houses, trucked in like trailers, seem to be the only sense of permanence, as Bruno goes to work in a garage and Eva serves up coffee and steak at the local truckstop. Scheitz goes slightly mad, convinced he has finally been able to register the animal magnetism described by Franz Mesmer.

    Along with the house, evidently, comes a television set and other required luxuries, along with the bills and, soon after, a visit from a slightly embarrassed, but nonetheless determined bill collection from the bank (Scott McKain). Evidently, in this new paradise, working full time pays even fewer bills than occasional street performances did in Berlin.

     Bruno goes back to the bottle and Eva to the oldest profession, both now at odds with each other and their new environment.

     The US into which this inverted trinity has stumbled is filled with more soulless folk, it appears, than even was Berlin of the Weimar Republic. What’s even worse is that the inhabitants of this empty world believe that they still live in Eden or, at least, that their world, like Candide’s, is the best of all possible worlds. The radios belt out tunes of tortured hope and desire, while those listening to them are gradually drained of all dreams and possibilities.

     When the inevitable happens, Eva has already skipped town with truck drivers on their way to Vancouver, leaving behind the symbolic father and son left to watch their dream home auctioned off and driven away, soon followed by the television set. The two, facing off into the cold Wisconsin landscape, have nothing left.

      Like those lost individuals of so many American legends, they use their last few dollars to purchase a pair of rifles, intent on robbing a bank; but even their grand drama turns into farce when they find the bank closed, taking out their anger, instead, on a nearby barbershop, whose owner quickly offers up the few dollars he has in the till.

     Instead of attempting to escape, the duo enter the local grocery store to pick up a frozen chicken and a few bottles of beer. When the police enter the store, they quickly arrest Scheitz without even noticing Stroszek, who might as well have become invisible.

     Stealing the truck from the garage in which he works, Stroszek heads off to an Indian-owned hotel and amusement arcade, probably near the tourist world of the Wisconsin Dells, where the truck sputters to a dead stop. Frozen bird still in hand, Stroszek spends his last few dollars on lunch, speaking with a German tourist before he returns to the parking lot where he propels the truck into a circular pattern before its engine explodes.

      He enters the entertainment arcade across the way, which features a real rabbit driving a toy fire truck and two chickens, one of whom plays the piano while the other dances. The major funhouse seems to be an ever-circling ski-lift that takes its riders up a painted tableau of a winter landscape before returning them back to ground zero.

     The movie ends with these two images of meaningless repetition, the chicken unable to stop its mad little stomps, while Bruno rides up his magic mountain from whence he will inevitably be returned—unless, as in so many American stories, he is shot to death by a policeman who quickly arrives, radioing into headquarters: “We’ve got a truck on fire, can’t find the switch to turn the ski lift off, can’t stope the dancing chicken. Send an electrician.” Such a line might make one howl out in laughter were it not so very sad. The gentle musician, we recognize, has literally come to road’s end.

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2015).

 

 

Guí Luka and Adriano Oliveira | Meu Jogador Favorito (My Favorite Player) / 2018

a fortuitous confession

by Douglas Messerli

 

Guí Luka and Adriano Oliveira (screenwriters and directors) Meu Jogador Favorito (My Favorite Player) / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

What does a soccer play do when he gradually begins to discover that he is gay? Pai (Valdeci Gonçalves) wakes up one morning to perceive that he is facing just that problem, and moreover that he is in love with his fellow friend soccer play Gustavo (Raphael Machado).

    What you surely don’t do soon after the coach has demanded half the team take off their shirts (Gustavo included) to play a scrimmage game with the other half is to head off to the shower room pretending that you’re not feeling well. And most certainly you can’t be so naïve as to ask your macho dad later that afternoon, while he’s watching football on TV, whether he knows of any soccer player who might be gay.

    He doesn’t even understand the question. Just look at them on the television set, he argues, they’re all men. Soccer players are males, as if he son’s question was about gender. Clearly Pai’s father has never heard of Justin Fashanu, the British gay soccer player; or, quite obviously, seen Rhys Chapman’s 2016 film Wonderkid wherein the young soccer player has problems similar those of his son; or even heard of Ádám Császi’s soccer pro Szabolcs who leaves his German team in Ádám Császi’s Land of Storms (2014), in frustration over a many things, including his gay sexuality, returning to his native Hungary, only to be killed there by a young man with he falls in love.

     In Pai’s father’s very next sentence, he describes one of the opposing team members as a “faggot,” without any intention of suggesting that the player is really queer.

     For another day or so, Pai pouts, while his friend is scheduled to date a girl, leaving Pai out in the cold once more. He returns to the soccer stadium and sits down to do some hard thinking.

     What a surprise that Gustavo, worried about his friend’s health, has canceled his date, and pleads with him now to explain what’s going on.

     How can Pai explain it without endangering any friendship that remains? Yet, as his friend continues pleading, he mentions what he father as said and done, Gustavo asking quite simply, does Pai think he’s gay. Yes, he admits, he’s been having these feelings recently, and moreover, he has wanted to have sex with boys and finds he’s in love…it comes spilling out…with Gustavo himself.

      Pai hurries away, startled by his own revelations, and now racked with fear and isolation, literally bent over in deep pain. Soon after Gustavo comes to him, stands him up and gives him a hug, telling him that the feeling is mutual.

       So that’s how it ends in this Brazilian encounter within the macho worlds of soccer and spots in general. I have to say, I doubt it’s easy even today. Yet more and more sports players have been feeling the need to speak up and out.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).