Eric La Barr and Efrem P. Towns | Slate / 2012

remembering the dead by forgetting the living

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric La Barr (screenplay), Eric La Barr and Efrem P. Towns (director) Slate / 2012 [17 minutes]

 

Within the first five minutes of this short film, Slate (Eric La Barr), who has been through a series of sexual encounters forced upon him by his pimp Terrence (Efrem P. Towns) is kicked out of the apartment he shares with the overweight, lazy pimp because of a cancellation.

    Sleeping on the roof of a local business building, he is discovered the next morning by the plant manager, Johnny (Kellan Rhude), who not only ignores Slate’s breaking and entering transgression but makes a date with him for that very evening. A relationship quickly develops between the two young men.

    Even when he returns home with a full night’s pay for his hustling, Terrence demands he get up and bring him back some food. There is no rest for the boy who was obviously brought under the pimp’s control when he was a young boy without any home and financial possibilities. He remains as a slave, while also being used as a sexual toy for his truly obnoxious pimp.

    Slate, however, hasn’t yet seemed to catch on to the rules of being a hustler. He begs for a day off to meet up with a friend (Johnny). At first Terrence pretends not to care, happy only if Slate pays his “part of the rent.” But when asked why Terrence doesn’t get a job, the pimp slaps him, reminding that he gave him a home and that without him he would be nothing.

    Slate’s answer, “I am nothing,” further exacerbates Terrence’s anger. Again, Terrance tries to calm the boy down, reminding him, however, that he still has two appointments that day, starting at 3:00.

    When Slate finally rebels, arguing that he’s “done,” Terrence beats him and locks him in a closet.

    Johnny stops by, and when told by Terrence that he has the wrong room number and he hears Slate’s muffled voice from the closet, he breaks in and frees Slate.

    They run off, but Johnny now is furious, wanting to know who the man at the door was, and yet when Slate attempts to explain, is terrified of hearing what he might suspect. “I’m glad I helped you, but I can’t do this. It’s too much!”

     If only he knew. Slate explains that he was locked up for drugs some years ago, and Terence got him out of jail; homeless he had no other place to go. We started having troubles making rent…and well the rest is the story we know, Terrence selling his roommate to johns for sex.

    “Why didn’t you get out?” Johnny demands to know.

    “Who’d I run to? No one helped like you did.”

   Johnny insists that he’s there to help Slate now break free. But the pimp is relentless, and soon enters Johnny’s place of employment and brutally beats him, kicking and stopping on him even after he throws him to the concrete floor.

    In the next scene Johnny suggests to Slate that Terrence will probably leave them alone, if they just disappear. But the blond haired boy insists that Terrence won’t leave them alone until he finds them, destroying them in the process. “He won’t stop. Terrence feels he owns me.” The only answer is to kill him.

    Understandably Johnny wants no part in Slate’s solution to their problem. “I can’t murder someone, Slate. That’s insane.”

    Slate openly announces that Terrence has been sexually abusing him for a while now. But still Johnny can’t bring himself to kill another human being.

     Slate can get a gun, he argues, and he’ll pull the trigger if only Johnny will help him with everything else.

    Shockingly, Johnny agrees.

    When the time comes, Slate hands Johnny a bat, asking him to hit him over the head while he takes care of the rest. “Okay,” says Johnny. “You sure?” Slate responds. Johnny’s final words are “Do I have a choice?”

     In this abbreviated work, the actual events are whipped out from view. On a black screen we hear both their voices as Slate pretends to return and apparently Johnny lifts the bat without being able to use it. He hear slugs, shots, the words from Terrence, “I knew you were a coward.”

     In black-and-white images return. We see Terrence dragging a covered body to the swimming pool and tossing it in. Behind him, now in color, Johnny appears with the gun, saying “It’s over,” as he shoots Terrence whose body also crashes into the pool. We observe both Slate and Terrence floating in the water. When did these two figures, Slate and Johnny, suddenly change their weapons?

    The last few frames show what look like Slate walking in woods-like setting, talking about how vast the universe is and that he hasn’t yet found a way to set himself free, but he’s sure he will someday. Presumably this is his spirit, a ghost wandering in the afterlife not yet free from its earthly restraints.

     But spare me, I’d argue, the imaginative niceties, the religious pieties. What happened to the very caring but now equally guilty Johnny? What about this good Samaritan’s soul, a man who tried to save his new-found friend, but discovered himself instead entwined in such a brutally corrupt world of abuse and hate? Surely, he might have been arrested. Or has his otherwise eventless simply turned into a life of grief and guilt. Is he, now with blond hair also, supposed to be the figure at the end seeking a way to set himself free? I truly doubt it.

    You can open a tragedy with a ghost—Hamlet being a perfect example—but it’s simply absurd to end one with a spirit seeking release. The living have been left out of this triangulation.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

 

 

 

 

 

Alfred Hitchcock | Jamaica Inn / 1939

strutting the stage of his own imagination

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Gillat and Joan Harison (screenplay, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier, with dialogue and continuity by Sidney Gillat, J. P. Priestley, and Alma Reville), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Jamaica Inn / 1939

Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn is a movie that attempts to prove itself as a period piece, with plenty of moody Cornish waves lapping upon the shore, shipwrecks, pirates, and a haunted inn within which is trapped a poor abused housewife and a young beauty, Mary Yellen (Maureen O’Hara) who has innocently stumbled into this brutal landscape.

    If only the local wealthy landowner, Sir Humphrey Pengallen (Charles Laughton) had been tethered and kept under the director’s lock and key, Hitchcock’s last English-made film might have turned out quite wonderfully—although it’s clear from the start that Hitchcock was not the least bit comfortable with creating such a period piece.

    Laughton as the greedy, smooth-speaking, and at-any-moment ready-to-go-mad villain simply cannot control himself, nor, quite obviously, be controlled by the director. Decked up with one of the most outrageous set of eyebrows, wig, and embroidered costumes Hollywood make-up artists and costume designers ever created, Laughton lunges through his role, hardly leaving Hitchcock a moment to establish the mysterious mood of the locally hated Jamaica Inn before his central actor suddenly shows up in one of the inn’s backrooms to express his evil involvement in events which we’ve just witnessed where Cornish pirates intentionally have lured a ship to its wreck upon the coast before killing all aboard and looting the vessel’s contents.

     If only we, the audience, had had a few moments to assimilate the fact that the lovely colleen, Mary, has suddenly been swept up into the activities of this pirate’s gathering place; and if only Hitchcock might have been allowed the opportunity for a bit of purposeful obfuscations to that we might wonder whether or not the gentle Patience’s (Marie Ney) husband, Joss Merlyn (Leslie Banks) was as evil as he first appears to be, we might have been surprised, and accordingly entertained by the obvious turn of events. But Laughton keels showing up, again and again, stumbling through every possible encounter so that it’s hard for the others to even keep up. With a few seconds the pirates, suspecting someone of plundering their own plunder, pick upon the newest member of their group, Jem Traherne (Robert Newton), and, given that they find actual money on his body, determine to hang him on the gallows of the place.

     Laughton as Pengallen is interested only in money—or to be more accurate, is so primarily interested in displaying his substantial dramatic chops as a villain interested in only money—that he allows the man’s murder with a wave of his disgusted hand. Somehow, sent off to a bedroom above, Mary gets a eagle’s view of all the actions transpiring below, and with a bread knife manages to cut down the hanging Traherne, saving his life.

     But by this time, we realize that all those things that Hitchcock does so well—sweeping up his audience in a confusion regarding innocence and evil, the characters’ inevitable being caught up in the events that are larger than they can comprehend—have been rendered inconsequential. When Traherne and Mary Yellen show up on Pengallen’s doorstep demanding justice, we absolutely know their hopes will soon be dashed. Indeed, events have so quickly whipped up that hardly has Traherne presented his credentials to the corrupt local authority, than Mary is forced to speed off once again to Jamaica Inn to warn her aunt. It’s hardly surprising and thoroughly unexciting when Pengallen pretends to have himself tied up with Traherne by the landowner’s unwitting cohorts, only to easily break his binds, and rush off (with the beautiful Mary as he princess bride) to a new life in France.

   The movie is now so thoroughly discombobulated that both the loyal butler (Horace Hodges) and Mary herself are ready to spare the life of Sir Humphrey Pengallen because he is totally mad. Like an amateur melodramatist, the actor seems far more intent on announcing his evil intentions, again and again, than in actually accomplishing anything. Laughton plays the role so over the top that we do ultimately believe the man is utterly mad, and his final dive from the ship mast to the landing below seems inevitable.

     But I have forgotten half of the plot! For a while Mary runs away with Traherne, hiding out in a cave, before she proves she can swim (she’s already established that she’s a wonderful horsewoman); she later saves an incoming ship—the last target of the pirate gang—before being bound and gagged by Pengallen. Even then she secretly unlocks her cabin door and makes a final escape. Quite a gal! Too bad she doesn’t have a movie in which she might have displayed her numerous acting talents! But then nobody has a chance with the operatic Laughton strutting the stage of what was clearly his own imagination. Perhaps we should see this as Laughton’s first attempt at directing, a craft in which he would certainly redeem himself in his marvelous later film, the Night of the Hunter. Perhaps we can forgive him, accordingly—along with the clearly missing English director—for this misbegotten romanticized adventure tale.

 

Los Angeles, June 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).