Esteban Bravo and Beth David | In a Heartbeat / 2017

heart leaps to love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Esteban Bravo and Beth David (screenwriters and directors) In a Heartbeat / 2017 [4 minutes]

 

In only 4 minutes of animated narrative, writers and directors Esteban Bravo and Beth David present a story of gay love that children of all ages can easily comprehend. The film was so well done that it was nominated and chosen as one of the finalists for the 2017 Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, and won special recognition at the GLADD Media Awards, as well as being popular on the LGBTQ film circuit.

    The story is a simple one. A red-haired young boy, Sherwin hides in a tree awaiting the arrival of Jonathan, a self-assured young man upon whom he clearly has a crush, his heart beating heavily and even escaping his chest as Jonathan walks past below while reading a book and juggling an apple.

    As often happens in real life, Sherwin’s heart jumps ahead of his ability to speak and express his love, suddenly escaping his hand and rushing after Jonathan. Sherwin, embarrassed for what his heart might reveal, runs after it, grabbing it way from Jonathan’s hand where it as perched, replacing his apple, at the very moment the boy is about to bite into it.

     Once more the heart moves ahead of Sherwin’s body, squeezing into the school just a second before it closes behind Jonathan. Sherwin follow in an attempt the retrieve it from Jonathan’s fingers to where it has attached itself.

     As the two boys fight over the heart, falling to the floor, other students begin to notice and stare, Sherwin even more determined to grab his heart back and hide it in his chest where it belongs. But as he pulls if from Jonathan’s finger, the heart breaks in half, leaving him with that well-known idiom we describe as a “broken heart.”

 

     Sherwin retreats to the tree under which he sits in tears.

    Almost without him even noticing, Jonathan comes up to him offering the other half of the heart back to his friend. The two parts of the heart immediately clicks back into place, and spring to life, and as the two boys sit beside one another, both their hearts beating with joy and anticipation of becoming a single, larger heart.

     This film is so professionally accomplished that it’s almost difficult to believe that this was a senior thesis project of at Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. Originally the two creators had imagined that it would be a work about a boy and a girl, but suddenly realized that it could become a more personal work for both of them if they shifted to a same-sex story.

     With music by Artur Cardelús and the few words of dialogue and mutterings by Nick Ainsworth and Kelly Donohue, this work brilliant reveals how love has a way of making itself known even when it attempts to hide itself or to deny its existence.

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).

    

 

 

Luchino Visconti | Ludwig / 1973, 1980 (director’s cut, restored)

body and soul

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luchino Visconti, Enrico Medioli, and Suso Cecchi d'Amico (screenplay), Luchino Visconti (director) Ludwig / 1973, 1980 (director’s cut, restored)

 

Before I even begin writing about Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig of 1973 it is necessary to report which version of Visconti’s great film I saw, since there are now four editions of the work. The original “director’s cut” was over four hours long, far too long argued the film’s distributors—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (USA) and MGM-EMI (UK)—who cut it back to three hours when it originally appeared in German theaters. Visconti was unable to fight the changes since he had had a stroke during the filming and was too ill to further hold up the film’s release.

     The depiction of Ludwig’s homosexuality, moreover, caused a huge stir in Bavaria where Ludwig was still beloved by many conservatives, among them Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss, who attended the film there upon its premiere. Fearing further controversy, the distributors immediately cut another 55 minutes from the already butchered work of cinema, reducing the film to two hours, and excising any remaining hint of homosexuality along with removing most of the philosophical dialogues which help to explain Ludwig’s difficulties in attempting to serve the nation, the church, and himself simultaneously. Presumably, the people at MGM felt that these extensive cuts would help make the film more popular for mainstream audiences; it did not, only further estranging its audiences because of its disjointed plot and seemingly unrelated incidents. It was this two-hour version which most of the world saw when attending Ludwig in theaters in the US and the rest of Europe.

     In short, most viewers attending the March 1973 US showing, as film critic Wolfram Schütte put it, “haven’t even seen the film.”  Is it any wonder that Vincent Canby wrote of it in The New York Times Review:

 

“Ludwig, which opened yesterday at the 59th Street Twin 2 Theater, is opera buffa that doesn't know it. Visconti and his writers give us the story of Ludwig's reign (or, at least, the outline of it) in a manner that is meant to be grand but actually is just a frantic inventory of what historians usually call his excesses—his rather superficial appreciation for art and architecture, his love of sweets (which resulted in his teeth falling out) and especially his love affairs with a series of grooms, actors and other pretty fellows. Visconti has been such an intelligent film maker in the past that it's difficult to believe that Ludwig could be quite as bereft of ideas as it is. Is it about kingship? About the genesis of the Second Reich under the domination of the Prussian dynasty? About family? I don't think so.”

     Actually, had he seen the entire film, he might have realized that the movie is very much about just those subjects he brings up, but is also about so very much more. I’m surprised that he even figured it out that Ludwig (the always beautiful Helmut Berger, Visconti’s real-life lover of many years) had an eye for the boys, although apparently the cut vision did retain the later film scene in which we observe the leftovers of an all-male orgy. The posters and film promos, even today, feature the central figure about to kiss his cousin Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Romy Schneider), as if the film’s exploration of his personal life was focused upon a heterosexual liaison between the two. If he loved her it was only because she reminded him so very much of himself, a strong-willed royal who hated having to play out the responsibilities of being one, which cannot help but remind us today’s Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor, better known as Prince Harry Duke of Sussex, the so-called “bad boy” grandson of Elizabeth II. Ludwig, at least if Visconti is to be believed, was a virgin when it came to women, and accordingly had no Meaghan Markle to help him escape.

     Finally, I’m not at all surprised that a film in which most of the philosophical ideas have been erased, does in fact appear to be a work “without ideas.” The original, however, is very much a film of ideas, of which the issue of Ludwig’s sexuality is only a small part; and even then, Visconti is not at all interested in portraying gay sex as much as it is showing us why Ludwig’s sexuality helped to torture him and bring others to describe his as a mad man.

     The review of another US critic, Roger Ebert, makes even clearer the damage done to this work due to its numerous lost passages:

 

“I guess the movie might have made more sense in its uncut version, but I can’t be sure. There are all sorts of moments that are either (a) enigmatic, or (b) simply unresolved loose ends. At one point, a breathless courier races into the room and informs Ludwig that Bavaria has been defeated and has surrendered. Fine, but until this moment the movie has made no mention of a war. Nor is it ever mentioned again, and Ludwig stays in office.

      At another moment, a character of little importance suddenly becomes a narrator and tells us what we can see perfectly well: That Ludwig has invited a young actor to spend some time with him in the country. This is the only narration in the film; I suppose it’s inevitable that it would be used to explain one of the few moments in the film not needing explanation. Then again, at the end, there’s a printed epilog that informs us, so help me God, that “In death as in life, Ludwig remained an enigma.”

 

     Those of us who have now seen the entire four hours and seven minutes of this phenomenal artwork, were not confused by any of these incidents, recognizing them in a larger context of the film. Nor were we told as an afterthought that Ludwig was an enigma, since the character himself described that it as his intentional pose. (Near the end of the film Ludwig tells von Gudden, “I am an enigma. I want to be an enigma forever for those outside my world and for myself.”)

     Fortunately when I determined to watch this film, I couldn’t find a DVD version in print; and when I finally did see one for sale, I had already begun to watch on Mubi the restored version that the film’s editor Ruggero Mastroianni and screenwriter Suso Cecchi d’Amico had created for the 1980 Venice Film Festival four years after Visconti’s death. Apparently, the DVD version I had tracked down was the butchered one. Chance had saved me from mistakenly judging the work for something it had never been. Thank heaven for serious film sites such as Mubi, Criterion, Kino Lorber, and Filmatique for their careful curating and preservation.

     Visconti’s film, in reality, is a long epic that with a careful and deliberative pace establishes several things about the “Swan King,” the truly “bad boy” of the late 19th century who died of apparent suicide by drowning.

      Perhaps most important is that Ludwig was raised and trained to be precisely the aloof connoisseur of arts for which he was later damned for being. Although Visconti does not probe into his character’s childhood, the Ludwig he presents to us obviously was trained dutifully by tutors and Roman Catholic priests to be a pious aesthete, a man highly attune to the arts; and one of the earliest scenes in the film shows him coming of age and confessing to his personal priest, Father Hoffman (Gert Fröbe) that he has finally realized—faced at 19 with the death of his father and his own ascendency to the role of King of Bavaria—how he might best contribute to the well-being of his kingdom. Since he has hardly ever encountered people outside of the wealthy circles in which he was isolated from the rest of the world, Ludwig has utterly no ambitions of seeing to the welfare of his citizens or, although architecture is one of his deep passions, of remodeling the public structures of Münich or other Bavarian cities (yet he did, in fact, lay the cornerstone of Münich’s Cort Theater, now the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz). Ludwig, raised entirely a creature apart from others (history reports that he hardly ever even met with his father), given his noblesse oblige training intends to introduce Bavarian society to great European theater and, most importantly, to opera, in particular the works of Richard Wagner (Trevor Howard).

    But what happens when the gift you’re bestowing upon the entire society is not easily comprehended, the Bavarian audience not quite knowing who the great composer is or what his then experimental operas mean for the history of musical theater? Resentment that your King is focusing so forcibly upon an outsider is obviously one of the first reactions, particularly given the highly conservative, religious cabinet members of Bavarian government who are also appalled that Ludwig was not only paying for the production of Wagner’s new opera, Tristan and Isolde, but would build a new house for the composer, a new theater for the opera’s production, and pay for the composer’s previous debts, to say nothing of paying the salary of the conductor Hans von Bülow (Mark Burns) and his wife Cosima (Silvana Mangano) the later of whom, Bavarian secret agents soon discover, was having an affair with Wagner of which her husband was aware but  remained silent simply to maintain his position.

     In short, Ludwig was betrayed by those receiving his philanthropy and his best friend whom he has brought to Münich as his to the masses. One of the most painfully moving scenes on the first part of the film is when Ludwig must finally request that his “best friend”—one of several men throughout his life to whom he bears his soul and puts his trust who does not live up to his demands—leave the city. But even then Ludwig promises continued support and would latter help fund the Bayreuth productions of Wagner’s greatest achievement Der Ring des Nibelungen. Without Ludwig we would not have the Wagner that most of us know and love today.

     To describe Ludwig as “mostly a rotter,” as Canby does or, even worse, as Ebert characterizes the “Mad King,” “an egotistical little martinet,” rather misses the point. If Visconti is fascinated by his subject, it is not as both critics hint that he pruriently enjoys visiting the Bavarian Royal’s sexual depravities, but because, despite all the horrific epithets that were heaped upon him, Ludwig did truly accomplish a great deal that history has revealed as being of notable worth. And Visconti is not just speaking of what some might describe as a “dabbling” in music and a “hobby” of building fantastical castles such as the wondrous and highly “kitsch” fairy-like bastions of Schloß Neuschwanstein, Schloß Linderhof, and Schloß Herrenchiemsee—all now popular tourist attractions which, it was later discovered were paid for by his royal allowance not with public monies, having since reaped the Bavarian State a fortune over the years, while even at the time of their construction bringing considerable wealth to workers on the poorer regions of Bavaria where they were built. (Visconti does, however, give us a long grand tour of these castles as Elizabeth inspects each of them after hearing of governmental complaints of Ludwig’s expenditures.)

     What Ludwig accomplished in his abhorrence, as he describes it to Elizabeth, of “wars, weddings, babies” and his family’s “incestuous and fratricidal” activities, was to create an entirely new concept of how monarchies might be employed in the many European countries in which they have continued to exist into our own century. By refusing the involve himself in any matters with the disastrous Austrian-Bavarian alliance against the far more dominant Prussians, Ludwig removed himself from involvement with everyday politics and became the symbol of power rather than its executor, much the way the European monarchs serve their countries today. In a sense, Ludwig showed Europe how to deal with its archaic leaders who would soon lead them into World War I, with its ultimate ramifications being the tragic world struggle of World War II. Ludwig, as the Visconti’s film shows us, was radically opposed to the Bavarian alliance with Prussia which clearly foretold both Wars and—particularly given the conservative elements which helped depose Ludwig and the fact that Adolf Hitler spent most his childhood living in Lower Bavaria—would help the Bavarian rightists gain power in Germany long after Ludwig was dead.

     While these links are simply hinted at in Visconti’s biographically-based epic, they are made quite literal in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s anachronistic film, Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King of a year earlier. As cabinet members late in Visconti’s film plot discuss how to rid themselves of a King who will not politically involve himself, they also recognize that many of their fellow countrymen are absolutely delighted by Ludwig’s absence in the political arena.

      Indeed, Ludwig behaves throughout almost precisely as he has been raised to—except his refusal to attend family social occasions, present himself as a beneficent leader in public, and, by far most importantly, to marry and produce an heir.

      The latter is what is generally described by all as his greatest “eccentricity,” a code world even today for a homosexual, which, although not against the law in Bavaria, was still outlawed in Prussia (which may have played a role in Ludwig’s fierce refusal to join in an alliance with that country), and would have been unthinkable among Bavaria’s social elite. As Jonathan Romney summarizes it in his excellent commentary in Film Comment:

 

“Ludwig’s doom was partly to do with what enemies in his court here term his ‘eccentricity’—in other words, his homosexuality.”

 

     Budd Wilkins, in Slant expresses Visconti’s focus in this film in more general terms:

 

“Visconti’s film is at bottom the attitudinal antithesis of a traditional biopic, eschewing the grand historical set pieces (an odd blend of battles and opera performances, in this instance) that would’ve been the bread and butter of a more conventional film. Ludwig instead becomes a penetrating character study of an individual isolated from, yet in thrall to, the dynastic royal family that rejects out of hand his natural proclivities and artistic instincts.”

 

      If Visconti, accordingly, seems to some viewers to focus on Ludwig’s homosexuality—which I insist he most certainly does not—it is because the real problem the politicians face is not simply his exorbitant expenses, his isolation from his own countrymen, his “dabbling” in what was considered as the “esthete pleasures” of music, theater, and art, but his refusal to marry Sophie (Sonia Petrovna), Elizabeth’s sister, and bear a male who might take over the country upon his death.

     It’s not that Ludwig didn’t try. After intense counseling by the two men who were closest to him and obviously knew just what his eccentricities consisted of, Father Hoffman and the dashing Count Dürckheim (Helmut Griem)—both of whom attempt to convince him to abandon his natural instincts in service to the national cause—Ludwig struggles deeply to control his sexual inclinations. Both recognize, however, that just as Wagner is a genius, different from the others, so too is their beloved leader. To turn him into an ordinary being will surely be to kill him, just as it destroys his equally sensitive brother Otto (John Mouder), another young man whose “loneliness” we are told (perhaps we might read that as a coded word for his closeted existence) has made him insane.

     After one such conversation, Ludwig suddenly declares that he will marry Sophie, waking up the entire household and calling Father Hoffman to his side to declare his intentions. Yet, Hoffman and even Ludwig’s mother (Izabella Teleżyńska) recognize that the young man’s sudden enthusiasm—today Ludwig most certainly would be defined as suffering from bipolar disorder—is a problematic joy. Hoffman is highly skeptical of the whole event. And Ludwig’s mother Marie and associates higher proceed to hire a stage actress to initiate him into how to engage in heterosexual behavior.

     Without having any of her sister’s worldly knowledge and abilities to cope, Sophie is nonetheless a beautiful and well-trained woman. She, unlike Elizabeth, even shares her fiancé’s love of Wagner. But to hear her sing while playing the piano is, as Berger’s preposterous passive expression reveals, a true torture; he even takes a small revenge by encouraging his friend Wagner to ask her to privately perform for him. Fortunately, the wise and crafty survivor, foregoes the pleasure.

      Ludwig continually postpones the wedding, ostensibly because of the fact that he will have face an endless series of social gatherings. Eventually he cancels it altogether, sparing Sophie years of suffering.

      Despite Visconti’s own homosexual relationships with the last king of Italy, Umberto II, the notorious director of operas, films, and theater Franco Zeffirelli, in Ludwig as well as the rich sensuous quality of the cinematic images in almost all of Visconti’s films, he has seldom represented homosexual sex as a passionate or sensual affair. Here, once again, we never see Ludwig engaged in sex or even in bed with another man. The clearest evidence of Ludwig’s desire is the gentle kiss he plants on the forehead of a sleeping servant. We observe Ludwig almost having an orgasm as he listens to the handsome stage actor Josef Kainz (Folker Bohnet) declaim passages from a role that has made him famous.

     The sexual energy it releases in Ludwig, however, is not at all what might normally be described as love-making, as in another frenetic episode soon after, he demands that Kainz immediately join him on a voyage to Greece, Italy, and other countries while all the trip spouting passages from his plays. While Ludwig is ready to offer up both body and soul, the voyage totally exhausts the venal Kainz (the actor expects to be paid for his sexual services with jewel-encrusted rings and watches) who finally collapses on a bench serving as the only bed into which Ludwig has apparently enticed him. Once more, a dear friend disappoints him in love.

     If there is any sign of sex in Visconti films it is that of the voyeur staring into at the body of his would-be lover with desire (as in Death in Venice) or in the aftermath of an orgy of sexual drunkenness (as in the scene of the young SS officers in The Damned). Here Visconti conjures up just such a scene, which I would describe as a tableau or frieze of sexual satiation with an entire small battalion of stable boys, soldiers, and servants—only in sex was Ludwig a true “man of the people”—having fallen to the floor and even hanging out naked in the trees in the lavish imitation of a Bavarian beer-stube that the King has evidently carved out of his castle grottos. We see sex portrayed in Ludwig and his other films only as a consummation, something that has burned away all desire to leave us only a vast portrait of a debauchery of the imagination. It is, like all of Ludwig’s endeavors, a theatrical representation of love having little to do with a literal gathering of men to suck and fuck. Like the movie itself, it is a piece of art in which no prisoners of the heart are left standing.

     I should imagine that was precisely how the Bavarian bourgeoise pictured Ludwig’s grand “eccentricities”; after all, hadn’t he already expressed his sensibility in the extravaganzas of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and three fairytale castles? Could they truly have conjured up the rather pudgy, rotten-toothed, frowzily dressed, worn-out King that Helmut Berger portrays at film’s end? A King being so grandly conceived, must be able to corrupt all those around him, including the society itself. Action therefore immediately necessary, despite the fact that Ludwig now acted only in private and had no longer any contact with the world in his rule. Surely, he might simply have been left alone to die alone in a corner of one of his castles, mourned by a nation of followers who truly conceived the aristocracy as fantastical beings.

     The only way the government could imagine for destroying the beast they had created, however, was to pretend to use science in order cure it. A psychiatrist, Professor Bernhard von Gudden (Heinz Moog) was called upon to access the situation and certify Ludwig as being of unsound mind. His report read:

 

             His Majesty is in the advanced stage of a mental disorder

             known as paranoia. Such a disorder does not allow freedom

             of action. And such incapability will continue for the rest

             of his life.

 

Even if we were to forget the fact that just such plots to depose the King—which he long before suspected—might have led to any signs of paranoia Ludwig might have shown, the real tactic was to describe his “eccentricities” (his sexual “disorder) as representative of mental illness. It certainly wasn’t the first nor the last of many such proclamations used to silence homosexual individuals Although it is hard to imagine, even I, in my youth, would have been labeled mentally ill by The American Psychiatric Association and possibly arrested by the local police for illegal activities if I had been found acting out my sexual desires.

     The Ludwig we see at the end of this film, moreover, seems utterly enraged but totally sane, releasing the cabinet members he had briefly imprisoned for their actions, and recognizing that he had no choice but to obey their demands to be locked up in Berg castle on Lake Starnberg, just south of his now hated Münich. He is sane enough to know that his enemies are insistent upon “keeping me alive by killing me just as my brother (Otto).” He seeks the keys to the parapets of the castle in which now resides so that he might hurl himself to his death and, when that fails, he seeks out poison from his only ally, Count Dürckheim,” his request refused by the man who still loves him.

     When he was finally allowed to walk the lake paths with von Gudden, he seemingly strangles von Gudden before drowning himself in the lake. Rumors persist even today, however, that since Ludwig was a strong swimmer and no water was evidently found in his lungs that he was shot to death, perhaps by Count von Holnstein (Umberto Orsini), who told others he would notify them of Ludwig’s discovery with one shot. In Visconti’s film two shots are fired.

     Visconti’s film suggests that King Ludwig II, perhaps unintentionally, performed the role as an existentialist gay man—so different from Oscar Wilde who a few years later would suffer out his imprisonment—who one might describe as the first modern gay hero. He did not destroy himself out of infamy or shame, but rather to escape the imprisonment and silence imposed upon him, to retain his freedom. We can even imagine his killing of von Gudden as representing a kind of revenge against the society that could not embrace the gentle Frankenstein it had created. His desire to remain an enigma, finally, might be perceived as an attempt to fully claim his strangeness, the queerness that stood against everyday social niceties, pious complacency, and the petty hate that begat warring, while buggering body and soul, beauty and art.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

               

Jan Oxenberg | Home Movie / 1973

at home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jan Oxenberg (screenwriter and director) Home Movie / 1973

 

The dominant frame of Jan Oxenberg’s 1973 work, Home Movie, is a time near the date of this short cinema depicting lesbian marches and the activities of the director and her current friends before permitting us entry into earlier images of her childhood and high school years. One of the major questions her film raises is how precisely to define home.

     Is “home” best represented by the cinematic images of Oxenberg imitating the actions of her mother as the latter nurses her newborn sibling, with the child mimicking those actions with her doll? The child tries hard to do the same as her mother, holding the doll as her mother does the real baby, patting it gently upon its back, feeding it a bottle as the mother feeds milk to the child. Yet, the narrator queries “I wonder why I was doing this?” challenging her pretense as a little girl. “I don’t know, I look so...normal. Just like a little girl.” After a pause she continues, “Which is really strange because I didn’t feel like a little girl.” “I was different, you know. I was a pioneer, I was in the army.”

      Beyond the narrator’s voice, moreover, we do see significant differences between the mother and the would-be mime, the second, as she herself puts it, trying to fool all the others. The child, at moments, looks somewhat angry, clumsy in her actions, holding her doll and moving it with rough, jerky actions. Although constantly looking over to her mother for clues, the child is clearly not quite certain of how to do what she’s being encouraged to, and, more importantly has no indication of why. The placid look of approval which briefly crosses her mother’s face obviously explains a great deal of the young girl’s motivation.

      In another early “home movie,” the child, slightly older but still dressed in a rather frilly gown, dances, a kind of wild whirl of movement, sometimes seeming to imitate the taps of Shirley Temple, but at other moments incorporating some of the techniques of a spinning ballerina. Critic Michelle Citron, writing in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media describes it:

 

“Her dance is extraordinary. Arms waving frenetically, the child is trying to keep her balance. Then, trying to negotiate a graceful turn, she falls on her ass. It is simultaneously funny and painful to watch. Here is Shirley Temple as performed not by a precocious child star but by a real child. The girl is trying to imitate what she thinks should be cute and feminine, but since she is real, not a male-manufactured icon, she fails at this attempt. Her dance is not graceful or coy. Rather, it's the desperate running around in a circle of a kid who doesn't quite catch on. The image resonates with our memories of trying to fit in, struggling to be those images of ‘true femininity’ presented in films, magazines and television commercials. This image symbolizes growing up female. On the sound track the woman's voice intones, ‘I never felt like a girl. They let me be crazy.’ Few of us could measure up to the ideal, unreal images, always feeling somehow crazy.”

 

     If the would-be dancer doesn’t exactly “fall on her ass,” I would argue, she ends what was clearly meant to be an expression of gracefulness with a more ruffian somersault as if say to herself, “Forget that. I’m better at the rough and tumble of life.”

     An important memory of her best high school friend, with whom she did not engage in a sexual relationship but shared such deeply intense feelings that it might has well been, follows, ending in further family-shot footage of her high school days as a cheerleader.

     Like the former childhood attempts to accommodate the expectations of how she should behave, Oxenberg describes her knowledge of who was on the “inside”—a lesbian—being conflicted with what she was attempting to portray on the “outside” as a kind of normalcy. For her, a little like the character in Jamie Babbit’s But I’m a Cheerleader, her relationship with her fellow female cheerleaders was of far more importance than “the guys we were cheering for.” For her the football players were “just kind of irrelevant.” “It was as if the football game was just an excuse for us to get together and do our thing.”

     Yet the dichotomy of inner and outer being she felt could clearly never be resolved. “I never saw myself as a cheerleader type. And maybe that’s why I was a cheerleader. ...If I was a cheerleader on the outside that would make it okay to be a lesbian on the inside. ....But it really had to be on the inside. I mean what would it look like if I were walking down the street in my Elmont High uniform kissing a woman? We weren’t even allowed to chew gum.”

      On either side of these older home films, however, are her adult relationships with the lesbian community, at one point a lesbian group marching down the street shouting “1-3-5-9 lesbians are mighty fine,” representing another kind of cheerleading; and an all-woman football game played utterly differently from the male-on-male contact sport that often does damage of the player’s brains. The women seem hardly to care about the ball they hike and attempt to carry down to the goalposts; rather their goal is to run and leap upon one another in a kind of bacchanalian joy of touching and hugging each other. No rules here, just a joyous sense of female camaraderie ending in laughter instead of scores.

      At the distant beginning and end of these amateur-made film clips are pictures of women holding hands, circling into one another, and just sharing with one another as a singer (the music is credited to Debra Quinn) joyfully performs a work with the following lyrics:

 

                    We are women. We aren’t waiting any longer

                    to be free. We’re not alone, we’re together.

                    So don’t tell us what to be.  [my own line breaks]

 

     Finally, one realizes that these images also represent a kind of “home movie,” but a far more significant one. The home that faces the women in these images is a place where they can come together and share with one another in a manner they could never have back in their family homes, schools, or small town streets. These home movies present the women most at home in one another’s company, without having to enact how they should perform in imitation of their mothers, movies, media, and high school social mores.

      Oxenberg’s film, accordingly, is structured almost like a flower, its blossom appearing on either sides as it progresses through repetition to its fragile central buds which represent the hidden insides that finally are allowed to express themselves in full bloom. The mother and the previous social restrictions delimiting them have been pushed aside for others like them defining a new space in the world: “We’re not helpless...We’ve got each other.” What was clumsy and graceless is now transformed into a powerfully new expression of the beauty of being at home.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).

 

 

David Sale and others | Number 96 / 1972-1977 [TV series] || Peter Benardos | Number 96: The Movie / 1974

guilty pleasures in braver days

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Sale (creator), David Sale, Brian Phillis, Peter Benardos, and others (see below) directors Number 96 / 1972-1977  [TV series]

David Sale (screenplay), Peter Benardos (director) Number 96: The Movie / 1974

 

If by some incredible accident a US citizen should happen upon and attempt to watch the movie titled Number 96: The Movie, directed by the Australian Peter Benardos, I should imagine he would have utterly no idea of what it is he has just witnessed. If he might even recognize it as a strange soap opera-like work, its mulligan stew of a rape scene, two attempted murder cases, a comic Ruby Anniversary party complicated by the fact that forty years ago the groom’s friend mistakenly signed the marriage certificate in the space where the husband was to have written his own name, along with a failed attempt of a handsome young man to consummate sex with the female fellow worker he believes he loves, coupled with the fact the same woman soon after marries the Prime Minister of Australia and the same man who failed to have sex with her joyfully jumps naked into bed with a gay lawyer (in Australia, of course, he’s called a solicitor, which I fear, to the American ear, might suggest he has solicited the sex) whom he has just met—all occurring in the same apartment building among individuals who appear to know one another intimately—might utterly confound even those who have overcharged imaginations. And I’ve not even mentioned the hard-working Jewish Hungarian wine-bar / deli owner and his wife who lose 2,000 dollars he’s hidden in his mattress when a fire burns their bed, their nerdy clerk, a few wacko males who attempt to construct a pre-fab sauna in their building’s basement, a bi-sexual, film-loving caterer planning a lavish party for the married couple for 20 cents a head who just happens to be the former boyfriend of the lawyer (although the film seems to have forgotten that fact), and numerous other women and men who have apparently fought over the bodies of several of those mentioned above. After just a few moments of this, I would guess, this stymied Yank would click the Vimeo connection, for which he had just paid $2.99, off.

     I watched it with great glee despite is obvious flaws of coherence, color quality, and inconsistent sound. But then I had just spent several hours before this watching a number of episodes in black-and-white and color (most of the black-and-white ones, shot in the early 1970s have been destroyed) of the long-running (March 1972-August 1977) Australian TV series, Number 96, the success of which had occasioned this 35mm film. Like the Aussie audiences who made this mess of a movie an overwhelming hit, I too now knew most of the characters’ names and some of their history. The original audience, so I’ve read, applauded as each character appeared upon the screen, having, by series end, joined them in their living rooms five nights a week for 1,218 episodes. For their audience they were family and friends.

      Facing an increasingly small viewer base, the youngest of Australia’s three commercial networks, Channel Ten, decided in 1972 to commission a soap opera from writer David Sale, then executive producer of The Mavis Bramston Show a weekly satirical comedy review in the manner of the British series That Was the Week That Was. Producers Bill Harmon and Don Cash gave Sale almost carte blanche for the soap opera series which, instead of being aired during daytime hours, would be aired at the 8:30 p.m. slot to fit the Australian government’s quota that all commercial networks must produce 40 hours a month of dramatic programming.

      Working without even a general series plot, Sale created a semi-coherent story by setting his series in an inner-city apartment block, 96 Lindsay Street, in Paddington, the inner-city region of Sydney—the site of the former home of two of his characters, the nosey, gossipy, interruptive and conservative Dorrie Evans (Pat McDonald, who appeared in 321 episodes) and her browbeaten husband Herb (Ron Shand). Despite its heavy mix of vaudeville humor and melodrama, along with a number of somewhat saccharine love scenes, Sale created a sexy, often hip, culturally knowledgeable series centered on issues of homosexuality and homophobia, drug use, racism, adultery, rape, and even in its later incarnations episodes featuring a serial bra and panty-snipping intruder and a bomber. Characters often appeared in their underwear or even less, talked quite openly about sex, and grappled with issues relating to xenophobia, transvestism, exhibitionism, incest, hierarchical class privilege, juvenile delinquency, and numerous other issues that had never before reached the television screen. Along with Dorrie, its primary figure—together they were the only two characters who survived until the end of the work’s run—was an attractive gay law clerk who eventually became a solicitor, Don Finlayson (Joe Hasham, appearing in 297 episodes), whom everyone in the building and the surrounding neighborhood respected and loved, and from whom they often sought legal and other advice. As The Daily Mirror critic Matt White wrote the day after that 1972 premiere, it was the night Australian television “lost its virginity.”

     The vast majority of the episodes, 1,215 to be exact, were directed by the series creator Sale; other episodes were directed by Brian Phillis (51 episodes), Peter Benardos (45 episodes), Howard Scrivenor, Ted Gregory, Peter Pascoe, Derek Strachan, Ross Napier, Tim Purcell, Kate Harvey, Eleanor Witcombe, Jonny Whyte, Lynne Foster, Tom MacLennan, Ken Shadie, Michael Boddy, Robert Caswell, Pat Flower, and Alan Kitson, Lance Peters, Anne Hall, Michael Laurence, Susan Swinford, and Bob Ellis.

     Although there appears to be a DVD sampler of episodes that can be played only in Australia and surrounding regions, I have only seen two full episodes (designated without any other confirmation by their YouTube posters as nos. 1 and 3), a collation of early gay scenes posted by Roy Gardnerra on YouTube, along with fascinating commentary on what it meant to Aussie audiences to see a gay man regularly portrayed on their tellies, and clips provided by anonymous contributors and the Australian Screen archive. As I mention above, when the series switched to color, most of the original black-and-white tapes were reused or destroyed, being seen to have little value. Yet, it might be illuminating to relate aspects of the two early episodes I watched just to provide a sense of what this series offered during the six years of its existence.

      In the first episode Mark (Martin Harris) and Helen Eastwood (Briony Behets) are moving into the building, watched like a hawk by the always intrusive Dorrie, who as soon as all the Eastwood’s furniture has been delivered, walks into their flat uninvited to observe the newly married couple kissing on the couch. Dorrie explains that she serves as the “unofficial” concierge (which in a later episode she, thinking it’s a German word, calls a “conserge”) since the apartment building has been built on the site of her and Herb’s former house. Mark, rather sarcastically, understands, accordingly, why she might “still regard this whole block as [her] own.”

      When the couple finally get Dorrie to leave their apartment, Mark expresses his frustration that, since her pregnancy, his wife no longer allows any intimacy between them. He is obviously a “horny” man, almost angry for the constant barriers his wife puts between them, he suggesting that perhaps they should have waited longer after their marriage to have a child.

       Meanwhile, in another unit, shared by Jane Chester (Suzanne Church) and the buxom blonde of the early episodes, Bev Houghton (Abigail), Janie describes the difficulty she has in finding a job, while Bev, who works as a sea cruise hostess, shows off her new outfit—a tight sweater accentuated by an open leather-fringed jacket and short dress—telling her roommate that she’s about to pose for Bruce Taylor (Paul Weingott), a photographer who lives next door who’s doing a little  “moonlighting” from his regular job (in order, we later discover, to earn a little extra money to support the parties he and his gay companion Don regularly throw). Janie wonders whether the seemingly sexually promiscuous, but actually quite innocent Bev might be posing for a “girlie magazine,” but Bev assures her that it’s for Mode Photography.

     Shift to Dorrie—now in the downstairs Deli run by Aldo Godulfus (Johnny Lockwood) and assisted by his daughter Rose (Vivienne Garrett) (we do not meet Aldo’s later wife Roma [Philippa Baker] in these early episodes)—complains to Aldo and another neighbor, Vera Collins (Elaine Lee) about how the new tenants, having just moved in, were already “canoodling.” Vera and Aldo both stand up for the couple’s lovemaking; after all they are newly married. But, having heard their voices from the hall, Dorrie is distressed that they may be noisy, arguing that “we have enough noise already” (a complaint we later perceive about Don and Bruce’s “bachelor” parties). Vera, whom we quickly realize has little tolerance for Dorrie’s behavior, suggests that they might have less noise if only Dorrie would keep her mouth shut. In response to which Dorrie describes Vera’s part-time occupation of fortune-telling as “garbage.”

      When Helen drops down to the Deli for a bottle of milk, she briefly meets Vera, on her way out. Dorrie immediately whispers to Helen that, in the future, she should keep away from Vera: “She’s bad news. Very bad news.”

      Upstairs, in yet another unit, we meet Alf (James Elliott) and Lucy Sutcliffe (Elisabeth Kirkby), a couple who have moved to Australia from Great Britain. Alf is a truck driver totally unhappy with his new life down under, while Lucy seems to have assimilated quite nicely. She has just purchased a new dress for her young granddaughter which Alf insists must be of inferior quality if made in Australia. It turns out the dress he mocked was made in England. He’s saving up to move back to Britain, but Lucy insists that if he moves back, it will be without her. (Later in the series she does join him on their return to England.) She threatens to find a new job to bring in money for her own purchases.

      Back in the Deli, Mark meets Rose, talking briefly with her in a light conversation in which he reveals he’s a schoolteacher and she hints of her unhappiness of working, temporarily, as her father’s assistant. When Rose goes to lift up a crate of bottles to put them in the refrigerator, Mark intervenes in a rather macho gesture, carting them to the fridge himself.

     Mark’s wife Helen, meanwhile, has decided to take up Vera’s offer to read her fortune. After she chooses five cards, Vera briefly looks at them before dismissing what she sees as “meaning nothing,” although we see a slight look of consternation upon her face. The two women talk, Vera admitting that she had been married but that one day her husband just walked out on her. Again, Helen draws five cards, and once more Vera shuffles them, obviously disliking what she sees.

      Downstairs we observe Bruce’s photo session with Bev in which he snaps her in several suggestive positions, selecting a final pose of her against the wall featuring her sweater-bound breasts. The shoot keeps getting interrupted, first by Don, who at this point is an article clerk in his last year of law studies, who enters and seeing Bev cries out “Oh, no,” she responding. “The kind of greeting a girl dreams of.” He has to study he tells his lover, who asks him to make himself scare, as if he were simply as a petulant child. “Where?” Don wonders. “Well, there’s always the bedroom,” answers Bruce. “Oh, are you talking to me?” quips Bev.

     Bruce tries to reposition Bev, but the moment he is about to snap the shutter, Janie enters to tell her roommate that her mother has called to say it’s urgent, something about her brother Rod. “Oh go on then Bev, your brother may have dropped dead or something.” Bev turns and angrily speaks out: “Don’t you dare say that. You can say anything want about my mother, but not about Rod!”

       (I’ve gleaned from a very brief later clip that something eventually happened to Rod that has taken away his ability to work. Visiting his sister Bev, he recalls the days when as children they used to huddle together late at night in bed, and asks her to do so now, just to reassure him. Somewhat hesitatingly she does so only to have the man with whom she is currently living enter, discovering to two hugging in bed, he wrongly perceiving it as a case of incestuous love, which it may have been.)

      As we return to the fortunetelling session, Vera asks Helen to pick just one card, and seeing it, admits “this just isn’t my day,” stuffing it back into the deck as Helen is called back to her apartment. Obviously, something in the cards has upset Vera. Lucy enters Vera’s apartment to ask if she knows anything about a possible job. “I’m sick about Alf and his mean ways.” Vera says she might know of job in a launderette.

      Downstairs again, Rose has an argument with her father. She wants to “go her own way,” while he wants to look after her a while longer; besides, he hopes to open up a restaurant next door where he will need her help. When Bev enters the shop, Rose points to her as a young woman, like herself, who has moved successfully away from parental control. Bev mentions how much she disliked her mother but is meeting up with her because her brother Rod is passing through on his way to the Texas King Ranch to study beef cattle.

      Rose’s former boyfriend, a tough leather-jacketed kid, enters the shop just as Aldo heads off to inspect the new location where he hopes to open the restaurant. The boyfriend forces her into the back room and is about to rape her as she screams, with Mark, having just entered the establishment, coming to her rescue. After slugging Mark in the stomach, the former boyfriend threatens Rose that he will return.

     Even in this very first episode, moreover, we get glimmers of the series’ wide range of future topics: the budding sexuality of Bev; the possibly of an adulterous liaison between Rose and Mark; the questioning of Bruce’s personality and intentions; a separation of father from his daughter; and a flash into a disturbing future for Helen—not to even mention the thwarted rape of Aldo’s beloved Rose.

    The so-called Episode 3 begins with the Eastwoods, just as Dorrie feared, loudly screaming at one another, Helen rushing from the apartment down the stairs past Dorrie—always serving as a sentry for all the tenants’ actions—and falling forward down the next flight of steps. Mark quickly follows, demanding someone call an ambulance, which soon appears, Mark making the trip to the hospital with his wife. Vera appears on the staircase in distress, claiming that the tarot cards she had read for Helen had told her that this was about to happen.

     Alf returns home drunk, and he and the always patient Lucy fight. She determining more than ever to get a job just in case he might decide to move back to his beloved homeland.

     Meanwhile, Janie, an aspiring actress we now discover, insists she has failed her audition. The American producer evidently, like so many others, was simply seeking a “playmate,” a role she rejects. Bev attempts to convince her that it might be worth going to bed with him for the few lines she might be able finally to perform on a stage. (I should note that this series is quite absurdly misogynistic, women throughout treated like the sexual toys against which an executive in the American musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying of a decade earlier warned his male associates in their treatment of the opposite sex. Very few of Number 96’s occupants have seemingly ever heard of feminism.) Bev all but admits that she has gotten her job as a cruise hostess by having sex with her employer. “But you’re just the right type for a cruise hostess,” argues Janie. “So were the other 49 birds who applied for that job,” she answers. “Do you mean you...,” interrupts Janie. “I do, and I did.”

      Dorrie, as one might expect, having heard the Eastwoods battle royal, tells residents gathered in the Deli that she wants Mark to suffer, suggesting that the Deli man’s daughter has been having an affair with Mark, and that Helen had caught them in flagrante delicto. “Didn’t you hear how they were carrying on before it happened,” inquires Dorrie. “No,” responds Vera, “because I’m not blessed with super-sensitive hearing, X-ray vision, and a talent for ‘sticky-beck’,” as she pulls away the nasty gossip from the deli counter so that Aldo will not overhear her accusations.

    Yet Aldo is suspicious that Rose may have been doing “something wrong,” which his daughter denies. She suggests she simply is not feeling well, accusing him being suspicious, shouting at her, and making her feel like a child.

     Lucy visits Vera’s apartment for a fitting of her new launderette outfit, describing her husband the working man’s poor Dean Martin. (Martin is almost a running joke in this series.) Despite accusing Vera of tampering with the occult, Lucy also asks for a Tarot reading.

     Bev appears in her underwear, her ample breasts almost overflowing her skimpy bra. Again, she and Janey discuss the producer’s lecherous intentions. He’s asked her out tonight; he has to finish casting by the next day. Bev argues, “Better a professional actress than a professional virgin.”

     Back in the Deli it is now confirmed that Rose and Mark have been having an affair, or at least sex. He’s waiting a call from the hospital about his wife’s condition. Mark tells Rose that Helen is the only one he really wanted, and tries to make the young woman understand that, despite his attentions to her, he is no longer interested in having a relationship.

     Rose later confesses to Vera that she was in Mark’s apartment when Helen came back. Vera: “I’ve been around. You name it, I’ve probably done it. Twice,” attempting to convince Rose that Mark has simply wanted her because of his sexual needs given they were not being relieved by his pregnant wife. But the young woman is certain that the relationship was serious.

    Don and Bruce reappear in the Deli to purchase supplies for their next party. (From the gay compilation, I should imagine that Episode two held the scene from which I saw with them rising the next morning after their party dressed in bikini-style underwear, to clear up the mess left over from the previous night. Dorrie appears in the hallway as they attempt to carry the trash boxes to the basement, bitterly complaining of the noise). Suddenly Dorrie enters, Bruce commenting, “Oh my God, it’s the Bride of Frankenstein. Maybe we should order four kinds of cheese...to go with the flagons.” Dorrie angrily accuses them again of having noisy parties, to which Bruce responds, “they are simply ‘exuberant.’” She threatens to call the agent. Don says they will try to keep the noise down. “Which shouldn’t be difficult,” adds Bruce, “since we’re only having 100 kids in for an orgy.” Dorrie’s last words: “Well...you can joke all you like. But let me tell you, if there are any disturbances tonight, you’re in for trouble [pausing] big trouble.” (Evidently, from what I’ve seen in the gay compilation Don disconnected a cord in their photograph and demanded the party’s participants to quiet down so often, that their “orgy” was a bust, everyone apparently leaving early, for which Bruce complains, demonstrating Don’s sense of responsibility as opposed to Bruce’s disregard of acting in any way that doesn’t prove pleasurable.)

      Mark finally gets the telephone call from the hospital. Helen has had a miscarriage; the baby is fine. But Helen is evidently not so. He tells Vera the news and rushes off.

    The American producer passes on the stairway, asking Vera for directions to Janie’s apartment. Finding Janie at home without anyone else in the apartment, he insists they work “on the script” at home, pulling her onto the couch, putting his arms around her and addressing her, “Now, I want to find out...all about you.”

      So we have now added adultery, wild gay parties, and a possible couch casting scene—all mixed with a significant amount of semi-nudity which evidently increased as the series moved forward (several of Lucy’s launderette customers determining to get naked as they wash their clothes, etc.)—all in the very first week of this series’ initiation to its soon to be addicted audiences.

      The introduction of openly gay figures to the television world, obviously, became something of great interest to Number 96 viewers. When church and other conservative representatives demanded that Don be converted into a straight man, Sale and his producers refused, telling network executives that if they demanded that, he would take his series elsewhere. Gardnerra, accompanying his gay postings of the series, observes that “Don became one of the most popular cast members and was regarded as a sex symbol by many fans.  He appeared multiple times on the cover of the National TV Week and other publications.” Gardnerra also recounts that when he erratically saw episodes—his own father was highly religious and for a long while would not permit the family to watch, which they nonetheless did when he was out of the house teaching—he was only 11. Yet the TV series nonetheless was crucial for him growing up to see a homosexual who appeared as a seemingly normal being, “always caring, compassionate, helpful, honest, hard-working,” hinting at how important it was to his own life.

     Since in the movie version of series episodes Don meets up with another gay man Simon, the two of them becoming heroes as they save Vera’s life, it might be useful to share the little bit of what I’ve been able to glimpse of the further series adventures of Don and his various lovers.

     As I’ve suggested, Bruce does not at all seem a right match for Don. And when we begin to perceive in later episodes that he pretends to his employer Maggie Cameron (Bettina Welch, who plays her character with all the wicked lustfulness of Joan Crawford) that he is willing to fulfill her desire of bedding him, despite the fact that she is married, he begins to perceive him as a kind of a scheming gigolo, particularly since, we soon discover, Maggie owns the apartment and has helped purchase most of the art that lines the walls. He accepts her demands to visit what she describes as “their” apartment for dinner when her husband is away on business, Bruce manipulating Don into cooking ahead of time, and then forcing him to spend long hours at the movies with Bev, putting him in a situation much like the Jack Lemmon character, Calvin Baxter in the film The Apartment (1960), a man locked out of his own house.

     The results are disastrous as first Maggie’s husband, suspecting her of seeing another man, has her tailed and throws her out of their house, forcing her to move in with Don (I don’t know the details, but by this time Bruce has gone missing), toasting their new minted “friendship” (“With you as you are and I as I am, what else could it be?”): “Here’s to crime.” “What crime?” asks Don. “The crime of you staying on here with me. You know you have a very nice body. Oh well, such is taste.” She allows that he has every right to bring men back home, but “When it comes to young men, I’ve got claws like an eagle.” Don responds: “So this flat has become your aiery, has it.?” Is it any wonder when, much later on in the series, we discover that Maggie Cameron is the bomber?

     The second victim of Bruce’s behavior is Bev, who in another episode we see grabbing Don and attempting to kiss him, while he desperately pants and tries to pull away, finally pushing her back just enough to say: “I thought you knew. I’m a homosexual.” If faces can fall, hers cracks. “This thing between us was just...a deep friendship. I thought you knew about Bruce and me. I’m sorry.”

     Her response is perhaps one of the most clearly expressed examples of homophobia ever on either the TV or motion picture screen. Coming up for air, she suddenly explodes: “Sorry? You filthy, filthy, dancing little queer,” before retreating for days into a shell of incomprehension.

     Trying to comfort her later, her roommate Janie, when Bev admits that she still loves Don, argues that she should try to see him and talk. “I couldn’t, it’s so revolting. Janie.”

     Janie: “It’s not impossible for a homosexual to love a woman. Well it’s an accepted part of society whether it’s against the law or not.” That terribly hypocritical statement by one of the most level-headed citizens of Number 96 is one of the most startlingly statements of all. Clearly, if it’s still a criminal act the society has truly “accepted” it.

      When Don attempts to contact her again, Bev calls him “Miss Finlayson.”

      “Try to understand,” he implores her.

      “Oh I understand you mistook me for another nancy boy.”

      Soon after, she runs out into the hall screaming “Finlayson is a queer. Don is a fag,” etc.

      Don receives a note from Bruce, who admits he is taking the cowardly way out. (Evidently Bruce has fled Sydney for Adelaide after the death of Bev, of which I know absolutely nothing.)

     Eventually, Bev apologizes and forgives him. Yet even in Episode 35, when he encounters her much-hated patrician mother Claire Houghton (Thelma Scott), visiting her daughter because she perceives that something is quite wrong, Bev is still suffering over her love of Don, although by this time it has become quite comic in tone.

      “Well if you must know, I’ve fallen in love with a homosexual, and I’m trying to get over it.”

      Claire: “What, you mean one of those creatures who wear false eyelashes and douses themselves in Chanel No. 5?”

       Bev contradicts her mother’s conception, describing him as just an ordinary guy, an article clerk, while Claire grandly suggests that there are far more acceptable deviants such as the successful dress designer they know and “that interior decorator who stands to inherit a fortune when his mother dies.”

       Bev finally comes round to expressing the obvious in their shared homophobic conceptions: “You’re just as much a pervert as a drag queen.” 

       Her mother’s response is hilarious: “Let me be the judge of that!”

       While Bev’s final retort reveals both her general fear of any LGBTQ individual while mocking her mother’s inverted notions of reality: “I still think you wouldn’t mind me being with a lesbian, as long as she was a dame in the British Empire.”

       I don’t tend to watch many US soap operas, but I can’t imagine any repartee quite as cleverly campy as what we encounter in this scene. It reads a little like Charles Ludlam rewriting Joan Collins.

       Don evidently had three lovers in the series, Bruce Taylor, who I talk about above.

       And then there is Simon Car (John Orcsik) who is in the closet for much of the time, but finally comes out with Don in Number 96: The Movie, which shows them in bed together and, before it was inexplicably cut, allowed them on a screen kiss.

       Don’s final lover was Derek Costa (Stephen O’Rouke), about which I have information and have seen no clips.

       In later episodes another gay character is introduced,  Dudley Butterfield (Chard Hayward*), a rather campy figure who first disrobes as a hippie in Lucy’s laundromat, but later comes to work at Aldo’s wine bar, before evidently turning bisexual, opening a disco, a hair salon, and becoming an TV actor, all before he is shot.

       And finally, before I turn to the movie version, I should mention that Aldo’s later assistant, the bookish Arnold Feather (Jeff Kevin) falls in love with Carlotta (Carole Lea), a transvestite who finally when Arnold is on the verge of asking for her hand in marriage, asks “You really don’t mind me not being a girl?” “What?” “I’m not really a girl. But you said you knew.” “I knew nothing of the sort, Miss Ross, Mr. Ross?”

 

For the movie, written by the creator of the series David Sale, I won’t focus on all the subplots, which involve several characters I have not mentioned above, the Whittakers, the comic figure Flo Patterson (Bunney Brooke), and Dorrie’s more tolerant friend, lodger, and bowling mate, and several others such as Lucy and Alf Sutcliffe to which I have introduced you. The central figure here is Vera Collins (Elaine Lee) who has come a long way from being an unhappy ex-married tarot reader to become a noted fashion designer, who, after working previously with Bev’s pompous mother Claire, is now collaborating with Simon Carr (Orcsik) on a new line of clothes for Maggie Cameron, who has returned after her divorce to appear in several reincarnations, including the owner of the Number 96 building and now a business partner with Vera in fashion. 

      The film’s very first scenes show Vera, whose car has stalled, being surrounded by a gang of motorcyclists who instead of providing the help she had hoped for, gang rape her. As beautiful as she now is, Vera evidently cannot find her way out of the turmoil she has had to face in her past life.

      While recuperating poolside, she is taken to lunch by Claire, who promises Maggie not to steal any of Vera’s designs, taking her to an elegant restaurant along with her friend, Nicholas Brent (James Condon), who is running for Australian Prime Minister. Fortunately, Claire, self-centered as usual, so dominates the conversation that the two can exist almost in another world while sitting at her table, and the two quickly develop a rapport and over the next few days begin to fall in love.

       Yet at the very moment they are most happy Vera realizes that, with her past, she might possibly destroy his career, and to save him and her later embarrassment pulls away, devoting her time to working with Simon (who as I’ve suggested in my opening paragraph to this long essay, falls in love with her again, attempting but failing to express that in sex).

      Meanwhile, there is Dorrie and Herb’s 40th anniversary to celebrate, which, with catering organized by Arnold Feather and cooking planned by Dudley Butterfield (who has now seemed to have totally forgotten his ex-lover Don) all seems to be going swimmingly. Dudley even suggests that the stodgy Dorrie turn the affair into a costume party, which gives Vera a lot more work to do that helps to keep her mind off of Nicholas. If only it weren’t for Dorrie and Herb’s absurd punctiliousness when it comes to the marriage license, convincing poor Dorrie that she is truly married to Herb’s old, now alcoholic friend Horace Deerman (Harry Lawrence) who takes a shine to her after all these years and makes her nights hell as she struggles to keep away from her own bed. Fortunately, Don assures them that there is no legal problem with the license, and that she and Herb are still officially married. So all is well, if only Aldo hadn’t mistakenly hired Horace as a server for the banquet!

      And then there’s the most preposterous plot Sale ever concocted right out of Midnight Lace (1960) with a dash of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) thrown in as spice. Former Number 96 resident Sonia Freeman (Lynn Rainbow) returns after her nervous breakdown with a new seemingly doting husband, Duncan Hunter. He’s worried about the fact that Sonia is beginning to lose things, first her wedding ring and then the pendant he has asked the next-door flight attendant   

Diana Moore to bring back from Hong Kong as a gift to his wife. Shades of Gaslight are soon beginning to glower over the plot. Sonia’s old friend, serial philanderer Jack Sellars (Tom Oliver)—who once courted the now deceased Bev Houghton and is now shtupping Diana as well—is equally puzzled, particularly when Sonia describes her dreams and he discovers the lost pendant in a box in Diana’s apartment. He realizes that he himself has been cuckolded, that Diana’s real lover is Duncan and they’ve long been drugging poor Sonia so that any moment now she’ll go the balcony, stand on the railing, and jump.

      Fortunately, he’s let his old friend know what’s been going on, and the police arrive just in time to cart the duo of D’s off to jail.

    Nick, meanwhile, is determined to find out where he went wrong with Vera, returning to her whereupon she confesses to her rather checkered past, including her recent rape. He still loves her, and takes her off to his summer retreat to meet his beloved son, Tony (Patrick Ward). The only problem is that upon meeting Tony, Vera suddenly finds herself facing the ringleader of her multiple rape. What else can she do but flee from Jack’s side once again. She can’t tell him about the son he idolizes, can she? And even when Tony threatens her, she won’t spill the beans.

       To cheer her up Don tries to take her out on a dinner date, which she refuses; but when Simon arrives to offer her the same evening on the town, she has no choice but accompany both handsome men who somehow slipped her grasp. If she didn’t know why, all three encounter a drunken Maggie upon their return from the night on the town, who reminds Vera and the Number 96 neighbors that Vera’s dates are both “pooftas,” Don an open queer and Simon a closeted one. You’d think by now that Dorrie would have a clue about her nice neighbor boy who keeps dragging in such undesirable men. But apparently she never figures it out.

     Finally, we get to the meat of this movie, as Don and Simon take the day off to go swimming and lolling on the beach. Back in Don’s apartment Don washes off the sand, returning to the bedroom to find a naked Simon applying a lotion to relieve his sunburn. But a moment later he has relieved his sexual problems as well, the two luxuriating in bed until late the next morning. Why those stupid film execs stole their kiss can never be explained, but my guess is they wanted it for themselves. Certainly, the scene with Don and Simon is the best thing about this ridiculous little box-office hit. And it’s apparent that in Australia, at least, gay sex sells.

      Now it is time for Dorrie and Herb’s grand party, where every burlesque pratfall happens, including a final cake in the face.

      Receiving a message from Nick, Vera exits this melee only to find a car racing head on in her direction. At the last moment Simon pushes her away, being hit himself in the process, with Don, dressed as Pierrot, leaping to capture the perpetrator, who crashes the car into a nearby wall, sending it into flames with Tony obviously inside. Simon recovers and joins Don presumably in bed for as long as the series can sustain their love.

      And the writer and producers order up happy endings their endeavors well deserve; Nick has won the election and drives in an inaugural motorcade waving at the crowds with Vera at his side. Dorrie always knew she was up to no good.

      The US has still to see a series, even with Sex in the City, as absolutely free-wheeling as the down under Number 96. From our point of view those numbers might as well be reversed. And as Michael Idato quotes Sale in an interview: “One executive said to me, before he’d even read [an update version of Number 96] ‘I feel I should point out your original series was launched in much braver times.’”

 

*On December 9, 2017 I attended a musical concert at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles of Lou Harrison: Music of the Pacific. During that concert I sat next to a couple, a smartly-dressed woman with red hair and her husband, with whom I briefly talked before the concert and during the intermission. They told me that they had driven in from the then fire-plagued Ventura to attend the concert because their son, Sean Hayward, was performing in the group. Hayward had studied the Gamelon in Indonesia and played it during the concert as well as several other percussion instruments. Because of his beautiful long hair, it was not difficult to identify their son among the other players, and I believe I briefly met him, through an introduction from his parents, after the performance. I reviewed the piece on December 17 on my USTheater, Opera, and Performance blog, and have since included it in My Year 2017 (not yet published). Soon after Sean and I became Facebook friends.

     While researching for Number 96, I suddenly perceived that Sean Hayward’s father was the actor Chard Hayward, who had played Dudley Butterfield as Don’s second lover, who left Don at one point in the series and later returned to him, along with performing later transformations of that figure as Aldo’s wine-bar waiter, a caterer, and other roles I describe above. Obviously, in 2017 I not only had no idea that Sean’s father was an actor but that I would later see him perform as a gay man/ bisexual in the series and the movie I describe above. The woman to whom I spoke must have been the Cynthia Killion, also an actor, who married Hayward after the marriage with his first wife.

 

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).