one more for the road
by Douglas Messerli
A.J. Rose, Jr. (screenwriter and director) Penis
/ 1965
The Internet Movie Data Base of Films and
Movie Professionals describes—still as of the date I am writing this piece—A.
J. Rose Jr.’s 1965 19.24-minute short as a “movie about a man’s manhood is
endangered [sic]. He must rob enough banks as to where he has enough money to
get a genital reconstruction surgery.” The IMDb entry describes it as being 45
minutes in length.
No
one apparently ever bothered to check whether this rather incoherent
description was actually correct since for over 55 years the film has
apparently been lost. It was first mentioned in the AFI American Film
Institute Catalog of Feature Films 1961-1970 under the title Penis. Obviously
that title roused the interest of several individuals who sought it out—without
success.
In
2020 the young Asian-American host of the YouTube site “Iceberg Video”—on which
he attempts to uncover information about unusual and unknown videos (including
games), films, and documents—called the AFI to ask about it, only to be told
that they no longer catalogue “sex films,” and accordingly no longer have a
copy. The general consensus, evidently, was that the film was a work of
pornography of some kind.
Someone else, trying to track down the film by the IMDb entry found that
the description actually matched another movie titled Percy from 1971,
directed by Ralph Thomas. That entry reads: “Edwin Antony (Hywel Bennett) is
emasculated in an accident which kills a young philanderer. Doctors
successfully replace his member with that of the dead man, but refuse to tell
him the full story of the organ's origin. So Edwin begins a search which takes
him to the philanderer's wife—and also to his many, many girlfriends...”
Having mentioned the disappearance of the film on his “Iceberg Video”
blog, the site’s host heard from an individual named Maurice Jones who reported
that he had sought out the distributor of the film, Filmmaker’s Cooperative, to
see if they still held the distribution rights for the lost work. They
responded that it was still in their files and might be rented for $100, but
since no one asked about the film since 1999, they weren’t sure whether the
copy still existed.
Jones evidently took a chance and sent off the payment. The movie titled
Penis by Rose that arrived in the mail was not at all a porno flick nor
an adult “sex film” but was a silent, black-and-white experimental work of
cinema that is quite fascinating.
The
“Iceberg Video” host—known simply as the “Iceberg Guy” (although his letter box
code is Zelcher20 and the videos he posts are under the rubric of Zelcher
Productions—went on to show several scenes from the rediscovered Penis
and to interpret the work’s meaning.
Interestingly, this savvy kid did perceive some of the film’s art house
influences, including Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and
Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1929). Through the evidence provided in the opening
scene of a long heterosexual kiss and the following scenes of a tortured young
man visiting a decaying cathedral in which he recalls a mass in which he
evidently attended the priest as an altar boy; a later scene in a museum;
another in a laundromat in which each of the washing machines is named after a
woman; a skit in which a naked man makes love and “fucks” an army poster (“I
Want You.” U.S. Army”); and the final scene in which the woman the man was first
kissing delivers him up a gift—the young commentator was able to determine that
the film concerned the man’s struggle with his homosexuality.
The
“Iceberg Guy,” however, interpreted the film as having a rather tragic ending.
Since what the woman delivers the man at the end of the film is a penis, which
he accepts and stuffs back into his pants, this critic interpreted it as a
final acceptance, despite his desires, of normalcy. Since gay males were often
seen not fully being men, he argues, by accepting the gift of the penis, he has
restored himself to manhood defined by the standard heterosexual definition of
what it means to be a male in our society.
Our
young analyst also provides a second possible meaning. Since in the laundromat
the machines have been given female names, perhaps the man is wondering why
they can be named but not he. Accordingly, he may be seeking to become
transsexual which means the gift and its acceptance suggests an equally sad
ending since he has apparently given up his attempt to redefine himself as a
woman.
I
applaud these interpretive efforts, as wrong-headed as I think they are. In my
reading this lovely small cinema masterwork is actually a quite comic vision of
the standard “coming out” tale, bearing, I argue, the kind of relationship with
that genre as George Coe and Anthony Lover’s satiric film De Düva: The Dove (1968)
does to the films of Ingmar Bergman.
To
prove my point, let me just recount the scenes of the entire film (now
available on-line on The Internet Archive).
The
film begins with the long heterosexual kiss between the film’s hero and what
later becomes evident is his girlfriend. After the title, the word Penis placed
upon an image of erotic Indian art, a male with an erect penis and a woman with
bared breasts appears. But the very next moment the screen displays the closed
door of a safe, with, soon after, a hand reaching from outside the frame to
deposit a dime, as if it were the kind of locker in which one keeps possessions
in a bus station or gym. The hand is waved back and forth almost as if
signifying that some magic trick were involved.
The
door opens to reveal the heads of marching C.O.R.E. protestors demanding
“Freedom Now.” Although C.O.R.E. (the Congress of Racial Equality) is perhaps
best remembered for their protests against racial segregation, they also
fought, according to their stated principles, for gender equality, freedom of
religious belief, social equality, and for open expression of sexual
orientation.
The
very next scene shows a priest, other adult officiates, and altar boys all
deeply genuflecting at the altar. In fact, the gesture is repeated in several
following scenes and young altar boys, after the service, genuflect to the
cross, lain on of the floor, several times repeated as in a loop tape. Even
this first time at the main altar the gesture is repeated in quick succession
seven times.
There is a quick frame of a young boy, obviously in pain, with a bandage
winding from his head to his jaw. Apparently, he has suffered an accident, a
childhood case of mumps, or perhaps a tooth extraction. Perhaps his wisdom
teeth have been removed, allowing him to move ahead without the “wise” clerical
beliefs of the church.
If nothing else this connects the individual with the general scene of
the several altar boys in the previous frames.
In the next scene the cathedral is
completely in decay, plaster falling from the walls, pews overturned, dust
settling upon the entire shell of the former place of worship. Obviously the
role that religion once played in this community has been abandoned. And the
man, who looks like the figure from the first scene of the kiss, who enters
from out of the frame to walk up an outside aisle, is visiting the church in
memory of it, likely representing his role as one of the altar boys since in
the very next instant we return to the priest holding up an embellished cross
before several kneeling altar boys, who rise and continue in procession. With
the alteration of the image of lone man in the destroyed church and further
scenes of the priest and altar boys we are quite obviously made to make the
connection between the two.
Intentionally, almost comically given the looping of some fragments, the
director makes no attempt to be subtle about the relationship of this man’s
past to his present. The church which was a large part of his childhood has now
fallen into disarray, not only physically we perceive, but psychologically. Its
significance is not only diminished but possibly, since we now know how many
hundreds of such altar boys were sexually abused, part of the reason the now lone
congregant has lost his faith.
The following scene is a direct quote of two film sequences based on dreams. The man is
now seen pulling a small wooden broken-down handcart, chains around his neck
holding what look to be heavy round lodestones, the cart hooked up to a dead
dog which trails behind, leading him in a direction he cannot resist.
This an obvious reference to Buñuel and Dalí’s young man in Un Chien
Andalou who we witness chained to engraved tablets of the Ten Commandments,
while he pulls behind him two grand pianos each with a dead donkey upon them
followed up with two religious seminarians—the burdens of his religious and
cultural past. The animals are different from Rose’s film only in their braying
stubbornness as opposed to his beast’s growls warning of potential bites. In Penis
the man is obviously in a used motor parts lot, the sign in full reading “All
types of trucks, cabs and bodies,” with the camera focusing particularly on the
worlds “types” and “bodies,” referencing both gender and sex.
This scene, particularly when the cart becomes stuck in a rut out of
which he struggles to pull it before proceeding on his perilous path also
references Ingmar Bergman’s hearse in the dream sequence early in The Wild
Strawberries, and there is a feeling in this scene of the deserted city of
Bergman’s work.
Our
silent hero is now in a museum staring up at a sculpture whose tormented face
the camera lingers on. The “Iceberg Video Guy” admitted he could not recognize
the work of art and sought help in identifying it. I believe our gentleman
friend is enjoying a day off in the Metropolitan Museum of Art studying Auguste
Rodin’s Adam cast in 1910. Our young man is clearly an admirer of the
male body.
The man, sitting crunched up on a small bench, seems almost
as tormented as Adam. But in this case it’s a comical torment, as we waits in a
laundromat for his clothes to finish their cycle. As the video critic observed
the washing machines each have a handwritten name upon them, in order of
appearance, Mary, Arleen, Debbie, Cindy, Jill, Lindy, Rose, Nancy—the camera
resting on that name for some time as the man blows cigarette smoke toward the
name that also means in certain heterosexual circles a queer or faggot, a
Nancy-boy—and finally, Betty. Rather than hinting at his gender preference, I
suggest that the director is here moving our hero into the gay camp world of
the time, when gay men identified their friends with female names, a fact made
even more apparent when we glimpse that all of these feminine sobriquets are
also designated Speed Queens, the manufacturer of the washers—most certainly
hyped-up fairies.
If
we need any evidence that this young man is actually afraid of the female sex,
we simply have to watch him walk through Times Square where the gigantic movie
marquees bombard us with horrifying images of the female sex, one woman,
evidently behind bars, her mouth open in
an apparent scream, and a second brandishing
an axe with murderous intent, both images for Joan Crawford’s 1964 film Straight-Jacket.
Next stop for our roaming Romeo is a butcher warehouse were our confused
hero walks in and out of the huge carcasses of hanging meat, loosening his tie
as he slowly begins to stroke and caress the fatty surfaces of the slabs. He
grows so excited in the act that he finally strips off his shirt to embrace
them more fully in seemingly steamy lust.
These actions were completely beyond the comprehension of our
self-identified cis-male straight commentator, laughing as he joked “Each to
their own.”
But
any gay boy would have known that it was not the beef they serve up in
restaurants he was seeking but what the metaphor signifies: gay bars are often
described as meat racks, long bars lined with young men just waiting for
someone to take them home and enjoy their beefy pleasures. We can now presume
that our handsome hero has taken off his glasses and wandered into the joys of
gay bar sex.
Apparently he can’t get enough the male glance as the next few seconds
of the movie reveal him back at the Met studying the numerous fleshy
indentations of bronze that Rodin molded to represent Adam’s rippling muscles.
By this time if you’re not giggling, at least just a little, I suggest you
click your player off.
His thoughtful contemplations are interrupted by an effeminate
blond-haired gay boy apparently singing; another long-haired guy smiles,
smoking a drag. A third chunkier crew-cut kid is shot head-on sitting on a
couch blinking at the camera. A woman, who may a transvestite, smiles and
flirts, while the camera quickly winks again at Adam’s buttocks. Obviously by
this time our man has found some fun outside the museum halls.
We
watch our man walk along a wall with a large clock implanted into the cement of
the edifice, apparently permanently stopped at 12:00, since the building seems
to be a derelict remnant of another time. This too might remind a Bergman
aficionado of Professor Isak Borg’s dream in Wild Strawberries where an
ocular clock has lost its hands.
se give a hand, if you’ve got yours, for a little gay political vaudeville
theater. A clown pops up on the screen, and out struts a cute, thin, completely
naked boy carrying the iconic sign of Uncle Sam’s longing: “I want you [for
the] U.S. Army”—this at a time during the Vietnam War when much of the US male
population didn’t want anything to do with their eager uncle. Unlike today,
when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals are delighted to finally be able to join
the Armed Services, in 1965, when the US force had reached the size of 184,314
men joined in brutal combat by 514,000 South Vietnamese soldiers there were
very few males left excited to be drafted. And gay men felt themselves lucky,
if they could convince their draft boards that they indeed were homosexual, to
be determined to be unfit for military duty. 1965, the year in Vietnam of
Operation Rolling Thunder, saw the first major protest against the war.
In
this charming number our nude dude slowly lowers the Uncle Sam sign down to
give it a quick fuck before literary coming out with penis in full view on one
side of the poster. He turns to Sam to give him a blow job while giving a nice
view of his thin ass, before dancing like a go-go boy around the invitation to
join up.
With a magic hat the hot boy makes himself and the poster disappear,
only to re-enter, still nude, with a clock, this one with its hands still
intact. The time is 2.35, and he slowly moves the hand right up to read a
quarter to 3, hinting, one suspects, of the famous Frank Sinatra ballad, the
perfect song to sing male friend off to war with:
It's quarter to three,
There's no one in the place except you and me
So set 'em' up Joe
I got a little story I think you should know
We're drinking my friend, to the end
Of a brief episode
Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
I know the routine
so drop another nickel in the machine
I'm feeling so bad
Won't you make the music easy and sad
I could tell you a lot,
but you've got to be true to your code
So make it one for my baby
And one more for the road
But then he might also be lauding at the great
rock-and-roll hit of 1961, Gary U.S, Bonds’ number “Quarter to Three,” where
instead of sadly drinking the night away, they dance “As happy as they can be.”
Evidently, his time has run out, as he sets the clock down and hunkers
beside it in a most despondent position.
No
wonder, for the next scene he’s back attempting his luck with his straight
girlfriend this time attacking her tits, not unlike the figure in the Buñuel
film tackles his girl’s breasts, exploring her erect nipples with forehead,
nose, tongue, and finally lips. It’s hard to know whether she’s his lover or
mother. But you have to give it to the lad for trying.
Apparently the sex is not successful. No penis in sight. And the very
next scene our patient gal is herself in a museum, fondly checking out a female
nude sculpture, while he stands on a bridge smoking a cigarette as he looks out
over what appears to be a wasteland, his tie blowing in the wind a bit like a
male figure out of a Robert Longo painting.
Suddenly she appears at the other end of the bridge, bearing something
as she walks in his direction. She hands the object to him, turns away, and
begins walking back in the direction from which she has come.
We
realize a moment later that the bridge on which they stand is a drawbridge and
that the figures are soon after located on either side of where the bridge is
rising up into the air. Obviously, they are now in separate spaces, in opposing
worlds. We now see the gift she has given him: a rather well-shaped and long
penis which he briefly strokes before putting it into his pants and zipping it
up.
She has returned his manhood and he is now free to use it as he wants.
We
have no idea who A. J. Rose was, but I’d guess it was a pseudonym. This film is
far too clever and witty to be the work of a neophyte to filmmaking. But
finally, as our friendly “Iceberg Video Guy” declares, we’ve found the Penis
and can now do something about it. My words above represent a raw attempt.
This work of the 1960s continues all the themes and dilemmas of the type
A “coming out” films of the 1940s-1950s: the pull of the church and traditional
values, the painful attempt to remain true to normalcy in heterosexual
relationships while yet being terrified and disinterested of women, the pull of
military all-male world and the community of gay friends, and the final
restoration and redemption of the individual and his manhood.
Penis
is a quite amazing summary of the early coming films which I have described
as the “A” version that would not be replaced until the late 1980s.
Los Angeles, February 17, 2021 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema
Review (February 2021).
