conjuring up romance
by Douglas Messerli
Peter de Rome (director) Daydreams from a Crosstown Bus / 1972
De Rome’s Daydreams from a Crosstown Bus—along with Underground of this same year— might be described as one of the earliest of the numerous “cruising” movies, which I more fully describe as a gay film genre in my 2008 contribution.
What begins as actor Joe Leone simply taking a crosstown bus across Manhattan shifts very quickly when at stop he spots Richard Perez leaning against a tree, dressed in a white shirt and black pants. Leone leans further toward the window to get a better look, and at that moment their eyes meet.
Within seconds de Rome, through Leone’s imagination, conjures up an entire day when the two of them, beginning with a bicycle ride and walk through Central Park filled with beautiful male bodies as it often is on a summer day. They move to different spots in the park including the Lake, the Great Lawn, Bow Bridge, the Ramble Arch by 76th street and elsewhere.
They end up, it appears, at the Museum of Natural History in front of the fish tanks where, totally nude, they have a long fuck-and-suck session, the camera catching as much as the action as it can without full lighting.
After a quick trip down lower end of Manhattan with its famous 1972 skyline, they seem to end up back on the West Side, briefly at Lincoln Center before looking over the Hudson River, and then retreating from a balcony into an apartment where they again have sex twice, once on the bed and later in the shower, enjoying every orifice of their lean and handsome bodies.
Back on the bus, Leone’s character again locks eyes with Perez as the bus door closes and the vehicle begins to move off. Leone rushes forward, getting out at the next stop and running back to meet up the beautiful boy he’s just had hours of daydreams about. But no one is any longer to seen, even the bus stop is empty, the wall and tree nearby without a being in sight.
Although this film is highly erotic and sexually explicit, it actually represents nothing more than a highly romantic sexual fantasy that cannot really be described as pornography any more than we might describe women’s romance novels or even love passages from classic fictions as such. The original was accompanied by music by Michel Legrand. I know many are offended even by viewing a penis, an anus, and, even more troubling for them, the two organs engaged; but it is all truly beautiful under the camera lens of Peter de Rome; and after all, as many of a gay film has observed, “It’s just sex.”
Los Angeles, November 14,2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).
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