Dorothy Arzner | The Wild Party / 1929

no time for men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Hopkins Adams and E. Lloyd Sheldon (screenplay), Dorothy Arzner (director) The Wild Party / 1929

 

Already in the 1920s a certain amount of authorial and directorial coding with regard to LGBTQ issues was taking place. William A. Wellman, for example, embedded his tale of male love in Wings (1927) within the narrative of war-time camaraderie, a nearly perfect fit that covered for their obvious visual affection and kisses. For the everyday movie-goer, not acquainted with the classic literature itself, even Manfred Noa’s presentation of signs of male sexual desire in Helena (1925) were easy to embrace by even the most devout homophobe within the context of wartime heroism and the kind of deep friendship that often develops between men living and fighting together day after day. It almost seemed to explain the island retreat at the end of the two former Legionnaire friends in Clarence Brown’s The Flesh and the Devil (1926) and certainly detracted our attention from what the sailors visually showed us in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). A close male friendship, particularly when a slightly younger man claimed to admire and want to emulate an older friend as in Brown’s A Woman of Affairs (1928) stood as good cover for a passionate love relationship and sexual boyhood friendships such as that in Jean Epstein’s Finis terrae (1929) which were even more opaque to audiences disinterested in looking deeper or unable to read beyond narrative declarations of heterosexual normativity.

     With women it was even easier to cover any possible lesbian interest. After all, females were known and still are for their communal gender involvement, and even in the Victorian age deep love of the unsexual kind expressed between women did not raise eyebrows. So for a lesbian director such as Dorothy Arzner it was not terribly difficult to code her 1929 talkie The Wild Party by gathering around the central character Stella (Clara Bow) several college chums who make up a group named the “Hard Boiled Maidens.” Recording their conversations with a boom mike, Arzner could present a rather complex narrative of young heterosexual desire while still cloaking any same-sex desires in the language of female friendship, distracting those who did not wish to recognize the depictions of the lesbian relationship between Stella and her hard-studying and non-partying opposite, Helen (Shirley O’Hara). A bit like Eisenstein, Arzner’s film shows us one thing while telling us something else. And for those who are most attracted to normalcy, that “something else” was for more disturbing than the open heterosexuality of these young girls, even if in their sometimes scandalous behavior might appear shocking for the time. Their heterosexual naughtiness was far preferable to the darker secrets that are played out before our very eyes.

     Film critic Luke Aspell perceptively writes: 

  

“As well as social space, Arzner also creates romantic interpersonal space, most strikingly in the naturalistic choreographies of homoerotic body language between Stella (Bow) and Helen (Shirley O’Hara). Just as Bow’s performance often seems plural in its transitional quality, a detailed physical performance accompanied by speech rather than an integrated speaking performance, so the scenes between Stella and Helen have two distinct, simultaneous meanings. As dialogue scenes, they are discussions of heterosexual activity; as images, they are depictions of a lesbian relationship.”

 

     This would be far more difficult in a silent film as in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, who was able to show us another reality only by his intense intercutting, sometimes blurring what we might imagine we are seeing by allowing us to glimpse only in an instant or two a man coming up behind and standing close to another or two men moving together as in a kiss. But with the use of a boom microphone, Arzner was given far greater freedom by allowing us to hear many voices speaking at nearly the same time in conversation which in its college girl banter sings the praises of the male body while sometimes hugging close the female friend.

     Once again, Aspell’s comments in his essay in Film Issue are provocative:

 

“Freed to move the microphone over and between her actors, Arzner creates an aural social space, and, despite the camera’s comparative immobility, can also follow mobile group conversations, as when the ‘Hard-Boiled Maidens’ gather around Stella (Bow) asking her to tell the story of the spoons in her luggage. The gradation between intelligibility and unintelligibility is relatively subtle; whereas crowded voices were often being used during this period purely for the novelty of their sound (frequently run, unsynchronised, over silent footage), the voices in The Wild Party are always distinct and embodied enough to carry narrative significance; as Sara Bryant notes, the sound of ‘women collectively chattering, singing, and laughing’ creates ‘an unruly acoustic experience that, at moments in the film, prompts from male characters ineffective disciplinary responses… or mild fear.’”

 

      The story of the “spoon,” for example, is crucial one in the narrative plot since it establishes how Stella accidentally met a man on a train, returning in the night after a bathroom visit to a berth she thought was her own in which she finds a man, James ‘Gil” Gilmore (Fredric March), who turns out later to be her anthropology teacher at Winston College where she is enrolled. Indeed, it is her relationship with him, first as an enemy, then as her savior, and finally as her lover and confidant that appears to be central to the entire film in terms of its heteronormative plot.

      His attempt as a teacher to tame the wild and thoughtless young girl who gets into trouble is the first signs indeed that he is interested in Stella. When she and her “HBM” friends get turned away from a class dance for their skimpy costumes they drive to a nearby roadhouse where they are accosted and she kidnapped by drunken men, which for all practical purposes constitutes the heart of the film. It is those actions, after all, which allow Gil to come to her rescue, admit his love for her, and ultimately to win her over to become his wife, promising at film’s end to whisk her away to Malaysia where together presumably they live happily ever after in an exotic and fulfilling world of adventure and love.

      But even as Stella tells what at first seems a nearly nonsensical story of the spoon (awarded to her as a “teasing” medal for her possible attempt to “spoon” or make love to him), the action of the girls around her tell us something different from where that narrative will take us.

    Helen, a studious girl, is hoping to win an award for the outstanding student which will pay for her continued education at the school, spends most of her time, unlike Stella and the other girls studying and typing up papers. Yet the moment she appears in Stella’s busy room just before she tells the story of the spoons, Stella goes to hug her and tease her face with a puff, actions with which she does not engage with any other girls. Throughout this movie, in fact, Stella can be seen hugging her roommate, something one might not necessarily notice—these are after all young girls who signify their many emotions through their bodies—except Stella seems to grow calmer and less girlish around Helen, and behaves toward her differently from the others.

      Helen, in turn, seems to have utterly no interest in men and obviously is desperately fond of her roommate. Were this film to be in color we can almost see her blush with pleasure each time she meets up again with the vivacious and beautiful Stella. At one point, when Stella teases her about spending all her evenings hard at work studying instead of searching out a man, Helen makes it quite clear that she has “no time for men.”

      The wild night at the roadhouse is without Helen. But at a later party in one of their boyfriend’s mansion, after she has cajoled and insisted that Helen join her in the fun, Stella is insistent at an early hour to return back to the dorm as she has promised her roommate. But this time even Helen seems to be enjoying the outing, particularly after Stella has saved her from the arms of a drunken boy who Stella and the others have “dizzied” out the door—dancing him in so many circles that he literally stumbles out the front door and collapses—and hooked her up with George (Jack Lunden), a boy who evidently Helen is attracted to, in part because of his kindness and decency.

      After agreeing to stay later at the party, Helen and George walk off to the beach where they remain for hours, simply sitting together innocently enjoying the moon and the feelings they have for one another.

       In the meanwhile, however, Stella has heard that Gil has been shot, although not seriously, by one of the men who had attempted to molest her. Truly suffering over the fact, she ditches her boyfriend for the night—over his great protestation—and retires to another room, truly shaken up over the event, particularly because if word gets out about the reason for the shooting both her and his reputation and her stay at the college will be challenged. When she realizes it is past time to return, she is disturbed by hearing, as another girl puts it, that Helen has gone “into the wilds,” the place apparently where some girls go to make love. She seriously goes after Helen, calling her name and is truly disturbed by finding her with George so far removed from the house, even though Helen assures her it was all innocent. But we realize in this series of untypical selflessness and true concern for Helen and Gil’s welfare that Stella is indeed far more complex than she might superficially appear.

       If her and Gil’s love appears to be the arc of the story, it is in fact far less important than this event and what happens after. Helen takes up a correspondence with George, writing him that she cannot see him because she is studying hard to win the class award, and recalling the night they spent together.

     Meanwhile, impatient, after a month of his absence because of the healing wound, to find about Gil’s condition Stella again goes far out of bounds by visiting him in his rooms late at night. Stella’s class foe, Eva Tutt, sees her going to Gil’s house, follows her, and finds proof of her visit through a rhinestone bow design that has broken off of Stella’s heel as she climbed over the fence. Rushing back to the dormitory, Eva pulls the fire alarm forcing all the girls out to be accounted for by Faith Morgan (Marceline Day), the highly ethical class president.

       Stella makes it back just in time, but Eva knows her secret. Moreover, as the girls rush out of the rooms the winds of the hall blow the stack of Helen’s correspondence over the floor and into the hall itself. It is inevitable that Eva will find the very page that Helen has written about her love and illicit (although pure) experience on the beach with George.

        And it is this sub-narrative that is truly the most important, since ultimately, when Stella discovers that Eva has Helen’s missing letter and has turned it into Faith who in turn has sent it on to the faculty committee that is the most important element of the story.

      For the very first time, Stella acts truly selflessly and maturely, joining Faith at the faculty committee to claim that the letter was hers, not Helen’s, arguing that Helen is the only one worthy of the class award and would never have been involved in such an affair.

        Her act means her own expulsion from school. As she packs up, exclaiming with usual pluck that it’s time to move on, keeping the truth about her reasons for leaving from Helen, and truly suffering for having to leave Gil, we see Helen almost in tears over the reality that she will have no one at school any longer who loves her as much.

       That Gil, impressed with Stella’s actions, decides to leave school as well, showing up on the train just as Stella is about to hand over her ticket to the conductor, seems like an add-on plot maneuver, particularly his announcement that as a couple they will soon be traveling to Malaysia. Who, in a US Hollywood-produced movie ever honeymooned permanently to what was then a British colony nearby Borneo, Thailand, and Indonesia, countries where women in the movies nearly always got into trouble and seldom came back happy. This seems like something from another script like George Melford’s East of Borneo of two years later or Bette Davis’ torrid murder romance The Letter of a decade later, told here only as a bromide to hide the real story of girls in love and Stella’s sacrifice to protect their secret.

     It is interesting in hindsight that neither Rose Hobart of the former movie nor Bette Davis was happy in her Southeast Asia location or romance. Joseph Cornell later devoted an entire film (1936) to the clips from East of Borneo just to convince us how terrible Rose’s life had been, which was later turned into camp in Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra (1963). Certainly, it is hard to imagine Clara Bow sweltering in the evening heat as she sips martinis by her hubby’s side.

      As we might have expected, however, coding does indeed work, leaving a film open to different kinds of reading through time and alternating perspectives. As critic Richard Barrios notes:

 

“Arzner's staging, particularly of its dormitory intimacies, gives it a Johnny Arthur-like transformation of something palpably different [from what might read like a dimestore romance]. The reviews of The Wild Party preferred to remain on the subjects of Clara Bow's voice....and the general silliness of the material. Only occasionally did they single out the unusually fluent direction, and never did they speak of the uncommonly tight and personal bonds of the 1930 graduating class of Winston College.”

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (July 2022).

D. W. Griffith | Lady of the Pavements / 1929

heterosexual heathens

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Taylor (screenplay, based on a story by Karl Vollmoller), D. W. Griffith (director) Lady of the Pavements / 1929

 

The real gem in this 1929 silent picture story of revenge is Lupe Vélez who plays the sleazy cabaret singer, Nanon del Rayon, of The Smoking Dog (I’m not making this up). Working for Papa Pierre (Henry Armetta) Nanon holds the attention of her customers and D. W. Griffith’s camera whether singing “You Tickle Me—I’ll Tickle You” or her chaste love song, which Griffith later recorded and released as a disc to accompany the picture (and which amazingly made it onto the pirated DVD from a televised broadcast I’d purchased online).

    Fortunately, Nanon is on camera for most of this predictable “aristocrat-meets-up-with-street-girl-and-falls-in-love” story; for the rest of the film is basically a costume drama over which the evil Countess Diane des Granges (Jetta Goudal) hovers when Griffith is not making love to Count Karl Von Arnim’s (William Boyd) handsome profile when Nanon’s offstage.

      Prussian attaché serving in Paris, Count Karl is about to marry Countess Diane until he arrives at her mansion unexpectedly one evening only to discover her having sex with the Emperor himself. The old-fashioned kind, Karl will not excuse the behavior of his future wife, even if it’s the emperor who visits her bed, suggesting he’d be better off married to a lady of street than to the lady who moments before ruled his heart.

      Deeply offended by his denigration of her considerable social status the Countess determines to make certain that Karl gets precisely what he asked for, summoning the Chamberlain to procure a lady of the “pavements” (hence the film’s title) who they might pay to convince Karl to fall in love.

      If Nanon at first visually looks the part, the Chamberlain and dance teacher M’sieu Dubrey (Franklin Pangborn) find it nearly impossible to teach the girl anything beyond a clumsy curtsey. Although they’ve dressed her up in a lovely gown for the ball, she keeps lifting up her skirt and petticoat as if she were about to launch into a raunchy can-can or, more precisely, she were trying out for the title role of Charles Walter’s The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964).

       The more the Chamberlain and the prissy sissy Pangborn attempt to instill a bit of self-control, the wilder Nanon gets until finally even the arbiter of correct demeanor realizes he’s met his match. When the Chamberlain leaves the room on an errand, the film’s queer finally decides to give it up and join the heterosexual heathens, attempting to plant a smooch on his utterly resistant hussy’s lips, resulting in a hurricane of fury as she knocks him the ground, tops his frail frame and begins to beat him to a pulp until the Chamberlain returns to break up the one-sided battle; and even then she’s ready to take him down again until he has no choice but to slink out sight and out of Griffith’s movie in order to allow the film’s more predictable goings on.

    Of course, Nanon plays the young Spanish convent girl as perfectly as Audrey Hepburn’s performance at the grand ball of George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (also 1964). Without a hitch Count Karl falls metaphorically head over heels in love and two or three dates later asks her to marry him.

       Obviously Nanon, especially after the Chamberlain’s visit, has her doubts, despite the fact that she has also developed a crush on the Count. But to save her lover the embarrassment and herself the pain when he discovers the truth of her former life, she’s prepared to go on the run until Diane, ready to go the whole hog with her evil plot, convinces her to follow her heart.

       The two marry, Diane insisting on throwing the couple a grand dinner party for which she secretly hires the rustic orchestra of The Smoking Dog, forcing Nanon to either pretend not know her long lost friends or admit to her native habitat.

        She temporarily loses her stuck-up hubby, but he soon comes round to The Smoking Dog to claim his wife, realizing that love is always more important than a perfect pedigree. Only Pangborn, had Griffith let him hang around, might have disapproved of their closing kiss.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).

 

Charley Rogers and Fred Guiol | Skirt Shy / 1929

the most kisses between two males ever portrayed in a movie

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screenplay) Charley Rogers and Fred Guiol (directors) Skirt Shy / 1929

 

In several of his later films Harry Langdon plays a character that seems best described as a drunken baby, a grown man who speaks with a slur and can hardly put a full sentence together who looks so misshapen that he appears not to yet grown into an adult. This is particularly true of his Hal Roach films from 1929, of which Skirt Shy, an early talkie, is among.

     There’s no use trying to establish a coherent plot. Let us just say that the woman for whom Dobbs the butler (Langdon) works for, Maggie Herring (May Wallace), is bankrupt and was hoping in her latest meeting with her beau Edgar (Tom Ricketts) for a marriage proposal. He almost utters it, but can’t quite get it out, and besides he has now to hurry for the train since he’s traveling—to where and for how long is never explained.

      Maggie, however is certain the mortgage collectors will arrive the very next day, so she gathers her butler and maid, Nancy (Judith Barrett) to tell them that she must let them go, and hurries off to the bank to see if she might postpone the collection process.

      Almost immediately Edgar returns, having missed the train, now with a bouquet of roses. He plans to finally propose to Maggie. Seeing him at the door, Nancy pleads with Dobbs to find a solution in order to keep him in the house until her mistress returns, but Dobbs is lucky to even find his way across the room, let alone imagine a coherent plan. Knowing that their jobs on the line, she forces Dobbs into female attire, pleading with him to keep Edgar in the house by suggesting that she is mad at him.

       How anyone other than Dobbs himself might possibly perceive him as being a facsimile of Maggie Herring is a problem resolved by Edgar losing his eyeglasses almost the moment he enters the room. Simply seeing the outline of someone in female apparel who smells of perfume, which Nancy has sprayed upon Dobbs in plentiful squirts, he attempts to propose, with Dobbs playing hard-to-get as he attempts to evade Edgar’s sudden changed demeanor, attempting to kiss his lover every opportunity he gets. His evasion leads to a chase through the botanical shed.

      Everything suddenly becomes even more complicated as a long-forgotten beau of Maggie, a cowboy friend of her youth (Arthur Thalasso) also shows up ready to marry her as well, cash in hand. He too is infected by a desire to kiss his sweetheart, and it soon becomes apparent that Langdon now holds the record of the most kisses between males ever portrayed in a movie. Perhaps only later in the century would this record be broken.

    As the two loving beaus encounter one another, their actions turn into hate as they quite meaninglessly struggle to get rid of the other through gunfire, bricks, and even bees, Dobbs taking the brunt of it and even joining in the attempt to drive away the cowboy who is the more fit of the two.

      The endless skits that involve their warfare are increasingly tedious and, I’m sad to report, not very funny. But finally, Maggie returns to find her glass arboretum destroyed and the two men exhausted, the cowboy particularly upset by the fact that he has discovered that Maggie is actually a man.

      Presumably she marries Edgar and lives happily for a few years longer, looked after by her quite incompetent but truly loyal butler.

     

Los Angeles, December 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Lloyd French | That’s My Wife / 1929

the happy couple

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leo McCarey (screenwriter), Lloyd French (director) That’s My Wife / 1929

 

I’m going to begin this review by admitting something I’ve never before put in print: I did not actually like the Laurel & Hardy short films until I begin more carefully looking back at them for My Queer Cinema, during which I gained a new admiration for the comic wit, particularly that of Stan Laurel.

    Indeed, I’d argue That's My Wife, directed by Lloyd French, is one of their best, a sentiment I was happy to discover has long been shared by several critics and audiences. I rarely laugh out loud when streaming movies, but this time I couldn’t resist.

    This 19-minute short wastes no time in getting down to business, with Oliver Hardy’s wife, Magnolia, marching down the household staircase with packed bags, declaring—as she also did in Their First Mistake of 1932—that either Stan goes or she does. But in that later film, she was simply fed up with Oliver spending most every night with his friend, while this time, as the intertitle quotes her: “He dropped in to stay five minutes—He’s been her for 2 years.” “He’s untidy,” she continues; “He eats grapes in bed,” an observation that almost suggests that he is a Bacchus or Dionysian-like figure, the god of wine, music, and ecstatic dance, connections that will be returned to even beyond his previous bedtime grape-eating habits soon after.

     If in Their First Mistake Stan and Oliver attempted to woo her back with the acquisition of a baby, this time it is clear that she has gone for good, and with it the possibility of Oliver inheriting money from his Uncle Bernal. To demonstrate her disregard for Oliver, the uncle whom she has never met, and Stan, as she sweeps out the door she dashes a nearby plant and its pot to the floor, returning momentarily to do the same to its twin.

     So desolate is Oliver that he too thrusts another piece of pottery to the floor and so sympathetic is Stan that he does the same, upon which Oliver and his friend parrot Magnolia, with Stan declaring that either Oliver leave, or he will. Since, obviously, Oliver has no intention of leaving his own house, Stan marches off upstairs to pack.

     The ridiculousness of the entire series of acts is only magnified by the sudden appearance of Uncle Bernal at the door, visiting in order to meet his niece. Before he allows him entry, Oliver quickly tries to sweep up the pottery shards and, sitting on the couch with Bernal, is about to tell his uncle that Magnolia is temporarily not at home until the sounds of Stan’s attacks on his bureau drawers is heard in the living room in which they sit. There is no way out of the comedic situation we recognize has now been set up: Oliver will have to bring Stan downstairs to portray his missing wife—particularly if he hopes to inherit his uncle’s estate.

     After a few moments of utter refusal, Stan—always the stooge for Oliver’s ridiculous propositions—dresses up in a flapper-like dress, using a barbell for his breasts and a doll’s hair for his wig.

     She’ll be down in a moment, declares Oliver, admitting that she is not a good-looker but is a great clown filled with fun.

      That word fun seems to be the film’s running gag, as Stan trips in his heels, rolling down the stairs to meet Bernal. If Bernal is a bit off-put by “her” sudden and awkward entry, he chalks it up simply to her high spirits, inviting his nephew and niece out to dine and dance at the Pink Pup (another clue that this film is quite aware of its homosexual possibilities).

      The Pink Pup seems to be filled with half each of high society snobs and roués, the latter of which might define our heroes. Even before have they been shown to their tables Stan again trips taking down Oli before he himself is pulled over Hardy’s hulk in what appears almost to be a male-female wrestling match, about which the uncle highly shows his utter disapproval, presuming that this is yet another example of his niece’s “clowning around.”

       Even when the three are finally seated, an elderly man at a nearby table, getting a glimpse of Stan scratching his itchy hosiery, becomes highly attracted to Oli’s new wife and begins lobbing sugar cubes her way which, despite her attempts to ignore him, intrudes upon their family gathering by appearing at the table himself, propositioning Stan with the old conversation starter: “Didn’t we meet at the Fountain Hotel in Miami?”

      Eventually, when the stranger tries to barge his way into sharing dinner with him, Bernal scolds his nephew, demanding he do something forceful about the flirtatious intruder, at which point Oli stands up and pours a bowl of soup over the drunk’s head, the man finally rising from his seat and ordering another cup of soup “to go.”

      In the original scenario, Bernal himself, spotting a beautiful woman nearby, begins to flirt with her, not realizing that she happens to be Magnolia, Oli’s now estranged wife. The device would have later provided a nice tool of blackmail when, finally fed up with Stan and Oli’s public displays of bodily affection, he chooses to disinherit his nephew. Fortunately, however, the writer and director (Leo McCarey and French) chose a quirkier route.

       In the revised version, even after they rid themselves of the would-be home wrecker, a shady waiter who has just stolen a jewel-laden locket from the neck of one of the Pink Pup guests, determines to stow his loot within the bodice of the new Mrs. Hardy’s dress.

       The sensitive-skinned Stan whispers his problem to Oli, as the two quickly rise up to dance with the others, hoping to shake the irritant from Madame Hardy’s gown. Their terpsichorean pleasures are quite charmingly funny, but when even that fails to free whatever has gotten into Stan’s gown, Oli attempts to pull it free—first in a telephone booth where a would-be caller observes what appear to be their sexual gyrations, then behind a screen which the waiters pull away to reveal their bodily gymnastics to the entire room of diners, and finally behind a curtain which opens to present the nightly sex show, featuring by accident the seemingly impatient couple.

       As they attempt, with flushed faces, to tromp back to their table, Stan again trips, bringing Oli and falling over him once more as if it were simply impossible to separate their apparently intertwined bodies.

        It is at this point that Bernal determines to leave, taking his money with him, while the man over whose head Oli has previously emptied a bowl of soup appears from out of nowhere to dump the contents of his order “to go” over Hardy’s pate.

        It may be a fine mess into which they have once again gotten, but as they hold hands and turn to one another as if almost taking a bow, we recognize that they are pleased at least to still have one another, and that Laurel and Hardy have now in cinema history been, for better or worse, forever wed.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2020

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

 

 

Jean Epstein | Finis terrae / 1929

a cause of the celebration and its consequences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Epstein (screenwriter and director) Finis terrae / 1929

 

Four sailors, two older and two young friends have signed on for a three month season in Bannec, a barren islet off the coast of Brittany, where they harvest seaweed, drying and burning it in order to produce an ash which has chemical properties making it of great value to the local economy.

      It is hard and lonely work, since each of the younger men burn their piles of seaweed, and the daily gathering at sea is dangerous given the coast tides. The men, moreover, live is small cave-like dwellings using a local well for water that often seems to need repair.

      Yet the film, Jean Epstein’s brilliant Finis terrae (1929), begins with the two younger men celebrating—the occasion is not established; perhaps it is just a celebration of their friendship—as Jean-Marie (amateur actor Jean-Marie Laot) takes out his knife to cut slices a hard-loaf bread, ordering his friend Ambroise (local actor Ambroise Rouzic) to run to his dwelling to fetch his only bottle of wine. Ambroise joyfully makes the trip, but when he excitedly returns with the wine it drops from his grasp and breaks among the island boulders at the very same moment when Jean-Marie’s knife goes missing.*

       In the process Ambroise cuts his finger on a piece of glass.

      These boys have little else to offer on this desolate “end of the earth,” and a knife is necessary for survival. Accordingly, a fight breaks out between the two boys—who, it is clear have been lifelong friends back in their nearby coastal town of Ushant (Epstein uses mostly the citizens of Ouessant in his film)—and when Jean-Marie accuses Ambroise of all stealing his knife. Ambroise denies the accusation, but Jean-Marie nonetheless pulls away from him, his fellow workers also rejecting his company.

     

     The boys still must work together, each burning his own pile of kelp, but they don’t communicate, and Ambroise refuses to let his former friend know, soon after, when he discovers that his small cut has evidently become infected.

      No longer able to function, Ambroise stops working, one of the older men arguing that he is just lazy, the boy allowing his friends to believe that. When one of the elders attempts to roust him from his hut, Ambroise refuses to open the door, and when he does, after the man has moved away, he simply hurls further abuse at his fellow worker.

      By that very night, in his hut, he begins to hallucinate—helped along by Epstein’s almost always moving camera—the images centering on the Ushant lighthouse Phare du Creach, the noonday sun, and other familiar figures such as Jean-Marie. Knowing that he needs medicine if he is to survive, he takes out a small rowboat to their larger skiff with a sail; but without wind and in his sickly condition he is unable to manage it, and is forced to return to shore where he collapses on the beach.

      The other three, observing him asleep on beach, again comment on his laziness, briefly inspecting and mocking him for his behavior. Yet Jean-Marie is suspicious and returns to help his former friend back to his hut, but still basically shunning him for his actions.

       But as Jean-Marie returns to the beach, Epstein’s photogénie tells us that he is troubled. When he accidentally discovers his missing knife, he gradually perceives that he has been wrong about Ambroise and regrets fighting with him over the broken bottle of wine. Returning to Ambroise’s dugout, he tries to rouse the boy, only to realize that he is desperately ill, although Ambroise, slightly coming to, is still diffident to his attentions.

       Jean-Marie attempts to gain the help of the other two sailors in returning to land in order to get help for Ambroise, but given the calm weather conditions and their continued belief that Ambroise is simply faking it, they refuse.

       Slowly Epstein begins to reveal the depth of the two boy’s relationship, as Jean-Marie attempts to walk the boy down to the rowboat, but almost immediately is forced to carry him a bit like a cross he must bear before finally delivering him into the rowboat and, soon after, with the help of ropes, toppling the body into the larger vessel.

     So he begins to fight the lethargic waters holding on to the keel for fear of crashing into the numerous rocky outcrops while at the same time ministering to the boy who lays at his feet.

       Seemingly taking what intuitively seems to be the wrong course, Epstein now steers his camera to the small village where these two boys grew up. In a scene in the town center, an older sailor tries to rouse other older seamen for another trip to Bannec, presumably when the season for the current sailors ends. Most of them are disinterested or are too old to take on the effort, but he finds a couple of younger volunteers.

      A view of Jean-Marie’s mother is suddenly interrupted when another elderly woman, like the former, dressed in Sunday black, angrily assaults the young sailor’s mer. The attack seems inexplicable to her and to us until it dawns on us that this woman is Ambroise’s mother, who like the boys, has now picked a fight on her other longtime neighbor. If nothing else, through this sudden enmity we begin to recognize the long time relationship of the two families, and their own recognition of a bond between their sons.

        We might almost wonder whether these to provincial mothers, who we can assume live in a world of folkloric belief, have suddenly had nightmares about their children. But when we finally learn that Ambroise’s mother has observed that there is only now one plume of smoke coming from distant Bannec, she is rightfully fearful that something may have happened to her son. And soon together the women arouse the fears of their neighbors, the entire town gathering together to shout out—so the director shows us in increasingly distressed handwritten visuals featuring the word Bannec—that something is terribly wrong.

        While most of the villagers gather at the shore, demanding the two younger sailors just returned from a trip out, check out the offshore island, the two mothers pay a visit to the town’s elderly doctor, who appears to be playing nursemaid to many of the town’s children. The two quickly convince him to pay an unimaginable doctor’s visit to the island itself to check out the Bannec patients, to which he oddly agrees, joining the other two recruited sailors and another he steals from the crowd to travel the exhausting waves, now beginning to rouse themselves, in a fisherman’s rowboat.

       Epstein has now brilliantly set up a scene with two small seacraft heading toward one another as he alternates frames showing their pilots’ personal efforts and struggles to keep their vessels moving with the crashing waves upon the rugged Brittany seascape, reminding us of the perilousness of the voyages. And if that weren’t enough he arranges for a thick fog to settle in—emblematic for the central characters’ ignorance and confusions—so that they might pass by one another or even crash; but this director is no melodramatist, and finds a way for Jean-Marie to spot the other craft and call out to it in time, bringing the doctor on board to successfully lance his boyfriend’s thumb and save his life.

      The mothers meanwhile sit out the operation in hopeful terror as if in some Greek tragedy, the other townswomen creeping about the shore like to so many chorus members commenting on the action. And indeed, as the boat with now all involved is spotted, they do silently shout out the news, a young boy crawling down the rugged sea rocks to tell the women to hurry to the pier where they greet both boys, the doctor, and the hero seamen.

      Ambroise is carefully carried ashore as Jean-Marie is greeted as the hero he has become, even what is apparently his local girlfriend showing up to claim her rights to his heart; but the viewer can only perceive the real situation as Jean-Marie quickly leaves her side, grabs a piece of bread and a glass of wine, and sits by the side of Ambroise’s bed where he sleeps, the other exhausted seafarer himself nearly falling asleep before he gently movies his own arm under the wounded arm of the boy we now must recognize as his true loved one, to protect his boyfriend’s wounded “wing.”

      If in his La Chute de la maison Usher this director presented a world in abstraction, with empty spaces and undeterminable actions, here he represents a total concrete world that reveals its psychological motives in specific physical and bodily actions. Nearly every frame of Finis terrae is so beautifully composed and physically tangible that we feel drawn into this world as much as we are terrified to mentally enter its terrain. The island of Bannec and the small Brittany village of Ushant are as alien as Usher’s crumbling mansion but yet are so very visually appealing that we cannot take our eyes away from its landscape and inhabitants. In this film the “strange” or the “other” is from moment to moment normalized and made real. Why shouldn’t these surly young men also be lovers, the gruff old village hags gently tiptoe around the sleeping doctor, and the frail old doctor just as quickly take up the hand of a young boy and hurry off to another medical emergency at the other end of the peninsula? These are not types, but true human beings.

     Some commentators have complained that Epstein’s figures are not more clearly delineated as gay characters. One could hardly have expected in 1929 for the homosexual director to present his central characters as openly gay lovers. That their love for one another is apparent, nonetheless, is because Epstein, in one of the first examples of cinematic “coding,” has signaled for those readers able to recognize embedded elements of the film’s rhythm, movement, and imagistic symbols, and interconnect various frames that something is was going on at another level than what the simpler narrative is expressing. Take a careful look at first seven frames I posted in this essay (not necessarily in the precise order that they appeared in the film) and I think you will quickly recognize that the boys’ celebration of bread and wine was also meant to be read as a sexual event.

 

*If one were to read this as amateur Freudian—and I do this with a great deal of humor—one might argue that the celebration can almost be seen as a mutual arousal of the boys, like the gamboling of colts in one of the film’s first frames, but when in his excitement Ambroise spills the wine (early ejaculation), Jean-Marie loses his erection (his knife goes missing) and he dismisses his younger friend, infecting their relationship. Only when he rediscovers his knife can the hurt the younger boys suffers be resolved and their relationship be restored.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).