Steve McLean | Postcards from London / 2018

stepping out of the picture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steve McLean (screenwriter and director) Postcards from London / 2018

 

Steve McLean’s follow-up film to Postcards from America, about the work of artist-AIDS activist David Wonjarowicz, is a very strange film indeed. And many critics have found the work not only to be highly stylized (which it is), but have seen it as a rather snobbish gay work (Mansel Stimpson, Film Review Daily), “mannered” (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian), and ultimately boring.

    And in some senses, particularly if you take the film at literal face value, perceiving this tale about a young gay boy from Essex who, bored with small-town life, escapes for the London Soho scene just after it had been stylish center for art, as about a search for and identification of beauty, it is, at best, as Branshaw puts it “Too much of a good thing,” or as others have insisted, a self-conscious panegyric about gay art, literature, and post-coital conversation. After all, at various times the small group of rent boys with whom the central figure, Jim (the sculpted beauty, Harris Dickinson) joins up, call themselves the “raconteurs,” reading up on figures such as Caravaggio (particularly in reference to Derek Jarman), Titian, Lucien Freud, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Constantine P. Cavafy, E. M. Forster, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Joe Dallessandro, and Francis Bacon so that after sex they can provide their elite clientele, made up of mostly of artistically involved older gay men, with informed conversations.

     Accordingly, these expensive rent boys, live in a kind of imagined past, joyfully offering delightful sex and informed discussions to a group of men who often even have direct connections to the halcyon days of Soho history.

    Even beyond the talents of his colleagues David (Jonah Hauer-King), Jesus (Alessandro Cimadmore), Victor (Raphael Desprez), and George (Silas Carson), Jim, given his great beauty becomes muse to an artist Max which mimics the relationship of Bacon and his lover George Dyer, and suffers from Stendhal Syndrome, a real disease wherein the viewer becomes so emotionally involved in art that he actually mentally and physically enters the art work, in Jim’s case fainting as he joins in a tableaux vivant of the artwork conversing with the real artist—often works by his favorite artist Caravaggio.

     A former member of the raconteurs, Paul, who has left the group because of his desire to make even more money, is able to even manipulate Jim’s gift by offering up his services to curators and

gallerists to determine which works of art of real masterworks (which all ultimately floor the young sensitive boy) or fakes, which leave Jim with no reaction.

     Along with the artificially-lit highly colorized scenes, the numerous tableaux vivants, and the intellectualized chatter that at times sounds as if the characters had been educated by reading a mix of encyclopedias and Wikipedia, all presented in a manner that reminds one at times of Jarman’s films and at other moments scenes stolen from out of the films of another gay artist, Sergei Paradjanov, Postcards from London does appear at moments to be centered fully on the issues of beauty and artistic truth, not exactly the most engaging of cinematic topics, especially since McLean has otherwise removed these rent boys’ encounters from all traces of actual bodily sex.

      But then I didn’t read this work the way most of the others seemed to approach it. For me, instead, it shares much in common with another earlier paean to London life, Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple’s 1986 film based on one of writer Colin MacInnes’s London Trilogy). Like that work, I see this film as a joyous satire of the London scene, a kind of gay Pilgrim’s Progress, where in our young gay boy is drawn to the world outside his home only to be robbed (he spends his first night in a rented cardboard box where all of his money is stolen) before hooking up with other young gay men who quickly educate him on how to live and communicate in the new world.   

     For a great part of the film, Jim’s education is a passive experience wherein events happen to him; and his first forays out of that world are simply for greater financial gain; two other boys, moreover, attempt to recruit him for their more contemporary roles as raconteurs, drawing him out of the past into the 21st century. But in the end, “lucky Jim” (with purposeful reference to the novel by British novelist Kingsley Amis) realizes that he needs to stop viewing art and begin to make it; instead of experiencing beauty, by the last frames of the film, he is determined to himself create it, leaving the rent boy and the other manipulative worlds that “use” art to define life behind.

    For so much of the film, Jim is told by artists and friends to keep quiet, to pose in silence, or on occasion, to spout his learned knowledge like an apt student. He himself is seen as a thing, objectified as an object of beauty, his cock (referred to as his “money”) described as a sizable aesthetic prize. But from this new perspective we can comprehend all the palaver about art as a somewhat satiric jab at the old-school gab fests of closeted gay men nightly meeting up to chat about beauty more that actually experiencing it. Indeed, like Jim in some senses, the very sight of “real” art utterly terrifies them, sending them into a spin.

    But Jim, the wise pilgrim, realizes that there is an entirely new world out there that neither sucks at the tit of the art world nor wishes to manipulate it, but like his original friend, simply creates it, even if it consists of nothing more painted cardboard boxes (at the sight of which, incidentally, Jim also swoons, making it clear that it is real art). Art is something alive, not a dead form to build a life upon. Jim is special. Even the great art of the past comes to life in his presence, endangering his own life, not permitting him to simply use it as a subject for conversation or a tool for financial survival.

    By the last “postcard” view of his new world, Jim has found his true god within himself, and we can almost see him strutting down the highly colored world of people engaged in all sorts of sex, music, and conversation come to garish life as in Absolute Beginners.    

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

 

 

Lewis Milestone | The Garden of Eden / 1928

sleeping beauty and her awakened prince charming

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hanns Kräly (screenplay, based on a play by Avery Hopwood, adapted from a play by Rudolf Bernnauer and Rudolf Österreicher), Lewis Milestone (director) The Garden of Eden / 1928

 

This work is ultimately a rather delightfully romantic comedy in the manner of Ernst Lubitsch (screenwriter Kräly wrote scripts for at least 14 Lubitsch movies), which also paints a very different picture of director Lewis Milestone, now mostly known for his wartime epic productions such as his 1930 masterwork All Quiet on the Western Front.

    Yet The Garden of Eden does not all begin with the trappings of its ultimate genre. A young, truly innocent provincial, Toni (Corinne Griffith*) rises in the night as soon as her aunt and uncle have fallen asleep, and escapes their Vienna pretzel bakery, heading for Budapest where she has been invited to try out as an opera singer. Her local correspondence diploma proves, so she believes, that she has gifted voice.

     There she visits what she believes will be august institution of the Palais de Paris only to discover it as a rather filthy little theater as she is ushered into the office of Madame Bauer (Maude George). Madame Bauer, a woman with short cropped hair, wearing a black tied men’s cravat, and puffing on a cigarette through a long cigarette holder, looks her over, takes another suck on her cig, and asks the young girl to lift her skit to show off her legs.

    Confused by the request, the young girl is nonetheless encouraged by the crude concierge to do so, whereupon she is told she’s hired. Toni, by this time almost in tears, asks if they might not want to hear or sing, but Madame Bauer dismisses the suggestion, writing a note to the servant to be sure she is dressed in a skimpy costume.

     Fritzi Kramer, writing in Movies Silently takes it from there: “Then the club seamstress, Rosa (Louise Dresser), dresses her in a costume that is clothing more in theory than in practice. The audience (but not Toni) should by now be pretty sure just what kind of nightclub this is and it ain’t an opera-lovers club.”

     And, I might add, the audience has also quickly perceived that the director of this club is clearly lesbian.

     Curious, since Google has alas introduced an AI feature that refuses to let you think for yourself, I entered the words after the title, “gay content?” and received back its programmed assessment, almost making it sound as if it knew what it was talking about: “The 1928 silent film The Garden of Eden, directed by Lewis Milestone, features potential queer subtext, particularly through the character of Rosa, a seamstress who takes the lead, Toni, under her wing. Reviewers have noted a "predatory lesbian trope" or strong chemistry between the female characters, suggesting a possible queer reading of their relationship.” The entry goes on to say that Rosa (Louise Dresser) is portrayed as a protective coded “fairy godmother,” and that some viewers have interpreted “the intense, nurturing, and exclusionary bond between the two women in the first 20 minutes of the film as having lesbian undertones.” The message goes on to almost scold those commentators which have suggested that there may be gay elements due to the fact that the work was adapted by Avery Hopwood, “a writer known for risqué comedies. It has been suggested that the presence of these elements might be linked to Hopwood's own sexuality or the original German source material,” the entry once more arguing that these are all highly coded elements.

     In some respects, the AI commentary is not wrong in its initial insistence that this work is basically a heterosexual romance. But, in fact, the film is not at all coded, with the figure of Madame Bauer being an easily recognizable cinema stereotype of the 1920s and 1930s of a lesbian figure. All she is missing, perhaps, is a monocle. But anyone of the day would easily have recognized her as a gay type and perceive quite immediately that the Palais de Paris as being a kind a music hall brothel where the young performers are all presented up on the evening’s program as edible delights, Toni being described by Madame Bauer to her customer Henri D'Avril (Lowell Sherman) as a “Vienna squab, cooked country style.”

    Observing that her new country girl refuses to dress in the skimpy outfit, the clever and experienced Madame suggests instead that she wear a Puritan outfit that, unknown to the girl, when properly lit up becomes a transparent garment through which the male audience can see the entire torso of the supposed opera singer.

    Far from being simply a writer of risqué comedies, moreover, the original US author, Avery Hopwood, was one of the most successful writers for theater of the day. His and Mary Roberts Rhinehart’s The Bat, or instance, ran for 897 performances on Broadway and 327 performances in London, a phenomenal hit of the stage. He not only was known for his early sex comedies but was himself described as “The Playboy Playwright,” and lives as a rather openly gay man who had affairs with writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten and fellow playwright John Floyd. The London stage production of Garden of Eden starred the outspoken bisexual actor Tallulah Bankhead. And when he died, Hopwood, set up a grant for young University of Michigan students which stipulated "It is especially desired that students competing for prizes shall be allowed the widest possible latitude, and that the new, the unusual, and the radical shall be especially encouraged.” Among the grantees over the years were black writer Robert Hayden, playwright Arthur Miller, and gay writers Edmund White and Frank O’Hara.

    Once we gotten the fact that the gay author actually created a recognizable lesbian out of the way, we needn’t even bother to imagine some vague sapphic relationship with the elderly, experienced costumer Rosa and the young girl whom she saves from being raped by Henri.

     Having failed to satisfy one of Madame Bauer’s most noted customers, both women are immediately fired, and since Rosa was about to embark on her annual vacation in any event, she invites the young country rube to join her at Monte Carlo. The fact that she signs in as a baroness naming Toni her daughter is explained quite logically: she actually is a Baroness, whose family having lost most of their money, receives only small monthly pension that, when she saves it up, can afford her two weeks every year living in the style she once enjoyed; and she, a lonely old woman, is only too delighted to imagine having a beautiful daughter such as Toni, whom, quite incredibly in terms of the plot, she somehow manages to legally adopt during their two week stay.

     What follows is a kind of romantic farce, again with plenty of sexual innuendos but absolutely no coded messages, even if the stay in Monte Carlo begins with a kind of sexual “winking.” The hotel in which Baroness Rosa stays is quite obviously filled with wealthy lotharios. Even as she checks in with Rosa, Toni is immediately observed by Colonel Dupont (Edward Martindel), a friend of Rosa, but by his young nephew, Richard Dupot (Charles Ray) who spies on her through binoculars and, in order to get her attention after she smiles, plays a game of turning on and off his room lights. The innocent girl follow suit, believing it to be simply a game instead a possible series of sexual signals, and before she knows it, and quite the horror of Rosa, she has involved most of the obviously sexually horny visitors to the hotel, lights switching on and off in numerous rooms.

     Determined to put an end to the sexual play, Rosa intercepts Richard’s telephone call, inviting him to their room with the intention of a severe scolding of his behavior. But before she can even prepare for the visit, Richard has been greeted by Toni, who now attempts to hide him from her “mother,” as Rosa determines it is time to dress for dinner. Richard, hidden behind the door, forces Toni to divert Rosa’s attempts to undress, and eventually is made even more confused, with the visit of Colonel Dupont, who invites both Rosa and Toni to join him in dinner, which, sneaking out of the apartment and returning, Richard, having sneaked out the room, overhears, inviting himself along to join, to Toni’s surprise, his uncle.

     Their dinner is interrupted (she repelled by the oysters) by a dance between Richard and Toni, followed by a late night walk in the nearby titular Garden of Eden, and a night ending with Toni having fallen utterly in love with Richard, desperate, as Rosa attempts to turn out the lights, to write down in her diary, resulting in another mad “winking” of hotel lights, flashing off and on like so many fireflies desperate to find lovers.

     From there on the plot turns somewhat more predictable, as Rosa discovers that they are running out of money and have only two days left, and Richard and his uncle, each vying for Toni’s love, agree to a competition to win Toni’s hand in marriage.

     Richard is given only 10 minutes to propose and win her over before Colonel Dupont will enter and give it a try. Unfortunately, in an attempt to calm down her now over-excited daughter, Rosa determines to spike Toni’s nighttime drink with sleeping powder, and by the time Richard arrives the young girl has turned into a kind of sleeping beauty, unable to respond to his marital proposal.

    Increasingly distraught by failure, Richard also drinks some of her nighttime potion, and almost the minute she awakens from her sleep, he falls under its spell, himself turning in a kind of sleeping beauty that only angers the uncomprehending girl.

     The Colonel shows up and attempts to let music express his feelings for her, without knowing that he is performing precisely the song with which his nephew attempt to first woo her some days earlier.

    Fortunately, Richard awakens in time, sneaks into the girl’s embrace and, after some strong hesitation, gets her to say yes.

     We now see a way that Rosa and Toni might finally be able to stay on in Monte Carlo or at least have the wealth to survive a return to Paris (Hopwood, after all, was the creator of the term “gold-digger,” a trope of money-hungry females that became so popular in films throughout the next decade). But there are yet further complications.

     Richard quickly writes to all his aunts and uncles requesting their attendance at his wedding, and finally sensing that the boy may have brought some wealth, through the daughter of a baroness, into their ranks, all hurry off to the event. Only one uncle has not responded, Richard’s uncle Henri.

     Yes, that Henri, Toni’s unsuccessful rapist. When he shows up, she, still pure at heart, is distraught that she has not been honest with him, explaining her background and admitting that she was not the daughter of a Baroness, and even she is Rosa’s daughter, they have no money.

     She challenges “uncle” Henri to tell Richard the truth, and when he refuses, evidently not being a total rake, she herself admits it openly to the entire family, who now circle round her to insist that there is no choice now but to call the wedding off.

    For one of the first times in his life, however, Richard, recognizing that he has found in Toni a wonderful woman, despite her poverty, pushes aside his relatives at the very moment when Toni has publicly removed the beautiful wedding dress he has bought for her, along with her jewels. She rips up the check the family offers her as resolution.

     He picks her up and carries her off, this time in the true meaning of rape, demanding that she marry him nonetheless.

     Hilariously, because of the character’s public removal of her wedding dress, film censors in Montreal cut the scene, causing the Canadian audiences to be unable to even comprehend the ending.

     Dear reader, she eventually marries him.

     Alas, again we learn that gay figures and their cronies are evil. But at least we are once again reminded that they do exist, not as AI would have it, that they are just a figment of the imagination of coded queer readings.

 

*The star of this film, Corinne Griffith was recognized as one of the most beautiful women of the silent screen era. But she lived a life that turned out to be one of the most bizarre in a world of strange Hollywood stories. Beside performing in many notable films, Griffith married four times, first to Webster Campbell whom she divorced three years later to marry noted film producer Walter Morosco, son to the theater and opera impresario Oliver Morosco who leased the Majestic Theatre and opened the Morosco Theatre on Broadway. Ten years later she married businessman and Washington, D.C. Redskins owner George Preston Marshall. She left motion pictures becoming a quite successful business women, buying up business locations in downtown Beverly Hills and writing two bestsellers: My Life with the Redskins and Papa’s Delicate Condition, the later which became a movie. But it was after her final marriage to actor Danny Scholl that her life turned quite odd. School at 44, was more than 25 years younger than Griffith, who sued for divorce after only two months of marriage, contending that the marriage had not be consummated. During the divorce trial, Griffith suddenly revealed that she was not actually Corrine Griffth, but her sister who was 20 years younger who had taken Corrine’s place when she died in 1924. She also denied have her first two husbands, Campbell and Morosco after School’s lawyer argued that Griffith had falsified her age and failed to disclose her two previous husbands. Close friends denied her testimony, But Griffith stood by her story, afterwards, in an interview, even changing it to insist that she was Corrine’s twin sister Mary:

 

“I am Mary Griffith. Her twin sister. Let me explain. She, Corinne, was starring in a film in Mexico in 1920. She was stricken by a mysterious local malady and died suddenly at age twenty-four. Mr. Adolph Zukor, head of Paramount, called me in person and told me I must save the day; a cancellation of the picture would be a disaster for the studio. He told me what had happened; I cried and cried. He said I must pull myself together: there was a million dollars in it if I would become my sister. I had never acted and didn't want to act. But I couldn't resist the money, and I felt Corinne would want me to help. So I went to Mexico and took over, and nobody knew the difference. From then on, I was Corinne Griffith.”

     

    During her last years she continued write books, and upon her death at 84 in 1979 it was estimated that her estate was worth 150 million dollars, mostly from real estate.

    

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).