Peter Bogdanovich | Saint Jack / 1979

a moral man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard Sackler, Paul Theroux, and Peter Bogdanovich (screenplay, based on the book by Paul Theroux), Peter Bogdanovich (director) Saint Jack / 1979

 

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1979 film Saint Jack was filmed on location in Singapore in May and June of 1978, featuring many of the city’s landmarks, including the now lost Empress Place hawker center, Bugis Street, the former Singapore International Airport, transformed in 1981 to a military airbase, Raffles Hotel, and other major spaces. Due to the conservative government and political climate of Singapore, a city the attempting to eradicate the history of any sexual and particularly homosexual past, Bogdanovich and his crew submitted a fictitious synopsis of a film that the director himself described as “a cross between Love Is a Man Splendored Thing and Pal Joey. Even the Singaporeans involved in the production were most convinced by the fabricated narrative, not even quite perceiving what was actually happening in the shooting.

     How startled they were to later discover that the central figure of this film, Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), a Buffalo, New York native portrays a genteel and friendly pimp, working ostensibly for a local Chinese importer but actually spending most of his time gathering up British, Americans, and European visitors and offering them nightly companionship working primarily out of a house which serves almost as his own private bordello.

     Yet we quickly perceive that if Jack is a pimp, he is unlike almost any such figure we have previously met in the movies or literature. This man is a kind of “saint,” beloved my most of the natives on the street and those working in the neighborhood, in bars, kitchens, and small shops, a man who knows everyone on sight and calls out their names with friendly aplomb. They in turn offer him and his friends liquor, cigars, and other special privileges in part because he provides so many of them and their friends jobs that certainly treat his mix of female prostitutes, transsexual women, and occasionally even a gay boy with a respect and dignity that clearly isn’t rewarded to them by the competing syndicate—determined to end Jack’s maverick operations—or for that matter by the British ex-pats, Frogget (James Villiers), Yardley (Joss Ackland), and Smale (Rodney Bewes) who drunkenly muddle through each afternoon and evening singing English melodies as if the colonials were still in control. They are tolerated only for their money and for their utter harmlessness as ghosts of something long passed.

     If Jack is also a kind of imperialist, he practices it with an almost always joyful banter and commitment to the local community that binds the locals to him and helps create a kind of shield of individuals surrounding him, some of whom do not mind playing sexual games and subservient roles for the tourists, particularly since the pay is good.

     But Jack doesn’t spend his entire time, either, as a ponce. His first action in the movie is to meet a British account at the airport and scurry him back to his inscrutable and obviously corrupt businessman employer. But once he meets the basically good if somewhat befuddled accountant, William Leigh (Denholm Elliott) who is more interested in playing a game of squash than meeting up with a whore, Jack keeps him with him the entire evening as if he were a kind of lucky token, taking him for a drink in the British expat bar, keeping him close as he hooks up a sweaty-faced Australian customer with a transsexual couple (Bridgit and Lily Ang) who play out a sex routine for the paying voyeur, and eventually even involving Leigh in a run for his life when faced with the always-following triad of syndicate enforcers (Peter Pang, Ronald Ng, and Teow Keng Seow).

    As Ron Yap argues, in what is surely one of the most intelligent and inclusive of essays on this film, “The Counter-Imperialist: Reflections on Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack (1979) by a Singaporean,” Leigh becomes symbolically Jack’s “ally,” the way in some respects, the pianist Sam served Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca.

    Leigh also serves as a representative of time in the film, his annual visits announcing the passing of years in what is otherwise almost awash of routine in Jack’s life as he maneuvers his prostitutes in and out of the arms of the passing Singapore visitors and, despite his surface expression of eternal positivity, attempts to keep the devil from catching him, like his friend Leigh also imagining a time when he will be able to afford the freedom to return to a life he has long abandoned. Leigh, with a serious heart condition, that finally ends in his death in Jack’s hands as he desperately attempts to revive him with artificial respiration, as a signal that his own time in his attempt to fulfill human desires is coming to an end.

     On the first night he meets Leigh, Jack also first encounters a beautiful Sri Lanka model Monika (Monika Subramaniam) who wears a long blue sari which she gradually unravels to almost bare her body a bit in the manner Salome. If Jack is not a particular expressive fellow when it comes to the beauty of woman, it is clear that she pleases him, and the two remain bedmates for the rest of the film until it becomes clear that Jack is contemplating an end to his Singapore activities.

     His life may have gone of for years in the dark city of pretense if it weren’t for the evil forces of the gang, who abduct him, tattooing his arms in demeaning Chinese profanities such as “Red Butt Face,” “Son of Prostitute,” and “Curse of Dog Shit,” a kind of name-calling for life. Meanwhile, the trio and the other syndicate goods ransack and wreck the brothel, the girls escaping for their lives. If he is devastated by his losses, Jack can’t allow himself to fully express it, as he immediately visits a tattoo parlor to re-tattoo both arms with various images of flowers, covering up the slurs.

     An even more pernicious force appears in the character of Eddie Schuman (Peter Bogdanovich), a CIA operative who convinces Jack to become the ponce for an army station set up only to bus the soldiers serving in Viet Nam and elsewhere in the East Asia into it for a relaxing weekend or more of sexual pleasures. Eddie reclaims the Civil War legend that the word “hooker” came about from the illicit gatherings of men serving under General Joseph Hooker followed by a contingent of prostituted nicknamed “Hooker’s Brigade.” The word “hooker used to mean prostitute, however, appears to have been in use at least as early as 1845, long before Hooker came to prominence.

     It doesn’t matter, however, since Eddie is simply convinced that it is good for morale, and as far as Jack goes, it is simply another way to put his knowledge and connections to good use. At one point, with the promised visit of a US commander, Jack is asked to scrounge up a boy, this particular commander’s preference. No problem, Jack suggests. But it is a problem, a true moral dilemma, when soon after he is asked to follow a visiting senator who evidently is speaking out too strongly against the US activities in Asia. Jack is asked to film him in a compromising situation.

As we have seen, Jack does have moral principles, even if he does not recognize sexual fulfillment as being involved. Yet the payment of $25,000 or more is tempting, particularly since it might offer him a way out of his nefarious activities and a return to some sense of “normalcy.”

     The senator, played in a quite ironic bit of casting by one-time James Bond performer (George Lazenby, himself a kind of conjure artist, worming his way into the role without any acting experience simply by showing up for the audition in a tuxedo).

     It almost seems as if Jack is ready to turn in his halo as he follows the senator out of the Shangri-La Hotel, picking up a young Asian boy along the way before checking into the Hilton and returning to the street to provide him with his room number.

    Jack follows up, paying the kid for the room number, and begging him to keep the door unlocked. When the boy finally does visit the senator in his room, Jack sneaks a peek through the door, snapping a picture of the boy in the nude being hugged by the senator.

     By the next morning, it appears that he actually is planning to return to the US, with, as I suggest above, Monika determining it’s also time for her to return home. But when he exist his room to see Eddie sitting across the street on a park bench, he simply cannot give up his saintly bonhomie and refuses to hand over any evidence, soon after tossing the camera he’s placed in a small package into the ocean.

     This brilliant film was banned in Singapore until 2006, while most of the rest of the world got to enjoy Gazzara’s brilliant performance and a film the critic Liam Sherwin-Murray nicely summarized in The Paris Review:    

     

“A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.”

 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).

 

Peter Jackson | Heavenly Creatures / 1994

enemy of the people

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson (screenplay), Peter Jackson (director) Heavenly Creatures / 1994

 

Based on the real-life murder case in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1954, in which two girls, aged 16 and 15, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme killed Pauline’s mother by bludgeoning her over the head. The murder was trumpeted in all the papers as the girls were described as ruthless child-villains.

     The truth, which Peter Jackson attempts to portray in his 1994 film, was far more interesting and complex and involves the girl’s relationship beginning in 1952, when the beautiful Juliet transfers from the Bahamas and elsewhere to the Christchurch school where the working class Pauline is enrolled.

     The younger of the girls, Juliet (brilliantly played in this film in her first major movie role by Kate Winslet) just 13 years of age is well-traveled, sophisticated, and knowledgeable, taking out time in her very first class to correct her French teacher’s grammar, immediately catapulting her, as she probably has been throughout her young years, into the domain of the outsider where Pauline (Melanie Lynskey) sits brooding.

     The girls immediately discover that both have had sickly childhoods, Juliet suffering from different lung difficulties and Pauline needing serious operations to her legs, the scars of which impress her new friend. As they sit out gym class, both find they also share an obsession with the then popular movie tenor, Mario Lanza, hot from The Toast of New Orleans (1950), The Great Caruso (1951), Because You’re Mine (1952), and The Student Prince (1954).

      Both girls are highly intelligent and display a dark sense of wit, but Juliet, in particular, pulls  Pauline into her far more well-off world, with educated, open-minded parents—her father Henry (Clive Merrison) is a professor and her mother Hilda (Diana Kent) is a psychiatrist—and into her highly imaginative romantic world in which she argues for “the Fourth World,” a heaven without Christians that celebrates music and art.

      As the girls paint, together write a long romantic novel whose characters they play out in their own lives, and create plasticine figurines of the characters of their imaginary kingdom Borovnia, both girls imagine that they actually are, at moments, in that fourth dimension, a world of such beauty and splendor that it is indescribable to all others.

     At about this same time, Pauline receives a diary book for Christmas from her poor parents and begins to write a series of diaries that expresses their private world and were later used to convict her and Juliet of the murder. All of the spoken narrative and many actual lines in the film were taken from Pauline’s diaries.

      Jackson, as his later Lord of the Rings trilogy makes clear, was the perfect director to create the fantastical worlds of these young “heavenly creatures.” Indeed, their world, as they run endlessly through space both indoors and out, does seem almost heavenly. The talents of both girls are suddenly drawn out by the other as they together fall romantically in love, the beautiful Juliet playing the Princess and Pauline playing her Prince consort.

      At one point, Juliet even gives birth, played out quite convincingly with a pillow, in which she produces a royal son who unfortunately proves his mettle by killing off many in the court in an unpredictable attempt to protect both his mother and father.

       As a year passes, the girls in puberty begin to realize their actions of love in a manner than more closely parallels lesbian love, which disturbs Juliet’s father enough that he pays a visit to Pauline’s mother Honora (Sarah Peirse), who terrified by the news sends her daughter to a physician recommended by Dr. Hulme, who typical of the profession of the day, immediately describes her daughter’s obsessions as an unnormal one (whispering the word homosexual), that perhaps she will grow out of or, if not, must be corrected by other methods.

     The ignorant working woman is worried enough by day to day living to know how to help her daughter escape the strange “affliction.”

      When Juliet is diagnosed with an infection of pneumonia in one lung, both their parents seem to feel that they prayers have been answered as the girls are necessarily separated. But the situation merely intensifies the girls’ love for each other, as they write each other daily in both their own voices and those of their fictional characters. Juliet, moreover, locked away in a clinic with other sick individuals, with her parents choosing this moment to take an extended vacation together, is so totally isolated that her entire attention is now focused on “Paul” and she has long before renamed Pauline.

      During this same period, a male boarder at the Parker home, John (Jed Brophy) is attracted to the chubby teenage girl who made her own bedroom in a family outhouse, and one night sneaks out to snuggle up in her bed, Pauline being so amazed that a boy might be attracted to her that she accepts and even encourages his rape.

     Now Honora and her husband are faced with even further terrors and their newly enforced restrictions only further turn Pauline against them, particularly her mother whom, in comparing her coarse manners with those of Juliet’s mother, she grows to hate.

      When Pauline even describes the boy’s attraction to her, Juliet grows so jealous that she gives up all heterosexual intentions and grows into an even deeper lesbian-like love with Juliet. Whether or not their shared bathing situations, bedtime snuggling, kissing, and perhaps further sexual explorations can truly be described as lesbian is open to question, since both girls also still fantasize about males making love to them, Lanza of course, but even the hideous Orson Welles whose horrific behavior in The Third Man (1949) haunts but also excites their sexual imaginations.

      There is no doubt, like many young girls of their age, they lived a full sexual life, but frankly playing out their Borovnian fantasies with out-sized plasticine figures, as Jackson and his special effects co-workers Richard Taylor and George Port do may result in visual wonderment for some, but for me seemed just to be silly. There is no reason to suspect that the girls imaginatively kept their court in the form of their plastic figurines. Surely they transformed them, through their imaginations into handsome, colorful living figures.

      But if the girls might have remained somewhat innocent about real sexual events, the world around them did not spare them. Even as Juliet’s parents return and any normality, such as it might be, is restored, without them even knowing it the girls’ beloved father and for Pauline fatherly model is fired from his professorship and given until the end of the year to find a new position. Alas, the reasons for this action remain vague, something which I wish the film at looked at more carefully.

     The film does, however, look quite specifically at the behavior of Juliet’s beloved mother, for Pauline the representative of all her own mother can never be, has been leading some of her male psychiatric patients to her own bed, ultimately even suggesting one of them, Bill Perry (Peter Elliott) move into their house for recuperation. When Juliet discovers the two, Bill and her saintly mother, in bed together she threatens to tell her father, only to be told that her father already knows and the two are planning eventually to divorce.

      As if that were not enough, the Hulmes soon reveal to their daughter and her friend that her father is returning to England and the daughter is being sent off to South Africa to lives with a relative.

      In short, both girls’ life and love is simultaneously shattered in numerous ways. And even their plots to escape together before the dreaded day fail when Pauline discovers she cannot obtain a passport so that she might escape with Juliet to Hollywood without her mother’s signature.

    For Pauline in particular, but since the girls now almost share minds, for Juliet as well, Honora becomes the symbol of almost everything that stands in their way. The result is not so much planned but almost inevitable, the reality played out in shocking detail—the first instance in which the camera has taken us out of their perspective—as they hit the mother over the head with a brick enveloped in a woman’s stocking again and again.

      With the proof of Pauline’s diaries, the girls were both tried for murder, but their convictions as minors lasted only 5 years each, released on the condition that they would never see one another again.

      Pauline disappeared from sight and has not been heard from since. Juliet moved to Scotland where she became a murder mystery writer under the pseudonym of Anne Parey. Jackson and Walsh did not attempt to contact Parey nor track down Pauline, choosing to allow them their peace, however they have come to it.

       Heavenly Creatures may not, ultimately, be a tale that reveals much about the so-called lesbian relationship of these two individuals, but it certainly deals with their queerness, representing them as the ultimate outsiders, urban “goths” long before they came into existence.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

 

Constantine Giannaris | Mia thesi ston ilio (A Place in the Sun) / 1994

a knife in the back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Constantine Giannaris (screenwriter and director) Mia thesi ston ilio (A Place in the Sun) / 1994

 

One of the most interesting of the LGBTQ filmmakers of the 1990s, Greek director Constantine Giannaris was already moving away from his focus strictly on gay and lesbian issues in A Place in the Sun of 1994.

     As he himself described it, the “eroticism” of his early works such as Caught Looking (1991) is here tempered considerably by his focus the issues of immigration that began to plague Greece in the mid-1990s as the Balkan countries’ Communist governments begin to fall, and millions of their citizens migrated to Greece not only for political asylum but for sexual freedom as well.

     The rather smugly set-in-his-ways, handsome, gay Athenian worker Ilias (Stavros Zalmas), whose narrative voice dominates this 45-minute film, notes that his city has changed, the former gay gathering night spots being taken over by the thousands of new immigrants from Romania, Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania, seeking mutual sexual contact and/or and/often both seeking men who will pay for them for their pleasures.

     Ilias is clearly not interested in long term relationships nor even, it appears, in friendships, but is perfectly happy picking up boys each night, often refusing to take them to his home for fear that sometime later they might return to rob him and put a knife in his back.

      If he sounds somewhat like a friendly bigot, he has reasons, as we shall see, for his fears. The first night of this film’s narrative he picks up a cute Romanian boy (Valentino Hagi) and enjoys the sex.

     Sitting in the café the next time we see him, Ilias spots a broodingly beautiful young Albanian, whom he immediately cruises, without success. But later that evening we see the young, Panagiotis (Panagiotis Tsitsas) join him, playing various macho games such as rolling a cigarette Ilias has offered him back and forth on the table, suggesting that before he’ll accept the gift he must make certain that it becomes his own, something that can easily be given back, as if the gift were of no matter to him. So too does Panagiotis play with Ilias’ sexual advances, enjoying the fact that in doing so, he remains in control.

      They go home and have sex and Ilias against all his former principles quickly grows to like the young man, offering him money and, in some respects, even a nightly bed.

       So too does Panagiotis seem to like and respect the older Greek man, needing the money he gives him just to survive but also slowly growing to like him. But still, a product of his macho culture, Panagiotis will not allow Ilias to kiss him on the lips, despite the fact that he allows his hands to stroke his face and body. He wishes Ilias, a clearly sis-gender male, might be a “tranny,” which would make it far easier for him to engage in their sexual acts.

       Ilias falls in love with him enough to even rouge his lips as a kind of compromise. And so the two continue, Ilias offering the advice of an elder, and Panagiotis developing a sort of dependence on his new lover. But that neediness and the resistance to admit it, pushes the relationship to its limits. Panagiotis is constantly in need of more money, and spends long hours in Ilias’ modest apartment watching TV instead of making love. Ilias, now desperately in love with the young man, also now fears that one night the brooding beefcake might still put a knife into his back.

       Given the negatives of the relationship and his latent fears, Ilias finally sends the Albanian boy off, as the camera shifts its focus, following the wanderings of Panagiotis as he attempts to survive, watches a small streetside musical performance by fellow Balkan performers with joy, and hooks up with men in the toilets, making plans to meet one of the young men (Ilias Marmaras) as a “customer.”

      From the beginning of the film, moreover, Giannaris has demonstrated the young Albanian’s dreams and imagination with fragmentary scenes in color, mostly simply snippets of Athens landscape in the bright sun, a world which Ilias does not seem to inhabit. But even these golden reveries do not quite seem enough for Panagiotis who has told Ilias that what he would really love is to work on a boat headed for America, the golden world of so many immigrants’ imagination.

       In the meantime, Ilias discovers just much he misses the boy, as his love becomes even more of an obsession, he roaming the streets in search of Panagiotis, sitting at the same table where he originally met him, etc. All of his time seems to now be devoted to finding Panagiotis, who has seemingly disappeared from the landscape.

      One night while driving through the square, however, Ilias suddenly spots him sitting on a metal railing and turns back to speak with him. The boy returns to Ilias, but he has changed, and is no longer open to Ilias’ sexual approaches. Finally, he reveals that he has robbed and stabbed to death a sexual customer and admits that the police are after him.

      Instead of throwing him out, as the boy feared, Ilias is now so obsessed with the dangerous boy that he determines to escape with him by ship to another world. In full color, obviously now representing both of their dreams and fantasies, the two drive to the pier; but instead of finding work on a ship, they confront one another is a game of switched identities.

      The very questions which Ilias first asked Panagiotis upon meeting him are reversed as the Albanian now challenges the Greek—“Where are you from, mate?”; “I’m Albanian.” “How long have you been here?; “Two and a half years.” “Got a job?”; “Yes.” “How much do you earn a day?; “5,000.” “Like it here?; “Yes, and you?” as the boy pretends he is an American from Chicago, encountering Ilias at a bar—the two of them now emphatically having switched roles, finally permitting them to come together in a deep, loving hug.

      The film seems to end, accordingly, on a note of reparative resolution as the credits appear. But after the credits we are returned, alas, to the mean world of reality. Both have been arrested, Panagiotis sent to Crete to stand trial, while Ilias still awaits a trial in Athens, his home city, which perhaps can no longer be described as such.

      Much like Montgomery Clift’s character in the George Stevens 1951 movie of the same name, the young Albanian immigrant is only punished for desiring a place in the sun.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

André Téchiné | Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds) / 1994

blowing in the wind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Olivier Massart, Gilles Taurand, André Téchiné (sceenwriters), André Téchiné (director) Les Roseaux sauvages (Wild Reeds) / 1994

 

Yes, this is another young gay coming-out movie. But it is far too much more to describe it as that. The young boarding-school boy, François Forestier (Gaël Morel) of André Téchiné’s film, is certainly ready to discover his sexuality, given his close, non-sexual, relationship with his teacher’s beautiful daughter, Maïte Alvarez (Élodie Bouchez), but he is not only a shy boy, but an obedient farmer’s son, determined to become the best in his class, but also—as his teacher herself confirms—is not only over-eager but too self-confident, particularly when it comes to his abilities in French literature. His math skills are a bit more dubious, as his even more removed classmate, Serge Bartolo (Stéphane Rideau) perceives, who is willing to exchange math answers in return for help in literary essays.

      But these gymnasium exchanges have, actually, little to do with the problems these youths are facing. The film begins, seemingly in loving generic devotion, with a new wedding between Serge’s older brother, Pierre to a young bride, Irène, which in any other film might be portrayed as an absolutely joyful event. But here, we quickly learn, Pierre, a solider momentarily on leave from the French-Algerian war—a former student of Maïte’s mother, Madame Alvarez (Michèle Moretti)—has married his bride only to find a way to escape from the war, and is seeking, through her, a Communist member, a route to hide out for a period of time. She morally refuses him: he is and his family members, after all, are former Algerian residents who oppose Algerian independence. The Communists might have tried to intervene for French men opposed to the war, but he is a member of the Algerian rightest group, and intervention in his case is a sticky situation.

       Director Téchiné says nothing of this, presuming his French audience will comprehend the political situation, but American audiences need to know how difficult the French political situation was, when many French who had lived wealthy lives in Algeria such as Serge and other politically opposed figures, were now suddenly ousted from their somewhat privileged worlds.

      As the young boys, both outsiders, François and Serge, crawl into each other’s beds, finding  temporary comfort in each other’s bodies, things become even more complex, as François, suddenly confronting that he is, indeed, a “faggot”—a scene beautifully realized as he shouts the word out over and over again into a mirror until it finally becomes a declaration of true identity—realizes that his new would-be lover is far more attracted to his virginal female friend, and later, after he shifts rooms, perceives that Henri (Frédéric Gorny), a bi-sexual older student, is just as attracted to his woman friend, is quite devastated by the situations he must confront.

      The death in war of Pierre sends Maïte’s mother into a psychological breakdown: she has, after all, been directly responsible for his death by refusing to help him.  Maïte, now left alone, is even more confused about her possible relationships with men in general.

       Téchiné reminds us that youth is a very difficult period, particularly in relationship to sexual identity. But here, we also have deep political alliances that confuse everyone. Both Serge and Henri accuse the good-Catholic-farm boy François of being a coward, and they are right; he cannot comprehend either of their own deep emotional involvements with the political situations of the day. His immersion into their lives is simply sexual. But that, of course, is just as confusing and troubling, revealed so terribly with his visit to a local shoe-salesman—known as a gay man in the local community of Toulouse—who, when François asks him for advice, cannot even remember his feelings as a youth. Youth, it is clear, regarding both sex and politics, cannot rely on the older generation who can offer no significant answers, only simplistic mantras; even the sympathetic Monsieur Morelli (Jacques Nolot) will not honestly answer Henri’s questions about the failures of the Algerian revolution, even after the French have retreated.

     The wonder of Téchiné’s film is that it offers no easy solutions. It is for the young “reeds,” who in their adolescent tenacity, will survive into the future and come to terms with reality, as opposed to the old oaks of Aesop’s fable retold by La Fontaine.

 

Los Angeles, November 3, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).