Marcel Carné | Hôtel du Nord / 1938, USA 1940

a large and open heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Aurenche and Henri Jeanson (screenplay, based on a novel by Eugène Dabit), Marcel Carné (director) Hôtel du Nord / 1938, USA 1940

 

Filmed between two of French director Marcel Carné’s masterworks, Port of Shadows and Daybreak, Hôtel du Nord has been seen by many critics as a lesser work—in part because Carné’s usual collaborator, writer Jacques Prévert was not available for this adaptation of a novel by Eugène Dabit. And unlike the darker and political elements of the films just before and after Hôtel, with a cast of dozens, it is far more artificed, designer Alexandre Trauner creating an entire Paris block, including moveable metal bridges along the canal Saint-Martin.

   Not that this work does not have its dark moments. The film begins, in fact, with a poor couple checking into the hotel with the intention of committing suicide, while downstairs most of the other tenants are celebrating the first communion of a young girl. Michèle, who lives in the hotel with her policeman father. She takes a piece of cake up to a woman, Raymonde (Arletty), who works as a prostitute and lives with a former thief, now her pimp Edmond (Louis Jouvet), who works on the side as a photographer.

      Among the other regulars downstairs are Ginette (Paulette Dubost), a student hairdresser, Prosper (Bernard Blier), a cuckolded locksman, Adrien (François Périer), a gay confection salesman, and the woman joyfully overseeing these and other individuals, Louise Lecouvreur (Jane Marken), the wife of the hotel’s proprietor. The one thing they almost all share in common is they are outsiders, societal outcasts who have sought out in this inexpensive hideaway one another’s company.

      As Edward Baron Turk observes in his essay for the Criterion collection:

 

“[Madame Lecouvreur’s] benevolence is also on display in the foster care she and her husband provide—to the chagrin of one xenophobic resident—for a mute youngster, a displaced, traumatized victim of the Spanish Civil War, and in her extending, quite literally, an equal seat at the table to Périer’s character, the first nonclichéd depiction of a queer male in mainstream French cinema. For Carné, who was gay, Adrien functions as simply one more self-confident social outsider in an overall project that would never have been greenlit by Hollywood’s Production Code Administration.”

      Thus we quickly meet the work’s major figures before the camera returns us to the suicidal couple in whose room, Pierre (Jean-Pierre Aumont) has just shot his lover, Renée (Annabella), but doesn’t have the resolve to go through with his own death.

      Hearing the pistol, Edmond enters the room to see Pierre standing over what appears to be Renée’s corpse. He silently signals for the Pierre to escape before going down to report what appears to be a murder, but which the police soon diagnose as a suicide.

     In fact, Renée is not dead, but awakens to find herself in a hospital, having been given, so she is told, a blood transfusion. Meanwhile, despondent and disgusted with his cowardice, Pierre has turned himself into the police and is locked away.

     When Renée returns to the hotel to collect her things, she is given a job by Madame Lecouvreur. Working as a server, the young girl becomes quite popular with the tenants, particularly with Edmond, who girlfriend has been taken away by the police who found her papers not in order.

     Ultimately, Edmond falls in love with the new serving girl, and plans to move with her to another city, hoping to escape his dark past and the two men who have been attempting to track him down to kill him.

     The two travel away from Paris, but at the last moment, Renée—still in love with Pierre—returns to talk with Pierre in jail. Followed back to Paris by Edmond, Renée warns him not to return to his room, since there are two men waiting there.

     Edmond not only returns to his room, but tosses his gun upon the bed for one of the men to shoot him. His death, however, will not immediately be noticed since it’s Bastille day, and children below are setting off fireworks.

     Without explicitly saying it, accordingly, Carné has told a tale of dark fate and, given the general financial states of the hotel’s several tenants, presented us with a story of impoverishment. Yet this time, the director has wrapped it up in a kind of Grand Hotel-like structure that includes a great among of fascinatingly mundane and often humorous dialogue, and we are struck less by the inevitability of fate than the possibilities, particularly in the love between Renée and Pierre, to disrupt it.

     This film suggests that it is women who can redeem the future. From the early moments of Michèle’s celebration with Madame Lecouvreur at the head to the table, to our ongoing encounters with Raymonde and Renée, it is the women who, offering community and love, that keeps this little society together. If in the first scene Pierre has failed to act out of cowardice, and least he has saved them both from death; Edmond, finally, finds salvation in facing his own death. And although it may be difficult to imagine a happy ending for Renée and Pierre, she has, at least forgiven him and promised her continued love.

     If Hôtel du Nord, with its picturesque scenes and larger-than-life characters, seems, in its very perfection, a bit old-fashioned, over the year, as critic Inge Fossen has put it, the film has gained a king of lustrous patina, as its large and open hear is seldom to be found in contemporary works.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).

Rowland Brown and John Cromwell | Hell’s Highway / 1932

stealing a spoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Ornitz, Robert Tasker and Rowland Brown (screenplay), Rowland Brown and John Cromwell (directors) Hell’s Highway / 1932

 

Long before Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967) portrayal of prison life in a Southern chain gang, Rowland Brown and John Cromwell even more brutally realized the hellish world of a prison turned forced labor camp in their 1932 production of Hell’s Highway, starring Richard Dix as the popular prison camp leader “Duke” Ellis.

     The prisoners used by a contractor trying to build “liberty highway” are kept shackled together each night in bed, are offered the worst food possible, often left to starve for the slightest infraction—in one instance for a stolen spoon—and locked away in a deathly sweat box if they question or challenge any authority. But whereas Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, released later the same year, focused on the unjust system that sent the hero to such a hellish prison, the prisoners of Hell’s Highway are all guilty of robbery, murder, and other crimes such as the three-time bigamist who constantly spouts Bible verses and “reads the stars.” But the real villains in this film are not the prisoners, not even the terrible system which commits repeat offenders such as the likeable Duke to life imprisonment, but the capitalist William Billings (Oscar Apfel) who will do anything to get his highway built ahead of schedule, an effort that seems to consist mostly of the prison gang hacking away for forever on a never ending supply of boulders.

    Brown’s films is rich on presentation of character types, including several black figures, many of whom predictably—given the standard stereotypes of the day—spend their days and nights singing. But who might complain about the film’s use of the wonderful Etude Ethiopian Chorus. And some of the character types would be popular even in today’s films, one a mute man who primarily signs, uttering only a few words. One figure seems to spend his entire life collecting pictures of beautiful women, all of whom, he claims, he knew since they signed the obviously promotional photos—clearly a lie, since he later steals the photo of a boy’s sweetheart.

      Another, more tragic figure, is a guard Captain “Pop-Eye” Jackson, who is so convinced by the star-reading bigamist that his wife is cheating on him that he returns to his prison-farm cottage, gun in hand, and shoots his innocent wife dead, a major moment in the plot since it is during the star-reading session that Duke and several of his friends, having distracted that very guard, attempt an escape. They might even have been successful had Duke not turned back when he discovers that his younger brother, Johnny (Tom Brown) has just been delivered up the prison for a petty crime. He realizes that the only hope to set his brother free and get him on the right track is to stay, a fortunate choice for Duke since by the next morning they bring back the dead bodies of his two escaped friends.

      What is also truly fascinating about this film is the existence of a homosexual character Burgess, the camp cook who is evidently is in a relationship with the head guard, “Blacksnake Skinner” (C. Henry Gordon). “Cookie,” who doesn’t at all hide his effeminate manners and even looks longingly, at one point, at the handsome Duke, and is patted on the butt at one point by his guard and protector. Except for Duke’s umbrage over “Cookie’s” languid gaze in his direction, the prisoners seem quite accepting of their cook’s sexuality, if not as tolerant of the food he serves them. In short, Burgess is no mere sissy in this film, but another of the various prison “types”; and when in 1934, after the Breen and the Hays board strengthened their anti-homosexual strictures, the film could not get permission for a re-release, which is why, perhaps, this excellent work is hardly known today, whereas I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang has been listed on the National Film Registry.

     Another minor figure, but worth noting, is the beloved wife of one of the prisoners who visits, played by Louise Beavers; on that same visiting day Duke’s mother and his brother Johnny’s girlfriend show up, the mother further convincing her elder son to take care of his idolizing sibling.

   To save Johnny from possible death in the sweat box where another young boy died just a few days earlier, Duke agrees to play the role of a company overseer, a position his fellow inmates, who previously admired him, now bitterly resent. But it is only by performing that task that he gets Johnny switched to a prison desk job.

     Eventually, however, their tortures become so unbearable that the entire camp rises up, most of the men escaping and setting fire to the entire place, a remarkable scene, made even more dramatic by the fact that Duke has locked his brother away in a wooden prison carrier so that he cannot join them and endanger his own parole. But when Johnny makes an escape, he cannot avoid freeing the camp guards, trapped in another wagon in which they would certainly have been burned to death had he not opened the door.

     The long scene of escape and its aftermath, when Johnny attempts to join up with the other prison escapees, ends in his being shot by locals—a bounty has put on all the prisoners so that the locals might join in the capture—Duke turning back when he hears of his brother’s whereabouts.

      In the end, because of the governor’s arrival and an underground investigator he’s assigned to the camp, Johnny is saved from hanging and treated by a doctor, and Duke is saved from the same end—although he still may have spend the rest of his life in prison—by his testifying against the criminal acts of Billings, he and others are saved from that man’s decree about sending slackers to their death in the sweat box.

      Prison reform, accordingly, seems to save the day. But we know that any changes were only temporary. Luke Jackson (Paul Newman) and dozens of other such figures in between in both film and fiction have made it clear that many prisons throughout the world were and are still something just short of death camps even today. One only has to read of New York City’s Riker’s Island to perceive the truth.

      But Hell’s Highway gave us an early look into the system that revealed over and over again in works as various as Sex in Chains (1928), People of the Summer Night (1948), The Kingdom of Heaven (1949), The Song of Love (1950), Caged (1950), Girls in Prison (1956),The Quare Fellow (1962), Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971), The Consequence (1977), Midnight Express (1978), Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), Chained Heat (1983), Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Lilies (1996), I Love You Phillip Morris (2010), Great Freedom (2021), and so very many others that we preceive not only are all prison systems often unjust but are filled with LGBTQ individuals as well as others who practice in its confines same-gender sex, the former sometimes arrested simply for acting out sexual desire.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

 

Robert Siodmark | Tumultes (Tumult) / 1932

romantic conventions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Liebmann, Yves Mirande, and Hans Müller (screenplay), Robert Siodmark (director) Tumultes (Tumult) / 1932

 

Tumultes (Tumult), the French version of Robert Siodmak’s 1932 German film Stürme der Leidenschaft (Storms of Passion) is often described as being a dark noir of “murderous rage” which demonstrates the inescapable passions of uncontrollable criminality. As one such correspondent wrote:

 

“Set almost entirely at night or in shadowy gloom that seems to press in upon the characters, Tumultes is a dark film both thematically and optically. It doesn't leave you with a good feeling about the human race. We are, in Siodmak's vision, wretched creatures, imprisoned and ultimately destroyed by our lowest impulses. Twice in the film Ralph [Boyer’s character] gets free from captivity. But his freedom is illusory. His obsessive jealousy and pride, centered around the femme fatale Ania, make his downfall a grim inevitability.”

 

     I’ve not seen the German version, which, long thought to be lost was found eventually with kanji side-titles in Tokyo’s National Film Center, but the French version, staring Charles Boyer is actually nothing of the sort. Or perhaps, as often happens, I just read it quite differently.

     Whereas some of these commentators, accordingly find Boyer’s character as unlikeable and assess the ordinarily suave actor’s attempt to play a tough criminal character an ill fit (I presume they are forgetting Boyer’s 1944 role as a truly disgustingly obsessed villain in Gaslight) he is presented in the film I saw, in fact,  rather as a quite likeable being from the very first frame as, working in the prison kitchens, he tosses in some flavoring to the soup, adds salt to the meat which he slices up in larger chunks than usual, and ladles out to certain prisoners—in exchange for a single cigarette from each—an extra portion, the latter for which he is caught by the authorities and chastised. As he explains, his mother as always described him as a soft touch. Soon after, Ralph Schwarz is, in fact, released early from prison.

     Faced with the late Weimar Republic world on the brink of Hitler’s Nazism—Siodmak would escape to Paris a year after this movie, and from there move on to Los Angeles in 1939—Ralph is rather taken aback by the rise even in the cost of the trolley fare, and recognizes that in some ways he had it had it better off in prison. He reminds us a bit more of Franz Biberkopf from Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, adapted to German cinema only the year before (and, of course, later brilliantly remade by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1980), a kind of beloved fool more than an obsessed criminal mind.

     Ralph’s only desire is to return to his lover Ania (Florelle) and when the neighboring women get wind of his return, they’re all so delighted they shout over to one another through their open windows to share the news. And no one seems more pleased for Ralph’s return that the chef of the local cooperative bar, “Emma” Emmerich (Louis Florencie), the film’s “pansy” figure who is so excited and overwhelmed with the news that his pal has been released that he is having difficulties getting orders out of the kitchen, making time, nonetheless, to flamboyantly announce his new plans for the grand festival he’s organizing which will involve the whole community, including Ania singing.

      Obviously Ralph is far cleverer than the dense-headed Biberkopf, but he is ignorant when it comes to his blind love for Ania, who has been cheating on him with a photographer, Gustave Krouchovski (Thomy Bourdelle) having taken several nude photos of her which she hides by sending them off with her best female friend, Yvonne (Clara Tambour) for safe-keeping.

     Ralph seems more interested in meeting up with his old criminal gang, who appear to call each other by feminine nicknames (at least in the translation I watched) than in having sex with Ania. When she plants a lipstick kiss upon his cheek, he slaps her, having evidently forbidden her to wear cosmetics. And he is even more consumed by the mail he has received in his absence, particularly when he reads a note from his friend asking him to help in the release of a parentless boy from prison, Willi (Robert Arnoux). Indeed, pretending to be a local cashier, he achieves the boy’s release only to be disappointed that the kid isn’t better looking (“Poor boy. You’re so ugly.”)...and brighter, as if he were taking custody of him for his personal delectation.

       As for future criminal plans, when his friends suggest the heist of a local bank through the tunnels via a local candy store, he declares it far too dangerous and perceives their planning to be elementary, something that will take many more months. His “friends” determine to proceed without him, using the upcoming festival as a kind of cover, hoping to arrive by its end after the robbery to establish their innocence.

       Indeed his “friends” have also betrayed him by refusing to reveal that he is playing the cuckold to Ania. And when Willi, who is brought the first night home to live with Ralph and Ania, discovers the truth by observing Gustave hiding in their apartment when Ralph returns home from his meeting, Ania threatens to kill him if he reveals the fact.

       Meanwhile, at the festival, Ralph discovers that the others are robbing the bank at that very moment, rushing off to help them knowing that the police will soon be alerted of their acts. By pretending that he is a guard at the bank, he tricks the police to ignore the alarm going off at that very moment, and rushes to help his friends escape from the tunnels in which, after using explosives incorrectly, are now trapped—events which, according to critic Christoph Huber, appear only in the French, not in the German version. He later again pretends to be a police guard sending away the police van off so that his acquaintances can escape.

     Back at the festival Ania is furious when the tickets Ralph has bought for the raffle of an ermine coat, fail to win; and, blind-sided by his love once again, Ralph rushes off, trying to please her by stealing just such a coat from a local furrier. Upon his return he finds her missing, the loyal Willi finally revealing that she has shacked up with the photographer in a room nearby.

      Throughout this misogynistic tale, the only truly fatal flaw that possesses Ralph Schwarz is his almost incomprehensible commitment to the woman he believes he loves. Like a tragic operatic figure, Ralph is wed to conventional heterosexuality despite the fact that the movie keeps suggesting that he is desperate to pull away from it, even when, after he has killed Gustave in revenge and the police come looking for him—oddly, for stealing the coat, not the death his has facilitated—he appears to have shacked up with Willi, accusing him of not caring anymore about him, and finally disavowing the faithless Ania and any other woman in his life.

     Like a drug, however, he cannot resist the lure of her deceitful love, sending Willi on a voyage to bring her to his hidden encampment. Like Wedekind’s Lulu, she seduces the boy instead, handing the address Willi has provided her over to the police.

      Ralph’s detective friend Goebel shows up to arrest him, at one moment in the interchange between them Ralph grabbing the man’s gun; but even then he cannot kill him. Ralph can kill, it appears, only in love’s revenge. Goebel tells him that it has been Ania who has betrayed him once more.

      Ralph is arrested and sentenced to six years in prison, Ania and her new lover Willi now believing they are free of this passionate mad man. Yet the indomitable Ralph escapes, returning for further revenge. In a brutal fight outside of his former flat, he nearly kills Willi but once more cannot bring himself to destroy another man, leaving him alive while trying to convince Willi of his own folly since he is certain that the woman will eventually betray him as well.

     When yet again Goebel arrives to arrest him, the idiot romantic finally seems prepared to leave all the tumult of the world of “normality” forever, destined to return to a prison where he can remain locked away in a society in which he can openly express his kindness and friendship to those of his own sex.

      In sum, while superficially Siodmak’s work is a grand expression of a passionate heterosexual male who is disappointed that his woman “done him wrong” again and again, it is finally a rather gynophobic homily against womankind. In his behavior we finally recognize the “hero” of this tale as a manically closeted queer, a man who actually gets on well with those of his sex if they simply return his love and admiration. From the wide open world of normative heterosexuality, this film shows Ralph endlessly pushing at the door wherein lies the realm of the “other,” finally entering therein after having come to terms with his inability to live in the normative sexual world. As Ania recalls, “Ralph always said he was happiest living in jail.”

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

Dudley Murphy | The Sport Parade / 1932

a bisexual built for two

by Douglas Messerli

 

Corey Ford and Francis Cockrell (screenplay, based on a story by Jerry Horwin), Dudley Murphy (director) The Sport Parade / 1932

Like most of the films with any LGBTQ references of the early 1930s, Dudley Murphy’s The Sport Parade (1932) portrays its requisite pansies, in this case two very limp-wristed boys who for some reason have decided to attend the pro wrestling matches—which consist even today mostly of theatrical demonstrations of athletic brutality—who, in the midst of watching the film’s lead Sandy Brown (Joel McCrea) being tossed about the ring by the current champion Sailor Fritz Muller (Ivan Linow) stand up together, the one saying to the other, “Oh God, this is just brutal. Let’s go!” As critic Richard Barrios has suggested, their presence and sudden absence from the story makes it all the clearer that this film has a far more traditional male physique to focus upon instead of their willowy, frail frames. For the camera, as Barrios outrightly admits, is in love with McCrea’s 27-year-old athletically fit torso, and it makes no bones about the that that fairies are not welcome in this love-fest. 

         The sweaty, muscle-toned chest of Sandy Brown has by this in the film long been the major focus of cinematographer’s J. Roy Hunt’s brilliant framing (the cameraman one who later daringly filmed Flying Down to Rio of 1933 and the great Crossfire of 1947) but is also loved by two other figures in the audience, Murphy’s pretend heroine Irene Stewart (Marian Marsh), and, more importantly, Johnny Baker (William Gargan). And amazingly, Dudley’s movie, despite using Marsh as a decoy for the early MPPDA code head James Wingate, doesn’t even try to hide the fact.

      From the very first scenes of the film while they play as passer and receiver in the famed Harvard vs. Dartmouth football game, winning the game by a late quarter touchdown, everyone knows they are a couple, Baker and Brown; even the somewhat annoying sports broadcaster Robert Benchley vaguely outlines the “score” despite the fact that throughout the film he remains fervently drunk. Certainly their teammates know it, believing that the boys whose code word between each other is “contact” (yes, they truly shout out the word each time they attempt to athletically “link up”) will stay together for the rest of their lives. And even the sleazy agent “Shifty” Morrison (Walter Catlett) who tries to woe Sandy to the college football league knows it: “What would Damion do without Pythias? What would Romeo do without Juliet? What would Baker do without Brown? I’ve got his contract right in my pocket. You two kids are going to work together.”

      When we’ve given access to the shower room after the game, we certainly come to know these two are a loving pair. In a room where Hunt’s camera is allowed even the catch the image of a male butt, we see the two showering together, Sandy thwacking Johnny’s butt, and the two rough- housing in a manner which we’ve long come recognize is a little bit more than “bro love.” When Sandy wrestles his Juliet to a nearby massage bed, Johnny pleasurably asks: “You wouldn’t be trying to get physical with me?” Sandy answers, suggesting the real action will surely occur later,  “Listen, if I was trying to wind you up you wouldn’t run down for 8 days.” With lines like that you can only wonder why Joseph I. Breen didn’t have a heart attack. Maybe he just missed the movie

     As we all know, however, in love stories things don’t ever work out the way they’re expected to. Sandy, a bit of a youthful womanizer and certainly less morally straight-laced than is very best friend, would prefer to try professional football fame rather than go immediately into the civil service of newspaper reporting that Johnny had planned for the two of them. Sandy is clearly a little more reckless than his companion, which is, of course, what makes the women go mad for him.

      Women and wine—the latter of which his agent so completely encourages that one suspects his first client must have been the newscaster Benchley—may be just fine for passing catches, but it doesn’t work at all for catching passes. And he’s soon a has-been in a world where a few weeks before he was a hero. Even the movie makes clear the dilemma faced by so many high school and college jocks who can’t grow up. And when Shifty asks him to throw a ballgame, he finally calls it quits, but can’t find a job even at the Bulletin where Johnny works. Everybody’s off the annual Harvard-Dartmouth bowl, but Sandy has to sell his special gold award football locket to make the trip.

     There he meets up again with his college “lover,” Johnny almost immediately coming up with the idea of playing out their relationship with a duo-sports column Baker to Brown. But before Johnny can even sketch out the idea, Sandy sweeps off his friend’s girl Irene to the dance floor. The two are a couple again, but Sandy doesn’t somehow get it that Johnny’s asked Irene several times to marry him and had hopes of making her a kind of trophy wife—obviously without breaking any “contact” with Sandy. When the dumb ox finally catches on, he disappears, supposedly into his reporting coverage of all sports from cycling, tobogganing, and speed skating to baseball, basketball, and pro wrestling of course. Which is where, when he meets up again with the despicable Morrison he escapes so that Irene might realize that her true love is Johnny.

      Certainly he seems to be a better pro wrestler than a professional footballer; but he’s not a good enough actor to ever become a champ, and when Morrison demands he throw his challenging bout with the champion with Muller he knows he has to become a wash-up in order to financially survive. 

    Just like everyone knew about Baker and Brown, so too do they know about Brown and Muller, but this time what they know is that everything is fake. Even Johnny can’t keep his moral scruples in tow long enough to save his beloved friend; he himself writes a scoop predicting that Sandy will throw the match. Irene drops into the locker room just before the bout to try to convince Sandy to win the game just for his ole friend Johnny, but the camera is so busy checking out McCrea’s crotch in his tight whities that we’re not sure whether or not she’s convinced him of anything. As Cameron, the entertaining film commentator for “Blonde at the Film” summarizes:

 

                     Right before the match, Irene finds Sandy and proclaims that she

                     loves him, not Johnny. She says that she still believes in him and

                     knows he’s not a crook. I’m surprised she was able to form

                     sentences when Sandy is in those teeny-tiny shorts, but she has

                     excellent self-control. .....Sidenote: I thought those white

                     short-shorts were Sandy’s locker room attire, but they are

                     his uniform! 

     So here we are back at the beginning of this essay with Hunt’s lens all steamed over for showing McCrea get pummeled and pulled in every which way by Linow, the camera capturing every move of the white shorts over the actor’s butt crack and crotch in a manner we won’t see again until Michael Cacoyannis’ The Day the Fish Came Out (1967) in which Tom Courtney shows nearly every aspect of his body through his briefs, eventually wearing them atop his head. In a wonderful irony, the champion wrestler actor Linow played the man-loving/man-hating twins Loko and Boko in David Butler’s Just Imagine (1930).

      By this time even the actor who played Johnny had figured out the obvious: just after its release Gargan described the film as “high camp. Boy meets boy; boy loses boy; boy gets boy.” After pantingly watching Sandy contort his shorts in every imaginable way to reveal what he might, refusing to give up he wins the bout, and, as Johnny runs into the ring, the two grabbing one another’s hands, Irene meekly joining them, Benchley declares he cannot to watch any more.

      Head writer Corey Ford, was evidently a closeted gay man who dared in an early draft to have Sandy sing the line “a bisexual built for two.” Cut.

 

Los Angeles, September 2, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).