Peter Ustinov | Billy Budd / 1962

resigning freedom

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Ustinov (screenplay, based on the play by Louis O. Coxe and Robert Chapman, based on an early version of the novel by Herman Melville) (director) Billy Budd / 1962

 

Premiering in 1962, the same year, coincidentally, when Harrison Hayward and Merton M. Sealts Jr.* published the most authoritative of editions of the novel, Peter Ustinov’s version of Billy Budd, just like Benjamin Britten’s noted opera, cannot be perceived as a definitive presentation of Melville’s great book. But it is about as good of a version possible, beautifully filmed in black-and-white, and basically well-acted.

        Certainly one cannot imagine a better actor to play Billy than the cherubically beautiful young Terence Stamp, who has such a glowing smile that Ustinov’s camera quite literally fawns on him; and although the film does not overstate (or even overtly suggest) that “the handsome young sailor” may have aroused homosexual longings in both the repressed master-at-arms, John Claggart (a frowningly brutal Robert Ryan) or the slightly pompous and orthodox Captain Vere (Peter Ustinov), it is not difficult to imagine why Billy, impressed on board the Indomitable through “the Rights of War,” has suddenly delighted the entire ship’s crew.

      Despite the harsh cynicism of the seasoned crewmen, including the older Dansker (Melvyn Douglas), he quickly makes friends with all except for Claggart, charming them with his wave of the hands and naïf grin; he’s a natural charmer, and in those very actions, perhaps, suggests that in this world of near-thugs, the beautiful Billy is a slightly effeminate being. Given his stunning face and psychic, it is hardly incidental that such an “eye-candy” as Stamp would later go on to play a multi-sexual Christ-like being in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema and, later still, an aging drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.   

     Not only is he lovely to look at, but, even more powerfully, totally innocent, refusing, even though he has had his “rights” taken away—he has been snatched off the merchant ship The Rights of Man—to recognize the evil of the world into which he has been suddenly immersed. With absolute positivism, he describes the sickening gruel which the sailors are forced to eat: “It’s hot. And there’s a lot of it. I like everything about it except the flavor.” And we know that from the beginning such a ridiculously gifted being will not/cannot survive in the violent and vindictive world in which he has suddenly found himself. Despite the warnings of the wise Dansker, Billy cannot resist speaking to the sinister Claggart about the floggings he has ordered and simple wrongness of that vision of life. “It’s wrong to flog a man. It’s against his being a man,” he simply asserts, while Claggart—about whom Melville and this film never quite explains the roots of his sadistic nature—proclaims: “The sea is calm you said. Peaceful. Calm above, but below a world of gliding monsters preying on their fellows. Murderers, all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who’s to tell me it’s any different here on board, or yonder on dry land?” The problem is that Billy, just through his actions, eloquently argues against that very view.  

     Captain Vere, himself, perceives the ugliness of his Master-of-arms,” behavior. But he is too weak, and far too conflicted to take his subordinate to task.

     In an early review of the film, The New York Times critic Bowsley Crowther argued that Ustinov’s acting “is a little too petulant and soft for the full effect of this character, which must represent rigid rectitude.” But to me, that is precisely the qualities in Vere that allow the terrible incidents aboard his ship to recur, ending, obviously, in Budd’s hanging. Terrified of the recent mutinies aboard other ships, Vere believes in an iron-fist approach to the class so clearly below him, the sailors, even though he perceives his own position and, particularly, the sociopathic behavior of Claggart as wrong. And in that inability to bring reality into focus, he is a failed leader, a Pontius Pilate unable to perceive his own ineptitude, always ready to give into the unjust laws governing the behaviors of men in service at sea, “resigning freedom” for the larger cause of war-time behavior—all of which makes this story even more prescient given the current spying and other personal intrusions of our own government after the attacks of 9/11, along our war-time brutality in Iraq and Afghanistan. Vere, despite Billy’s forgiveness of the man (“God bless Captain Vere!”), is a weak leader, who like too many of our recent leaders believes control is more important than empathy, a position which can only end in self-destruction of both his world and his own being.**  

     In this version of Melville’s tale, the French win out over the English, not because of their sailor’s lack of resolution, but the English leader’s lack of humanity. The Indomitable clearly is not what it pretends to be, any more than the systems it advocates can possibly survive. It is Budd, obviously, the root of a new and different society, who survives in this tale, despite his hanging. The old order, at film’s end, dies, Vere along with Claggart, destroyed by their own attempts to protect themselves at the expense of all others.

      If there was ever an example in American literature of Kierkegaard’s call for a “leap into faith,” Billy Budd expresses it again and again, clinging to the top foremast with a bow, a wave, and smile—an agile angel doomed by what lies below him.

     This is the perfect example of why any society needs gay men to love and admire, which director Ustinov, not a gay man, clearly comprehended.

 

**I took a course with Merton M. Sealts at the University of Wisconsin during my year’s of education at that institution.

*It’s rather startling today, that at the time I wrote this piece, I was talking about the Bush administration. Today under Trump, we have someone even worse than Claggart in control.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2014

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2014).

Dania Bdeir | Warsha / 2022

the dazzling joy of being suspended in air over a city which doesn’t want you to exist

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dania Bdeir (screenwriter and director) Warsha / 2022 [15 minutes]

 

I fear, hoping I am entirely mistaken, that even younger gay and lesbian viewers may have difficulty viewing Lebanese-Canadian Dania Bdeir’s quite powerful and audacious 2022 short film Warsha, the title referring to a working or construction site.

     The film is made more complex because it features a group of Syrian migrants working in Beirut and high rise construction. They are forced to live in a horrible shared open space with only one small bathroom for their use. Moreover, they speak a different dialect of Arabic than do the Lebanese which make the latter suspicious of their behavior and almost as xenophobic as US citizens seem to have become of all immigrants.

     The lead in this film, Mohammad, is played, moreover, by noted queer singer, dancer, and multi-disciplinary performer, Khansa, beloved by many but also hated by the Beirut conservative religious communities. So startling was his performance in this role, that I immediately watched a number of his videos which I will be sharing with my Queer Cinema audiences in the near future.

 

    Mohammad rises early, sneaking off into the bathroom just for a few seconds of privacy each morning as he lays out a picture of his idol, perhaps the Egyptian diva Oum Kalthoum. Or just a vision of himself in drag. But he hardly has a moment to himself before there are a number of knocks and the bathroom door and his almost brutally masculine co-workers demand to be let in so they can rinse themselves off and brush their teeth.

      They are all bussed on to the construction job where they have been hired, a high rise in the middle of Beirut. Even on the way, someone pounds on the window of the bus, cursing the migrant Syrians for even working in Lebanon.

     As they march into their gritty jobs for the day, they overhear the foreman (Mohammad Kamal) desperately calling on the phone for a new crane operator since there as been a serious accident which hurt of perhaps even killed the former worker.

     Before the morning even begins Mohammad contacts the foreman volunteering for the job, since he had previously worked as a crane operator. But this crane is far newer and more complex than any he might have worked on in the past, and besides that the “beast” as the workman call it is taller than most cranes, towering far above the Beirut skyline. Mohammad, nonetheless, signs on and makes the truly terrifying trip up the elevator, across a narrow but long connecting bridge, and climbs rung by rung even higher into the operator's seat so high in the air that it even gives us vertigo. By the time Mohammad has reached the cabin, he is out breath, speechless, unable to even answer the messages on his receiver from below demanding to know of his condition.

     Yet finally, after catching his breath, he turns on an ancient transistor radio from where he hears Kalthoum’s performance of the song-poet by Reyad El Sonbata dn Ibrahim Nagy’s Al Atlal (The Ruins), miming for a few moments before Khansa takes the character off into a truly splendiferous drag performance as he sings, an imaginary version of himself dressed all in red dangling from the teeth of the crane over the city heights.

     This is film at its very best, a true dream of cinematic imagination that Mohammad would never be allowed in his daily life, but separated far from the rest of the world he inhabits in the crane cabin he can imagine for himself, the kind of gender-shifting reality never permitted below. It is so very dazzling that it truly generates a kind of vertigo in the viewer, a spinning world out of this world where dance and the music of the spheres truly dominates reality.

    To ready himself for this role, Bdeir reports in an interview with Mehdi Balamissa in Film Fest Reports, the performer, known for his challenging of notions of male gender masculinity, actually spent a few days under cover as a construction worker.

      As Bdeir comments:

 

“During the preparation [for the film], it was very important to make sure that we were all operating with empathy and trying to experience this same story through different perspectives and not only our own. We organized for Khansa to spend a few days working in a construction site where nobody knew that he was an actor and where he received no special treatment. Khansa entered the male dominated world of Syrian workers and felt the physical & emotional strain, the pressures and the marginalization. He was able to bring this experience into his performance.”

 

      Khansa’s performance is simply astounding, and hard to imagine outside of Toderick Hill’s theatrical extravaganzas.

      Finally, having been released into what Bdeir describes as “space and privacy to break out of gender norms and express himself truly, in a way that he can’t in his daily life,” Mohammed ends the day, congratulated for his operation of the crane.

      He climbs back down those steps and joins the others in the bus back to his squalor with a smile on his face.

      This short was advanced to the shortlist for the 95th Academy Awards as the Best Live Action Short Film, but failed to qualify to the final five nominees.

 

Los Angeles, May 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

 

 

Edward F. Cline | Go Chase Yourself / 1938

winning by losing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Yawitz, Bert Granet, and Walter O’Keefe (screenplay), Edward F. Cline (director) Go Chase Yourself / 1938

 

Although director Edward F. Cline helmed a significant number of works with gay subtexts over the early years of filmmaking with “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, his 1938 film with comedians Joe Penner and Lucille Ball, both appearing in their first feature films, cannot truly be said to be a queer movie.

     But this work is a true farce, and when the not so very clever bank teller, would-be singer, and daily sucker for every contest and promotional gimmick named Wilbur Meeley (Penner) accidentally meets up with two gangsters, Nails (Richard Lane) and Icebox (Tom Kennedy) and reveals where the bank’s real safe is hidden, the work turns into a kind of campy film that, at moments at least, can’t help it—despite the restrictions of the Motion Picture Code and Joseph Breen—but appear at moments to be a coded gay film.

     Meeley spends a great deal of time in his deposit line talking with “friends” who encourage him to give up small amounts for their pretended “give-aways,” raffles, and other imaginary ways of making money, but can’t be bothered by the mousy and meek sissy (Chester Clute), who finally finds the opportunity to tell Wilbur that he has actually won something, a streamlined trailer.

     Wilbur is overwhelmed by his luck, the only problem being that he doesn’t even own a car, and must, like a horse, pull the streamlined trailer home by rope.

     There he is met by his not so happy wife, Carol (Ball) who is not at all impressed that he has finally won something that has utterly no purpose in their lives and who, while accomplishing numerous household chores, is asked to provide her husband with his continued advances on his miniscule weekly allowance. She suggests that he spend the night sleeping in the trailer instead of joining her in their conjugal bed.

      Wilbur gladly does so, delighted by his new utterly pointless prize.

    Meanwhile, the crooks sneak into the bank, steal $50,000 from the hidden vault and attempt to outrun the police who are on their track. In this film of impossible coincidences, they discover, while trapped in a cul-de-sac, Wilbur’s trailer, hook it up to their car, and accordingly elude the police. And before the night’s out Wilbur finds himself sharing his small trailer bed with Nails and the even denser-minded Icebox.

       If this isn’t gay then it surely should have been, as suddenly Wilbur—who earlier in the day caught his suit coat in the vault door and instead of reopening the locked door, simply snipped the fragment away with a scissors—is suddenly seen by police and the angry head of the bank, Hamilton Halliday (Granville Bates), as one of the gang.

      Before he even knows what’s happening, Wilbur is not only spending one night in bed with the boys but traveling across the state as the gang rushes off into hiding, as well as sharing friendly breakfasts with them in the moderne trailer kitchen. So dense is Wilbur that, despite his realization of what the others have done, he actually feels pleased at moments to be perceived as their friend. Obviously this is a man desperately in need of approval and love, which he certainly doesn’t get a home or in the workplace.

      Of course, it’s not really love they offer, merely determined as they are to keep him close so that he won’t report their whereabouts. Nonetheless, the fool is able to find a way by crawling up a desert electric transmitter to get a worker to help him call his wife, and later, again in the frenetic whirl of coincidence, to be able to help the daughter of a wealthy copper tycoon, Judy Daniels (June Travis), temporarily escape her upcoming marriage to a French count Pierre Fountaine de Louis-Louis (Fritz Feld). 

      In a matter of a few frames, Judy is whisked by her family back home to marry the rascal, Carol has boarded a train to rescue her now defamed husband (how could such an incompetent, she muses, ever be involved in such a crime?) and encounters Pierre, a total fraud and actually a would-be Casanova (in the manner, one might argue of Alberto Beddini, the Italian fashion designer in Mark Sandrich’s Top Hat of 1935), whom she uses as a shield by demanding he invite her to his wedding with Judy Daniels to escape the police and banker Halliday who have joined her on board hoping to be led to Wilbur.

      When the gang members finally realize that the young woman Wilbur has helped is the daughter of the J. D. Daniels (George Irving), the copper titan, they use their now always confused bank teller to invite themselves to the wedding.

       At the Daniels estate everyone meets up with one another, as Wilbur, of course, imagines his wife is having an affair with Pierre just as she imagines he is somehow involved with Judy Daniels.

     Pierre, Judy’s father and mother, Halliday and the police are by this time so confused no one can comprehend who is who and why they are attending the would-be wedding. But one thing is certain: Pierre is revealed to be a crook and Carol, Wilbur’s wife, is definitely not Pierre’s cousin. They end up in a local jail overseen by the spittoon spitting, radio-listening warden (Arthur Stone), who despite his stolid Swedish skepticism is finally convinced by Carol—playing a role of a jailed moll not dissimilar to Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—that, having heard Wilbur on the radio singing a song of his whereabouts and plight, that she knows where he is.

     They rush to the sight, finding Wilbur and his now now-so-friendly brothers, but all end up in the trailer, which (don’t ask) finally gets disconnected from the gangster’s car and goes endlessly careening backwards down mountain paths while somehow miraculously remaining on the curving roads.

     When it finally crashes into a haystack, Wilbur flying through the air into the stack, he is proclaimed as a hero (after sending what was supposed to be Judy’s suitcase with a ransom note, but actually a matching case with the stolen money back to the copper king). Carol, still handcuffed to Pierre and the Warden, moves to kiss him, but results instead in the Warden kissing Wilbur, the lonely, long-employed Warden actually smiling with pleasure and Wilbur jokingly pinches the Warden’s butt.

      This farce is pure hokum, but we still glimpse possibilities of love and relationships that by 1938 were simply not permitted to be represented in US movies. And if this film isn’t precisely an LGBTQ work, it is most certainly queer.

      I decided to watch this work because it appeared in the fullest list of gay films on Letterboxd, Beryl Parkey’s “Any and All LGBTQ+ Films” where a lot of films appear just because someone or another thought it seemed queer to them. It’s not to be fully trusted. Yet it certainly is more reliable than the completely humorless and absolutely blind AI system Google has installed which greets me when I query on any gay context. AI, sounding again a bit like a schoolmarm scold, assured me “There is no evidence of explicit gay content. The film is a fast-paced "screwball comedy" plot focused on a bank teller (Penner) who wins a trailer in a raffle and inadvertently gets involved with bank robbers.” It went on to explain just how strict the code was in those days, as if I hadn’t yet done my homework.

     I think I’d rely any day on the eyes of someone who just thought it sounded gay—and not just in the “happy and mirthful” manner.

     If by film’s end Lucille Ball’s character is not precisely happy with her lot in life, moreover, I might remind my readers of the most unhappy trailer trip on which she ventured with her later husband Desi Arnaz in Vicente Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).