Gus Reed | Free Bench Must Pick Up Today / 2023

a haunted bench

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gus Reed (screenwriter and director) Free Bench Must Pick Up Today / 2023 [6 minutes]

 

I guess this must be a “gay” film because the two boys who pick up the free bench advertised for free, actually a lovely small church-like bench, live together. There’s nothing more to the part of the story.

    Nor, actually to the so-called “horror” film that is very short work promises itself to be. One of the boys, Simon (Davi Santos) begins to see a man on the bench. He knows know one is there, but he sees the figure nonetheless, and his friend, George (Hunter Doohan) begins to worry about the fact that he keeps seeing this presumably ghost sitting on their bench beside their front door, where they’ve placed it. Eventually, in the middle of the night, George also visits the bench to discover the same ghost hovering about him.

      If you’ve seen even a half-dozen horror films, there is absolutely nothing so terrifying going on here. Frankly I see a ghost roaming our house every day. I don’t mean this literally, but after Howard goes to bed and I work late, I feel as if there is still someone in the room, who comes and goes. Obviously, it is just my imagination. Do I need to make a film about the tricky feeling of those who have left you behind, and there are now hundreds, creeping back into your imagination each night? Absolutely not. And there is, alas, no real reason for this short movie.

    Let’s just say, I would have kept the bench and been happy for the extra company.

   These young boys do the logical thing. Post an ad, just as the one which piqued their interest: “Free Bench Must Pick Up Today.”

    Nothing at all happens in this film even a little out of the ordinary, and absolutely nothing about this film is gay, except these cute actors. So please, don’t waste your time.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

Alfred Hitchcock | Spellbound / 1945

playing doctor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Angus MacPhail and Ben Hecht (based on a novel by Francis Beeding), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Spellbound / 1945

 

Over the years I have watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound numerous times, and yet—although I have written essays on most of the director’s films—I had not even attempted any comment on this.

      Although I have often enjoyed watching Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck romantically entwined in what becomes a kind of psychological-detective tale, I also have long felt it is one of Hitchcock’s silliest works. Spouting populist notions of Freudian Theory, Spellbound puts Bergman (as Constance Petersen) in the uncomfortable position of diagnosing her lover’s every move. Not only is the poor man apparently suffering from amnesia, he has a guilt complex for accidently killing his brother as a child and, having witnessed the murder of Dr. Edwardes on a skiing trip, attempts to impersonate him, presumably again out of guilt, by show up as the new head of the psychiatric clinic where Constance works. Even to describe this pot gives one the giggles. Poor Berman has to pretend to believe it all between swoons and smooches.

     Oh, and I forgot to mention the even less credible ending. It seems the “real” murder was Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll), the for head of the clinic Dr. Edwardes was about to replace!

     True, Hitchcock’s plots (think of Vertigo and North by Northwest) can often be quite complex and even illogical, but mightn’t he and writers Angus MacPahil and Ben Hecht have assigned their poor hero just something a little bit less off the charts. And did Hitchcock truly have to use kitschy Salvador Dali sets as an aide to interpret John Ballantyne’s (the name of Peck’s character) dream?

Did he really have to introduce yet another figure, Constance’s know-it-all, elderly mentor, Dr. Brulov, to help Constance diagnose her lover-patient?

    Hitchcock was obviously greatly interested in psychological motives, which are at the heart of almost all of his films. And accordingly, in his movies he often brought in psychiatry to explain character motivations. In one of his earliest works, The Lodger, the director toys with the seeming madness of his hero, and in several later works, including Rope, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, Psycho, and most notably, Marnie—again, I am convinced, a failed film—explores psychological analysis nearly to the extent of Spellbound.

     Watching this film again the other morning, I wondered why I had even bothered to see this movie more than once. And yet, despite its labyrinthine plot and hooky imagines of opening doors, along with the sled tracks in the snow which show up on clothing, bedspreads, and even a piece of linen on which Constance traces the shape of a proposed swimming pool with the tines of a for (events which send Peck into an immediate trance and, inexplicably, abusive outbursts), Spellbound remains somewhat spellbinding, full of intense moments and lust romantic intervals—evidence, perhaps, of Bergman’s and Peck’s real off-screen relationship during the shooting.

     This time around, moreover, I finally realized that, although Hitchcock is somewhat serious in all of this psychobabble, he is also quite clearly mocking it—perhaps in reaction to producer David Selznick’s own exultation of his personal experiences with psychoanalysis conducted by Dr. May Romm, who is credited an advisor to the film. Somewhat like another 1940s work, Marianne Hauser’s fiction Dark Dominion (1947), the director of Spellbound and his figures on one level are utterly serious about their schoolteacher-like dream analyses and layered dream analyses and observations of behavior, white also testing and teasing us about our personal expectations and evaluations of the new “scientific” field.

    Early in the movie, the lecherous fellow psychiatrist, Doctor Fleurot (John Emery) makes fun of Constance and his own profession, suggesting that his beautiful colleague is using her career as a shield behind which to hide from any emotional involvement. Even the clinic’s head, Murchison, realizes that his young employee needs more time, metaphorically speaking, “in the field.” And once Constance meets the fraudulent Dr. Edwardes, we see her desperately trying to fend off her sudden infatuation with the newcomer with medical doublespeak.

    He, it turns out, is also a doctor—but of another kind, a medical doctor, who, despite his mental illness, can equally analyze the body and its maladies. And only he, given half a chance, can open Constance up to human contact. But, obviously, she must first nurse him to mental healthy before he can cure her “school-marm” tendencies. Even after she has fallen in love and in a mad rush away from her own profession, has chased John to New York, the hotel dick still mistakes her for a schoolteacher. And Ballantyne/Edwardes calls her that again when she immediately begins to badger him to recall his past.

     If psychiatry, as she and others keep insisting, can heal the patient, it can just as easily lead to further misreadings of human behavior and put the victim into further harm. A patient in the clinic attempts to kill himself. And the more Constance and her elderly professor (Michael Chekov) badger John with their probing questions, the sicker he seems to become, sleepwalking with a razor in his hand, and falling again and again into faints (in accompaniment with Miklós Rózsa’s theremin-inspired score) in which he behaves more like a drugged-out zombie than the healthy newlywed he and Constance are pretending to be.

    His revelation of his dream is so ridiculously prolix (with card games hinting at the New York dining club, 21, and a hovering bird-like figure pointing to the ski lodge’s location in Gabriel Valley) that Dali’s corny curtains of eyes, severed by over-sized scissors, along with the sculptures of melted clocks and wheels seem right at home in the over-the-top presentation of what a madman’s dream might look like. The actual scene was reportedly 20 minutes long, of which we see only about two minutes. It would be fascinating, maybe even frightening, to see the original shoot. As it is, the short scene, nonetheless, is one of the campiest moments in all of the great master’s films.

      Even when John is finally cured, his layered secrets all spilled, psychiatry cannot, so Hitchcock posits, save him, as he is arrested and tried for murder. But even then the analysis doesn’t end.

     Constance must still save her man and does so more as a detective than a psychiatrist—running with an accidentally dropped remark by Murchison that he had slightly known Edwardes—as she, confronting the reinstate clinic leader, determines that he was the man who shot the “real” Edwardes. After all, had he truly met his “replacement,” why would he pretend not to recognize Edwardes’ imposter when he joined the clinic staff? In short, we realize, as he puts a bullet through his head, the chief psychiatrist cannot even cure himself. So much for the wonders of Freudian thinking!

     The movie ends with the couple’s actual marriage, putting them in a position, finally, where Ballantyne can cure Constance by allowing her to be the beautiful and sensual woman she was hiding from herself. No further analysis necessary, even if it might appear to be a more than little sexist conclusion.

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).

Rhys Marc Jones | Boundaries / 2018

cornered into self-destruction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rhys Marc Jones (screenwriter and director) Boundaries / 2018 [9 minutes]

 

In this short film, Welsh-Irish director Rhys Marc Jones focuses on a young black man, Jared (Jared Free) has evidently been dumped by his former boyfriend, primarily for his desperate need to be loved. Even if one loved Jared, apparently, he is so desperately seeking attention at times that he violates, again and again, his own body.

     As we first encounter him we see him with razor blade in hand, and notice the long scars of cuts of his legs where, apparently, he has cut himself several times. This morning he simply bashes his head into the wall of the shower, causing a deep wound.

     Visiting his former boyfriend Paix (Paix Robinson), he is granted entry only so that Paix might tend to the head wound, which Jared claims was the result of intruders who seemed to want to do him harm, but were only after his phone.

    Paix reluctantly mends the wound and shares some drugs with him, in the process being swept up again, just for a moment, with love for this obviously dependent young man. But as he begins to undress him, he finds the phone still in his pants pocket, and again reminded of the several leg cuts, puts back on his clothes and simply demands Jared leave.

     Clearly he has had to much of this young man’s drama, his desperate need for constant attention and caring.

     In the next few scenes with see Jared on the subway, spotting a good-looking girl. He quickly pulls off the bandage over his head-would and moves into the next car where she sits, sitting beside her as she offers him up a tissue for the blood of the wound. She looks at him sympathetically as he obviously tells her yet another story of how he came to be attacked, calling upon himself, at least, a temporary kind of attention and sympathy, perhaps even what he can imagine is love.

     This is a terrible wounded human being, but not from the outside, from the attacks of others, but from within, by his deep, deep insecurities which are the very thing which finally make people pull away from him, leaving him always standing alone in the corner self-destruction.

     Whenever he might become strong enough to pay attention to the concerns of others, instead of himself, he may truly find love; until then he is frozen out of the very thing his fragile ego most demands.

     It is not that this figure has gone beyond the “boundaries” of love as much as that he has never entered into a true relationship, focused as he is, always, on his own constant sense of need.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).

Craig Johnson | Alex Strangelove / 2018

a different kind of bond

by Douglas Messerli

 

Craig Johnson (screenwriter and director) Alex Strangelove / 2018

 

Having truly enjoyed Craig Johnson’s second feature film, The Skeleton Twins, of 2014, I determined yesterday to watch his most recent work, Alex Strangelove, released by Netflix this year.

    His earlier film had been a clever family drama, starring Bill Hader and Kristen Wigg, which featured a rather unhappy housewife and her gay brother who both attempted to nurse one another, often rather clumsily, back to health, after attempting suicide, the ending of this black comedy being rather uncertain.

     Accordingly, I wasn’t quite prepared for the rom-com sitcom-like Alex Strangelove, although the title might have easily tipped me off, since the character’s real name is Alex Truelove. In a sense, it’s just a sex and drug-infused movie that, like another recent film, Love Simon, tells the tale of a handsome and quite popular young high school student who is in the process of “coming out.”

     Like that film, the central character doesn’t yet quite perceive that he’s gay. But things are so far different from the days I attended high school, that the entire decision of whether to be heterosexual, gay, pansexual, whatever, seems simply to be a matter of choice, like picking items from a Chinese menu. As the comic straight-guy in this film, Dell (Daniel Zolghadri), argues you just need to choose. Their school even seems to have an active LGBTQ community, the drama kids, who hold their own parties to which select heterosexuals are also invited.

    But Alex Truelove (Daniel Doheny), now the popular class president and a dogged cultural conservative—he’s carefully laid out all his plans for his life, determining upon studying marine animal biology at Columbia University, getting married, and having children—and he’s already found the girl of his dreams, his long-time friend, Claire (Madeline Weinstein).

      Although Alex is clever, witty, and even enterprising—he and Claire perform together in a popular on-line school web series, featuring the sexual habits of and other eccentricities of the school’s students—there’s still something slightly nerdy about him (at least in his own mind), and like most of these teenage comedy-dramas, he hangs out with a group of rather dorky friends who spend far too many of their hours describing their heterosexual conquests. Something doesn’t seem right. Why is this bright kid not moving on? And, most importantly—at least in terms of teenage hormones—why us he still a self-admitted virgin, particularly given the fact that Claire herself insists she has been desperately trying to “de-virginfy” him. He keeps putting off the event.

     Finally, embarrassed in front of his bragging buddies, he determines to do something about it, setting up a hotel room so that he and she might finally have sex.

      The plot needs time to hatch it’s secret, of course, so the sexual encounter is put off for a few weeks, while the meandering story takes him to one of the “drama kid” parties (consisting of numerous ridiculous stereotypes, including one male who obviously believes he is the permanent host of Cabaret and a hallucinogenic turtle which Dell immediately picks up and licks sending him into comic hallucinations that might have served nicely for a backstory to Todd Phillips’ The Hangover. Oddly there seems to be a lot a role playing and very little sex. Maybe that is what Johnson meant by “Strangelove.”

     Anyone with a sense of film history knows that gay director Johnson means that other “strange love,” even if there seems nothing at all strange in being gay in this progressive high school community.

     By accident, Alex stumbles into the more normative “pot” room, where a handsome young man, Elliott (Antonio Marziale) and what we used to call a “fag-hag” (a heavyset young girl who is best friend to a gay boy) are about to light up. Clearly not inexperienced with pot and quite obviously intrigued by this open gay guy, Alex joins them ending up head-to-head in bed with Elliott; and a day or so later, meeting up with him for a concert and slow walk, so to speak, around the park.

     Claire clearly begins to suspect something’s up, but Alex (I must admit, a bit like me at his age) is slow to wake up to the reality of his feelings. He still takes his girlfriend to the hotel, but in the midst of clumsy sex tells her there’s someone else.

      It takes a final deep dive into a suburban pool to make him come to his senses, finally admitting to himself that he is gay. (As I’ve written in My Year 2005, it took me a bad showing in an ROTC test and a few circles around my bedroom to come to that same realization).

      What’s a guy to do? After admitting to Claire that his “Truelove” has reverted to a “Strangelove—a moniker, as a gay man, I rather resent—they still agree to go with one another to the prom party. Claire, perhaps the wisest figure in this film of dumb-headed adolescents (she has also the wisest of mothers) arranges for Elliott—how she knows the address of a boy who has graduated from another school the year before is never quite explained—to also attend. 

     Suddenly faced with the boy he now knows he loves in a room with his high school chums, Alex gets cold feet once again, rushing off to the bathroom and almost losing his chance for maturation and true love. Returning just in time, he kisses Elliott, expressing his sexuality for the first time in the very judgmental public of young evaluations of life.

     I presume we are meant to be touched and overjoyed in that fact. But for me, there is something sad in the final image. Let us hope that Elliott does not have to wait for the sexual consummation as long as Claire and we have. But worse, can the otherwise excellent director, Johnson, release himself from this kind of teeny-bop writing to again create a sophisticated adult comedy-drama such as his earlier works? Or have we lost him to Netflix gay “feel-good” fantasies?

     This is not seriously a gay film, but a rather silly tribute to an LBGTQ nostalgia, where all is ultimately just fine as long as everybody just finds their own groove. I doubt that’s the way, even today, that most kids see those difficult years.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2018).