Howard Bretherton and William Keighley | Ladies They Talk About / 1933

blind faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brown Holmes, William McGrath, and Sidney Sutherland (screenplay based on the stage play by Gangstress, or Women in Prison by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles), Howard Bretherton and William Keighley (directors) Ladies They Talk About / 1933

 

As one of the most noted of the numerous “girls in prison” melodramas—the film was remade as Lady Gangster in 1942—you might imagine that Howard Bretherton’s and William Keighley’s Ladies They Talk About (1933) might be filled with just those kinds of women of whom people like to gossip: lesbians. But in fact, the three writers basically have erased such figures, concentrating instead on the classy former socialite-gone gangster’s moll Nan Taylor (Barbara Stanwyck, the actress who herself has long been rumored to have been bisexual), arriving at prison with a huge hat box and a stylish gown; the mean cheerleader type, ‘Sister’ Susie (Dorothy Burgess), the kind girl in high school who’d scheme and plot to take away another girl’s boyfriend and go home to complain to her wealthy daddy if she didn’t get her way; a dotty, formerly wealthy Long Island matron who served ground-up glass to her social rival; a former Madame of a brothel Aunt Maggie (Maude Eburne); a nice, tougher but wiser girl, Linda (Lillian Roth, alcoholic for much of her life before she regained her fame in Broadway shows such as I Can Get It for You Wholesale and Funny Girl); and a strict but truly caring Prison Matron (Ruth Donnelly), all of whom who don’t so much act as perform true to their character types—which permits the film’s audience to applaud Linda and Aunt Maggie, while booing the pretend civility of ‘Sister’ Suzie.

      Stanwyck, always a watchable actress, has two contradictory parts to play as Nan in this movie, the tough and hardened gangster moll and the would-be sweet “if they’d only trust her” Deacon’s daughter who somehow lost her way. Nan works hard to keep up her tough front, arranging with her now imprisoned gangster friends for a way they can tunnel up from the men’s ward of San Quentin into her room, from they will all hope to escape.

     But at the same time the religious broadcaster David Slade (Preston Foster), who’s trying to run for the job of District Attorney, inexplicably falls in love with his former hometown acquaintance, ready to forgive almost anything she does, in part to rectify his sending her to jail in the first place after she has confessed, given his unexpected faith in her, to having helped Lefty Simons (Harold Huber) and his gang rob a bank. Now he’s not only sorry but evidently so head-over-heels in love with her that he sends her endless letters which she never answers, but arranges finally for a meeting, and mails off an illicit letter from her to Lefty with a drawn impression of the prison front door lock, and allows her to shoot him in the shoulder just to get her down the church aisle and into their matrimonial bed.

    The only one who continues to stand in her way is sweet ‘Sister’ Susie who has fallen for the religious radio megastar—the Jim Baker, Michael Pitts, or Richard Rossi of his day—and is determined to make the man hers. The only major lesbian scandal of the movie is when she plants a “love letter” in Nan’s coat—presumably written to another woman in the prison compound—which gets her sent to work in the laundry with visitation rights cancelled for a month. Susie also witnesses, predicably through the keyhole, that Nan shoots Slade believing, mistakenly, that he has betrayed her to the authorities about her involvement with the failed prison escape (Nan: [immediately after shooting Slade] “I didn’t mean to do that.” Slade: [holding his hand to his shoulder] “Why, that's all right, Nan. “It's nothing.").

      Susie’s squeal to the detective this time only hurries the couple off their honeymoon, although even the film’s audience by this time have dropped their jaws a bit in complete disbelief.

      The original play on which this film was based was written by Dorothy Mackaye and Carlton Miles, Broadway actress Mackaye having had her husband beaten to death by her lover when her husband suggested she stop seeing him. And the character of Nan is clearly based on the writer herself, who, as the Pittsburgh Press described it, “showed up at prison with silk stockings and a modish dress,” spending ten months in San Quentin State Prison for her crime. So you’d think she might have been able to come up with some far juicer lesbian scenes. Maybe there are some in her play, but nothing much shows up in this movie. Other than the planted letter all screenwriters Brown Holmes, William McGrath, and Sidney Sutherland are able to provide is the female equivalent of the male pansy, a bull dyke whose cigar butt Nan finds on a prison cell floor, Suzie nodding her head to a woman who throughout the film does not nothing but exercise, Linda cautioning her new friend: “Be careful about her. She likes to wrestle.”

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

 

Jacob Burkhardt | Andy Dances, a Memorial for Andy de Groat, at Judson Church September 17, 2019 / 2019

expanding time: centers of a whirling world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacob Burkhardt (director) Andy Dances, a Memorial for Andy de Groat, at Judson Church September 17, 2019 / 2019

 

During the night of September 20th, 2019, I dreamt a long dream in which I was dancing—at first making miraculous leaps in the manner of Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, but gradually setting into amazing spins, something that I might have associated more with an ice skating dance than with ballet. The spins were startling tight an intense, a bit like a balletic version of the Turkish whirling dervishes, but without their flowing, whirling skirts; I seemed dressed in a more traditional male ballet outfit that represented more a continuously spinning top instead of the mesmerizing, trance-like movements of the Turkish dancers.

    I have long loved dance, and when I was young I studied briefly with the Joffrey Ballet, as I’ve written elsewhere, after being encouraged to take up dance by Paul Taylor, who I met briefly in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1960s. In New York, I signed up with the Joffrey company as a student, and after weeks and weeks at the barre doing the traditional dance exercise, the males were called to do a pirouette, my strict dance teacher commenting that I had done it quite well, a comment that thrilled me, even if I soon after began to realize that I would never be a significant dancer given the structure of my body and my late-coming to the art.

     While dance, accordingly, continues to thrill me and I attempt to review it as often as I can, I have never since—particularly given the fact that I am now a 72-year-old with a knee replacement—dreamt about me dancing as brilliant as in the images of my dream.

      Perhaps the dance-opera, The Want, directed by Adam Linder, which I’d seen earlier, stimulated something in my brain. In any event, I was delighted, even if more than a little amused, by my sleeping terpsichorean pleasures. By early morning I was comparing my dance moves, in my mind, with my memories of the hero of Paul Auster’s fiction, Mr. Vertigo, wherein the character Walt learns how to fly. I have certainly had many so-called “flying dreams” throughout my life, which simply evince the grace and will-power in which one can remain vertically in the air for very long periods of time. Sometimes in these dreams I just barely hover over the landscape—without flying off into the sky—proving only to myself that I can maintain a slight spin across the long paths home, probably based on a childhood memory of my long walks home each evening from my high school, from the southern end of town to the north where we lived.

     Every morning, after coffee and toilet, in those days, I perused Facebook and then YouTube, first checking the responses to my own postings and then visiting those of others. On this particular morning I suddenly was greeted by what appeared to be a short film on the choreographer and dancer Andy de Groat. I vaguely remembered his name—I had seen Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach, choreographed by Lucinda Childs and de Groat—but otherwise I knew nothing at all about him and his career. If I try to write on dance, I admit I am no dance critic or expert in the field. Literature, film, these are my specialties and wherein my major contributions lie, along with

a long history of art through my husband, art curator Howard N. Fox.

      In those days, before my work of queer film, I rarely clicked on Facebook offerings, but this morning the video on de Groat called out to me, and the synchronicity and coincidence that have long haunted my life as astounded me yet again as I quickly perceived he had died in January 1, 2019 in France, and what I was now witnessing was his memorial at Judson Church that took me down a rabbit hole that I might never have imagined.

      In fact, the very first figure who appeared to welcome the audience was my dear friend from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Mel Andringa. I momentarily blinked my eyes in disbelief. What was he doing, hosting an event for the dancer in honor of de Groat at Judson Church.

 

     I quickly recognized that their relationship might have harkened back to one of de Groat’s ealy collaborations with Wilson, Deafman Glance (1970), first presented at the University of Iowa where Andriga was then a student/artist/performer. I later brought Andringa and his companion F. John Herbert to perform at Temple University when I was an Assistant Professor there.

     I knew he had long been involved in experimental performance and theater, but now he was discussing personal relationships with so many figures I knew of and whose works I had seen such as Jerome Robbins, Wilson, Christopher Knowles, Deborah Jowitt, and numerous others.  

     The program was more than fascinating:

 

Welcome: Mel Andringa

Andy Dances, excerpt from “Syracuse Sequence” (1975)

with Andy de Groat and Julia Busto; film by Robyn Brentano,

“Get Dancing Poem” and reading by Christopher Knowles, 1975

“Rope Dance,” choreography by Andy de Groat, 1974

Translations Performed by Ritty Ann Burchfield, Charles Dennis, and Buck Wanner,

Reading Text by Deborah Jowitt; read by Sheryl Sutton

Tribute Molissa Fenley

Remarks Robert Wilson on video by Jacob Burckhardt

Tribute Makram Hamdan,

Reading Texts by Andy de Groat; read by Cindy Lubar Bishop, and Robyn Brentano,

“Fan Dance,” choreography by Andy de Groat, (1978) Performed by Martita Abril, Patricia Beaman,

Ritty Ann Burchfield, Satya Celeste, Molissa Fenley, Catherine Galasso,

Patrick Gallagher, John Gutierrez, Makram Hamdan, Meg Harper, K.J. Holmes,

Benjamin Kimitch, Michael O’Rourke, Kathryn Ray, Austin Selden, Viviane Serry,

Vicky Shick, Buck Wanner, and Emily Wassyng.

Remarks by Viviane Serry,

Tribute by Catherine Galasso,

“Willows/Angie’s Waltz” (2018), music: Alan Lloyd; voice: Julius Eastman; playback:

Dizzy Daisy May Schube’t-mahn a.k.a. Andy de Groat; Chamane Simone: Stephanie Bargues; Film: Do Brunet,

Tribute by Frank Conversano,

“Swan Lac,” choreography by Andy de Groat

    Of particular interest were the videos of his “Waiting for Godot Fan Dance,” and his famed “Rope Dance.”

   I hadn’t known previously that de Groat had a romantic relationship with Wilson. Or had I known, moreover, that de Groat was best known for his “spinning” dances, which he did in his own work and in pieces he choregraphed for Wilson and others.

    De Groat himself wrote: “I think of spinning as the base for my dance. There’s something about spinning which just seems kind of present. I can’t explain it.” He goes on to explain it, quite specifically, as the natural movement of dance, tracing it back to several ancient cultures.

     Suddenly this celebration of de Groat’s life seemed to have been recorded particularly for me, and I was slightly frightened by the coincidence of it. I hadn’t even known much about de Groat, let alone that he had recently died. How could I have dancing before I’d truly comprehended it? And why I had come upon this very video the morning after my dream?

    The commentary, videos, and dances were so very stunning, and I suddenly felt I was reliving a world I was never quite involved in previously. In a strange way, it seemed like a slightly out-of-body experience. It was as if my dream called into reality the existence of a figure whom I had been just waiting to meet.

    In my entire life to date (as I revise this essay, now at 79 years of age), I have never once experienced déjà vu, which nearly everyone I know has encountered numerous times. Perhaps my life of synchronicities and coincidence are my version of that experience.

    Finally, I should mention that in 2002, some years previous to this remarkable video, I received a substantial grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, established by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and numerous other artists deeply connected to the Judson Church. In the year I received a grant for poetry, one of my very favorite composers David Lang received a grant, as did Robert Ashley, both icons of avant-garde music and opera for me. I surely met them at that event, but was so in awe I never got to express my appreciation for their art. I never visited the Judson Church, but I remember how furious I was with my beloved friend David Antin when, in one of his more or less unscripted talk pieces he mocked their activities to a class of students at CalArts, and I told him so in no uncertain terms how I felt he was wrong and actually delimiting the imagination of the students.. But then David was a remarkable poet, who despite his wife Eleanor’s fantasies of being a member of the long past world of ballet, knew very little about dance.

    It was a bit confusing to me when I told a straight friend about the piece I had just written and he looked blankly at me, wondering why it might be of gay interest. Beyond the fact that almost all of the figures about which I had written were statedly gay, I was momentarily taken aback. I answered: "Straight people—unless perhaps they are in some religious elevated or drugged-out state of mind—generally do not spin." 

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2019

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (September 2019).

 

 

Sai Kiran K(odcherwar) | Come Out / 2022

an early meeting of love and dove

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sai Kiran K(odcherwar) (screenwriter and director) Come Out / 2022 [13 minutes]

 

In this comedy of coincidence from India, a young closeted gay man has been partying and drinking heavily at his friend Ritesh’s apartment.

    The young man (Arhaan) awakens, hung over, in the filthy, food and bottle-strewn apartment, the sound of his cellphone signaling him; the phone notifies him that he has an important appointment this very morning with a man with whom he’s been texting for some time now, nicknamed “Love,” who, himself long closeted, he perceives might be the man of his dreams and just possibly a way to “come out.”

     He quickly calls Ritesh, explaining that he will lock up the apartment and bring him his keys at the office later in the day, and once he has washed his face, found his shoes, and other articles, he is ready to escape.

     But just as he is about to go out the door, he hears a yawn and clinking of more beer bottles, as under a deep pile of covers another young man, also obviously a straggler from the last night’s party, emerges.

    Frustrated, he attempts to query the slow-moving and unresponsive wreck as he (Vamshidhar Goud) enters the bathroom, pees, and faces himself in the mirror, finally asking if the hurried other man is also a friend of Ritesh.

    Busy with his cellphone, checking on possible messages from his brunch date, he at first doesn’t respond; but finally asked if the two of them had met the night before, the first young man suggests that they didn’t meet, that he drank separately. But again checking his phone he discovers that he is now running late and calls into the bathroom: “Make it fast. I have to go to Madhapur urgently.”

     The second man vaguely recalls that he also has to go to Madhapur and insists that the other drive him there, since he also has an appointment in Madhapur.

      Now frustrated more than ever, the first young man, is forced to wait yet longer for the slow-moving second party-goer, who when he finally seems ready to depart, discovers that he has left his phone somewhere in the chaos of the party.

      Slowly re-tracing his steps, he finally finds it in a nearby bed. But upon checking his messages, he realizes that appointment is private, and suggests that we will get an Ola (India’s largest ride-hailing system consisting of autos, attached rickshaws or bike taxis) or Uber.

     Now, truly angry for having waiting all this time, the first young man insists he will take the other to Madhapur. But by this time both are madly on their phones attempting to explain to their appointments why they are late and reassure them that they will be there soon. In doing so, however, they note that as each of them texts, the other’s cellphone beeps with the message.

     While the first is attempting to contact his “Love,” the second is busy reassuring his “Dove” that he will soon be there.

     After several of these observed beeps, they each try out a further message, reconfirming, that they are, in fact, “Love and Dove.”

     They look up at one another and smile, as the first young man switches on the music, the two ready to dance among the chaos of the night before in which they slept near one another without having yet met.

     If the coincidence of it all seems a bit far-fetched, I would remind readers that in the gay world, not nearly as vast as the heterosexual one, there are far more coincidences possible. And gay men and women often each serve as a kind of network of interrelating connections. Often one finds one living in a parallel universe, where mutual friends unexpectedly meet up. And there is something always charming in the recognition that we share a smaller and more communal world.

     The only question left to ask is, does this mean Ritesh is gay?

 

Los Angeles, May 31, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).