Tavo Ruiz | Línea 9 (Line 9) / 2016

the adventure of sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tavo Ruiz (screenwriter and director) Línea 9 (Line 9) / 2016 [17 minutes]

 

Mexican director Tavo Ruiz is one my favorites, but his Line 9, despite its endless beauty and truly hot sex, is also rather portentous, I’m afraid.

     Beauty Andrés (Andrés B. Durán) has a sense that he is merely lost in a repetition of acts, and attempts to break out of his repetitive world simply by taking the subway, Line 9. He pauses before entering the underground, not even sure he wants to venture into his repetitive behavior yet again, but at the last moment catches the train.

     There, almost immediately, he observes, sitting opposite, a handsome young student Miguel (Holil Herdia). They share gay stares for a few minutes, and by the next stop is hooked, getting out of the car with Andrés, surely ready for something to happen.

     Perhaps they might share dinner together, but Andrés argues he really just wants to kiss him and knows of a lonely walkway nearby. Miguel is suspicious, suggesting they kiss right where they stand, now on the street above the metro.

     Nonetheless, he is lured into the narrow side street where Andrés begins to passionately kiss him, ending in Miguel giving momentary head before he is intensely fucked.

     Andrés is insistent that perhaps they are destined for one another, explaining that he has no past, just a future which the two might share. Yet, as always, he has no plans for that future. He simply takes Miguel’s number as Miguel, now at street level, decides to head off home in the Route 9 bus. There is no suggestion that they will ever meet up again despite Andrés’ grand profession that there lovely encounter might mean the beginning of something new and different.

      Andrés returns to the underground, almost immediately encountering another cute boy (Ernest Agraz) who begins flirting with him.

     For a moment, at least inwardly, Andrés screams out in the horror of his inability to escape the repetition of the pattern of his life—clearly quick sexual hookups that go no further than the moment of immediate six, despite his protestations of a changes destiny. He howls out in near despair.

      But a moment later, he too begins the knowing smile, the flirtatious wink all over again. He is stuck in a kind of hell of endless pleasure without any of the true meaning for it all he desires. He cannot escape the adventure of sex.

      Albert Palomo’s score and his song “Causualidad” adds a great deal of depth to this short film.

 

Los Angeles, June 1, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).

 

John Cromwell | Double Harness / 1933

the business of marriage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery), John Cromwell (director)

Double Harness / 1933

 

Double Harness is precisely the kind of rhetorical ugly duckling which John Cromwell and his favorite screenwriter Jane Murfin loved to whip up into a passable entertainment, a badly written play with a central theme that Murfin could turn into a witty work that basically kept to home in the drawing and dining room of wealthy and refined individuals such, as in this case, Ann Harding playing Joan Colby—from a proper, well-to-do but currently down-on-its-finances family—and William Powell as John Fletcher, sophisticate heir to a wealthy but slowly-going-broke father who owns a famous cruise line. Harding’s credentials as a queen of the cool beauties are sung out as adjectives even by the sometimes cruelly cynical David Thomson: “Elegant, refined, serene, classy, superior, noble aristocratic—perhaps patrician….” And as anyone can tell you who’s seen

him in The Thin Man films, My Man Godfrey, or the later Ninotchka, Powell has the kind of indolent intelligence that women can’t resist. (It is strange, however, that while one recognizes him as wonderfully flirtatious with the opposite sex, one finds it hard to imagine him actually having sex with his female conquests.) In this film he is perfect for his role often described as a “lazy playboy,” words I find don’t truly apply to his real talents as a couch-sitting seducer.

      It doesn’t truly matter since the level-headed Joan, observing her younger spoiled sister Valerie (Lucile Browne) about to be married, is totally ready to be seduced. For all of her high-minded disinterest in the men previously paraded before her, she has determined to capture the man whom her father, Colonel Sam Colby (Henry Stephenson), most detests, and plots her strategy as if, as she describes it to Valerie, she were going about a business transaction. Long before Tina Turner wondered “what’s love gotta to do with it?” The “virginal, yet alluring” Joan—as John describes her—argues that marriage has nothing to do with love. “Marriage is a business, at least a woman’s business.” Love, in short, is just a second-hand emotion.

      Allowing herself to be seduced, she slowly pulls the playboy of the western world to the edge, and when he’s still not ready to jump, afraid that he might return to his previous playmate Monica Page (Lilian Bond), Joan manipulates the situation by bringing in the incensed conservative Colonel to demand that Fletcher do the right thing by her, that is if she will have him. And Joan most certainly will “have him,” by this time having totally fallen in love with her target.

     John almost passively agrees to the marriage only because, as he reports to her as the Fletcher-owned ship pulls out of port for their honeymoon, divorce is easier. Chastened, she forces him to agree to a sixth month waiting period during which she manages not only to send him off to his previously unused office, which he discovers he truly enjoys and actually has a talent for the work he does there. The shipping line is improving its business, and to make sure of its total rebound she invites an old family friend to dinner, the current Postmaster General Oliver Lane (Wallis Clark) who might possibly assign delivery of US overseas mail to the Fletcher line.

     While dining with a friend at a restaurant where they spot John and his past lover Monica, Joan cinches her husband’s love and respect by stopping by the table and asking Mrs. Page to join them for a weekend outing. If she has tricked him into marriage, she seems to have finally come to make him realize that she is a proper mate. That night he brings home her favorite flowers, gladiolas.

    Unfortunately, there is still a fly buzzing around those lovely blossoms. The spendthrift Valerie confides to Joan that she has made clothes purchases of $1,000 which she cannot pay and dare not tell her husband Dennis for fear of his leaving her. She begs her sister to help her out. Unfortunately, this is not the first time she has asked for such sums, and Joan, who has paid out from her own monies, refusing to take from John’s income, has nothing left. She is willing to see if they might sell her mother’s ring, but it brings in only $500. In the meantime, Valerie has gotten $1,000 from her father, and when her sister is unable to come up with the same sum, approaches John, this time claiming it is for their overdue rent, he being only too ready to write out a check.

      Overhearing the transaction, however, Joan angrily intrudes, demands she hand over the check, and tears it up, the truth about Valerie’s outrageous expenditures for herself finally revealed to everyone. In revenge, Valerie reveals Joan’s deceit, pointing out Joan’s call to her which has precipitated their father’s visit. Taken aback by how he has been manipulated into the relationship, John leaves Joan without even permitting her further explanation.

      In one of the very best of the drawing scenes of this film, Joan visits John at Monica’s apartment, forced in front of “the other woman” to reveal her relief that he finally knows the truth, and to tell him the real reason for her trick, that by that time she had truly come to love him. She leaves without making “a scene,” but still not knowing whether or not her comments have made any difference.

     When he doesn’t show up to the grand dinner she has planned with the US Postmaster, however, she can only imagine the worst. And in a brief series of farcical disasters approaching screwball comic proportions—a scene that might have been much funnier in the hands of a less staid and fussy director such as Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks—the dinner falls apart, despite the fact that as everyone else disappears, with only Joan and the Postmaster left all alone at the table, he tells her that he will assign the US mails to the Fletcher shipping line. Suddenly John finally appears, another box of gladiolas in hand.

      Both wife and husband have clearly learned their lesson: love is all there is.

    In the end, accordingly, it is hard to not at least come to grow fond of this ugly duckling. And excellent scenes by the supporting cast help the heart grown even fonder, particularly as performed the butler Freeman (Reginald Owen) whose character reads as if he were meant to be gay, even though Owen does not play him in that manner. When Freeman proclaims to his master, for example, that things have improved since his marriage, John asks him why, if he is so fond of the results of matrimony he himself hasn’t married, Freeman answers, “Why I’m far too selfish.” And later he and the Chinese cook get into a kitchen brawl that might have been perfect for someone like Eric Blore and Wong Chung (who performed the cook in this movie).

      The very first scene, wherein Valerie is shopping with her sister and father for her wedding dress and trousseau, moreover, features the usual pansy of the period, in which Fredric Santley plays the prissy, handkerchief flouting fairy, owner of the dress shop, Bruno spouting lines such as “You should feel the material on that one Miss Valerie, I literally tingle when I touch it.” A little later, after having run up charges for Valerie of $3,600, he warbles into her sister’s ear, “Why don’t you let me have my way with you this Spring Miss Joan?” A wardrobe, not sex is on his mind.

      Santley performs the lines just perfectly, but what is truly interesting about this scene, in this instance, is that the role was originally assigned to the sometimes drag queen, more often tuxedoed comic emcee Jean Malin who is often described as the queen and creator of the “pansy craze.” It

is hard to even imagine how “over-the-top” his performance must have been to have then RKO studio president B. B. Kahane fire him, declaring after witnessing his flamboyant act, "I do not think we ought to have this man on the lot on any picture — shorts or features.”*

       I’d love to have seen those daily rushes, resulting in such astounding homophobia over a purposely pansy scene.

 

* Brett L. Abrams, Hollywood Bohemians: Transgressive Sexuality and the Selling of the Movieland Dream.

 

Los Angeles, October 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).

 

George Cukor | Our Betters / 1933

send in the queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Murfin and Harry Wagstaff Gribble (screenplay, based on the play by W. Somerset Maugham), George Cukor (director) Our Betters / 1933

 

One suspects that if there was ever one moment that George Cukor came to be defined as a “woman’s” director it was upon the release in 1933 film, Our Betters, focusing on a quartet of dominating American ex-patriot women, Lady Pearl Saunders Grayston (Constance Bennett), Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper), Princess Flora (Phebe Foster), and Bessie Saunders (Anita Louise). With its sharp-tongued dialogic put-downs, its gossipy sub-text, and its naughty female sexual goings-on you might almost describe it was a rehearsal for Cukor’s later women-dominated productions such as Sylvia Scarlett (1935), The Women (1939), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Two-Faced Woman (1941), and Adam’s Rib (1949).

     An “openly” gay man (open, that is, to Hollywood not to the public at large) from the 1930s on, Cukor became legendary for his Sunday gatherings of Hollywood celebrities which, at the bewitching after-brunch hour, turned into all-male pool parties with young boys and their friends whom he’d met at the gym and streets along with his close cadre of gay cinema friends, among them William Haines and his partner Jimmie Shields, writer W. Somerset Maugham (upon his play Our Betters was based), director James Vincent, screenwriter Rowland Leigh, costume designers Orry-Kelly and Robert Le Maire, and actors John Darrow, Anderson Lawler, Grady Sutton, Robert Seiter, Tom Douglas, and Cary Grant.

     Although Cukor was recognized as a homosexual within the film community, publicly, as  Joseph L. Mankiewicz put it, “he never carried it [his homosexuality] as a pin on his lapel”—although it did get him, thanks to Clark Gable’s homophobic disdain and perhaps his fear of his own youthful gay sexual activities, fired from the set of Gone with the Wind.

     Cukor also kept a low-profile in his filmmaking by focusing on women, sometimes forceful lesbians such as Katherine Hepburn, but mostly just outspoken females behind whom his male characters often lurked or, as in the examples of Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, around which the male characters carefully circumnavigated.

      Cukor seldom portrayed obviously gay males or lesbians in his films, but using sexually coded language sometimes veered toward LGBTQ expression, the most obvious cases being Sylvia Scarlett, Our Betters, Justine, and, if you stretch it a bit, My Fair Lady. When his female-centered works did not dare move into the realms of the sexual, he pushed his heroines into portraying early feminist figures as in The Women, Adam’s Rib, and Travel’s with My Aunt.

      As critics have pointed out, Our Betters might have been a far more successful work had it been directed by Noel Coward with a cast of witty British actors pretending to be Americans pretending to be British members of the upper class. Constance Bennett does a quite admirable job as the innocent young US girl corrupted by British class snobbery and the unspoken conventions of marriages of convenience. But even giving it her Bette Davis-best, Bennett tries valiantly to infuse the dialogue with sparkle, as Cukor had ordered, by speeding it up and dressing in costumes that demanded movement.

      The sparkle never quite ignites, however, into a shower of diamond-like sentences which pierce the heart with their coldness of their in-attention, but they draw sufficient blood that we get the point. These American women, spurned by their cold-hearted husbands, have learned to cope through, as Pearl puts it, “looks, wit, and a bank balance.”

     If that sounds cynical, you can hardly blame her. Just married and only five minutes into the film, she overhears her new husband whispering to the woman he truly loves that he has needed to marry Pearl for her nouveau riche US dollars. Instead, of bursting into tears and backing off into some desolate corner of the estate, Lady Pearl decides to gauchely push her way into British society by wearing black instead of white, celebrating her husband’s (Alan Mowbray) long absences with endless dinner parties and library lovers such as Arthur Fenwick (Minor Watson) who also helps  keep her financially afloat given that her husband quickly squandered the fortune for which he married her.

       Surrounding herself with US women who, like her, have survived through English marriages of convenience such as Duchess Minnie who is happy to have the money left her by the Duke to surround herself with young handsome loafers such as her current would-be gigolo Pepi D’Costa (Gilbert Roland).

       Princess Flora is precisely what Pearl refused to become, the tortured beauty who remains in love with the Prince who has since escaped from her embrace; she gives herself over to working for good causes, between her tears and nostalgia for the innocence she left behind in the USA.

       Young Bessie, now under Pearl’s tutelage, is awed by her sister’s ever shifting dinner guests, each of them, in her mind, more glorious, intellectually endowed, and well-dressed than the last. Having loved the good-looking lug, Fleming Harvey (Charles Starrett) who shows up at Pearl’s doorstep—apparently also a cousin about whose familial relationship with Bessie is never investigated—she refuses to send him away, forcing him to stay on to watch her painful transformation from a pretty US hometown girl into a wit-starved Brit. Pearl quickly arranges for Lord Harry Bleane (Hugh Sinclair) to fall in love and propose to Bessie so that she too can enter the charmed circle of revolting royals.

      Along with the pompous gossip Thornton Clay (Grant Mitchell) these characters and Pearl all retire to her country estate to dish all the best of society who make up Pearl’s dinner lists. We never get a glimpse of those endless dinners but, given what evidence we’re given from Pearl’s coterie, it’s perhaps better that we imagine their sniggering bon mots than have to witness them.

      And I can’t say that Maugham or his screen adaptors offer us much of alternative of conversational tidbits, unless you find lines such as Minnie’s comment to Pepi who perpetually asks her to marry him—presumably so that he might better be able to share her fortune—“Marriage is so middle class. It takes away all the romance!” to be a howler. Or you think you think that lines like “If one felt about things at night as one as one felt in the morning, life would be a lot easier,” is a brilliant pensée. 

       Yet somehow Cukor convinces us that Minnie’s endless complaints about Pepi’s inattentiveness, Clay’s “chipper chatter,” Fenwick’s “girlie”-laden exultations of Pearl, and Bessie’s girlish awe of everything around her is worthy our attention. And the beautiful Pearl inexplicably seems to be happy to have them around as company.

       Unfortunately, our perfect hostess accidentally slips on the banana-peel of farce as she reluctantly agrees to meet Pepi in the teahouse. Having just made the connection between Pearl’s visit to a London museum with Pepi’s admission that he has recently visited that same institution, Minnie already suspects that the two engaged in a tryst, and on the lookout observes Pearl sneaking out of the manor to visit the nearby structure, immediately hiding her purse and asking Bessie whether she might retrieve that forgotten item from the teahouse.

      Bessie finds the door locked, but what she can see through the window apparently might be the subject of a lurid novel. The girl returns pale-faced and startled, Minnie forcing the poor thing to name the cause of her consternation, thus forcing Fenwick, Minnie, and even the generally unjudgmental Flora to reject the company of their formerly beloved friend. For the first time in this work we witness Minnie as the rapaciously self-centered and mean-spirited woman she truly is. Insisting that Pearl doesn’t have a “redeeming quality,” she declares her break with Lady Grayston and her loafing lover Pepi. Fenwick is stunned by the sexual betrayal. Clay can hardly wait to get back to London to spread the gossip. And Bessie is so deeply hurt at having lost her idol that she can hardly speak.

       Into this sour-faced former fan club Pearl comes whirling back from her unfortunate rendezvous, speechless for the first time in the movie, knowing she’s now facing a scandal which may ruin her already shady reputation, having previously, as she puts it, made love to men only front of everyone else.

       But before Minnie can even get up enough indignation to call for a car to the train station, Pearl sends one car off to London and the other to a service garage. If she can only keep her guests over the weekend she realizes there can be no scandal since outranged guests always leave in haste.

    Looking her pale and wan best, she seduces Fenwick to forgive her and continue their financially beneficial “love affair.” When she realizes that Bessie now finds her “cheap and common and sordid,” Pearl implores Lord Bleane to break their marriage engagement, leaving the innocent to return to the US with Fleming Harvey. Minnie even manages to make up with Pepi, finally telling him she’s ready to marry him and settle on an annual allowance.

      To make it up with Minnie, however, requires something special which the car returning from London brings back. She, better than anyone, knows when to send in the clowns, that car having carried Ernest (the pansy actor Tyrell Davis) to them, who, made up heavily with extraordinarily large, rouged lips, proceeds almost immediately to try to teach Minnie how to tango. Preening, scolding, and doting upon the silly old dame, Ernest promises her extensive lessons after dinner, an offer—since several times throughout the work she has expressed her desire to learn the dance—she cannot resist.

      As always, the queer saves the day as the two frenemies kiss and make up, Ernest approvingly looking on to observe: “What an exquisite spectacle of two ladies of title kissing one another.”

      This was one of the most controversial of pre-code films, and was perhaps one of the films that Joseph Breen most abhorred, declaring it an outrage, the kind of film under his tutelage, that would never again shown in the theaters.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2021).