Andy Warhol and Chuck Wein | My Hustler / 1965

looking to buy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andy Warhol and Chuck Wein (directors, no authors listed) My Hustler / 1965

 

Andy Warhol’s and Chuck Wein’s 1965 film My Hustler, released soon after the limited success of The Chelsea Girls, is one of two films, the other being Chelsea Girls, that has received significant commentary, a great deal of it (as with most of Warhol’s films) exclusively negative.

      Bosley Crowther’s 1967 review in The New York Times reiterates what most of the critics of the day concluded:

 

“Looked at from any angle—and there are several from which to look at My Hustler, all of them requiring a firm stance of patience and fortitude — this 70-minute maundering over an incipient male prostitute by three casual companions at Fire Island leaves something to be desired.”

 

      Later observers such as Stephen Holden, writing in a time in which Warhol’s and Morrissey’s film-making was receiving new attention resulting in some new perspectives about works still often categorized as clearly amateurish films, offered only a slightly more open contextualization of some of his films. Holden wrote:

 

“The esthetic running through Warhol's films is an icy voyeurism. As witty or sexy or photogenic as Warhol's superstars may have been, their largely unstructured, crudely edited play-acting in front of his camera could also be cruelly revealing. Again and again, one has the feeling of confronting people with limited internal resources, desperate to be noticed at any cost.”

 

      And as late as 2014 bloggers such as Michael D. Klemm, although attempting to point out wider dimensions to the Warhol cinematic oeuvre by generally seeking to redeem it as being of great “historical interest,” summarizes it, early on in his otherwise fairly fascinating commentary, as something one simply has to bear with:

 

“Warhol didn’t believe in mundane things like scripts or plots. He was capturing what he felt was a more heightened reality. But there’s no beating around the bush about this; his films are amateurish, badly acted (many performers were stoned) and often incoherent”.

 

      It’s hard to entirely disagree with the fact that despite what has often been described as Ed Hood’s “deep, mellifluous voice,” that his portrayal of a southern-born older queen busily scolding and admiring the young boys around him, both of them “for hire,” does not imbue his character with much insight. Compared with Ed’s campy Fire Island diva, the characters of Mart Crowley’s play The Boys in the Band, which opened in an off-Broadway play only a year later, are almost Chekhovian in stature.

      However, reviewing Warhol’s and Wein’s My Hustler a couple of days ago, I was reminded more than anything of a late Tennessee Williams short play—albeit without the bard’s generally more clever and surreal-like dialogue. But in this work, for the one of the first times, the directors actually do create some structural boundaries, which in turn, redefine and transform the apparently improvised dialogue.

     I might describe the first half of My Hustler as “the viewing.” After a quick attempt to establish the central viewer by Ed dressing down his “slave” —who, quite symbolically is shown only from the waist down, as if he has been decapitated from his heart and brain—for not properly attending to his duties, which is to keep him and his guests well supplied with drinks and to look after and protect the handsome young prostitute he has just rented from “Dial a Hustler,” he turns his gaze almost immediately to a handsome young blond-haired boy, Paul America (who was born as Paul Johnson but changed his name after Warhol insisted he do so), spread out upon the beach with his crotch almost always facing the Fire Island “shack” in which Ed sits in delighted admiration.

      After a few moments of expressing his ocular pleasure—as we discover later, Ed may have shared his bed with the beauty but has treated his guest only as “eye-candy”—in rushes his neighbor, Genevieve Charbin, who has evidently just received a call from her neighbor (presumably Dorothy Dean, who makes a late-film appearance) about the chuck of meat—generally the way America is treated throughout this work—now ensconced on the beach.

       She is somewhat hostilely greeted by Ed, but nonetheless is served a drink by the near invisible “slave,” while the two gaze outward. I should mention that just behind them is a painting, parroting the work of David Hockney, of just such a beach scene with boys similar to the one they are currently scanning.

       Gradually we perceive that Ed’s disdain for his female friend is that she is simply a “fag-hag,” a lover of gay men whose major role in life, in this case, is attempting to seduce them—particularly young men like Paul, who, still confused about their sexuality, maintain a belief that they are heterosexual despite the truth of their daily actions—without, finally, offering any sexual relief. In other words, she is simply an inducement to remind them of their fantasy realities, leaving them soon after to have to face the hard and bitter facts behind their sexual choices, which in retaliation for which they evidently leave their gay john’s company.

      Apparently, Genevieve is as sexually sterile as Ed, her only pleasure derived from using her female body to torture the young gay hustlers who might desire her. It reminds me a little of the Tennessee Williams filmscript for Suddenly, Last Summer, particularly if the Elizabeth Taylor figure Catherine Holly had actually tried to seduce the boys before they turned on Sebastien Venable for the inevitable devouring.

      The violence she may enact upon the passive object of her gaze is hinted at my Ed’s question: “Maybe you’d like to run in your high heels through all the hair on his chest.”

      As she sizes up the situation, shifting from a mild drink to, excuse the pun, something stiffer, she suddenly spots another young male paying significant attention to the blond-haired (which both agree has been simply “dipped”) number. After reporting the situation to her host, both gather in horror of what the event may bode, Genevieve calling out for the intruder to come immediately up to the house (again, a bit like Elizabeth Taylor, this time in her role in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as if she and he were demanding that another wolf stay away from their “meat.”

      When the newcomer does “come away” from their prey, the queen recognizes him as another older hustler, Joe Campbell (the "Sugar Plum Fairy"), suggesting that Joe provided drugs over and beyond his sexual activities. What Joe now reveals is not only that he has previously had sex with Paul, but that he knew he would be on the beach and traveled to Fire Island particularly to see him.

     In short, all three of them, for slightly different reasons, now want the “dipped” blond. If we somehow sympathize with Joe (who from 1955 to 1962 was Harvey Milk’s boyfriend) more than the others, it is because at least we wants to share his body instead of simply swallowing him up with his eyes or worse yet teasing him away from the male gaze.

   Seemingly tired of all the testimonials to the young man’s beauty, Ed finally challenges them to try to take Paul away from him, since, after all, he was the one who rented the boy in the first place! If Genevieve wins, she can temporarily have him as her reward, although there will be nothing in it for the beauty. If Joe wins he can briefly encamp in Genevieve’s shack.

     Almost before any agreement is finalized, the female runs toward her prey, rubbing his back with tanning lotion and frolicking in the shallow waters of the ocean with him in tow, all to the frustrated discernment of the two male voyeurs left behind. Soon after the camera closes down, almost as if it has run out of film, signifying also that “the viewing” is over, that all involved, having finished appraising the sculpted body, like Genevieve, are ready to move into “the buying” phase.

 

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America, Warhol and Wein suggest, is so dumb that even the attempt to seduce it is a problem, especially when you can’t come out and say directly that you want to fuck him/it. Stuffed into a very small bathroom, Joe and Paul shower, piss, and slowly dance around each other’s bodies, with Joe obviously being the more active.

      In order to entice America into bed, Joe offers the dumb cluck (who clearly influenced Waldo Salt’s character Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, which premiered only 2 years later) advice in how to turn away from being a “dinner john,” which evidently is all the payment Ed has so far provided, to working as a true hustler—not of the 42nd Avenue variety, but a male who is willing to sexually play along with older men’s fantasies, a number of which (in another parallel to Schlesinger’s later film) he describes in detail.

     Explaining how America might rack up two nights a week at $50.00 each with a wealthy client, Joe suggests he might be willing to give America a name—obviously for the favor of going to bed with him, although he cannot express it that openly, and his prey cannot imagine anything else but that he’s suggesting that he take a percentage of America’s pay, as if it were a tax instead of a referral fee.

     While the two brush their teeth, shave, file their nails, slather themselves with perfume and generally pamper their faces the way a woman might apply makeup and lipstick, Joe, almost masturbating and pressing his crotch up against the hunk’s flesh, attempts to impress upon America that he has to “take the opportunity and make it into something”—in short, pushing his friend into the realization that he will have to determine the limits of his sexual activities both physically (what sexual actions he wants to embrace) and in terms of duration (twice a week, every night, etc.).

      But America seems to understand nothing but money, inquiring again and again how much he might be liable to make. Even after Joe rubs his friend’s shoulders with the pretense of relaxing him and gently massages his back with Noxzema, the younger man, although not rejecting the come on, can’t seem to comprehend anything that Joe is trying to tell him.

     Genevieve, soon after, is back for her second try, more openly offering the enticements of money and companionship; Ed reappears to suggest that he can help America to travel and to meet notable people, reminding him that he has a house and land in Montgomery Alabama (the root, evidently, of his appetite for “slaves,” and a home in Florida; after which Dorothy Dean suddenly pops in to suggest that she will help the beauty to get an education, permitting him open relationships, and again hinting that money is no problem.

       For all of these generous if rather meaningless offers, America has no answer, preferring, it appears, to look into the bathroom mirror at his own beauty rather than imagining a world that offers anything to him such as sex, money, a place to live, connections, or education. Everything seems beyond his comprehension, and the camera—almost as if in disgust for his silent narcissistic gaze—goes black.

      As the reader may have noticed, during these last passages I have gone from identifying the major figure as Paul to calling him by his last name, assigned to the actor by the director. If you think about Warhol’s decision to rename the centerpiece of My Hustler you begin to realize just how brilliant and intentional, as opposed to being accidental and entirely improvisatory, this work is. By using the actor not only as a cute hunk but as a symbol for all the country he represents, the directors have almost transformed a work which so many critics found to be so empty-minded and amateurish into a fascinating satire in the manner of Albee’s 1961 play An American Dream, which the author himself described as “a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, emasculation, and vacuity.” For me that pretty well sizes up the various figures of Warhol’s and Wein’s offerings in their desirous purchase of the territory into which they hope to lay their claims.

     The real New Jersey-born individual behind the actor (who for a while was Henry Geldzahler’s lover) also seemed to realize the implications of the name with which Warhol had christened him: “I went through a period of paranoia about it [his new name]. I mean, every time I saw that word—and it's everywhere—I related it to myself. The country's problems were my problems.”

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

 

Peter de Rome | The Second Coming / 1972

 the celebration of purity

 

Peter de Rome (screenplay and director) The Second Coming / 1972

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter de Rome’s 1972 film The Second Coming actually has nothing at all to do with Jesus of Nazareth except through a wink and a nod via William Butler Yeats’ great poem concerning the disaster of the Christian world “fallen apart,” and a play on the pun of its title:

 

                         Turning and turning in the widening gyre  

                         The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

                         Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

                         Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

                         The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  

                         The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

                         The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

                         Are full of passionate intensity.

     De Rome’s 14-minute work, in fact, begins almost as if were a spy / adventure story, with two men meeting outside the London Hilton hotel. They shake hands to greet one another, and carefully look around them, the camera revealing suspicious people in all directions. A foppish man in sunglasses, carrying a briefcase outside a men’s clothing shop seems to be looking in their direction; another more casually suited gentleman rests his hand on the glass of a shop where in stands looking back in their direction off-stage left.

     They move forward, strolling past several tourist destinations, including Buckingham Palace, where a man seems to be lurking behind a tree, another purposely resting against the protective gate. They survey a nearby sculpture and suddenly the foppish man again crosses their path, dropping a paper as he passes which one of the men quickly picks up. The message reads: “Casares.”

    So we now realize also that we are playing a rather odd and sophisticated game of “Clue,” the riddle of these two men are seeking, inexplicably, to solve.

    Suddenly one of them stares up into the sky, and when his purview returns to ground level we realize we now in Paris, he without the other. We spot the tour Eiffel and Arc de Triomphe, on the very top of which of the latter a man stands, dressed in black, who waves at our friend to join him. Once he has reached the top of the arc the man dressed in black pants and a black turtleneck sweater joins him, just as suddenly walking away, but leaving behind a programme, on the back which is written the words: “Not Maria Casares dum-dum.”

     The actress Maria Casares, the daughter of the Republican Prime Minister of Spain before Franco’s takeover, had a 16-year long affair with French author Albert Camus. She played in a number of French theater dramas and performing in several major motion pictures by Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau before returning to stage and playing in Corneille's Le Cid, Victor Hugo's Marie Tudor and Marivaux' Le Triomphe de l'Amour (The Triumph of Love) on Broadway. She, alas, has no role in our two gentlemen’s’ adventures.

    What is also marked, however, in this programme is a plane trip to Spain. And by the very next frame we see our previously clueless man in a telephone booth calling up his friend to tell him to meet him in Malaga on the Costa del sol, the capitol of the ancient Andalusia. They both immediately catch planes to that city and meet up at the airport. Now sharing a hotel in that beautiul city.

  

 Once more, like tourists, they explore the ancient town, finally after what appears to be several hours, coming upon the Marabella Hilton hotel. We observe a man running to a Mercedes convertible just like the one we spotted at the airport. Near to where the car was parked lays another flier containing a map with the city of Casares circled in black.

     This ancient town, the birthplace of Andalusian nationalism, dates back at least to Roman times, being the legendary spot where Julius Ceasar was cured of his liver ailment by the village’s sulfuric waters. So we travel with the man in the Mercedes to Casares, where we soon see our friends have also traveled, they standing on hillside looking over into the amazing, white-washed vista of the village. And once more, we are taken on a brief tourist tour of the town.

      We now witness the second man of our couple, the one who did not travel to France, briskly walking down the narrow, winding streets of Casares in search of some further sign of his destination. From a distance he spots the gray-haired man of the Mercedes who transverses the top of the T-shaped passageway toward which he is moving. He runs after him, following him finally to a small doorway into which he enters. Moving to the doorway himself, he pauses, as if debating whether or not he wishes to enter.

     Inside sit several men in a very dark room, some whose mouths seem to be open with awe. On the way we perceive a crucifixion, the body completely nude. But gradually, as our eyes become acclimated to the dark, we see the penis what a appeared to be a wooden representation of the crucified Christ moving, slowing becoming erect. It is a living being, his head moving back and forth, his arms wincing in some pain. His chest shifts back and forth. We see nails have been embedded in his open palms. His face looks upward toward the heavens.

     Almost immediately, sperm begins to spurt in impossibly long ropes from his cock, hitting his chest and even his face, an enormous overflowing of semen. His face falls to the right side of his neck, blood dripping from his mouth.

     What we have just witnessed is, literally, a perverse act by a man who is willing to be bound and symbolically crucified, finding such excitement in the act of being painfully tied up, nailed, bound, and observed by a whole room of men that he cums of his own mental volition, no friction, frottage, or even human touch necessary for ejaculation. If one sees this figure as a kind of Christ, it is most definitely a blasphemous one in the light of any contemporary religious theological teachings of which I am aware. This might truly be said to be—to the vast majority of society—precisely what Yeats meant by stating “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

      But here in the village of Casares, where the grand Moors lived beside their ancient Roman and early Christian brethren, perhaps in this very room the Third Century Christians with whom Flannery O’Connor attests sympathy coming together like our two friends through a great deal of secrecy and cost to the daily lives, met to celebrate with crude almost pagan like rituals to substantiate their belief in the man who sacrificed his entire body—with all the spirit, organs, and fluids therein—so that they might be saved. For them there was no difference in their celebrations between the spirit and the flesh, for if Christ was made holy as the son of God, becoming one with God himself, his entire body was sacred, his flesh, hands, head, and feet; his organs, heart, lungs, and liver; his fluids, blood, piss, and sperm were all equally holy. What American artist Andres Serrano (born of Honduran, and Afro-Cuban parents) in his is photograph of a crucifix bathed in his urine which he titled “Piss Christ” was expressing was similar, to my way of thinking, to de Rome’s depiction here of a symbolically crucified Christ covered with his own semen: the ancient roots of Christian ceremony and belief, the celebration of Jesus of Nazareth as a man become holy through the miraculous rituals of witnessing, prayer or awe, and faith.

      And what these men have just witnessed, one must admit, is kind of miracle so to speak. Given the narrow proscriptions of the rituals of our time, of course, there is some humor in both Serrano’s and de Rome’s art, but underlying it is a recognition that somewhere in these primitive representations of early Christian ritual,

 

                   Surely some revelation is at hand;

                   Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

 

And perhaps some “rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

 

Los Angeles, July 30, 20021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) / 1966

just another rebel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay and director) Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) / 1966

 

Directed as it was by a homosexual Marxist you might imagine that Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1966) would have aroused a great deal of protest, particularly coming after the movie I just commented on. And indeed, there were a few protests planned, but immediately abandoned upon its premier and after it won the Venice Film Festival Grand Jury Prize.

     Far more controversial and met with intense protests was Martin Scorsese’s version of Nikos Kazantzakis’ retelling of the life of Christ in human rather than divine terms, The Last Temptation of Christ. In that film, again not at all LBGTQ related, the primary controversies centered around

the Satan-induced hallucinations while on the cross, and the final passages of the film Christ marries and raises a family with Mary Magdalene

     As the story goes, after the controversy with La ricotta Pasolini was invited by Pope John XXIII to be part of a dialogue with non-Catholic artists in the town of Assisi, and to attend a seminar there at the Franciscan monastery. The visit of the Pope created such a traffic jam that the director was consigned to his hotel room, where, after coming across a copy of the New Testament, he read all four Gospels through, which immediately led him imagine adapting one of them into a movie. Supposedly, he found “John was too mystical, Mark too vulgar, and Luke too sentimental." But the work he finally made remained quite true to Matthew’s version, mostly quoting from it, creating a work, as he described it, by analogy instead of the usual process of an amalgam of the several different versions.

     Since his film is not primarily an LGBTQ work, in any obvious manner, I shall not discuss the movie in full here, but will only briefly mention it in relation to the scenes which end The Gospel According to St. Matthew having to do with the Crucifixion.

     I will just mention that the brilliance of Pasolini’s film lays in its utter simplicity. In stark black-and-white—please note if you have watched or are about to watch a colorized, English-language dubbed version that is also shorter than the original, you are not truly seeing Pasolini’s film and you should abandon the memory or your intent immediately—he attempted to re-mythologize the story by treating it more as a simple and straight-forward history, not just of events but of the thousands of years of Church belief since then rather than as reconstruction of Christ’s life as Mel Gibson and others have attempted. Using non-actors (Christ is played by an economics student at the time, Enrique Irazoqui), the director stays within the lines of Matthew’s telling but portrays it so straight-forwardly and simply that any aspect of belief or faith seems almost beside the point. In his argumentative statements and sometimes even slightly humorous behavior this Christ is truly one of us firmly planted in the real. As Roger Ebert describes him:

 

            His personal style is sometimes gentle, as during the Sermon on the

            Mount, but more often he speaks with a righteous anger, like a union

            organizer or a war protester. His debating style, true to Matthew,

            is to answer a question with a question, a parable, or dismissive scorn.

            His words are clearly a radical rebuke of his society, its materialism,

            and the way it values the rich and powerful over the weak and poor.

                Like most of Jewish men of his time, he wears his hair short —none of

            the flowing locks of holy cards. He wears a dark, hooded robe so that

            his face is often in shadow. He is unshaven but not bearded.

 

      Most of the traditional religious critics were impressed, surprised by its reverence. And Pasolini’s major critics of the film came, as one might have expected, came from Marxist leftists. Indeed, the director himself admitted, in response to leftist criticism, that "there are some horrible moments I am ashamed of. ...The Miracle of the loaves and the fishes and Christ walking on water are disgusting Pietism." But he also argued that the film, in part, was "a reaction against the conformity of Marxism. The mystery of life and death and of suffering—and particularly of religion...is something that Marxists do not want to consider. But these are and have always been questions of great importance for human beings."

       When asked by a critic in a 1966 press conference why he, a nonbeliever, had made a film with religious themes, Pasolini responded: "If you know that I am an unbeliever, then you know me better than I do myself. I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever who has a nostalgia for a belief."

      Christ in Pasolini’s work meets his end much as any human might, with fear and trepidation, too weak to even to carry his cross the entire way, it is carried mostly by Simon with Jesus walking behind. There is no great violence depicted here except when the nails are pounded into hands, first the man hanging near Christ, and later Jesus himself crying out in horrible pain.

      As Matthew reports, Christ cries out with the feeling that god has forsaken him. And when one of the guards suggest the other stop sponging off his lips with water to see if Elias will save him, Jesus howls in pain, while somewhere in the distance we do see a half-ruined building crumbling as if an earthquake has just stuck it, fire observed in its windows. But this occurrence, like the man who soon will die, may simply be just incidental. Although his mother and the gathering of friends who stand nearby clearly suffer, Jesus is not truly different from the other men nailed to a cross that day in Golgotha.

      Christ dies, a ladder is put up against cross, and the body taken down, the crown of thorns tossed away, the body wrapped in a white winding sheet by Mary and Mary Magdalene. He is carried without pomp to a grave and a large stone door pulled into place before the entrance once they have laid him within.

       The next morning the women arrive bearing wildflowers to discover that the door has been opened, a child of undermined sex—either a beautiful young boy or a girl just as lovely—appears to tell them that he is gone; the cell is empty, and Christ is risen, a large smile being registered by Mary, as the narrator tells all to go forward and tell the story to the nations.

      Pasolini’s Jesus—unlike those who might prefer to perceive the “glory” of the event such as fundamental Christians, or those who seek the uniqueness and strangeness of the Crucifixion and Resurrection like Flannery O’Connor who described herself as a Third Century Christian interested in its mystery and magic—has been nearly drained of all mythology rather that re-mythologized. As a nonbeliever myself, I don’t necessarily see this as a problem, but I am puzzled why those with a deep sense of faith might not be outraged by the director’s concerned young man killed, like so many others in his time, just for being an innocent, who believed he could change the society in which he lived.

      And one wonders, with all the horrors self-defined Christians have perpetuated ever since whether his teachings were ever properly understood or truly learned.

      It is interesting that in most of the works following this, Pasolini turned away from neorealism in the direction of fable and historical narratives that pointed to worlds truly out of the ordinary.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini | La ricotta / 1963

the cheese thief

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenwriter and director) La ricotta / 1963

 

     Pasolini’s 35-minute film La Ricotta appeared first as one of four films gathered as an omnibus production titled Ro.Go.Pa.G., the unmemorable title representing the names of the directors who make the movies included, Robert Rossellini (Illibatezza / Chastity), Jean-Luc Godard (Il nuovo mundo / The New World), Pasolini’s work, and Ugo Gregoretti (Il Pollo ruspante / Free Range Chicken).

     Of the four, Pasolini’s work was certainly the cause célèbre, if for no reason other than the director, accused of holding contempt for the state religion, was sentenced to four months in jail, which he avoided by paying a fine, the sentence later being declared void by an appeals court.

     But the film is also the most interesting of the four, even if they all bring up fascinating issues.

     Pasolini’s work is primarily a piece about movie-making, starring the great Orson Wells as the stand-in director for Pasolini himself, the huge-bodied American—in reality always seeking out roles to bring in some money in order to support his own directorial projects—somewhat smugly sitting back in utter disinterest in this particular film shoot, while quoting, at one point, from Pasolini’s diatribe against the Italian people themselves from his script from a year earlier, his 1962 film Mamma Roma.

    As with most movie-filming much of the time is spent with actors and extras standing around, finding ways to entertain themselves between the few takes from the actual movie in process. The movie being filmed, clearly a series of tableaux vivants and friezes of Christ’s Crucifixion, are filmed in color, while the rest of Pasolini’s picture, except for the opening credits, is shot in black-and-white. This obviously separates the cinematic art, which in this case is imitating the visual art of Renaissance painters such as Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, and the everyday occurrences going on around the around the artistic-cinematic evocation. If the film is intended to be sacred and even holy, the black-and-white sequences represent an insulting, vulgar, and at times even barbarous world which sustains the visionary expression.

     The major players of this work, the pretty boy who plays Christ, the divas (Laura Betti and Edmonda Aldini) who perform Mary and Mary Magdalene, a woman who stripteases on demand (Maria Bernardini), an interruptive journalist (Vittorio La Paglia), centurions, angels, dozens of young male hangers on and scores of extras, all seem to have poured out from a broken seam in a Federico Fellini film instead of feeling at home in the real world of Pasolini. Indeed, the journalist asks the director, in an obvious dig of the Italian master, what he thinks of the great Fellini, Welles answering, “He dances,” before possibly rethinking his description, but finally repeating it, “He dances.” The response suggests, clearly, that Fellini is more interested in entertaining—dancing like the boys doing the twist in the first scene—than in the “dance of the intellect.”

     In the vast amount of free time between moments of shooting that these figures have to themselves, they dance to the pop music of the day, eat, pet the dog, fret, plot, and even pick flowers.

     And then there is the extra who plays the good thief, Stracci (“rags,” played by Mario Cipriani), who is so poor that he is willing to accept the job just for the food he is fed. He eats, falls to sleep, and still wakes up hungry, realizing that his family, his wife and four sons, are visiting the nearby countryside that afternoon. With the free meal he is provided, he manages to feed them, but he goes hungry.

     Dressing up in one of the female costumes and wigs, he is able to get another serving of the ricotta cheese, and races off to hide it in a nearby cave. Speeding back to the set, he changes clothes and in a cartoon-like mania rushes back to the cave only to discover that the diva’s dog has consumed his lunch. It is enough to make a grown man break down into tears, just as we encounter when the journalist wanders by, soon after, catching the tearful giant now petting the dog he was about to strangle a moment before.

     When the journalist comments on how beautiful the dog is, Stracci tells him that it’s for sale, which the journalist is willing to buy if he’ll accept a check. Stracci, however, is willing to give the animal for only a thousand lira in cash. With that Stracci runs like the roadrunner to a countryside ricotta stand, buying up the entire offering of the fluffy white cheese made from goat or watery buffalo milk and good loaves of bread, rushing back to hide it again in the cave.  

      Meanwhile, as his family members sit it in the open grass enjoyably sharing the little sack of vittles with which their father originally provided, we observe the actor who plays the image of God pass by with a curious look in their direction. The street savvy eldest son rises, telling his mother he’s going on business, and that we may soon get a job as an extra. It is clear that by providing sex to the passing actor he may be able to serve the company in some minor capacity.

     A moment later, a couple of actors, one of them the handsome Christ of the movie, followed by cute boys also pass by, clearly moving in the direction of the little decayed structure in the near distance to have sex. The second son, better looking than the first, also rises, telling his mother that he too has a job to look after.

     The most beautiful of her sons, observing his brothers, still sits in the grass chewing the remains of his sandwich and cheese when suddenly out of the trees appears on the film’s stunningly beautiful angels. The youngest boy breaks into a full smile, as the camera pans to reveal once more the shooting location, where the call has just been made for the Good Thief to get “nailed up,” demanding Stracci to get hooked into his position on the cross. He rises, ready to take his position in the Passion. We don’t need to be told how the smiling beauty, Stracci’s third son, fares.

     Stracci is strapped to the cross, but the Diva, at that very moment, approaches the director demanding that her scene be shot immediately or she will leave. So Stracci, Christ, and the blasphemous thief are left on the ground to wait. Some of the crew members determine to entertain them as they wait—with another sort of dance—this gesture, in particular, meant to mock the immobile and now obviously suffering Stracci, his face seating in the sun, by asking a woman who obviously is sexually experienced with the crew to do a striptease.

     Refusing at first, she finally agrees to do it, raising Stracci’s heartbeat and other body parts as he frustratedly remains strapped into position, unable to move. Finally, the director issues the call for those on the crosses to be unstrapped, and Stracci rushes back to his cave to eat the cheese he has hidden there. As he gorges on this meal of his dreams, other cast members, who catch him the act, gradually bring him leftovers from the company table, sausages, liquor, cakes, and numerous other edibles to consume while they openly mock him for his enormous appetite, without realizing that in his poverty he has never had so much food set before him, let alone the opportunity to put it into his stomach.

     Stuffed, belching, and suffering from all the food, Stracci is called once again to strap up for the final shoot of the Passion. The crosses are moved up the hill and implanted, while below a crowd of well-dressed press members and the returned stars from the other scenes climb the hill, cameras snapping at their progress. The wind and lighting are checked out. The prompter, just to make sure that the dense-headed Stracci remembers his line, asks him to repeat it, which, despite his obvious indigestion, he successfully does. He is asked to repeat the line again, Stracci looking up to heaven with true conviction as he repeats:

 

                      Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy Kingdom!

 

     “Action” is finally called, as all wait for Stracci to repeat his line yet again.  But he only looks down as we have seen his face fall into place a moment ago. The director calls again for action, but Stracci does not respond. He is dead on the cross, killed not through suffering the torture of nails pounded in his hands and feet, but through the satiation of his lifelong starvation. His heart obviously could not handle the stress of all the food he has managed to stuff into the emptiness of his mouth.

     Christ has not been crucified, but the poor thief of cheese has, praying to God as he has left this earth. Isn’t this man as sacred as the man, the son of God, on the cross next to him? Is it sacrilegious to represent the good thief, in this case, as a figure equal to and perhaps just as important as the man who symbolizes the Christian faith? The Christ in the film is just an actor, while the thief, alas, is simply an ordinary man.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).