William Friedkin | Cruising / 1980

in absentia: a film obscuring its own character

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Friedkin (based on the fiction by Gerald Walker) (screenwriter and director) Cruising / 1980

 

I have quite purposely waited for several years to review this film, in part to let all the resentment and anger that William Friedkin’s film Cruising produced upon its release to die down, and also because I, myself, wanted to view it with an as objective eye as I might be able to.

    I was there when this film appeared, and I had some New York friends who were actively involved in the protest of the film. Although the LGBTQ+ community had not yet been established, gay liberation and it’s sense of openness had truly evolved, and the gay community were rightfully afraid that focusing on the S&M scene in the context of a murder story would demean not only the leather crowds of bars like Ramrod and the Mineshaft—both of which I had occasionally visited in my year in Manhattan in 1969—would once again confuse a world unacquainted with the gay world into believing that this was what homosexual life was all about, in the same way the previous generation were frustrated by the closeted, quick-witted Noel Coward-like figures in The Boys in the Band had represented the gay experience in the previous decade. Just as importantly, the first reports of AIDS, then described as a gay disease were beginning to be heard by the already embattled male gay community. Was this really the appropriate time to feature a movie in which an BDSM lurker was busy killing off his fellow gay men? As Vito Russo argued a year later in The Celluloid Closet, in the movies all gay men have to die.

   In fact, Freidkin was using the setting primarily for its shock value, to explore how a world in which young men in leather who symbolically play out the most masculine values of the heterosexual work, including torture and punishment, might easily allow, unwillingly, someone into their midst who could actually take just such tropes further, cutting up bodies and tossing them in the Manhattan rivers or literally slashing his victims dozens of times. 

    I recall visiting the art gallery only a few years later (1985) of Andrew Crispo, who after a few moments of discussing their current show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s flower paintings, he began to joke that perhaps he should lock up Howard in one their closets. Howard quickly laughed it off, but I, now wide-eyes and terrified, knew something was amiss and quickly maneuvered our departure.

     A few weeks later, a partially burned body of a 26-year-old man was found in a Rockland County smokehouse clad only in a leather hood. The young man had been drugged under Crispo’s control, and along with Crispo’s friend Bernard LeGeros, demanded that the victim kneel as he shot him, the gun later found in his 57th Street Galley. Crispo was charged with kidnapping, sodomy, assault, coercion, and unlawful imprisonment, but eventually go off when LeGeros took the fall for him, admitting to the crime, Crispo later being jailed simply for tax evasion.

     As the scenes of Friedkin’s movie reveal, those very bars, owned by the mafia, were wild places of open sex in those days, not so when I visited them in 1996, although clearly, as even the bar I regularly attended, there were back rooms with sex orgies. Since I was never into S&M behavior, I didn’t bother to visit them.

     A young cop, who shares the look of one of the gay men who was killed, a Columbia professor, is asked if he might like to temporarily join the detective squad, with a possible promise of advance if he can help catch them. The ambitious young man, Steve Burns (Al Pacino) agrees, although when told when he will have to do, go undercover, leave his girlfriend Nancy Gates (Karen Allen) behind, and act for several months as a S&M gay man, regularly visiting the gay bars such as The Ramrod and the Mineshaft on the lookout for the possible killer, at first does startle him a bit; but he agrees to the assignment, putting his previous life behind as he moves into an apartment in the West Village, not then nearly as tony as it is today, befriending a fellow gay man who down the hall Ted Bailey (Don Scardino), who shares an apartment with an abusive partner.

     In many senses, it is clear that Burns has no comprehension just how much the police are hated. Just previous to his entry into the film we have seen to abusive cops arrest two crossdressers, who they threaten with jail unless their perform sexual acts upon them, meaning presumably offering the copes blowjobs. One of the crossdressers complains to the police, but absolutely nothing comes of it. Clearly the police are heads, including Captain Edelson, who has hired Burns for his job, are willing to take any action against their own.

   The confusion between the abuse by police and men who prey upon the gay community, accordingly, merely helps those such as the killer hide out in the shadows, which might in the shadows, which might be anywhere from the bars downtown to the Rambles in Central Park, or even Columbia University itself.

     For a long while, the movie simply settles in to watch Burns’ slow assimilation on the gay scene he attempting to impersonate. But gradually, as he subtly queries bartenders and others, he begins to discover the dangers and joys of the scene, not only that of killers, who in fact in those days were not just singular, but the police themselves. 

     One might say that he slowly gets sucked into the world he is investigating. And he feels uncomfortable with what he is experiencing, running back, against the strictures, to his lover and their comfortable apartment in several instances, just to remind himself of who he really is—or at least used to be.

     The major trouble with this film is not its lurid presentation of the S&M gay world, of which there are several glimpses, but the fact that, perhaps because of the backlash of the gay community, the director was terrified of actually showing his character in any real involvement in the scene. We have to simply assume that in some of his meet-ups, with gay men in the Rambles and elsewhere result in sex, but Friedman dare not show any real relationships, but simply hint at them, which even further alienates both his character and his audiences from feeling any true sympathy, which does in fact make this a film simply about a community which he and his character can never penetrate, even if we sense he is now firmly entrenched. He even bothers to learn from a local purveyor (played by Powers Boothe, who later played a true gay true monster Jim Jones, who killed most of his religious followers in Jim Jones in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones that very same year) about the meaning of the various colored hankies worn in various pockets. And his friendship with his neighbor Bailey deepens. But we get no sense of how he describes on his various trips back home to his increasingly confused girlfriend, whom he cannot tell of his undercover job, is truly changing him, which would have turned this film into a perhaps much more profound work.   

  In his 1980 review Roger Ebert detected the problem and put it quite simply—he was never as profound reviewer as he was imagined to be:

 

The validity of these arguments [those of the protesters against the film] is questionable and I plan to discuss them in another article. For the purposes of this review, however, let it be said that the dramatic power of “Cruising” seems to have been very negatively affected by the protests against the movie. There’s evidence here that key elements of Al Pacino’s central role were altered or compromised so that Pacino’s own involvement in the events of the plot is deliberately left unclear. Since the movie is about his involvement – much more than it’s ‘about’ the challenge of solving the killings – what we’re left with is a movie without the courage to declare itself.”

     Keith Phillips in a 2022 review in The Reveal, summarizes the entire situation much more fully, and I quote at length accordingly:

 

   “….We’re never shown what happens when Steve wanders off with other men at the end of scenes, and Steve seemingly never admits his new (?) feelings to himself. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss this subtext entirely. Friedkin bakes ambiguity into the film in ways that are stylistically fascinating but also kind of gross. Though they speak in the same overdubbed voice, different actors play the killer in each murder scene. (Shades of Zodiac.) Is there more than one killer? Is it a comment on the way participants in the scene lose their identities in the roles they play? Or is it a not-so-subtle equation with the leather scene—and homosexuality in general—with death? The film’s infamous climax—and, yes, spoilers ahead—suggests that Steve might have become a killer. Or maybe he was the killer all along?

     Ultimately, Cruising ambiguous-es itself to death. It makes villains of homophobic cops who harass cross-dressing sex workers (and demand sexual favors of them) and depicts Steve’s gay neighbor (and maybe love interest?) Ted…with tremendous sympathy— if not enough sympathy to avoid turning him into the trope of a tragic, doomed gay man. But it mostly wants to gawp at what it sees, lingering on lurid details in ways that feel designed to shock rather than invite consideration. As Phil Nobile Jr. put it in a 2012 look at the film, the ‘extreme subculture is more exploited than explored.’ In 1980, depictions of gay sexuality of any kind in mainstream films were pretty rare and usually pretty tame. Though less explicit in the released version than in Friedkin’s original cut, Cruising drops viewers in the deep end with explicit depictions of an intentionally insular gay subculture. Today, a thriller set in a gay nightclub scene would be one of many depictions of LGBTQ+ existence. Unschooled viewers in 1980 with no point of comparison were given no reason not to mistake it for the whole of LGBTQ+ existence by a film that invited them to view it with, at best, wariness and suspicion. (Even the terminology making distinctions between L, G, B, T, Q, and + wasn’t in place yet.)” 

     There are moments when the film almost redeems itself, as when Burns, mistakenly it appears, focuses on a young local waiter Skip Lee (Jay Acovone), who working at a steak restaurant uses knives quite similar to those which killed the victims, and actually lures him into bed, with talk of tying the policeman up and having sex. Losing reception outside in a police truck, the cops get terrified about the situation and come rushing to Burns rescue before he is even able to begin any sexual contact or discover whether or not the young man is dangerous. Still, he is arrested and beaten by the police and to protect Burn’s identity, he too is roughed up by a near-naked black cop who enters and punches him in the face, a sort of marvelous role, given the justification it proposes of a black man hired to thump dirty white boys for just who they are.

     Finally, disgusted by the police’s gay bashing, Burns threatens to quit the job. He is convinced by Edelson to continue as he reprimands the officers involved with Lee’s interrogation. But still, he doesn’t seek out other street cops who have long been abusing gay figures.

     Nonetheless, Burns returns to his job, focusing now on a student of the Columbia professor, one of the first to be murdered. Burns now suspects, through searches of class pictures, Stuart Richards, a graduate music student whom Burns has seen previously at one of the bars. Richards seems outwardly ordinary, but when Burns breaks into his apartment he discovers S&M attire, and a box of highly disturbing letters he has written to his deceased father. He also discovers a knife in his closet, again matching the one used by the murderer.

     Luring the young man out of his apartment, he follows him later to the park where he cruises for sex. Richards, now knowing Burns is on to him, cannot help but play the sexual game, as Burns asks Richards to lower his pants. Richards pulls out his knife, but the policeman quickly disarms him. Later, taken into police custody, medical figures argue that the letters indicate schizophrenia, and forensic specialists determine that his fingerprints on the knife match those discovered at other murder sites.

     In a sense Burns becomes a sort of “hero” whom Edelson can finally congratulate. That is until

 Ted Bailey, Burns’ friend down the hall is found to be brutally stabbed, perceived a lover’s quarrel with his abusive partner Gregory (James Remar). But when Edelson discovers that his own man lived just down the hall, he has now his own suspicions that change the entire film.

     I don’t see that there is any evidence of Burns’ involvement. Just a few days previously, he has almost violently confronted Gregory for his abuse of Bailey, and throughout the film Bailey is one of his only true friends. And there is utterly no evidence that he approached Bailey for sex and was turned down, the only other logical explanation for such an act.

     Why the director suddenly wanted to shift blame to Burns himself is more than inexplicable and almost disgusting, suggesting perhaps that anyone into bondage or S&M can quickly move into violent territory.

      If nothing else, there is now clear evidence that Burns has changed his sexual identification, which again is something that the directorial team has not quite figured out. Is sexuality simply a matter of being exposed to it, or is it inborn. In 1980 there were no clear answers which increasingly, of course, we now see to be inborn with perhaps some social-parental issues also playing a role.

      In the film, however, Burns, having finally made up with Nancy, promising now to tell her about his role after he shaves, discovers Nancy dressed in his leather jacket, hat, and aviator glasses, while he looks off, as the Wikipedia article puts it, "blankly into the mirror." He appears he will not find it easy going back to regular heteronormative life.

      In short, Cruising in 2026 is not the monstrous film it was once seen to be, but just a failed and confused film by a talented director who should have done far more research on his subjects and locations before even imagining the he might be able to capture the issues it attempts to explore. Cruising might have been a far better film if only it wasn’t shot in 1980, at a time when the gay movement was coming into its identity, and was understandably nervous about how it was portrayed, particularly given the S&M focus of this work. Friedkin’s arguments that his film was never really about the gay world but was a murder mystery are rather lame in retrospect. But had he fully embraced his themes, expanded some of his characters and made them truly human, with his directorial talents he might have made a brilliant gay film long before such a work was even imagined. This movie merely escapes from really exploring its own subject.     

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

 

 

 

Andrew Hull | That Thing We Do / 2003

learning how to love a seemingly unlovable family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Hull (screenwriter and director) That Thing We Do / 2003 [16 minutes]

 

Canadian director Andrew Hull’s unusual coming out tale is as good as they come, but even I have to admit, at moments, in its quick shift of time frames is also a bit confusing. Kevin (Drew Roby) returns home to the woods and cottage in Alberta, Canada a couple of times in this film, the first after he leaves his boyfriend who has no interest in joining him.

     He appears to arrive by canoe.

  There we encounter his boisterous family of several sisters and their husbands, interested in wrestlingmania, played out in a charades event, and in other events that obviously have utterly no meaning to the handsome gay boy in their midst, who one sister knows is gay, but whom the others seem absolutely clueless about. Moreover, the father is apparently a true homophobe, insisting that the wrestling players are all a bunch of faggots who prance around half-naked in tights.

     On this first visit, moreover, Cody shows up, who the women all agree, is a hot young man, whom the heavier set sister introduces again to everyone, the young man just checking out who might wish to go skiing the next day. But we quickly discover that, in fact, Kevin not only knows Cody, but was an old sexual flame, which soon after begins to heat up with a kissing session; but in the midst of their intense kisses, Kevin backs off—obviously because of his relationship with Antoine (Salvatore Antonio)—Cody unable to understand the sudden lack of passion and angry at the confusing rejection of his past love.

    On his second visit, however, things have quite radically changed. If Antonine seemed simply disinterested in the visit the first time, he now, having established a quite successful landscaping business with his boyfriend, refuses to join him because Kevin has not yet come out to his father, something he insists upon before he will return back to the Canadian countryside with him. Things have also changed back home, where he now has a young cousin, Adam (Liam Robinson), who will hardly leave him alone for even a moment. Arriving in his landscaping SUV truck, everyone in this backcountry world is impressed, the young boy in particular.

    But it soon becomes apparent that the precocious boy is desperate for an older brother, even explaining the fun time he sometimes has with his young friend back at home. Yet, without suggesting that he is a gay boy-in-the-making, it is so clear that he not only desires but needs Kevin’s company that it is almost painful to watch him attempting to convey his love and admiration. At one point he comes and lays his head against Kevin’s back, a flower dropped on Kevin’s torso, unnecessary interruptions when Kevin is simply trying to recommunicate with his closest sister Susan (Leanna Barnes), and many other intrusions that it is resulted in tears for me, the realization that this young boy is trying finally to have a semi-adult conversation with his beautiful older cousin who is having his own problems simply facing up to his family. Kevin too might have found solace in an older male just to talk to while he was growing up, instead of a local boy lover.

     Finally, Adam begs him to please join him in “doing that thing we do,” which Kevin, at first, cannot quite comprehend; is he asking him to swim with him again, take him on his canoe? Finally, suddenly Adam makes their shared secret apparent. In the deep woods, Kevin has shown him major dance moves, not the kind of intimate dancing, his mother insists upon, but all sorts of other dancing that clearly Kevin participates in with his lover and others in the clubs.

      We watch them trying out new moves, even brake dancing to the boy’s absolute delight, and realize that this is what adult mentoring, the kind of brotherly love available to some younger boys, is all about.

     Later, Kevin finally insists that his father, a bit confused by his insistence, join him in the truck for a drive. We know what’s finally going to be said, and the movie doesn’t go them. But his young cousin has made him realize that he must try to explain to his father his own needs and existence just as Adam has made so clear to him.

      This is a perfectly refreshing, clear-headed film that works, however, by coming at the characters and its audiences from the sides, forcing issues they might never have imagined from other sources than they might have expected.

      Let me just admit that I loved this gentle film; but then there were so many excellent gay films in the first decades of the 21st century which I wish many of today’s films might have learned from. And Canadian filmmaking has been such a rich treasure hidden evidently from it’s nearest neighbor, the US. It’s frustrating still today just how many of the great Canadian director’s John Greyson’s films are unavailable to US audiences with extraordinarily high rental fees. The director of this excellent film, Andrew Hull, unfortunately, died of a head injury after a fall from his bicycle in 2010 at age 47.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

 

Tod Browning | Dracula / 1931

homage to a dead vampire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garrett Fort (screenplay, based on the book by Bram Stoker and the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston), Tod Browning (director) Dracula / 1931

 

Before I even begin discussing this film, I must reassert what has long been presumed and discussed often in academia, but not in the popular media: Vampires are inherently homosexual, and their activities of sucking the blood of living human beings cannot help but be associated with sexual activities, along with other queer forms of behavior which border on cannibalism and purposeful infection.

     Let me just begin by reminding the reader that in order to survive, the vampire, who lives only at night and evidently for eternity unless special actions are taken (a stake in the heart, sunlight pouring in upon a vampire in his coffin, etc.), survives only through the intake of human blood, the gender being of no importance. In both F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and in Tod Browning’s Dracula, in fact, it is the male courier Thomas Hutter in Nosferatu and Renfield (Dwight Frye) in the 1931 film to whom the vampire is first attracted, and who, in both cases, become slaves to his desires. In the original Bram Stoker fiction, the author expresses it even more clearly in having his Dracula—as he orders his women vampire cohorts out of John Harker’s room (in the original it is Harker who travels to Transylvania in order to meet with Count Dracula)—exclaim “To-night is mine! To-morrow is yours?” as he moves into the bite.* And later, after Lucy Weston dies, becoming the vampire described as “the woman in white,” she dines almost exclusively on female children, hinting at kind of lesbian pedophile behavior as well. Because of his needs of sleeping in the soil in which he is buried, his limitation to night time activities (the way we point to the gay life of bars and clubs today) and his strange sexual habits, the vampire inherently is forever an outsider, one who cannot safely be brought into heteronormative society.

     Of the numerous essays discussing this phenomenon, I’ll quote a couple of more recent critical studies, the first by Clare Nee from her essay “The Haunt of Injustice: Exploring Homophobia in Vampire Literature”:

 

“The classic texts of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula reinforce the notion that the vampire encapsulates societal anxieties about the “uncontrollable,” one that pertains to sexuality and transforms these narratives into cultural hauntings. While some people may believe that vampire literature are composed of merely silly, “make believe” stories, the truth is that they act as platforms to address serious social issues—such as homophobia—that still haunt our society. Carmilla and Dracula portray the hunts for and violent deaths of homosexual vampires to underscore the normalized marginalization of homosexuals, a cultural haunting that extends into modern society.”

 

     Or, as William A. Tringali puts it in his essay “Not Just Dead, But Gay!”:

 

“The vampire is the queerest of monsters. Its terror does not emerge because it is an ungodly creation of science, or a mindless killing machine. It does not rise from the deep, scaled and covered in algae to steal unwary beachgoers. It is not a mishmash of various corpses, sewn together by a mad scientist. It does not howl at the moon, or remain a mild-mannered Jekyll in its waking hours, only to transform when it lies down to bed.

     No, the horror of the vampire is sexual. Worse, it is sexual in all the wrong ways. It is beautiful, charming, even occasionally funny and likeable, but definitively abnormal. This allows the vampire to become a conduit for cultural anxieties concerning queerness within society. As a creature that straddles the binaries of life and death, drawing attraction and repulsion, the vampire queers both gender and sexuality. Stories about vampires can reflect and dramatize cultural anxieties surrounding queerness across both time periods and mediums.”

     Other than Dracula (Bela Lugosi) himself and Mina Seward (Helen Chandler), the female who he chooses to attack—more as a way to get to her fiancée John Harker, I argue, than his secondary  attempt to diminish the strong intelligent and independent-thinking women of the day who Mina and her friend Lucy Weston (Frances Dade) represent—the central figure of Browning’s version of the myth is actually Renfield, who is left by the vampire in the least pleasant of situations: a still-living man in the thrall of the beast, who, although able to survive in the daylight, is unable to fulfill his nighttime desires, particularly to feast of human blood. He is left only with rats, flies, and an occasional spider. Aware of what is happening to the Seward family, inculpating him the gradual murder of Mina, he is nonetheless unable to prevent what is occurring due to the ignorance of Harker and even Mina’s father, both of whom resist the warnings of Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) and Renfield himself.

     Renfield is both made detestable because of his horrific laughter which is interrupted to be part of his madness and pitiable because of his “in-between,” twilight kind of existence. He is neither fully human or one of the “undead.” You might almost describe him as gender indecisive, or even as a closeted queer, a man who dreadfully desires to suck the blood of a human male but is forced to refuse himself the privilege, demanded by outside forces (in this case Dracula) to fulfill his  desires with unhuman flesh, making him also an outsider but with none of the vampire group support system. He can read the language of the wolves, but still cannot run with them. At only one point in the film, when the maid faints, does Renfield dare to move in for human flesh, and that it quickly interrupted.

    If Seward and particularly Harker were not so stubbornly traditional and heterosexual in their presumptions, they might have used Renfield very effectively as a conduit to the vampire world, saving Mina far earlier from the intermixture of blood which will doom her to the life of vampirism. But Harker is insistent in Browning’s version of enacting a kind of rape, of carrying her off to London presumably to protect her, when in fact it will simply remove her from Van Helsing’s useful, if still ineffective protection.

     Instead, Dracula uses her as a tool to get to Harker, forcing her to attempt to bite into and suck her would-be lover’s blood, another evidence of gender shifts in this film, demanding that Mina be the active force of sexual desire while the male Harker sits back in dull contemplation of what he might possibly do to save his woman. And in this sense, the scene when she interrupted mid-bite is a truly comic scene.

     Of course, male privilege and English Victorian order must be restored, the source of sexual deviation—as well as representing an infiltration of foreignness (a symbol of the British fear of being overwhelmed by Jews and the Romani) and the Victorian fears of disease which Nosferatu and Dracula both represent (particularly Syphilis, but also with the specter of rats, Bubonic Plague and other diseases)—must be permanently destroyed before it spreads. The strange mix of scientificism and belief in primitive folklore that Van Helsing represents is finally forced into action as he and Harker visit the Abbey where Dracula resides.

     Dracula, feeling betrayed by Renfield, murders his slave who cries as he is strangled are those a still human being who knows that for him there will be no afterlife, since his blood has not yet been fully intermixed.

     Wandering about calling out Mina’s name instead of being able to bring himself to action, Browning’s Harker is sent to find some object to help Van Helsing pound in the stake, and it is Van Helsing who finally destroys the sexual abnormality that Dracula represents.

     That destruction, oddly, completely restores Mina to complete female lassitude as she explains to Harker her attempt to call out for him but had no power to express. Van Helsing, in a strange moment, sends the now normalized lovers off, explaining he will join them shortly. Why, one must ask, does he remain in the cellar of the Abbey with the dead monster, even momentarily? It is a question that has haunted ever since I first saw this film as a young man, and even more so when I revisited it the other morning.

     You needn’t be academic to simply wonder about this event or even in one’s attempts to possibly to explain it. I think the answer might have something to do with the fact that throughout the narrative, Van Helsing himself as been in a kind of middle-ground of the societal concerns in which he lives. He is, as I suggested earlier, both a believer in the scientific method and in the ancient myths and wives-tales of the Romani, who play a much larger role in Stoker’s original epistolary fiction. It is Van Helsing who first notices that Count Dracula does not appear in the cigarette box mirror, or, in other words, that his image is not properly reflected in the normative vision of the Sewards and Victorian society in general. Realizing that Van Helsing is his true enemy, Dracula attempts to do away with him through hypnotism, drawing him near so that, perhaps, he might suck Van Helsing himself into his world.

      Van Helsing moves slowly forward, as if on command, but then moves just as slowly backward in his tracks, obviously fighting the force of Dracula’s power. Dracula himself recognizes that his foe has “a very strong will,” realizing that he cannot simply pull the scientist into his orbit even if the man believes somewhat in the supernatural, or, to put it in other terms, perceives that there is in fact a world of sexual difference available to the society.

       Could it be that Van Helsing himself feels the pull of homosexuality, but has been successful throughout his life in resisting it, in disallowing his emotions to overtake his intellect? If so, it would only be natural that the man wants a moment to bow down in homage to the monster he has overcome, a monster even within himself. He perhaps needs a moment of private worship or prayer to the force he has been able to destroy not only in the world but within his own being.

       Given the immense outpouring of Dracula-based films and vampire movies since the appearances of Nosferatu and Dracula, it might have seemed like a wonderful idea to group and compare the dozens of films as I have done for the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-influenced works and the films involving Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. But the Dracula and other vampire films are so numerous and also involved, many representing a gradual transformation of the original myth, that in the end I felt it better to contextualize such films within the periods in which they were released.

    A substantial number of directors, moreover, not fully grasping the sexual implications of same-sex blood sucking, have presented their Draculas to be primarily heterosexual opportunists, like the monsters that the #MeTo movement have come to speak out against, who represent little of direct interest for the LGBTQ community. Particularly given the vast resurgence of interest in the vampire that has occurred in the past ten years, giving rise to dozens and dozens of new films mostly aimed at younger audiences, I will discuss appropriate works within the context of the period in which they were created. If the 1994 Anne Rice-inspired Interview with a Vampire is a direct descendant of Dracula, George A. Romeros 1968 ghouls of Night of the Living Dead issue from the graves of another fictional universe.

 

*Stoker, who was apparently homosexual himself, was worried that the line might make the novel unpublishable in the England of 1897, feeling that, as Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal put it, “the America that produced his Walt Whitman would have been more tolerant of men feeding on men.” Stoker wrote highly homoerotic letters to Whitman and the two became friends. Stoker also began writing Dracula one month after the death of his friend, Oscar Wilde.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2023).

Lloyd Bacon | Wonder Bar / 1934

sleepwalkers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Earl Baldwin (screenplay, based on the play by Geza Herczeg, Karl Farkas, and Robert Katscher),

Lloyd Bacon (director), Busby Berkeley (musical director) Wonder Bar / 1934

 

Upon her arrival early in the film at the famed Parisian nightclub Wonder Bar, a bourgeois Babbitt from Schenectady, Mrs. Pratt (Louise Fazenda)—wife of the manufacturer of “nuts” (Hugh Herbert), accompanied to the club with his businessman friend, Simpson (Guy Kibbee), the manufacturer of “bolts”—declares to Mrs. Simpson (Ruth Donnelly) “Well, this place doesn’t compare with the lobby of the Bijou Theatre in West Schenectady!” The women, nonetheless, find the interior of the bar, particularly in the vast caverns of endless dances featuring Busby Berkeley’s multiple-mirrored sets, to be quite enticing.

     Their husbands are simply looking for a good time with a couple of belles de nuit who spot them and follow along with the several moves of table Mrs. Pratt insists upon as the girls ogle and wink at their husbands. Don’t worry, when a gigolo gets sight of the heavily bosomed Schenectady “mother” he makes a pass, and the two women determine to put a little sleeping powder into their husband’s nightcaps to permit themselves a night in gay paree, just as their husbands determine to apply the same deceit to free them of their wives. We get the idea immediately: for those who can’t truly appreciate the wonders of Wonder Bar a good night’s sleep is a just punishment.

      The real denizens of this club which features the dance duo, Inez (Dolores del Rio) and Harry (Ricardo Cortez), are much more sophisticated in their attempts to get the love they want. Liane (Kay Francis) is determined to run away from her famous banker husband Renaud (Henry Kolker) if necessary to maintain her affair with Harry; and Inez, who loves Harry, as we later discover, is willing to go even further in her attempts to keep him in her bed.

      Meanwhile, nearly every male in the joint, particularly Wonder Bar’s owner and emcee Al (Al Jolson) and the club’s band leader and off-stage composer, Tommy (Dick Powell), is in love with Inez, Al having nightly dreams of her floating above his bed and Tommy staying up all night to create songs about his amorous pursuit.

      And then there is the Wonder Bar regular Captain Hugo Von Ferring (Robert Barrat) who, having just lost everything he had left in the stock market is planning to spend the few francs he has left to celebrate a grand send off with the chorus girls and others before driving over a cliff on his way back to his house.

      Love, it seems, might put nearly everyone in this film to sleep before the night’s out. If the American nuts and bolts quartet are destined to a long night’s snooze, so is the sleazy double-crossing Harry provided an early dispatch into eternal rest by a knife his jealous partner puts in his chest as they whip up, quite literally, a gaucho dance (the South American version, evidently, of the French Danse apache). To save the woman he loves from any embarrassment, Al manages to stow Harry’s body in the Captain’s car, having been told by that gentleman about his midnight plans. That’s 6 down...and 3 to go. But wait, Inez, almost immediately recovering from her passionate mistake, finally comes to realize that she truly does love Harry, who given the singing composer’s bland and always smiling presence will surely soon bore her to death.

      Meanwhile, the movie’s audience might wish to have a little cat-nap to escape the loudly recorded stand-up jokes which Jolson cracks whenever director Lloyd Bacon gives him an opportunity, which is far too often. There’s the one about the nudist colony from which Al has just returned, “tired from seeing the same faces all the time.” Did you know that in America a boudoir is a place to sleep, while in France it’s a playground? A chaise lounge is a Murphy bed back in the good old USA. A moment later there’s the long embarrassing skit in which Jolson pretends he’s Russian, striking up a conversation with his White Russian émigré friend Count “Ofenlong” in which he describes the former great “wiolinist,” having lost everything, is now a street peddler selling “or-ang-és wid and wid-out cids.” The skit goes on...but I have to presume that your interest has already “vaned.”

       If those worse-than-vaudeville jokes don’t put you into a dreamy heaven of slumber Jolson’s overtly racist blackface number “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule” will surely send you into a stupor of astonishment.

      Writing in Sense of Cinema, David Boxwell describes the event:    

       

"This now notoriously extravagant 'tribute' to African-American culture serves as a key illustration of the laxity of official overseeing and governance of content in Hollywood films before the middle of 1934. No doubt entirely defensible to its creators, this long musical number climaxing the film is only different in degree to the many ways in which mainstream American popular culture appropriated black culture and distorted it through a racist lens which was ostensibly “affectionate.” As Eric Lott argues, “blackface minstrelsy has seemed a form in which transgression and containment coexisted, in which improbably threatening or startlingly sympathetic racial meanings were simultaneously produced and dissolved.” Thanks to his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927), Al Jolson was associated with blackface performance traditions originating as far back as the 1830s. This number was a kind of apotheosis of Jolson’s blackface star persona, but Berkeley also intended the number to be a fashionable reflection of the Harlem Renaissance’s verve, as well as a utopian vision of material plenitude for deprived Depression audiences, regardless of their racial-ethnic identity. While we find the grotesque elaboration of racial stereotyping in the number appalling today, Wallis and Lord also must have known, deep down, that the unfettered breach of taste inherent in the number wouldn’t fly past the SRC, hence their unwillingness to screen it for the Committee."

      Well, you might say to yourself, there are all those Busby Berkeley numbers to simply sit back and enjoy. But here too, I find the repeated images of hundreds upon hundreds of women, hands swaying through the air while their gentlemen dancer friends move in and out of pillars to be a real snooze. There are, as usual, the impossible-to-believe overhead kaleidoscopic visions of human bodies shifting, like wilted flowers, into patterns that are momentarily worth watching just for pure wonderment. I am sure, however, that when Siegfried Kracauer saw this film he must have gone bananas (that’s crazy in German), with which, by the way, Berkeley had much more fun (that’s bananas not Kracauer).

      And speaking of fun: any gay viewer on the lookout for the film’s rumored “panze” humor should not blink twice. There is the early scene when a man asks if he may “cut in” to a seemingly heterosexual dancing couple, only to dance away with the man, to which Al, hand on hip, limp wrist in air, snipes: “Boys will be boys.” And even in heaven there is a blackfaced fairy, hankie in hand, who hands Al his silver foil wings. Well, at least black gays don’t necessarily go to hell.

      Whoever suggested that all pre-code movies were a lot more fun ought to be forced to sit down to watch Wonder Bar back to back twice, no snoring permitted. But then by the year this film was released it was no longer a “pre-code” movie. Things had changed, and those two men dancing off across the crowded dancefloor were also dancing out of our lives.

     It almost makes one want to cry when recalling that this film was 1934s big hit. I think Mrs. Pratt was probably right, I bet the West Schenectady Bijou did have better features.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queen Cinema blog (October 2020).