Matheus Marchetti | O Bosque dos Sonâmbulos (Garden of the Sleepwalkers) / 2017

deeper into the woods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matheus Marchetti (screenwriter and director) O Bosque dos Sonâmbulos (Garden of the Sleepwalkers) / 2017 [21 minutes]

 

In a Brazilian mountainside hotel that appears to be from another time, perhaps early in the 20th century, a singer (Mere Oliveira) performs a popular Italian number, while an older man (Tony Germano) dances with a younger woman got in in partial ballerina garb, Eva (Isabel Lima), and a young boy, Thomas (Celo Carvalho) stares at and flirts with the young piano player Oliver (Kaleb Figueiredo) (or perhaps vice versa since we are given no clear identification of characters).

     We know little about the slightly discolored scene, as if the film itself had faded over time, and the events are basically inexplicable.

      The nurse (Isabella Melo) comes and settles the old man back into his wheel chair as the dancing ballerina suddenly disappears.

      The young Thomas’ nose begins to bleed. Perhaps this is a retreat for the ill as in Thomas Mann’s great fiction The Magic Mountain. We have no context, except to know that for just a few moments its colors light up into full reality for its participants.

      But at the same time, as night falls, something even more amazing begins to take place as the would-be nighttime sleepers rise, one by one, from their beds and in the gardens and woodlands about the place, begin to live out their sexual fantasies.

     Yet it begins with what appears to be dreams of the past, Thomas as a young boy discussing with an even younger boy the story he is reading about vampires and how to kill them. In fact, he describes the denizens of the hotel itself being vampires who come out each night to satisfy their lusts.

     As The Night Creature (Alice Tassara) summons them, one by one they appear in the wilds about the place.

     In particular, the two cute boys enter into a kind of vow of marriage, drinking what may be wine, but looks more like blood from a goblet. It is clearly, however, a kind of vampirish marriage ceremony as they sing, “I shall be yours, to love and destroy you, come, tear me apart, love me…”

    The old man finally kisses his young dancer and other lovers embrace. The two young boys, now naked, engage in sex.

   Others coil into sex embraces, as one of the boy lovers now begins to drink the blood of his companion, the child of his youth now witnessing the acts and running off in terror, many of the demons of the night rushing after him.

    But the moon has suddenly disappeared, and the Night Creature suddenly feels betrayed as they quickly abandon her, “returning to Earth,” the night lovers “vanishing in the wind.” “Everything returns the way it should be.”

      And just as suddenly, we are back in the hotel restaurant, in the faded-colored world of the past, where the residents only have stares of desire left to amuse themselves, the only difference being is that it now appears the boy of Thomas’ childhood is now also amongst the guests, himself looking with pleasure towards the beautiful piano player.

     It is hard to know for sure what the sexual perspective is of this film. Is it suggesting that all love is a vampirish activity, a world only of nightmarish dreams?

     I’d argue that for these frozen individuals of another time, love was impossible to express except through such frightening visions. They were given no opportunity to actually live in the flesh-and-blood world of love. They were vampires simply because they couldn’t fully explore their desires, their true sexualities, and the myth of vampirish arose because of that very fact, presenting an imaginary world to them of their own lust and sexual perversities in a society that did not allow such expressions of love. In a sense, these are all vampires of their own making, of their own private imaginations. This cure spa does not resolve their problems but only imprisons them in further isolation from a world of sexual realization, perhaps one of Mann’s themes as well.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

 

Howard Hawks | A Girl in Every Port / 1928

loving men

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Kevin McGuinness (screenplay, based on a scenario by Seton I. Miller, with intertitles by Malcolm Stuart), Howard Hawks (director) A Girl in Every Port / 1928

 

I’ve always been bemused by the fact that the hard drinking, motorcycling and car racing enthusiast, close friend to macho writers and actors William Faulkner, Ben Hecht, Ernest Hemingway, and Gary Cooper, and rich boy celebrant of boy club behavior, also directed a substantial number of films that represented gay figures and often coded LGBTQ behavior (works such as Fig Leaves, Bringing Up Baby, Red River, I Was a Male War Bride, The Big Sleep, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and the film I’m about to review, A Girl in Every Port), as well as having created a substantial number of proto-feminist females—which film commentators have described as “the Hawksian woman” in works such as Bringing Up Baby, Ball of Fire, and His Girl Friday.

     Indeed, you might almost characterize many of his male characters as the Hawksian man, who prefers the company of his own sex more than that of female gender, which would include John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and other aggressively heterosexual males in films like Rio Bravo, El Dorado, Rio Lobo at the end of his long career. His easy-going directorial style, appealing to both men and women, allowed him to work with some of the most notable of Hollywood figures in almost every kind of genre from screwball comedy, war time adventure tales, westerns, and mysteries. And in many respects he defined Hollywood genres by often turning them around so that they revealed their flexibility under his great direction. If some like Orson Welles saw Hawkes’ works as “great prose,” while finding John Ford’s films to be “pure poetry,” many major directors, admiring his improvisational and collaborative style, strongly felt his influence: Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, François Truffaut, Michael Mann, and Jacques Rivette among them. Jean-Luc Godard described him as “the greatest American artist.”

    Certainly, no one would describe the chauvinist, womanizing sailors Spike Madden (Victor McLaglen later recognized for his roles in Dishonored, The Informer, and Gunga Din) and Salami (Robert Armstrong of later King Kong fame) as characters of a great US movie. The ire that Salami raises in Spike by beating him to the women he encounters in various international ports and leaving behind his calling card by branding them—either with a leg bracelet or tattoo of his finger ring insignia, and a loose anchor—might equally raise the hackles of any of us who recognize females as beings vastly most interesting and intelligent than merely playthings to fuck and leave behind.

      Yet despite this film’s obnoxious initial proposition, by its end this movie manages to switch genders so that these mindless lechers meet up with a woman, Marie (the always memorable Louise Brooks) who wants the same thing as they do, along with their money; and she leaves the two macho sailors who have slugged their way across several continents, to fall into each other’s arms and plan to settle down on a little farm together. Indeed, even after their first boxing bout, which ends in their venting all their pent-up male testosterone on the equally loathed local police force, they have already committed to traveling the world together; and even before being cured of their lothario-complex by Marie, Spike has invited Salami to settle down with him. It simply takes Marie’s attempt to wedge her body between their male alliance—call it camaraderie if you don’t want to face the fact that they can’t keep their hands off one another or want to ignore the fact that early on Salami has also branded Spike by the imprint of his ring—for the two to realize, as Salami puts it to Marie, “Nothin’ doin’ kid, that big ox means more to me than any woman.”

      And even if when Spike discovers that the woman he claims he wants to marry has also long ago been branded by Salami’s anchor so that he has to knock out of his best buddy, the film finishes up with him stroking his hand across his friend’s head as he moves in for what we know, the minute the director calls cut, will be a kiss. And both still have time before the blackout to restate their eternal commitment to one another which anyone but someone like Clark Gable or Mel Gibson would have admit were the words of a couple who were committing to marriage.

    Marie has no choice but to slink off into the sunset to find herself another dumb cluck with whom she might hitch a ride into heterosexual bliss.

   Even the tough poet-novelist Blaise Cendrars recognized A Girl in Every Port to be a film that “definitely marked the first appearance of contemporary cinema.” And French archivist and cinephile Henry Langlois proclaimed Hawks to be “the Gropius of the cinema,” by which I presume he was suggesting that Hawks was the architect and teacher of how to construct a great film, despite A Girl in Every Port’s obvious flaws.

      In the early LGBTQ cinema bible, The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo goes even further in testifying to Hawks’ importance for gay and lesbian filmmaking:

 

“Howard Hawks always concentrated on the guys, and in his films things went better—better than [William Wyler's] Ben Hur, at least. Dealing almost always with close, dependent, emotional male relationships, his films were informed with a particularly schizophrenic sensibility with regard to maleness and the intrusion of women into its world.

     ....Robert Armstrong repeatedly starts a brawl in order to keep his buddy Victor McLaglen away from the ladies in A Girl in Every Port, a film which Hawks called “really a love story between two men.” The title could well be ironic; the phrase “a girl in every port,” a bravado claim, was almost always used facetiously. No sailor ever had a girl in every port, and every sailor was paranoid about the fellows’ finding it out.”

       

      One might, finally, interpret Salami’s tattoo as not being a statement of his conquering and possession, but as a warning to others to keep away, hinting that the girl was dangerous and deceptive, someone, who like Marie, would steal your life-savings and skip out of any real relationship in which her lover imagined engaging. After all, Marie is a high board diver, a woman who can swoop down from the clouds like a vulture to steal the heart and wallet of dumb men like Spike. While in Hawks’ world men are equals; they fight and squabble on level ground, getting angry and forgiving one another in matter of a few seconds. The very moment Salami has dragged his enemy into the bay to beat his brains out, when he realizes that his sailor friend can’t swim he proceeds to save his life, while after, when Salami discovers all his cigarettes are wet, Spike offers him a fresh one wrapped in plastic.

       So strangely enough their chauvinism is redeemed by a misogyny so severe that they’d rather be chaste male lovers than active heterosexuals. In the end, one might argue their logic to be the reverse of that of many male prostitutes: what does sex have to do with the love of someone of the same gender?

       And, of course, just the year before the far braver director William Wellman had even more brilliantly explored a world, in his brilliant picture Wings, in which two male comrades not only experienced love but brought it very close to something we can describe as being sexual. And the very same year as Hawks’ film German director William Dieterle in Sex in Chains would make it clear that two men could very easily transform their love into sex, although for them, as Russo might observe, it would end badly as it did for most men and women who actualized their same-desires in cinema throughout the 20th century.

 

Los Angeles, May 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

 

Claude Chabrol | Les godelureaux (Wise Guys) / 1961

endless revenge for a perceived slight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Gégauff and Claude Chabrol (screenplay, based on a fictional work by Éric Ollivier), Claude Chabrol (director) Les godelureaux (Wise Guys) / 1961

 

I have long been an admirer of the early new wave-like films of Claude Chabrol, who I believe to be much more talented than the endlessly vaunted François Truffaut and often even Jean-Luc Godard, the latter of who I very much admire. Chabrol, moreover, was not at all afraid of including gay figures in a great number of his films, even, obviously, if sometimes they represent the evil or disorienting forces, or, as in this case, an almost satanic force, akin to Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of [the] Demon Brother. They are, at least, paid attention to and given force in his films, in this case, as we shall see, for a better result for all the heterosexual individuals involved.

     In Wise Guys it is Arthur (Charles Belmont) and his group of rowdy boys and girls who represent the new wave youths, who push their way through the Paris streets on their way to Café de Flore on Blvd St. Germain only to discover that someone has taken their sacred parking space in front of the café. The hot roadster parked there belongs to Ronald (Jean-Claude Brialy), a foppish, quite clearly wealthy gay slightly older man. With others inside the café, they pick up the car (the film is in black-and-white, but in my imagination it is red) and quickly move it onto the sidewalk so that they can park in their usual spot.

      These young men are also privileged, both by their youth and hot temperament and, in Arthur’s case, through living with his rich uncle (Jean Galland). One might argue that there are later incarnations of Arthur and his gang in the American wiseacres such as those in John Landis’ Animal House (1978) and Canadian director Bob Clark’s Porky’s series of films of the early 1980s. Yet there is none of these work’s adolescent humor in the French film, and Chabrol’s work, in general, feels much more sophisticated than the American crawls through drink, violence, and sex, even if while all of these are very much present in the French film.

     The outrage, moreover, of Ronald, discovering his car has been pointlessly moved, results in his swearing privately, almost Satanic revenge, plotting, along with his clearly queer and creepy "le jeune homme à tout faire’ (his working companion, played by André Jocelyn). The odd manservant is often seen carrying a metronome that reminds his lover-boss of time, something about which Arthur and his friends have no conception.

     Meanwhile, he uses the lovely street girl Ambroisine (Bernadette Lafont) as bait to begin his revenge on Arthur. She quickly gets the young man’s attention, he forcing her to join his retinue, and by night’s end joining him in his room at his uncle’s house for sex.

      So begins Arthur’s long love-affair with Ambroisine, who weaves him back into Ronald’s orbit, first with visit to a store to buy stink bombs on their way to attend a showing of a bourgeois artist who paints women’s bodies before demonstrating his own works. Ronald has just purchased all of the stink bombs, but invites Arthur and Ambroisine along as they enter the crowded gallery space, where even before the bombs go off some gay men offended by the artist’s display of female bodies, turn up their noses and quickly leave. Soon after Ronald and Arthur set off their stick bombs forcing everyone to immediately flee. The rapport he establishes with Arthur in this scene permits his growing friendship with the younger boy and his torture of the previously carefree boy.

     Commentator Shawn Grenier has noted on Letterboxd that the figure of this artist was probably based in Yves Klein, who recognizing himself in the caricature, attempted to sue the filmmaker.

      The next step is an invitation for the two of them, Arthur and Ambroisine, to join him for a luncheon at his aunt’s house. There is insists that Ambroisine attempt to flirt with his cousin Henri, a mathematician-musician who is about to marry his fiancé (Sascha Briquet) in two long years, when she finishes her education. Meanwhile Henri falls madly in love with almost every woman he meets, and cannot resist an hour or so with the lovely Ambroisine. Ronald agrees to decorate and arrange the charity event for his aunt’s support of orphans.

     The interior decorator in him comes into full play as he completely redoes her rooms, provides delicious canapes and even ballerinas and servants dressed up in 18th century garb. Once “Le president” (Jean Tissier) arrives, however, he settles down to business, presenting a wild modern female dancer, dressed scantily and showing off her body in the best possible manner (Stéphane Audran), followed by an older performer from the Folies Bergère, both completely scandalizing the elderly attendees. Finally, after lecturing them for their hypocrisy he introduces Satan, once more represented in a flow of stink bombs that sends the entire audience including his aunt out of the rooms.

      In so doing, of course, Ronald has again set his coils around the young, innocent Arthur, who now is completely infatuated with Ambroisine. But upon one of their visits to Ronald’s house, which have begun to be regular, they stay overnight, Ambroisine sneaks off to bed with the apparently bisexual or convincingly multi-sexual Ronald, furthering a divide between Arthur and his now passion.

     So far, he has brought the young boy into his snare through bad behavior against the elderly, ruling class, but now Ronald advances, in his most egregious acts, upon Ronald’s own life, jeopardizing his uncle’s largesse, his support to college, and even his possibility of having a place in which even to live. While Arthur accompanies his uncle for a couple of days to the country concerning family property, Ronald, with Ambroisine’s help arranges a true toga party, in which most of the celebrants are dressed up in the usual sheets, while he does truly dress up like a Roman emperor, cape and all. It is clear that he is a kind of Caligula, in this case demanding of his fellow revelers that they do not bother this time with sex, but in the pure destruction of the world around them. Slowly they destroy the furniture, objects, and precious valuables, including windows of Arthur’s uncle’s estate, dumping women into tubs of milk and, finally, tossing cream pies in one another’s faces all alternating with a totally polite but also somewhat course dinner at a provincial restaurant with Arthur and his uncle, who chows down a great many dishes on the menu with gusto and often a lack of recognition of even the ingredients; for example, he must ask the waitress / owner even what is the object lying next to his meat, which appears to be a grape.

     When Arthur returns before his uncle he discovers the chaos, Ambroisine pouting for her evil doings and Ronald promising to even pay for the destruction. Yet Arthur can only forgive Ambrosine for her behavior since he has become so absurdly in love with her.

     And even these actions do not keep him from seeking out Ronald. 

     Given Ronald’s advice to stop telling her he loves her, Arthur and Ambroisine temporarily break up, but do come back together, taking a lovely trip to the Pyrenees. But there they also discuss whether or not they are truly ready to marry, as they have insisted they are about to do back in Paris. She still commits to marriage, but when they are ready to return, she insists that she must go first to visit her daughter, of whom she has never spoken to Arthur.

     Actually, she is running away to Cannes for a prearranged meeting with Ronald, who evidently quite satisfies her sexual desires, so much so that she falls asleep on the beach, when Ronald creates a large sign explaining that it is time for him to leave. He grabs a large stick with a small bag attached as if he was a hobo, meeting up again with his manservant with a car waiting in the woods to drive him back to Paris.

      When Arthur can no longer explain Ambroisine’s absence to his friends, he again visits Ronald, who admits to him, as a “civilized gentleman,” as he assures him, although still lying like the Devil, but admitting honestly that he no longer knows where she is. But he does attempt to assure our young love-sick fool that Ambroisine was never the right woman for him, and in a short while he will some appropriate woman and everything will have changed.

      Indeed, just such a situation eventually occurs, as we see him with a quite attractive younger girl. Afterwards, he meets up with Ambroisine on the pier. She has just been brought into port by a crew of US Navy seamen. She is now married to an American head of a destroyer, and does even permit a kiss beneath her veiled hat. She quickly tells him of her situation and leaves with the vessel on which she so suddenly appeared. Composer Pierre Jansen’s driving opening score begins all over again. The end.

     Evidently, Ronald has successfully not only realized his revenge but, quite amazingly, forced a new direction for his “little Arthur” to realize that having fun at the expense of others is not what life is all about. In other words, he has stolen his youth from him. Ronald and his male companion’s endless metronome has forced Arthur to grow up, an unimaginable conclusion for the American bad boys who will perhaps never quite grow up.

     If there is something very sad about this film, it never becomes tragic, and I, having now watched it two days in a row, would gladly see it all over again. Here we see events that Truffaut’s naughty Antoine Doinel could not even have imagined, and which are far more radical, in some respects, than what Godard’s American gangster-based Breathless has to offer. The new youth in Chabrol’s world survive to become adults who have learned their lessons. At what cost is for the viewer to decide.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).

 

William A. Wellman | Beggars of Life / 1928

it must be love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jim Tully (screenplay, based on his autobiography, and Maxwell Andersen based on his play, Outside Looking In), William A. Wellman (director) Beggars of Life / 1928

 

Kino Lorber’s release in 2017 of William Wellman’s 1928 silent classic Beggars of Life is to be celebrated for a number of reasons. On the one hand, a film with actors Louise Brooks (as The Girl, Nancy) and Wallace Beery (Oklahoma Red), along with lesser acting legends such as Richard Arlen (The Boy, Jim), Bob Perry (The Aransaw Snake), and Blue Washington (Black Mose)—represented in a nearly flawless cinematic restoration—which certainly helps us to reevaluate these figures. Surely this was one of Beery’s best movies, and some claim to prefer Brooks in this role over W. P. Pabst’s iconic creation of her as Lulu in Pandora’s Box of a year later. For me Brooks will always be the spoiled lesbian bad girl of the German cinema, but she is absolutely fascinating here as a kind of hobo-in-drag wanted for murder.

     Beggars is also a wonderful adventure and love story, with scenes of potential rape, child abuse, and numerous other pre-Hays “daze” subjects, including a couple of plots that suggest not only the cross-dressing of Nancy, but a subtle queer tale almost hidden by all the other genres that are played out through Wellman’s brilliant direction. Indeed, except for the police posse who follow writers Jim Tully’s and Maxwell Anderson’s characters throughout the work, one might describe every figure in this film as already being an outsider in the year just prior to the Great Depression, which would soon create an entire society of “forgotten” and alienated men and women in American life.

     In one of the worst years I have experienced in my life (2020), seeing this film along with several other masterworks of cinema almost redeemed the general political, social, medical, and personal horrors that I, along with so many others, endured, and which might well prefigure a financial disaster close to that of 1929.

      This film begins where many others might have ended, a dead man still sitting at his breakfast table, discovered by a hobo (Arlen) who is so busy salivating over the diner’s steak and eggs that he hardly notices that the man has just been shot and killed. And when he does discover that fact, he is equally surprised to meet the murderer, a young woman (Brooks) who has already changed into a male ensemble of a jacket, trousers, and flat newsboy-like cap, which when pulled down hides her Dutch-bob and bangs, camouflaging her sex to make her a figure of androgyny that Brooks would maintain throughout her career. She is accordingly caught the very moment she was about to attempt an escape; but fortunately, the intruder, despite his mock disinterest in her involvement in the death of the man before him, is a caring and empathetic being who no intention of reporting her the authorities.

      When asked, almost disinterestedly, why she has murdered the victim, Nancy explains, in a long beautifully directed scene, that she is a foster child adopted by the man who a long while has attempted to carnally attack her which was met, this time, with her resistance and a gun.

     While the Girl describes the situation, Wellman portrays it visually by creating a montage that overlays that present action, forcing his audience to put her past actions in the context of the present moment which, given the transitory condition of her listener, prefigures the future which she must now face: a world set in motion that can end only through what appears to be her inevitable death. From that moment on, once the whirlwind of her past actions is locked into the present, we know any future, particularly the dream she soon after expresses of living in a quiet place, “a place to be clean in, a place to call home” is almost unattainable.

        She lies about having previously hopped a train, encouraging Jim to argue that she should move East—symbol of the entire country’s past—while he plans on traveling West, to the future. But watching her fail attempts to be able to hold on and board the freight, he has no choice but take her with him, thus insuring his own lack of a future as well, which becomes a theme throughout the work. Once you’ve committed murder, all of her hobo acquaintances remind the both of them, there is no future; she, and now he for helping her, will be tracked down and put to death.

       By the time they are brutally tossed off the freight train they’ve finally succeeded in boarding, there are already wanted posters describing her as a girl dressed in boy’s clothing. Metaphorically speaking she has already been transformed into a fugitive male, an outsider who, to most viewers’ eyes looks like a male. And it is this new identity which threatens to trap her into a being who no longer can be allowed to live within the normative society for which she longs.

       The odd couple take cover for the night in the commonly employed signifier of illicit sex which, when not taken advantage of, suggests something may be wrong with the male or the female. Certainly, Oklahoma!’s Ado Annie would never have accepted the “no” upon which Nancy insists.

     As critic Gordon Thomas writes in Bright Lights Film Journal:

 

“Necessarily the haystack provides tight quarters, and once again Brooks, lying sardine-can intimate next to Jim, projects an unease at the physical closeness that modulates into a relaxed recognition of Jim’s inner rectitude. For the film’s entire running time, Brooks’ character is defined by anticipating and dodging the threat of rape, yet with no moralizing intertitles (of the sort Griffith, say, would deem necessary), the film implicitly grants that Nancy’s murder of her foster father is a justified response to his abuse of her. Was a premise like this only possible in the pre-Code days?

     By falling asleep in the hay while keeping his hands to himself, Jim passes his chivalric test with flying colors....”

 

     What this scene also establishes is that Jim and Nancy are not only outsiders for her being a murderer and he the man who abets her as well as for their role as wayfarers, but they are “queer” in respect to their being absolute innocents, a word that might be applied to only two other characters in this narrative work.

      Walking the rails for the next day, their shoes and toes aching, Jim finally spots a group of hobos around a fire about to share their dinner. It’s a “jungle” Jim names it, a hobo gathering spot. But it’s also a “jungle” in other ways, this one filled with testosterone-filled beasts who have had no sex for ages. They also are not terribly receptive to intruders who turn up at the very moment they are about to serve up a wild herb and onion goulash.

      Here we first catch a glimpse of Black Mose (Washington) and the white boy he is gently attempting to nurse back to health, Lame Hoppy (Roscoe Karns). We know nothing of the reason for Hoppy’s inability to walk and why he is ill, but Wellman draws our attention to the pair almost immediately after he has introduced the stewing pot and the hobos hovered nearby.

      Here, apparently, the hobos are ruled by The Arkansaw Snake, who from a seated position watches over the cooks’ ministrations. Into this “jungle” arrives a jolly singing Bacchus, hefting a large barrel of whiskey while singing a barroom song. Appearing just in time for dinner and apparently willing to share his bounty, he is a welcome figure despite the sneering Snake, who is about to strike out at the joyful intruder until he hears his name, Oklahoma Red (Beery), which sets terror into almost all the hobos, including Snake.

      Having created a new pecking order, Red invites all to share his barrel of White Mule. The men rush forward, totally ignoring their soup. Seeing that Nancy and Jim remain behind, Red invites them to share, but Jim intervenes, reporting that his “brother” is feeling sick, thus putting the two of them into a very parallel situation as Black Mose and Lame Hoppy.

      Yet Red insists that they both imbibe, and when Nancy bends to fill her cup, revealing her shapely ass to the hobo tribe, Snake recognizes something he has not seen in an awfully long while. Thomas, writing is 2017, nicely expresses the shock of this scene:

 

“It’s a surprising moment of coarseness in this 90-year-old film but at the same time a reminder of what the movies could get away with pre-Code; it would be decades, I’m guessing, before you’d see a male character so brazenly grasp (if only visually) a female butt, particularly in the buns-up position Louise [Brooks] offers here.”

 

      Calling attention to her feminine derrière, Snake and others are about to lay their claim until Jim shows them the wanted poster he has pulled down from a tree. The men, now wanting nothing to do with her, are ready to let her go until Red intervenes suggesting they permit them to catch the next train out. But that is also the train all the hobos intend to hop, knowing that with her aboard the posse will be on their trails as well.

     In his intervention, Red is also making his claim to the woman. And when they all find themselves in a freight car together, he quickly sets up a Kangaroo Court so that he can evict Jim and make Nancy his own. If Nancy has previously been seemingly passive, she suddenly comes into her own as Jim is about to be thrown off the moving train, probably to his death, she challenging the presiding comic judge, Red, to allow her a voice in the matter as well, choosing Snake as her “guardian.” The ploy works perfectly, as the two, Snake and Red, determine to battle it out, with the other hobos joining in. Only a warning that the police are heading toward the train to search for the girl stops the battles.

     Thinking fast, Red finds a way to unhook the cable connecting their car to the others and steers it along mountainous embankments until he can stop it at a safe spot where most of the hobos scatter, while Jim, Nancy, Mose and Hoppy find safety in a nearby cabin to which Red directs them.

      Left alone for a while, Jim and Nancy’s brief celebration of their own salvation also makes it clear that Jim may not be the best man to protect her from travails ahead, which, moreover, will further endanger his life as well. Certainly, from this moment on Nancy dominates the film, leaving Jim to remain in the periphery as she and Red negotiate the next steps.

     Red briefly disappears, as does Black Mose who leaves to search for wild roots and other edibles to feed his ailing friend. Soon after his departure, Nancy and Jim perceive that Hoppy has died, and we suddenly recognize that during the several melees we’ve been witnessing that we have ignored the obvious. If Nancy the girl, dressed as a boy, has fallen in love with the boy Jim, who in the process has become more passive, Bose and Hoppy have been there all along as a kind of loving couple which has no name. We can’t define them as having a homosexual relationship, since we have witnessed no sexuality between them. Yet, Mose has touched and stroked Hoppy’s body more than other beings in this film including Jim and Nancy. And even if we were to describe Mose’s connection to the lame and dying man as simply a deep friendship for which we have no context, it is a far remove from the stereotypical servant-master relationship which in 1928 we might certainly have expected. Almost as radical as Jim’s declaration in Huckleberry Finn, “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!” Mose has been literally carrying and caring for the lame white man in plain sight without our truly recognizing it for what it is: a love deeper than any other this film portrays.

     Perhaps I should back away from the plural assumption, and explain it as something I realized only at this point in the film, a few minutes away from the scene in which Red returns with a stolen automobile and women’s clothing for Nancy. By demanding that she cross-dress yet again, Red is certain that they can together drive through police lines without them ever imagining that she is the sought-for murderess.

     While she dresses, he takes Jim outside in an attempt to argue some sense into him, making it clear that “the Boy” is not the right person to guide this woman into safety. By sticking with him, Nancy and Jim both will continue to endanger each other.

      When we finally lay our eyes upon the feminized Nancy, dressed in an old-fashioned polka-dotted sunbonnet that hides Brooks’ famed bangs and a frilly edged dress that reveals the outlines of her modest breasts, I’d argue any male would recognize that the look is all wrong for her— despite the fact that Red and Jim both appear smitten by the sudden change. Nancy, I would argue, was far sexier as a girl hiding out in the male body. The Brooks mystique relies entirely on her playing a gamin, a pubescent boy who hangs out on the streets or in the living rooms of wealthy men whom she will soon destroy. We could honestly believe her as a murderer in her hobo getup, but as a Sooner pioneer woman she has become infantilized, a woman with little but clean and soothing prayers to offer. She may have found her “quiet place.” but at what cost we can only ask. Oddly, I would argue, she looks more in drag in her dotted sunbonnet than in her newspaper boy’s hat.

     Critic Thomas agrees:

 

“By 1928, whether widely recognized or not, it was all there, that Brooksian air of non-submissive, yet eager to wield, sexuality, and I’d like to think Wellman could see it when he had Beery, sporting a knowing leer, hands the dress to her.... For us...the dowdy regalia clashes comically and somehow poignantly with Brooks’ – forget the character’s – sharply projected aura of sophistication and native intelligence.”

 

       Yet when Red offers her himself instead of her now equally infantilized Jim—a team which can only remind us of the original Barbi (1959) and Ken (1961) dolls, mannequins of American normalcy—she declares she will not leave without Jim. And, as suddenly it hit me that Black Mose and lame Hoppy were a loving couple, Wallace Beery as Red, brilliantly acts out his remarkable revelation: “I’ve heard about it, but I never seen it before... It must be love.”

     So too, had I just previously recognized the relationship between the two couples that Wellman has almost flawlessly intertwined in his story. Mose and Hoppy were, if nothing else, two men who depended upon and loved each other. That a black and white queer relationship could be flashed across the screen in a 1928 is astounding.

     What’s far stranger is that Red, allowing the loving couple to escape in the car he has stolen for his previously nefarious motives, determines to further help the couple by using the body of Mose’s dead friend as a kind of decoy to put the police off of their choice. Dressing Hoppy up like Nancy in her hobo attire, with the help of Mose he sets the stranded train car afire at the very moment the police move their dragnet forward in what remains of the original train. Mose jumps to safety, but Red stays to see the operation finished and gets shot in the process, dying eventually to save the escaping couple on their way to Canada.

      If nothing else, we can hope that in the grand conflagration of Hoppy’s body, Mose might be able to perceive the event as his loved one’s funeral pyre ceremony that sets afire the dead man aboard his favorite mode of travel like a Viking hero, in this case a freight car rather than a langskip (war boat).

      Not since as a kid after I saw Vertigo in a large old movie palace in Manchester, Iowa, have I watched a movie immediately over again just for the joy of the experience.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).