Gregory La Cava | Bed of Roses / 1933 || William A. Seiter | Professional Sweetheart / 1933

the catfish eaters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wanda Tuchock, Gregory La Cava, and Eugene Thackrey (screenplay), Gregory La Cava (director) Bed of Roses / 1933

Maurine Watkins (screenplay), William A. Seiter (director) Professional Sweetheart / 1933

 

Near the very end of Gregory La Cava’s 1933 comedy Bed of Roses Franklin Pangborn suddenly shows up in his usual overstressed squirrel-like role, this time selling women’s panties as a department store floorwalker where the central character Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett) also works. There is no true reason why we even need to identify him as being gay, except that, as usual, his character gives off a prissy, too proper, and overly harried sense of being, selling what we are certain would never cross the hands of a normative cinematic he-man except perhaps for pulling if off from a female body. In the few seconds devoted to his busy dialogue, moreover, he even gets the opportunity to show his appreciation for the piece of clothing that he holds up to display, while also taking a second to assure an inquiring customer, the Mae West-like hip- swinging Mrs. Minnie Brown Oglethorpe (Pert Kelton) that her friend is still working at the store a few yards from where he stands. The scene has no reason to be Pangborn’s except that he has played similar roles so very many times and so well that we even recognize him as the type, much like Pangborn was in real life, a man who lived with his mother and an occasional boyfriend, and accordingly is totally comfortable in an atmosphere of pushing, squealing, chattering, eager women. He made the act of coping with shopping women an art in the way that Humphrey Bogart made lighting up his own and a blonde beauty’s cigarette.

     Vito Russo quotes a RKO studio release of the same year for another of his roles, this for Professional Sweetheart:

 

     “Call Franklin Pangborn a sissy offstage and he’ll plant five hard knuckles on your proboscis. But call him a sissy on the stage or screen and he’ll pat you on the back and call you “pall”....for Pangborn is famous for his portrayals of “sissified” characters....those chaps generally known as Adelbert, who go in for the arched eyebrows and a mincing walk...and in RKO’s Professional Sweetheart, he plays a typical role...that of a male dressmaker who flutters about...adding to the general hilarity of the uproarious satire.”

 Pangborn may have winced if you described him as a pansy, but I doubt very much if he might have slugged you. He knew that he had a power over women that few other of the males in his films might even have imagined.

      Strangely, one of Evan’s central male beaus in this tough comedy, New Orleans publisher Stephen Paige (John Halliday)—best remembered today as Katherine Hepburn’s father Seth Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940)—who Evans encounters on the boat that might have taken her from prison to New Orleans, might be best described as a “woman hater.” When she finally arrives in New Orleans, she looks him up pretending to be a West Virginia news reporter, in truth seeking an eligible bachelor to prey upon, knowing that such a smooth-speaking, straight-thinking, respectable man is the easiest to push into a comprising situation which, with any luck, will keep her in room, board, and fashionable rags for a long time to come.

      He admits immediately, when told a woman reporter was waiting to meet him, he expected a “fat frumpy sort of thing,” and quickly sizes up her “interview” as being less interested in his career than in his personal being. Being the kind of man who openly supports the legal restrictions of prohibition, he sports of fully stocked bar which, with a little of her natural-born chicanery permits the double-crossing man-hater to get him drunk, and before he can even wake up from what knocked him out, convince him that he owes her and his entire society an explanation for a night-long affair that never happened.

       Paige perceives her money-grubbing tactics immediately for what they are and calmly swallows his pride along with the stomach pill with which his butler provides him. “How much do you want?” he calmly inquires, to which quite expectedly Evans, taking up her various well-learned rhetorical poses, answers: “I just want you?”

       “Well you can’t have me. I’m a respectable citizen. At least I was a respectable citizen until you tricked me into doing something I didn’t want to do.” As she threatens suicide and terrifying racket to announce to the world just how wronged she has been, he quietly tells his butler to “Tell Henry to get the car ready. We’re going out to look at apartments.”

       In a sense, he punishes her perfectly, locking her away in a bed of roses from which she is permitted little escape to mix with her friends or the other man, from whom she’s also swiped a significant amount of cash, the handsome cotton barge captain, Dan (the favorite hero of the decade’s comic romances, Joel McCrea.)

       While Paige traps her in a closed relationship based on his complete knowledge of just who she is and his needs for filling his stomach and satisfying his occasional sexual desires, Dan has unintentionally captured the heart that she and her friend Minnie never knew she even had.  Ensconced in an elegant apartment overlooking what appears to be the French Quarter, Evans becomes so stir- crazy that she truly imagines herself joining up to serve her life on a barge in the arms of the lean stargazer eating nightly meals of catfish.

       Strangely, Paige is even amused by her “ridiculous” love and is willing to let her go if only she tells Dan everything about herself, a request she simply cannot fulfill for fear of losing the one man whose kisses finally reveal to her what love is all about.

       Trapped between two extremes, Evans goes to work in the department store from whence the selfish Paige, eager to amuse himself through her, as he has in the past, tries to woo her back. It doesn’t work, of course, and inevitably Dan finds her, and asks her all over again whether she’s willing to roll down the river with him—with such silly plot that fear it will never cease until we hear the heroine say yes.

       The original critics and audiences evidently could not quite forgive Bennett’s Evans for her double-dealings, but adored Pert Kelton’s courser man-handling character Minnie who definitely wore the pants in her marriage to the Boll-weevil terminator, Ogelthorpe.

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Kon Ichikawa | 炎上 (Enjō) (Conflagration) / 1958

the believer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kon Ichikawa, Keiji Hasebe, and Natto Wada (screenwriters, based on the novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima), Kon Ichikawa (director) 炎上 (Enjō) (Conflagration) / 1958

 

Young Goichi (Raizo Ichikawa), whose father has run an out-of-the-way Buddhist center, witnessed his mother and uncle having sex shortly before his own father died, perhaps of complications for his wife’s affairs.

      Having been convinced of his father’s continued statement that “the Golden Pavilion of the Shukaku Temple is the most beautiful thing in the world,” the young innocent Buddhist acolyte determines to study there under Dosen Tayama (Ganjirō Nakamura).

       Although he is a true believer, there also seems to be something slightly backward about the likeable Goichi, who is not only unbelievably naïve but also a stutterer, a condition perhaps brought on by his rather abusive family life.

       The seemingly affable Dosen even offers to send him to further schooling, and, later hires Goichi’s mother who suddenly appears in her son’s life again, to work in the kitchen. In debt now to the kindness of the Dosen, she demands that her son study hard and, ultimately, replace the Dosen after he finishes his studies. But things do not go well, particularly when Goichi discovers that the Buddhist leadership, although giving an outward pretense of abstinence and piety are, in fact, running the Pavilion as a tourist stop and making a great deal of personal profit in the process. The Dosen even has a geisha mistress in town.

       Ichikawa reveals his hero’s inner feelings through a careful mix of flashbacks and plot extensions, revealing Goichi’s rather fragile ego developing as a being who has sought spiritual beliefs as a way to escape from the daily realities of post-World War II Japanese life. He, it is clear, has mistakenly perceived the shrine as a kind of Shangri-La, a world lying entirely apart from the everyday world. In short, the sad incidents of Goichi’s home life get purposely confused in Ichikawa’s telling with the young boy’s illusions of a kind of paradise. And before long, it has a profound impact not only upon his studies but, particularly when he meets a young woman, with his sexual fears.

      We might almost describe Giochi as a religious purist or, even, an over-zealous believer—despite the fact that we still sympathize with his spiritual crisis. What Ichikawa does not focus on is that the boy, with his love and devotion to his father and his utter hatred of his mother, may also be a closeted gay man who is simply unable to come to terms with his sexuality. Whatever the case, it is clear that for most, Goichi is not an entirely appealing figure. As The New York Times reviewer, Howard Thompson wrote upon the film’s original US premiere: “For all Raizo Ichikawa's righteous indignation as the painfully stuttering protagonist, he remains an extremely neurotic and naive whiner, and a dead duck from the outset.”

      As often the case in Mishima’s work, whose novel provided the source to this film, such inner turmoil, especially at the crossroads of sex, familial duty, and spiritual beliefs, results in great violence. In Goichi’s case, it erupts by him trying to burn down the “golden temple,” being arrested, and he committing suicide before he was to have been imprisoned.

     Like so many of Ichikawa’s films, Enjō profoundly explores how Japan’s World War II imperialist pretensions effected the generations that followed.

     This film was apparently Ichikawa’s own favorite of his oeuvre.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).