Salwyn Hurwitz | Representing the Famous Star of the Metropolitan Opera Co. : Ed Altie / c. 1940s

the diva at home

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salwyn Hurwitz (director) Representing the Famous Star of the Metropolitan Opera Co. : Ed Altie / c. 1940s

 

This 2.33-minute film begins with the famous Metropolitan Opera star doing housework on her patio, dusting and sweeping, like all divas, often stopping to pose, and at one point revealing her wide behind in the process when she notices a photograph fallen to the floor.

    She reaches down and brings it up only to admire herself in her heyday dressed in a kind of Carmen Miranda costume. She reenters her house.

     In the meantime, a young male admirer appears from around the corner and just as quickly disappears as she returns dressed in her full Carmen Miranda-like outfit. She dances a little, poses in various positions a great deal and finally turns, back to camera, to reveal the dress she is wearing has no backing, revealing her red dotted underthings.

    But no matter, her admirer returns. She runs to him, literally picks him up in the air, and plants a giant kiss of his cheek. He seems most pleased. And everything ends quite happily.

    This piece, again, represents something close to pure gesture and posing, a kind of camp performance that did not be popular again until the black and Hispanic clubs of the 1960s continuing into today, which began to feature ballroom contests for posing and vogue.

 

   The male is Hurwitz’s brother Louis whose sister Judy appeared about the same time, or very soon after in Romeo & Juliet.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2016).

 

Douglas Messerli | The Films of Ernest Thorp and His Circle: A Revelation of Apartheid South African Queer Identity in the 1940-1950s [Introduction]

the films of ernest thorp and his circle: a revelation of apartheid south african queer identity in the 1940s-1950s

 by Douglas Messerli

 

Somedays are just remarkable for the cinematic finds that one makes, and this is a special day in which I discovered the works of the very underground and unspoken works of apartheid-era queer film maker Ernest Thorp, making at a time in an almost unthinkable era of South African history, gay films that might have had him arrested and imprisoned.

    Little is known about Thorp (1911-1998) except what we learn from the revelatory essay by Ludwig Wagner “Redefining the Historical Timeline of Queer Film in South Africa: Ernest Thorp’s Nil Desperandum and South Africa’s First Queer Films,” noting that Thorp’s father Herbert founded the Durban Amateur Photographic Society (1921) and that Thorp himself was the curator of the Durban Botanic Gardens from 1950-1975.

     The short history we have, I quote from Wagner:

 

“Access to like-minded members and industry professionals through the society would explain how Thorp arranged for the queer and sometimes homoerotic footage he filmed to be clandestinely processed and developed.13 During WWII, while working as an apprentice horticulturalist, Thorp established himself as a prominent social figure in Durban. Unable to enlist in the Royal Navy during the war, he opted to “entertain as many visiting naval men as possible at his home in Durban,” becoming a “mentor” to many (emphasis mine).

     At the time, Thorp met Admiral Middleton, a commander of a British battleship anchored in Durban, who shared his interest in orchids and invited him to visit him back in England.15 On May 1, 1948, Thorp arrived in England aboard the Umtali. When, after a few months in Britain, Thorp could not secure passage back to South Africa, Admiral Middleton offered to transport Thorp back to South Africa as a guest of the Royal Navy as repayment for “the kindness he had shown to hundreds of sailors.” Thorp returned to South Africa in September 1948 after being given one of the Admiral’s cabins on HMS Jutland, part of a squadron visiting the Union. Thorp entertained the sailors on HMS Jutland during his return journey, showing “several films he had taken of places of interest” in South Africa.

    Thorp was an international authority on orchids and travelled the world collecting specimens. In addition to accompanying luminaries such as General Jan Smuts on plant-collecting trips in the Drakensberg, he had lunch with the King of Thailand at his palace. Thorp also met Queen Elizabeth—when she visited Durban along with King George VI and princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in 1947—taking her on a tour of the Botanic Gardens. Shortly before his retirement, Thorp presented a paper at the 7th World Orchid Conference in Colombia in 1972.20 Thorp was utterly discreet and private, always conscious of his position as curator of the Botanic Gardens. His students remember him being an “avid photographer and cinematographer,” showing them many films and slide shows of his international travels.”

     But what is most interesting about Thorp is not his hosting and mentoring of numerous sailors and their officers, but his own involvement with close friends such as Joe Gareson and his lover Salwyn Hurwitz, the latter of whom, under his friendship and tutelage made his own short films which I also review below. The overall contribution of these two figures give us an entirely new insight into what living as a queer man during a time in which one could easily be imprisoned for being gay actually meant. Thorp and his fellow travelers seemed to act, on the surface, with open impunity, but we know their lives must have been highly curtailed and closeted despite the films they made for one another and other members of their circle, a brave act given the times.

    These films include one, Black and White Dying Swan, a film by Hurwitz, dated 1945, hence its appearance here in my volume, as well as other short Hurwitz films vaguely dated in the 1940s, as well as Thorp’s own, far more important Nil Desperandum dated by Wagner to be from 1949-1951, and a latter Thorp film from 1955.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).

Salwyn Hurwitz | Black & White Dying Swan / 1946

busy with death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salwyn Hurwitz (director) Black & White Dying Swan / 1946

 

This very short film is interesting only with the context of the underground films of Ernest Thorp in South Africa during the 1940s and early 1950s. Hurwitz (1920-2011), was a dancer who met Throp in Durban after joining the Royal Navy at age 10, serving as a telegraphist on several ships.

     It is his scrapbooks and 400+ pages of notes, newspaper clippings, and other memories that has provided us, according to the most through, and archival of the articles on Thorp by Ludwig Wagner, on line in his essay, “Redefining the Historical Timeline of Queer Film in South Africa: Ernest Thorp’s Nil Desperandum and South Africa’s Queer Films,” published on line on OpenEdition Journals, that according to Wagner provide us  with “a veritable who-is-who of South Africa’s white queer cultural society in the 1940s-60s, names that include icons from stage and screen, the fashion world, artists and musicians, including Noël Coward, Cecil Williams, Leontine Sagan, Andre Hugenet, Siegfried Mynhardt, Ivor Kirsten, Alexis Preller, and Terence McGaw.”

    The Hurwitz collection, spanning four decades, makes clear that he and Thorp developed a relationship that existed between 1940 and 1974. As he puts it, “there is no doubt that the two men were, at some point, lovers,” although their romance did not last longer than a few years.

    Thorp filmed several of their holidays together, along with their mothers. And under the mentorship of Thorp, Hurwitz made a few films with Thorp’ support, including The Dying Duck (1940), in which he played a kind of Carmen Miranda figure, Black & White Dying Swan (1946), and Presenting the Famous Star of the Metropolitan Opera Co. Ed Altie (ca. 1940s)—all staring their friend Ed Alty—and Romeo & Juliet, featuring Hurwitz’s younger brother Louis as Alty’s suitor and his sister, Judy, in the cross-dressing role of Romeo.

     Alty, a former burlesque performer, lived in Johannesburg, appearing there in several performances atop the Clyde buildings.   

     In Black Dying Swan Alty comes dancing in around the corner and proceeds to reveal not only his hairy legs, but awkward perform as the famous Anna Pavolov in her 1907 role. It is a mix of grace and camp parody that sees her kicking, her tutu high in the air, as she proceeds to curl up on a piece of Alty’s stuffed bra and eventually die.

     Despite it’s true camp performance there is something quite stubbornly tragic in this Swan’s death, reminding one a little of Yevgeni Bauer’s 1916 film, Umirayushchii lebed (The Dying Swan), which, of course, was much more serious-minded than this 1940s movie.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).

     

Margarita Bagdasaryan | Buqaning yuragi (Bull’s Heart) / 2023

peaches and tomatoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Borodin, Margarita Bagdasaryan, and Cecile Gabeskiria (screenplay), Margarita Bagdasaryan (director) Buqaning yuragi (Bull’s Heart) / 2023 [14 minutes]

 

This film begins with a devoted son (Sanzhar Iuldoshev) talking on his cellphone with his father (Seydulla Moldakhanov), who argues that he should remain at home so that he may help him if a shipment of fruit comes in. Apparently, the father is a distribution of fruits, which in this case, includes tomatoes. Since this film does not attach actor names with characters, I am not certain I attached the appropriate names to characters, just to warn you.

    The son agrees, but soon after, his friend Anton (Illarion Marov) suddenly shows up, introducing him to his lovely new rat friend, who hangs out primarily on Anton’s shoulders. At first the son is taken aback by the visit, afraid for his “angry” father’s return, but he soon admits that he is happy that Anton has visited, and it becomes clear that the two are a gay couple, very much in love. Indeed, quite quickly before we can even establish their characters, they take to bed, now unavailable to the father’s desperate calls when the fruit does arrive.

     It is a terribly hot day in Uzbekistan, where this film was apparently shot, and the father comes home completely done in by the heavy lifting of the many trays of fruit by himself. By the time he reaches the apartment, encountering his son’s friend Anton there, he is heavily sweating, and soon after, he passes out on the floor of an apparent heart attack. Anton applies cardiac arrest tactics, telling his boyfriend to simply call for an ambulance.

     In the interim, the son, with help, takes in a new shipment of tomatoes. The father survives, Anton picking him up with the trays of the fruit sitting in the back hatch of the small car. He takes up two tomatoes, handing one over to his father, and recalling the time in his youth when he was hospitalized for surgery. Her recalls waking up from the anesthesia, being totally confused and quite unable to even think. His father was there and offered him peaches, which he recalls were the best peaches that he remembers ever tasting, a life-saver at the moment.

   His offering of a tomato is a testimony to the bond and love they retain, the father actually being, as Anton attests, a very gentle man, not at all the fiery disciplinarian that the son has pretended he is.

     This is a very lovely fable that one wishes had been able to attach a great deal more character development and plot with which to engage us. As it is, these figures remain sketches against a vague backdrop of Uzbekistan, in this co-sponsored German, Russian, and Ukraine production. We can only imagine, given the tone of these sketches, that the son, his friend Anton, and the father will get on just fine in the future, and the two boys work together to help the older man.

 

Los Angeles, November 9, 2026 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2026).