Edward Sedgwick | The Passionate Plumber / 1932

plumbing for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Laurence E. Johnson and Ralph Spence (screenplay), Edward Sedgwick (director) The Passionate Plumber / 1932

 

I was first drawn to this comic vehicle by a commentator who observed that, while the story was centered upon a love triangle between wealthy playboy Tony Lagorce (Gilbert Roland) and two women, socialite Patricia Alden (Irene Purcell) and the hot-headed Spanish Nina Estrada (Mona Maris), that because of plot circumstances lead Roland, a recognized Hollywood bisexual, instead becomes obsessed with the plumber Elmer E. Tuttle (Buster Keaton).

     The plumber, discovered almost naked in Patricia’s bathroom by Tony while Elmer is attempting to fix a leak, indeed does become a kind of obsession with the caddish lover, particularly when Patricia attempts to make Tony jealous by playing along with his assertions that Elmer is her lover.

     The film’s first major action involves a duel between Tony and Elmer, in which the plumber, having never before encountered such an event, attempts to follow the lead of his would-be killer, with a great display of dramatic flair and swish of how to properly drape one’s cape before dropping it to pace off for the kill. Tony, ultimately, prefers dueling with swords, but Elmer—who has created a kind of early laser gun which he hopes to sell to the military of the French government—obviously prefers guns. At one point, through his second, Julius J. McCracken (Jimmy Durante), he proposes a way to make both parties happy: Tony should use a sword and he employ a gun. Finally, a local hunter, firing his rifle, scares off all parties involved.

     Inevitably, the relationship between the two does not end there, particularly when Patricia later hires Elmer to continue playing the role of her lover in order to make Tony so jealous that he will leave his wife. Elmer is slow to catch on, Patricia carefully explaining to him that she wants him to stay with her at all times and kiss her whenever Tony attempts to approach. He is never to leave her side but remain there as an intrusion.

      Taking his job seriously, Elmer in fact follows her instructions carefully, finally intruding upon the situation even after Tony and Patricia make up and hope to return to their love affair. Indeed Elmer, who refuses to leave her side, becomes a kind of haunting figure for both Tony and Patricia since he never leaves their side and interferes every time the lovers attempt to come together again. But it is obsession that has nothing at all to do with their sexuality, and is a trope used in hundreds of such films involving heterosexual romances, particularly since Elmer soon discovers, as will Patricia before the film ends, that they really love one another. The intense involvement between the two males has very little to do with queer issues, even if their interchanges are comically queer.

       But do not despair, there are still a few remarkable gay moments in this pre-code movie.

  When living with Patricia, we find Elmer, who obviously has not arrived at her estate with a suitcase of clothes in hand, dressed in her definitely female pajamas, and as Tony arrives, we observe in the background, Elmer going through her closet as he inspects several of her lacy nightgowns as possible costumes in which he might don for a night of sleep or perhaps just for bedroom lounging.

       At another point, to momentarily get rid of him, Patricia demands that he take her small dog for a walk, which after a series of comic gestures, ends with him standing in front of the women’s beauty salon to which she has retreated, a beret upon his head, holding the miniature dog, looking to all the world as a poof having just left the hairdressing salon as either an employee or perhaps a “special” customer.  A passing man cannot resist laughing at the pansy, as Keaton stands firm enduring the mockery with the look of stoic befuddlement for which the actor is so very famous.

 

       It turns out that Tony has been lying to both women, telling each of the them that the other was his wife, the way heterosexual cads have often employed their various mistresses to keep themselves from being forced to the wedding alter by demanding lovers.

        Elmer finally settles the situation by calling up Tony and asking him to come over. By accident, Nina has arrived at Patricia’s mansion to fight it out, and with both of them present Elmer forces the women each in different nearby closets as he meets up with Tony do discuss his love affairs. The cad makes it clear not only that he has played his trick, but openly admits that he finds both women empty-headed and shallow. Perhaps Tony really does prefer the company of his bête noire, Elmer, but as soon as the women are released he hasn’t a chance to display any appreciation to the plumber let alone affection. Patricia immediately claims Elmer as her true love, and Nina, evidently used to abusive language, declares that she still loves the cad, and obviously will force him down the marriage aisle to prove it.

      Why Durante or the wonderful Polly Moran as the serving girl Albine in love with him are in this film is never explained. He does get one wonderful line, worthy of the Marx Brothers; regarding Keaton's laser gun, he responds, "It'll be the greatest invention since Einstein discovered them relatives." Otherwise, his and Moran's roles are so attenuated that it almost appears that the screenwriters and director Edward Sedgwick forgot about them after a few early scenes in the film.

      I might just comment, that if the reasons I was led to this film were not of LGBTQ interest, the movie itself still contained its share of gay incidents, proving that there is a gold-mine of LGBTQ films out there still to be discovered.

 

Los Angeles, December 9, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Ned Finley | The Leading Lady / 1911

prima donna of the kitchen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Allen Johnston (scenario), Ned Finley (director) The Leading Lady 1911 | difficult to obtain or lost film

 

In this work John Bunny plays an Irish cook, Bridget O’Flynn who seems to have found her way into a starring role in a play until....

      Theater Manager Matthew Talon (Van Dyke Brooke) has just engaged most of cast for the play “The Irish Washerwoman” except for the leading lady, a role that he and Muggs, the playwright (Robert Gaillard) are finding difficult to cast. Muggs finally sees a picture in the daily newspaper of a downtown restaurant cook whose look perfectly meets his type, and convinces Talon to engage her.

       She arrives and after a look over by the stage manager, Mr. Small (Wallace Reid), rehearsal begins. Bridget, however, new to the theater and used to getting her own way about everything in the restaurant where she is employed, disagrees with Mr. Small’s suggestions, her argumentations almost leading to a brawl.

       Talon and Muggs manage to smooth things over, but when rehearsal resumes the entire cast, stage manager, producer, and playwright are forced to bear a series of absurd and comic incidents which finally sends Bridget back to her kitchen where nearly everyone is happy for her to remain.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).

Kristine Stolakis | The Typist / 2015

this could be me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kristine Stolakis (screenwriter and director) The Typist / 2015 [8 minutes]

 

Based on a 1994 interview for “queer Smithsonian,” archived apparently by San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, The Typist, apparently reshot as a film by Kristine Stolakis in 2015 seems to promise a great deal. Afterall, the man being interviewed, Otto Bremerman (played in the film by Monterey Morrissey as an older man) was a gay Korean War veteran who worked as  a typist in the official headquarters of The Pearl Harbor Naval Base in 1952, charged with the tasks of writing up discharges for sailors accused of homosexuality.

     One might imagine a juicy piece of war history, particularly given the fact that Bremerman himself was gay. What might his feelings have been now and, more interestingly, at the time he was charged with such a terrible task. He begins by saying to the interviewer (Dana Edwards) that he knew if he were to let his guard down in any respect to his sexual preferences he too would be kicked out. And he reports that generally the files included a confession and that the offices required of those charged to name names, those individuals also being sought and discharged.

      If you were discharged, there no pensions, no loans for school, no GI Bill, no military benefits, perhaps no jobs when the soldiers returned back to the US. They could not serve in any other branch of the military, although after such an event one wonders they might have sought to.

 

     It’s fascinating that their approach was similar to those of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee seeing out Communists as well as gay men and women, but if you’re seeking deeper insights this is not the movie. Stolakis’ work quickly meanders into a clip from Boys Beware, presumably to represent the US attitude to homosexuality at the time. The camera moves down the halls of what is presumably the Naval Base offices, but quickly focuses in on a clacking Royal typewriter with an actor portraying the supposedly “younger Otto.”

       It seems that the homosexual actions that were most dangerous was on the base itself. And later, in describing his own sexuality—which actually takes up most of the film’s short 8-minutes—we learn that there were active gay bars off base where you could regularly meet young ensigns and share rooms with them in the local YMCA (a wonderfully zany notion of an early manifestation of The Village People’s song).

       Growing up in the Midwest, Bremerman describes his own childhood confusion where no one spoke of sex, heterosexual and particularly homosexual. He presumed he would find a woman and marry, and on his first leave from base sought out places “all along the piers” where he might meet women. But by chance he wandered in a gay bar, was picked up by and ensign and shared his room for the night, realizing almost immediately that he liked boys better than girls. And from then on,


he admits, he had many a wild night “on the town,” so to speak. As Bremerman puts it: “I got very active, very aggressive in having sexual liaisons most any night you could see the light in front of my door. I took a lot of chances.”

  

    While reporting what the piers were like, Stolakis relies on old movie reels of soldiers disembarking from ships and truly embarrassingly cutesy cartoon-like images of the soldier’s insignia with guns going off.  

       Only in the last moments of the film does the interviewer actually pose what might have been the major question to be asked from the start. “Were you worried about getting caught?”  His answer is vague of coy, “Yeah, I just couldn’t get dishonorably discharged.” But even here, the interviewer fails to ask him the most important moral questions, shifting instead into the sadly regressive questions of the 80s and 90s, “Are you glad you’re gay?” our WWII veteran answering wisely that he’s not sure since he’s never been any other way. But even here, the regrets pour out, the wishes that he might have left a child on the planet, and his observation that if he had it all to do over again he might have adopted an older gay boy to help protect him as he grows up, a somewhat questionable shift into slightly pedophilic complications.

 

      It is not until 7 minutes into this film that the narrator asks the important question of whether Bremerman ever asked, in typing up these reports, that “This could be me.” Bremerman’s answer, “Yeah, yeah, and this could be me.”

       The film ends, reporting: “Bremerman completed his term of service in 1954 without being discovered.” Even more devastating with regard to what appears to be the man’s empty conscience is the last of the film’s reportage: “That same year, the Navy discharged 1,353 sailors.”

       There have been many excellent films made about the military and homosexuality, but this surely is not one of them.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Jaime Patterson | Tucked / 2018

carrying on the party

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jamie Patterson (screenwriter and director) Tucked / 2018

 

What do you do with a veteran drag queen whose jokes are as old as World War I music hall routines (“What’s the difference between your wife and your job? After five years, your job will still suck.”), and who just discovered that he has cancer, with only a few months to live?  Moreover, instead being a loveable old faggot who inevitably has discovered the party’s over, that “it’s time to take of his mask and call it a day,” Jackie/Jack (Derren Nesbitt) is an alcoholic, often mean-spirited straight man whose daughter won’t speak to him after his refusal to attend her mother’s and his beloved wife’s funeral. Although he argues, seemingly justifiably, that his ex, having discovered his penchant for cross-dressing, didn’t want him there, his daughter Lily (April Pearson), also justifiably insists that he didn’t even bother to consider her needs, that she would have liked him to be there, either in a nice pressed suit or, if necessary, a dress.

     You have to credit British director Patterson for not approaching the subject the way most LGBTQ film aficionados have come expect. Representing their voices, Time Out scolded in their 2018 review that it was “disappointing in a movie ripe for a proper investigation of the lives of British queer people,” to present Jackie as a straight man. Yet, in fact, there have been even fewer films that actually tackle the truth that a large proportion of cross-dresses are, in fact, straight. For decades individuals such as Ed Wood, Dame Edna’s alter-ego Barry Humphries, and even Uncle Miltie Berle have been trying to tell us something to which we refuse to listen: straight men can also be queer in their obsessions with the female image and dress that compels them to explore again and again a gender different from own through the transformations of their own bodies. And, as in Jackie’s case, it can become a habit that is so overwhelming that it gradually becomes difficult to tell the difference between the actor and the performer, not only for the audience but for the man himself.

     What you do with such a figure? Just as Tim Burton did his character in the film Ed Wood, Petterson surrounds him with other outsiders and queer folk that help us to realize that sex is not always at the heart of queer behavior.

      Asked by his Bristol club manager to look after the new drag queen, the genuinely transvestite and gender confused Faith (Jordan Stephens), Jackie at first insists he’s not a school-teacher and not interested in this point in his life in new students.

      After a few jabs at the newcomer and fight with another drag queen and the new Faith over the use of wigs, Jackie eventually discovers that Faith is homeless and invited his into his own humble digs to sleep on the couch or, perhaps, even in the same bed.

      The inevitable happens all to quickly in this often moving but equally predictable little soap-opera. Hearing about the situation between Jackie and his daughter, Faith helps his new housemate to get on the internet and discern her whereabouts. Faith even manages to meet up with Lily ahead of time to explain just how kind and loving her father truly is.

      And the two meet up in the dressing room of the club, Jackie as the disadvantage in full drag sans wig, while the angry Lily thoroughly dresses him down for not thinking of anyone but himself and not being there for her—although the film never explains how she herself has gotten over the shock of her own Dad being a drag queen. One suspects that most young children might prefer such queer-like fathers not to show up in public with unforgiving relatives dripping with tears of sorrow and indignation.

      But the two eventually make up their differences, Faith helps Jackie with his “bucket list,” paying for a lap-dance with him and a 20-some year-old women in a strip joint who admits that she’s really into girls, providing him with a tattoo, and making a visit with Jackie to a sleazy drug dealer (Steve Oram) who finds the pair just too sexually confusing for his bourgeois sense of values. In short, Faith has sustained the party of Jackie’s life just a little longer that he might have imagined possible.

      Despite an evident lack of talent Faith wins over a new audience at the Bristol club, and eventually Jackie dies happily with the knowledge that he’s left behind two daughters, one cis-gender the other gradually coming to terms with his/her desired sex. And, as Stephen Farber writing in The Hollywood Reporter summarizes, if, “The movie’s ending isn’t hard to predict…we’ve become so drawn to the characters that the reconciliations still manage to be satisfying.”

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Douglas Soares | Inocentes (Innocents) / 2017

beach boys

by Douglas Messerli       

 

Douglas Soares (screenwriter and director) Inocentes (Innocents) / 2017 [19 minutes]

 

Douglas Soares’ Innocents is less a cinematic narrative than it is a collation of homoerotic film clips of the young boys shot from the Ipanema apartment balcony of the noted photographer Alair Gomes.

      Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Gomes (1921-1992) was trained in engineering and physical sciences, but from youth on he developed an obsession with the male body, writing, often philosophically, about it in his diaries which eventually amounted to some 20,000 pages, and then, beginning in the 1960s through photography, his best known series, “A Window in Rio,” of 1977-80, consisting of images taken from his apartment window.

     Given that this was also the period of the Fifth Brazilian Republic, the military dictatorship of Brazil, it is all the more amazing that he captured so many thousands of images of beautiful young men on the beach, often in small groups or pairs in which they worked out together, talked, and displayed—as the narrator on the phone and in his own voice in Soares short tribute announces—obvious erections. 

     If there is any continuity in this work it is in the gradual shift the photographer makes from being only a voyeur, shooting from his window and balcony, to actually moving down to the beach itself, and finally to inviting in young men to more fully reveal their genitalia and erections.

   Each viewer will have to determine which images are more homoerotic and evaluate the psychological and social meaning of the invisible photographer’s relationship to his images.

     But there is one thing clear particularly in the earlier of the images, that Gomes’ subjects, despite their display of sexuality, are total innocents. They do nothing except attend to their friends at the beach and any sexual connotations we attribute to their actions is through the manipulation of the camera. Only in the final images where, presumably, they are willing unclothe themselves and reveal their erections do the figures actually participate in the artist’s voyeuristic approach to the world around him.

      Marcos Caruso provides the voice of Alair Gomes, who telephones friends and later speaks to his models. The models in this collation of images include Luciano Carneiro, Julio Fernandes, Felipe Herzog, Bruno Krause, William Manfroi, Matheus Martins, Iann Pastor, Tiago Correa Pereira, Allan Ribeiro, and Ed Saldanha.

      Alexandre Meto has written about this body of Gomes’ work, offering a slightly different perspective than my own comments above:

 

“Gomes focuses his camera on the men strolling on the seaside pedestrian walkway (calçadão) or engaging in acts of physical recreation on the beach. Strictly speaking, he is not engaging in voyeurism but rather in the simple observation of nearly nude bodies in a public setting. The most distinguishing characteristic of Gomes’s work is the intensity of his gaze, which plunges into the banal summertime activities of thousands of bodies that anyone might pass by even today on Rio’s beaches. Through framing and an almost musical sequencing of images, the artist reveals in these bodies the raw material for a form of representation that harkens back to classical notions of beauty and an idealistic aspiration to create eternal value. With Gomes, we can speak of a philosophical attitude and a practice of imagemaking founded in the belief that transcendent value, the truth of the body’s beauty, can be captured in the simple presence of a stranger on a beach.”

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Anonymous | Queen for a Day / 1911

the king of cooney island

by Douglas Messerli

 

Writer and director unknown, Queen for a Day / 1911 || difficult to obtain, or lost film

 

In Queen for a Day (1911), a film for which we have no listed director, Bunny plays a cook, Bridget McSweeney, somewhat in the manner of the later Sweedie films, who is loved by the local grocer, Heinrich Vondiddlebach. I don’t know if this film still exists or is lost, since I could still find a reference to it on the IMDb site, along with the “the Moving Picture World” synopsis which hardly explains how many of its parts fit together on the screen.

    Apparently, Bridget suddenly is bequeathed a fortune from her Australian uncle, the cook determining to live a life style in accordance with her new found wealth. She purchases a mansion, invites society folk into her home, and begins to attract a number of elegant young gentleman asserting their own wealth and societal positions.

     Fearing that he may soon lose his beloved Bridget, Henrich also woos her by surrounding himself with what today we would describe as an “entourage” of mostly black men pretending to be African tribal leaders (in the language of the day described as “colored warriors”) while describing himself as “The King of Cooney Island.” In this ridiculous guise, clearly a lower class vision of wealth and titled position, Heinrich presents himself to Bridget as a suitor, she immediately falling for his “royal magnificence.” They are married, Bridget soon after discovering that she has, after all, married her old friend and neighbor Heinrich the grocer.

     The theme of sudden wealth coming into the hands of working-class beings either through winning the lottery and an unknown relative leaving them a fortune appears to be a common subject in many LGBTQ films of the day, particularly for the crossdressing males who have little other possibilities of social and class mobility.

      It’s also interesting to note that in this film and another of the same year, The Leading Lady, Bunny plays women in drag with no justification for and explanation of his gender switch.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).