Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kinney | The Reluctant Dragon / 1941

the upside down cake: how coding in film functions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemons, William Cotrell, and Harry Clork (screenplay based on the original story by Kenneth Grahame with additions by Erdman Penner, T. Hee, and Berk Anthony), Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwerks, and Jack Kinney (directors) The Reluctant Dragon / 1941

 

If one truly wants to comprehend how cinematic “coding” works, one need only watch the Walt Disney feature of 1941, The Reluctant Dragon. Coding, I would argue, is an extreme form of irony, wherein you say one thing but mean or point to something else. But it functions mostly in reverse of the general examples of literary irony. If in irony one begins often by saying something quite outrageous, he is doing so to point out a reality that forces one to imagine that extreme, the real permitting us to imagine the absurd. When Jonathan Swift argues that the children of the extreme poor throughout the country might serve a great purpose as “a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout,” he obviously is not arguing for cannibalism, but making the point of just how horrible the conditions are among the poor and how insufferable are those who will not work to find a way to help families pay and provide for their starving children. The absurd suggestion is an ironical statement that covers over his anger and frustration with a society not willing to help its own people and their children to properly survive.

      In “coding,” the statement being made generally begins as a placid one that fits into a fairly traditional viewpoint: a heterosexual hypochondriac gets the notion that he is about to die, so he begins looking for another man to replace him who might be suitable for his wife. Indeed, given the behavior of that man’s friend who is a bachelor who gleefully contacts women who are getting divorced or have just lost their husbands and pretends to console them with the real purpose of seducing them into his bed, the character (in this instance Rock Hudson, the film being Send Me No Flowers) is apparently attempting to be a good and protective husband. But the search allows him to spend the rest of the movie observing and commenting on the male sex, without having to devote hardly any time dealing with heterosexual matters. In short, Hudson’s character and his close friend played by Tony Randall to whom he has confided, are permitted to spend almost the entire film cruising men and at times one another.

      For the everyday theater goer, the humor of the film derives simply from the irony that, in fact, Hudson’s character is perfectly well, and all the efforts and mishaps he goes through in attempting to protect his wife are absolutely unnecessary. But for those viewers who knew of Hudson’s and Randall’s sexuality or at least suspected it, or for those who, without even knowing that both were actually homosexual, but perceived that the story was really a movie about something else, the humor is derived from the irony of the cinema’s pretense, the fact that he is hypochondrial being only incidental. I might just add, that since homosexuality was something rarely spoken about, moreover, and in many states against the law, Americans were generally much more innocent about such sexual possibilities and mostly unaware of gay humor.

     The example I used, however, is not typical of coding. In most films the thematic that lies underneath the veneer the surface plot, do not fully function throughout the film. Coding does not work like allegory, in which at nearly all times things can be seen in double. In most films with LGBTQ coding, the coded scenes are simply dropped in from time to time, with the major plot bubbling along in its heterosexual manner, usually ending in the prerequisite reiteration of heterosexual love and/or marriage. The characters often, in fact, change their sexual alliances according to the demands of the normative heterosexual template.

 

*

 

      On May 29, 1941, animators at Walt Disney Productions went on strike to protest inequalities of pay and privileges at the studio in Burbank. The strike lasted for three months and 26 days. Wikipedia actually nicely summarizes the basic reasons for the strike:

 

“Disney's animators had the best pay and working conditions in the industry, but were discontented. Originally, 20 percent of the profits from short cartoons went toward employee bonuses, but Disney eventually suspended this practice. Disney's 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a financial success, allowing Disney to construct a new, larger studio in Burbank, California, financed by borrowing. At the Burbank studio, a rigid hierarchy system was enforced where employee benefits such as access to the restaurant, gymnasium, and steam room were limited to the studio's head writers and animators, who also received larger and more comfortable offices. Individual departments were segregated into buildings and heavily policed by administrators.

     The box-office failures of Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940 forced Disney to make layoffs, although Disney rarely involved himself in the hiring and firing process with those who were not atop the pay chain. The studio's pay structure was very disorganized, with some high-ranking animators earning as much as $300 a week, while other employees made as little as $12. According to then-Disney animator Willis Pyle, ‘there was no rhyme or reason as to the way the guys were paid. You might be sitting next to a guy doing the same thing as you and you might be getting $20 a week more or less than him.’ Staff were also forced to put their name to documents which stated that they worked a forty hour week, whilst their actual hours were much longer. In addition there was resentment at Walt Disney taking credit for their work, and employees wished to receive on-screen credit for their art.

     The Screen Cartoonist’s Guild and [their president Herbert] Sorrell started meeting on a regular basis at the Hollywood Hotel from the start of 1941 to hear Disney workers' grievances and plan a unionization effort. Many animators, including Art Babbitt, grew dissatisfied and joined the SCG. Babbitt was one of Disney's best-paid animators, though he was sympathetic to low-ranking employees and openly disliked Disney.  Babbitt had previously been a senior official in the Disney company union, the Federation of Screen Cartoonists, but had become frustrated due to being unable to effect change in that position. Disney saw no problem with the structure, believing it was his studio to run and that his employees should be grateful to him for providing the new studio space

     Sorrell, along with Babbitt and Bill Littlejohn, approached Disney and demanded he unionize his studio, but Disney refused. In February 1941, Disney gathered all 1,200 employees in his auditorium for a speech:

 

‘In the 20 years I've spent in this business I've weathered many storms. It's been far from easy sailing. It required a great deal of work, struggle, determination, competence, faith, and above all unselfishness. Some people think we have a class distinction in the place. They wonder why some people get better seats in the theatre than others. They wonder why some men get spaces in the parking lot and others don't. I have always felt, and always will feel that the men that contribute most to the organization should, out of respect alone, enjoy some privileges. My first recommendation to the lot of you is this; put your own house in order, you can't accomplish a damn thing by sitting around and waiting to be told everything. If you're not progressing as you should, instead of grumbling and growling, do something about it.’

 

     Understandably that speech was not well received and in May many of the animators and others went on strike. During that time, of course, projects that had already been started and new projects were halted; and Disney, at the pitch of its early popularity, had no way to proceed with new pictures. Although an agreement was eventually forced upon the company, it resulted in the loss of some of its major animators and other executives, at least temporarily, and helped to delay some of the features the studio had been working on, including Peter Pan until after World War II.

     In order, apparently, to resolve that situation and to provide further product, in June the studio released what can only be described as a kind of “cover,” a feature film that pretended to be filled with new animated works, but actually features only two short films, the longest, The Reluctant Dragon being only 20 minutes in length.

     Most cleverly, moreover, this film engaged the popular comedic raconteur, former member of the Algonquin Round Table, Robert Benchley to supposedly attempt to pitch the children’s book, Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon, read to him by his wife, for production by Disney, although what rights he had to do so is never explained. In fact, it is merely a cover to allow him, supposedly on the run from the designated studio guide Humphrey (Buddy Pepper), into the deeper recesses of the Disney factory. Playing the somewhat fey common man that he often portrayed, Benchley appears to be reluctant to actually meet with Disney or attempt to sell him the book.

    What it allowed Disney studios to do is to show off their remarkable studios in its many manifestations and to feature some of their more loyal and noted animators, while simultaneously promoting the company characters such as Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and Pluto while pretending that all operations were continuing on smoothly and regularly, all in the guise of a featuring new works.

       Almost like Dante, Benchley tours the nine celestial spheres of Disney’s Paradiso. He first stumbles into a life drawing session where animators study how the make caricatures of people and animals by observing them in real life. Today’s subject is a live elephant, who Benchley mocks and praises alternatively, the animal sometimes reacting anthropomorphically, which is of course a Disney secret of their success. At each level of his holy journey is he provided with a small gift; here he receives a quick sketch of an elephant bearing a remarkable resemblance to himself.

     Again attempting to dodge the insistent Humphrey, Benchley attends a film scoring with a full orchestra and performers Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, and Florence Gill, the voice of Clara Cluck. Nash teaches him how to use his cheek for the Donald Duck effects.

      At a foley session, featuring a cartoon sequence from Casey Junior from Dumbo, he meets his Beatrice, Doris (Francis Gifford), who explains how to use the sonovox for the train sounds while the foley experts demonstrate how they create the noises of the traveling train and a storm that nearly destroys him. Doris allows him to play with sonovox as a treat.

      Finding himself in the camera room, featuring a demonstration of the multiplane camera, everything is turned from grayscale and black-and-white into Technicolor, Benchley himself examining his own now red and blue tie and commenting, when Doris asks if he remembers her from the foley room, “Yes, but look different in Technicolor!” Donald Duck makes another appearance on the camera stand as the cameraman explains how the duck is made to walk in animated photography. From here on Benchley has been given the gift of color.

    In the ink-and-paint department, the technicians show Benchley and the audience how the various colors are mixed and applied to cels such as that of the figure of Bambi we are shown and which is presented to Benchley to hold up against various backgrounds of glens and forests.

     Still evading Humphrey, he enters the maquette-making department which casts small statues to help animators envision their characters from all perspectives. A number of the maquettes are on display, including those from future films such as Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Tinker Bell, John and Michael Darling, Smee, and Peter himself. Benchley admires a small black zebra centaurette from Fantasia which is given to him along with a maquette of himself, quickly done by an employee, a work later purchased for the collection of Warner Brothers director Chuck Jones.

     Hiding out in the storyboard department Benchley encounters a group of so-called “storymen,” one them portrayed by Alan Ladd who flips through a completed story book to glimpse the animation process. There also he is given a premiere look at a planned work, Baby Weems (the creation of Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, and John Miller) with the use of an animatic, a story reel that uses limited animation. The lead director of this entire film, Alfred Werker, then working for 20th Century Fox, but loaned out for this film, was the first director to use the storyboard as developed by Disney staff in the early 1930s.

     In the penultimate room he meets up with the animators themselves, Ward Kimball, Fred Moore, and Norm Ferguson, where he is treated to a preview of the Goofy cartoon, How to Ride a Horse, which was later released as a stand-alone short in February 1950. Ferguson also shows him his new animations of Pluto.

     Finally, Humphrey catches up with him, following rather than leading him directly to God, Disney himself in a previewing room about to watch a new completed feature, the 20-minute short of which this film bears the title and which Benchley had hoped to sell to him, The Reluctant Dragon.

     Handing over all the gifts that he has accumulated along the way, almost as in tribute to Disney, Benchley can finally sit back and watch the story created with a screenplay by Ted Sears, Al Perkins, Larry Clemons, William Cotrell, and Harry Clork, based on the original story by Kenneth Grahame and rewritten by Erdman Penner, T. Hee, and Berk Anthony. The directors include Alfred L. Werker, Hamilton Luske, Jack Cutting, Ub Iwwerks, and Jack Kinney. In all there were some 44 animators and background painters, only 11 of them credited.

 

    Almost as what appears to be an in-joke, that animated short is itself a coded gay movie, featuring a Dragon (voice by Barnett Parker) who is befriended by a young Boy (voiced by Billy Lee) when the boy’s father and the community becomes terrified of the nearby beast. Visiting the Dragon, of whom the Boy has read, the Boy discovers that the storybook villain is not all interested in fighting but rather enjoys tea parties, playing his flute to accompany his bird friends, and, most of all, writing poetry. In every way possible—as the dragon tosses out its tiny front feet with the curvature of a limp wrist and sash-shays its huge rump with disdain of those who disagree with him, calling them sweethearts and dear ones—the writers, animators, and directors convey clearly that this Dragon is gay. Poets are, after all, the standard stand-in for fussy queers, and the poem he recites makes quite clear his inclinations:

 

Sweet Upside Down Cake

Cares and woes you’ve got them.

Because Upside Down Cake

Your top is on your bottom.

Alas Upside Down Cake

Your trouble’s never stop.

Because Upside Down Cake

You’re bottom’s on your top.

 

    (For those straight readers who have never watched TV, seen a film, and seldom leave their houses, I remind you that a top is the gay man who does the fucking, the bottom the one receiving. When the bottom is on his top, presumably he’s enjoying as ass-licking in preparation for the fuck.)

     When Sir Giles (voice by Claud Allister) shows up to fight the dragon, the Boy is equally disappointed that not only he is an old man, but he also writes poetry, although not of the same sort as the Dragon, his being more about the red radishes he downs in delight. When he discovers that the Dragon has no intentions in fighting, he secretly suggests they fight in gest, he pretending to slay him, while the Dragon will receive great attention and applause.

      Even Sean Griffith in his exploration of Disney characters in Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out notes of “the delight and acceptance [in this film] of an effeminate male.” He continues: “The dragon sports long emotive eyelashes and contains not an aggressive bone in his body, with the dragon prancing and pirouetting throughout the story... There is no mistaking how the film makes fun of the dragon's mincing manner and prissy pretentions. Yet, the film also makes it quite clear that the dragon does not believe in fighting, and the film doesn't specifically make fun of him for that... Just as in Ferdinand the Bull, The Reluctant Dragon presents an easily read gay character under the guise of fantasy and shows characters accepting him as he is."

     But the truth is that the Boy has a great deal of difficulty in accepting the Dragon, and does in fact taunt him, commenting, when the Dragon is unable to even get up enough macho to breathe out fire on the day of the fight: “Too bad you’re not a real dragon, instead of a puff poet.” That is the equivalent of calling him a faggot. And it so angers the sensitive beast that he suddenly draws up enough inner fuel to spew up a torrent of forgotten flames, allowing him to give the performance of his life.

 

     Like all gay films, the Dragon must die, or at least pretend to. Later, when the community discovers that he still lives, he must swear: "I promise not to rant or roar, and scourge the countryside anymore!" But then, of course, he never did rant or roar or scourge anyone before.

    Whether or not the average parent with children in tow saw this pacifist Dragon as being homosexual I cannot say. Did Disney know what his own remaining animators had cooked up as core of his personal tribute to his studio and himself? Certainly, it slipped by the watchful eyes of the Hays Board, who demanded that the film be censored only of the Dragon’s navel. What they might have been thinking of, I can’t imagine. Did a navel of this already totally anthropomorphized beast simply step over the line regarding him being too human?

     Clearly The New York Times reviewer entirely missed the point or purposely covered over it, writing: “As if to atone for the fearsome witches and monsters of his previous films, he has made of his dragon as dizzy a dowager as ever frolicked forth from her cave reciting little roundelays. Whatever the villagers think, she is nonetheless just a harmless old biddy forever drinking tea, and though, according to the best medieval practice, she is supposed to breathe flame, her very best is to emit one tiny smoke ring.” That’s certainly one way of escaping an effeminate beast.

       Did most of the audiences of the day simply read this as a parable of pacifist behavior, and if so, what did that mean to them in 1941, on the eve of the one of the most horrific wars of all time? We can no longer perceive it from the perspective of that moment.

     But if we can now see this work structured in a manner that might remind one of a series of increasingly smaller Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, the fruit we find in the final container is the sweetest one we might ever have imagined.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).  

Wesley Ruggles | Too Many Husbands / 1940

swiss dot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Binyon (screenplay, based on a play by W. Somerset Maugham), Wesley Ruggles (director) Too Many Husbands (1940)

 

In his book Screen Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall, Richard Barrios summarizes the LGBTQ Charles Ruggles’ 1940 comedy Too Many Husbands in a couple of dismissive paragraphs:

“Columbia’s Too Many Husbands (1940) was the typical bauble of the kind that will likely never be seen again—insignificant, devastatingly profession, and indifferent setting for stars to show off with nonchalant ease. ...It had a primeval plot unworthy of its creator [Somerset Maugham]: the one about the widow who has remarried and finds out that the husband she thought dead has been marooned on a desert island. Jean Arthur was the unwitting bigamist, and Fred MacMurray and Melvyn Douglas were spouses one and two. Amidst the expected ‘What am I going to do with two husbands?’ bedroom farce complications, there were contained some unmistakable gay allusions.”

     Barrios goes on to site the major “gay” scene in which, the two ex-husbands, forced to share a bed, begin to describe one another with the standard husband and wife familiarities of comedy writing: “you wonderful thing,” “darling,” “sweetheart,” etc. deflating the ego of one another by suggesting that the other has become his feminine, therefore gay, partner, rendering him meaningless with regard to the decision their mutual wife must make about who she will ditch and which one she will keep. It helps that the two, before the MacMurray character (Bill Cardew) went missing in a boating adventure, were close friends, the plot hinting that such a friendship may necessarily have to be transformed into something even deeper if the two are both to survive.

     Shuffled off into a room which Arthur’s (Vicky Lowndes) current husband Henry designed for the event of a female offspring, the macho MacMurray—who throughout the film shows off his athletic abilities and profile like some high school teenager—turns the very contents of the room into an expression of his friend Henry’s queer decorating abilities:

       bill:  I guess when you decorated it you made if just what you wanted          

                  for your very own room.

        henry: Rave on, you wonderful thing!

        bill: (looking at the draperies) What’s this stuff—mosquito netting?

        henry: Dotted swiss.

        bill: (with sibilant mockery) “Dotted swiss. You even look pretty when

                 you say it! (Going to the vanity table and picking up

                 two power puffs.) Hmmmmm...which one is mine?

 

      As Barrios concludes: “The equation is ‘decorating abililty=fussiness=unmasculine=gay.’ ...It helps to have a smirkingly macho actor like Fred MacMurray, plus a Breen Office so worried about the script’s bigamy that it doesn’t comprehend the undercurrents.”

      Yet, that isn’t where the LGBTQ issues end in this not so totally “insignificant” movie. Because she cannot choose among them, the two are forced to spend even more time together, including one entire night “on the town”—in actuality, so we observe, simply sharing a bench to feed the pigeons—in order to punish Vicky for leaving them both hanging without her full commitment to one or the other’s love. But as any red-blooded English-speaking adolescent knows “feeding the pigeons” linguistically calls up the act of masturbation, an activity which evidently these boys, in their utter loneliness, were sharing. Is it any wonder that they continue their exaggerated words of endearment for one another into a later scene.

      Moreover, although the structure of this story is certainly as hackneyed as they get—we last encountered it, as you may recall, in Michael Curtiz’ 1930 film The Matrimonial Bed—it was used to great comic effect the very same year as Too Many Husbands by director Garson Kanin when the adventuresome wife, Irene Dunne, was also stranded on an island with Randolph Scott, before returning home to her just remarried husband, Cary Grant. The fireworks between real life gay lovers Scott and Grant, obviously more obsessed with one another than with either Dunne or Grant’s second wife played by Gail Patrick, makes this work one of the most memorable not only of its genre of pre-1960s LGBTQ films.

      And interestingly, Vicky in Ruggles’ film likes the attention she’s now receiving from both men so much that she finally is forced to let the court make the choice of which husband to whom she will remain married. Inexplicably, the court chooses her first beau, Bill, supposedly leaving her current and more caring hubby in the cold. Yet Vicky arranges that while she’s married to Bill, Henry should feel free to continue to court her, all three meeting up that very night at their mutual favorite dining spot, Frank’s, where they dance it out in public as a trio, suggesting that the future may entail the kind of continental configuration that Noel Coward proposes in Ernst Lubitsch’s cinematic version of his play Design for Living, a ménage à trois that hints that they might better learn how to rephrase their endearments for one another—unless the MacMurray character truly does decide, as Henry has proposed to him, to once again take up his wanderlust by traveling to Siam or Greece—both with notable histories of gay sex. I surely wouldn’t describe this film as “indifferent.”*

 

*Ruggles’ film even posits a kinkier alternative as Henry’s secretary early in the work describes to Vicky how, loving both of Vicky’s husbands, she has imaginatively shared both their honeymoons with them, partially fulfilling her “impossible” love.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).

Lukas Vizner | Bytost (Only Human) / 2020

the liberating storm

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miriam Fulmeková and Lukas Vízner (screenplay), Lukas Vízner (director) Bytost (Only Human) / 2020 [28 minutes]

 

Like so very many LGBTQ short films, Slovakian director Lukas Vizner’s movie is a love story, but it is not until at least 13 minutes into this film before we fully realize that Krystof Janecký (Richard Pekárek) and Filip Varg’s (Tomás Magát) relationship is in the past, and it is only gradually that we come to perceive that their relationship was perhaps one of the most controversial of the gay community, not even their fellow gay friends being totally able to embrace the unlikely pairing, Krystof being a talented pianist, accompanist for Chloé (Ester Víznerová), a major singer, and his lover Filip working as a popular porn star.

     Even Krystof’s parents cancel lunch plans with the two of them, recognizing Filip as a lovely “friend” as opposed to their son’s beloved husband. Krystof himself attempts to find Filip a “real” job as an assistant manager and similar positions. Off the screen Filip is simply a hunky gardener, a man who finds a good rain storm comforting and liberating. Yet, Krystof has reason beyond the everyday prejudice he must face to be disturbed, particularly by the fact that Filip’s porno managers are pumping him up with performance drugs.

       But it is the prejudice Filip is made to feel at almost every formal event to which Krystof takes him that is the biggest contention in their relationship. How can supposedly intelligent and educated individuals treat Filip’s lover so cruelly, as if he didn’t even exist?

       Yet we know this happens all the time. When Howard and I were young, and I was still in the

university finishing by Masters and PhD, we used to attend Washington, D.C. parties, Howard being then a hot young Hirshhorn Museum curator, whereas I was received as if I might have been a hairdresser—nothing wrong with hairdressers—or some other sort of meaningless accessory not worthy of their “art” world. I felt uncomfortable and spurned. I can only imagine if I’d been in the sex “business.” Being a student was somehow of secondary worth, and even later being a professor of English was perceived as a liability. Krystof and Filip’s arguments remind me of our own at the time. Krystof’s argument that, “It is their game according to their rules,” doesn’t help. Why play with their rules?

    If Filip feels trapped in his role, it doesn’t help when Krystof insists that he find another job, “something normal.” Filip can’t imagine what that job might be. Besides he has a contract, and he is the primary financial support of the couple.

       We don’t truly know the cause of Filip’s death, but we can presume, after one of their fights, it might have involved drugs, a kind a suicide so that Krystof might live the “normal” life he so desperately desires.

       Most of the rest of this film feels secondary, Krystof going to court to block the continual distribution of his lover’s porn films, joined by Filip’s mother—a case they lose; Filip did have a contract as he kept reminding Krystof, and the judge agrees that the contract is still valid. Yes, the continued viewing of those films on the pornographer’s internet website are understandably torturous to the young pianist. But one wants to take him by the lapels and shake him into the reality that Filip’s life was not meaningless simply because his employment involved his body engaged in sex.

      But sadly, we know that no society is ever going to agree with that concept? Certainly not the conservative European world, not the macho Catholic cultures across the planet, or the still Puritan US. They will happily watch the porno films and label the actor within them unworthy of their social status. Only in autre moments do certain parts of the culture vaguely embrace such figures, such as the actors in Andy Warhol’s movies or the arty films and photos of people like Bruce Weber or Robert Mapplethorpe. Even Howard, in describing this very project, feels it necessary to remind our friends that I am not writing about porn. We are all embarrassed by our sexual desires and certainly don’t want to fully share them with others.

     It seems shocking to me that one of our most natural instincts, our sexual urges is something we feel most uncomfortable about sharing with others.

      Krystof resolves his suffering by singing a song at the end of Chloé’s concert about his love for Filip. Too bad, it’s a rather rambling kitsch song during which the director shows us clips of their good times together, but it serves its purpose: a gentle memorium for the man he’s lost.

     The lawyer apologizes for his own prejudice and back in his hotel room, Krystof goes to the window where he hears the thunder of the liberating storm Filip so loved.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2024).