Lewis Allen | Desert Fury / 1947

you can always go home again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Rossen and A. I. Bezzerides (uncredited) (screenplay, based on a novel by Ramona Stewart), Lewis Allen (director) Desert Fury / 1947

 

Desert Fury (1947) is a hothouse of a movie comparable to Douglas Sirk’s later Written on the Wind (1956), this film shot in Technicolor by Edward Cronjager and Charles Lang with scenes of stunning desert landscape and intense melodramatic encounters within bedrooms, living rooms, and offices accompanied by the constantly swelling strains of a score of Miklós Rózsa. And indeed British-born director Lewis Allen’s credentials (The Uninvited, reviewed elsewhere in these pages, The Unseen, and The Imperfect Lady of the same year) with his film’s mix of soap-opera, mystery, and ghost film genres puts him very much into the same context with figures such Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and others.

     Desert Fury contains elements of all three genres, particularly the first. But it quickly becomes a mystery when, without apparent reason, the film begins with the sudden return of two of the desert town Chuckawalla, Nevada’s natives, Paula Haller (Lizabeth Scott) and Eddie Bendix (John Hodiak), Paula seemingly in a hurry to get home and Eddie stopping by a bridge—where we later discover his wife was killed in an automobile accident—not sure whether he really wants to settle back into Chuckawalla life. But then neither is Paula sure she wants to return permanently to a town where most of the girls her age look down on her for her mother Fritzi’s activities as the owner of the Purple Sage, the local gambling establishment. 

     Paula has just left yet another school to which her mother has sent her to become a refined and educated young lady, but the beautiful woman wants nothing to do with refinement nor, apparently, with becoming wiser. If she misses the fresh air of the desert and, just perhaps, the company of the local sheriff Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster), her real draw, whom she’d most love to escape, is her mother Fritzi (Mary Astor), who is so powerful as a kind of amazon force that even she feels safe in the fact that her daughter will never truly be able to leave her. It is hardly coded if we feel we can describe her mother—who, we later discover, often slept with her daughter when she was a child—as having something close to a lesbian relationship with her offspring. Without a father —who has apparently died, perhaps murdered, when Paula was an infant—the daughter has been so overpowered by her mother’s love for and definition of her that the two have developed love and hate relationships that go far beyond the confines of a mother-daughter affair.

      Eddie also arrives with someone upon whom he is utterly dependent, his “friend” Johnny Ryan (Wendell Corey) who has been with him for most of his life and with whom he soon perceive that he is so intricately intertwined that once again you could hardly describe their relationship as coded. When Paula, later in the film, asks Eddie how he met Johnny, the gangster replies: 

“’It was in the automat off Times Square, about two o'clock in the morning on a Saturday. I was broke, he had a couple of dollars, we got to talking. He ended up paying for my ham and eggs.’ ‘And then?’ Paula asks? ‘I went home with him that night. We were together from then on.’”

 

    You don’t describe “going home with someone” if you’re intending to sleep on their living room couch for a few days, and you don’t stay together with someone for most of your life if there isn’t something more than a relationship with a “best buddy” or “close advisor” going on. And when we later discover that even while he was married to the woman who everyone reports looked a lot like Paula, Johnny still lived with him, I think we can safely report that the connection between Johnny and Eddie is homosexual.

      The film, released in 1947, is obviously not openly suggesting that mother and daughter or Johnny and Eddie are having “sex”—that would be impossible if you wanted to have your film screened, and this work, produced by Hal Wallis Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures was a true Hollywood production, so there no escaping the Hays Code in the year I was born. But as Eddie Muller, San Francisco film critic who as authored several books on Hollywood cinema, particularly noir films, observes: "Desert Fury is the gayest movie ever produced in Hollywood's golden era. The film is saturated—with incredibly lush color, fast and furious dialogue dripping with innuendo, double entendres, dark secrets, outraged face-slappings, overwrought Miklos Rosza violins. How has this film escaped revival or cult status? It's Hollywood at its most gloriously berserk."

     And yes, Johnny is a gangster who apparently hooked up for a while with Fritzi back in the old New Jersey days before she had to move West for her mysterious (the film never reveals its nature) illness. But why Robert Rossen and A. I. Bezzerides’ screenplay keeps suggesting that Paula has an uncanny resemblance to the former Mrs. Bendix is inexplicable. Are the writers somehow signaling that the relationship between Fritzi and Eddie was deeper than they want to outwardly proclaim, that the other woman was, preposterously, an older sister of Paula’s? Was incest also one of Eddie’s crimes?

     All we can know from what Fritzi tells Paula and what her sheriff friend Tom hints is that Eddie is no good and dangerous for a pretty girl who is still “wet behind the ears”—and here we are entering Written on the Wind territory—which is, of course, why she immediately falls in love with him.

     In movies like Allen’s and later, Sirk’s and Ray’s films, good girls never fall in love with the right man, which is what gets the pot of the plot into such a boiling frenzy. As bad and controlling as she is, as “too-good-to-be-believed” as he is, Fritzi and Tom cannot keep the rebel Paula locked away in her bedroom for long. As she keeps repeating, she’s got her mother’s bad behavior in her blood and she’s just naturally attracted to evil gay gangsters like Eddie.

     Even Johnny’s abuse and open abhorrence of the potential home-breaker doesn’t give her pause, as she weaves the weak Eddie around her finger, demanding that he get rid of his “life-long friend.” When Eddie finally does get around to telling his lover to get lost, it is utterly clear that the idea is incomprehensible to Johnny. While realizing that Eddie may have romantically fallen for Paula, he insists he will still hang around. But when Eddie tells him he actually has to leave the premises, the look on Johnny’s face is one of utter confusion and terror at the same instant, a kind of sickness until death.

     Finally, when the true mystery is revealed, when Johnny, no longer caring enough to try to protect Eddie or himself, tells Paula the truth—that Eddie does not truly exist but is a weak puppet manipulated and given credibility as a human being entirely by Johnny—we feel almost as foolish as Paula for not having realized that the passive aggression we observed in Johnny’s demeanor which defined the two men’s existence together.

    Having now broken the Hays Code restrictions, revealing the true nature of the way the two men actually functioned as a couple, the script has to destroy the queers. There is no way around it: Eddie shoots Johnny dead and runs himself—in a pretend chase to bring back Paula—off the same bridge which he has previously forced the look-alike Paula’s car.

         So now Paula no longer needs to leave her mamma. She can stay right in Chuckawalla, or at least nearby in the farm Tom Hanson has always wanted, with her as his forever happy wife. Order is returned without even having to cut the proverbial apron strings. And since Tom is well-liked by everyone in town, we can be certain that eventually Paula will become a scion of Chuckawalla society, just what her mother wanted for her, and even at one point in this fable, attempted to buy for her daughter.

    Peyton Place has never looked better.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).

       

 

Raj Jain | Ammi / 2019

the kiss in the mirror

by Douglas Messerli

 

Raj Jain (screenwriter and director) Ammi / 2019 [8 minutes]

 

   It appears that a Pakistani family who seem to be fairly assimilated into US culture, are finally having to face serious issues. The young son, Ibrahim (Karn Kalra), is disturbed by his father’s emails, particularly when he sends a message that he would like to meet Ammi’s boyfriend. The boy approaches his mother, Sanaa (Cindy Pusad), disturbed by the message, while she, who has been married to her husband for 33 years, has grown accustomed to the fact, while clearly knowing that her husband is also gay and has been regularly out with gay men many a night. She describes it as his attempting to make amends.

 

     The son, Ibrahim, even admits to his lover Jimmy (Joseph Pugh) that he has never felt he has had a father in Taahir (Afrog Khan), the man who went missing from his life as well. It is a strange reaction to someone who shares the same sexual desires; but he, evidently, cannot accept them in a father, who perhaps, in his imagination, should be a normative heterosexual. 

     Moreover, the situation is made even more complex by the fact that the dinner to which they invite their son’s boyfriend is the father’s anniversary with Ammi’s mother. 

   Things seem to go quite nicely, with the boyfriend complementing his friend’s mother for the wonderful meal, while also paying attention to the father. But when he asks to visit the bathroom, the husband, rather inexplicably, leads the way, the boy’s mother catching the two of them, her son’s boyfriend and her own husband, in a deep kiss in the mirror as she passes the room.

      She packs her bags, seemingly ready to leave. When he claims, that is not what good mothers do, she counters, that kissing her son’s own boyfriend is not what good fathers do. She hands her always absent husband his own bags, demanding he leave in her stead, which he has no choice but to do.

      Strangely, in this film it is neither her son’s or husband’s homosexuality that is the question, but her husband’s attempt to usurp in his sexual desires even with her son’s boyfriend that determines her actions.

 

      This fascinating work of homosexual acceptance might have resulted in a kind of coming out movie, for either father or son. But in this case, since everyone is out, it is only the rejected mother who must make her decisions, challenges which she finally recognizes when her own son’s lover has become the object of her husband’s desires.

      Jain’s work, accordingly is an oddly perverse story that doesn’t quite fit into the typical homosexual canon, but is more interesting for that very reason. My only wish is that this short film were more professionally accomplished. This movie does not seem to be listed even on IMDb, nor on any of the other typical film sites. I feel fortunate to have found it on the Audprop site of award queer films.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (March 2024).

 

P. J. Palmer | North Star / 2022

sorrowful goodbyes

by Douglas Messerli

 

P. J. Palmer (screenwriter and director) North Star / 2022 [30 minutes]

 

Gay actors Colman Domingo as James and Malcolm Gets as his husband Craig star in what was certainly one of the best short films of 2022, US director P. J. Palmer’s North Star.

      The men live together on isolated ranch in upstate California, a spot so beautiful that you want to cry out with joy upon just seeing the fields and woods (the movie was filmed at Eagle Creek Ranch, in Trinity County, California). But Craig is dying of a degenerative disease and can no longer care for himself. The pills, even purchased in Canada at a cheaper price than they might cost in the US, run for each batch to $900, and James has already sold off all of the livestock and animals except his two dogs and his favorite horse, North Star, a beautiful animal who the actor works with so marvelously, as one critic noted, that you might imagine the horse (actually named Butterscotch) to be his own.

      On the particular day in which the film takes place, we see James rise early before the sun is up to feed the dogs and the horse and return to clean and bathe his diapered lover before frying up some eggs which he carefully tries to spoon-feed him, Craig hardly being, at this point, to any longer swallow.

       What we also soon perceive is that on this day James is selling North Star, his last mare, with the hopes that, despite the ranch’s foreclosure notice that they can survive for just a little while longer. The love between this interracial couple is clearly deep and long-lasting, James speaking to his basically unresponsive companion in a manner that, as critic Jennie Kermode writes in Eye for Film, which shows him “that he still recognises the intelligence and personality within his wasted body.”

       Into this quiet place of worry and yet some contentment comes a force of well-meaning care but also a closed and bigoted mind, Craig’s sister Erin (Audrey Wasilewski), who comes loaded with pills and food and the willingness to do the laundry and clean up their house, but who also treats her brother like a child, speaking to him in a kind of loving baby talk. She turns on the evangelical TV station where the on-line minister, Dr. Owen Broderick (in a surprise portrayal by actor Kevin Bacon) who damns homosexuality while she makes long distance telephone calls sharing her frustration with friends and family that James won’t allow Craig to be taken from the ranch to their home so that she might look after him.

 

      She is fully loving, the only way she knows how to be, but totally cruel and insensitive to his actual existence and the man she claims to love and forgive for his sinful ways. Without being able to speak a word, Gets shows his recognition of her love, while still portraying his sorrow and frustration for her treatment of him.

        As Kermode nicely summarizes the situation:

 

“She has not forsaken Craig. She even tries to love Jimmy. It’s their sin, she tells him, that she hates. She comes to help, and when somebody needs full time care, it’s very hard to do without such assistance. She runs errands for them, obtains medication, possibly illegally. When Jimmy is out, she switches the television set, at which Craig is pointed, over to a religious channel full of homophobic rhetoric. There’s an implicit suggestion that he’s to blame for his suffering because his love for Jimmy has cut him off from God. To add to his discomfort, she talks to him as if he were an infant, talks about him on the phone with her friends, expressing her disgust at the way he lives. But he loves his sister; he knows that she’s agonised by the thought of him going to Hell, and he shows us something that we rarely get to see from disabled characters in cinema: pity for somebody else.”

 

        Meanwhile, the auction firm willing to buy the horse arrives with a truck, and James is busy trying to carefully lead his animal into the horse truck and to say goodbye to his beloved North Star. At this same moment Erin finds the foreclosure notice in a drawer and goes into a kind of fury, interrupting James’ negotiations with Mike (Chris Sheffield), who is purchasing the horse, with a demand that Craig move in with them—without his sinful presence of course. Without comprehending their own feelings and love, she attacks them openly for the life style and the failure of the ranch because of her brother’s illness. Throughout, James attempts to keep his balance, refusing to do battle with her but firmly assuring her that her brother’s decision has been to remain on the ranch with him.

       She returns inside, disturbingly crying over her brother in a strange mix of sorrow for his condition, worry about his future, and hate for his sinful behavior all these years. Gets shows the mixed emotions that such a reaction might require, a love for his sister, but also fear that she might win out, and an anger for her narrow-minded views of life.

 

      Erin speeds off in her car as James gives a gentle goodbye hug to his horse and returns inside to comfort his pained and dying partner. His words to his now crying lover, “I got you. You got me,” say it all. No matter what happens and despite the family and cultural prejudices, they will remain together until the end.

      All the actors in this film are truly excellent, and all are presented as fairly complex, each with differing emotional beliefs, needs, and desires. Domingo is so wonderful that he should have been nominated for major awards for this short role even before his brilliant acting in Rustin the following year.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Michelle Leigh | More Than Only / 2017

when more is too little and less not enough

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelle Leigh (screenwriter and director) More Than Only / 2017

 

Although the central figure of this film, Justin Johson (Jonathan Miles) is supposed to be clever and cute, as his roommate describes him he is also terribly annoying. At 20 years of age, a junior in college, he’s a rich boy who is still locked up in his father’s demands: that he get straight A’s and he remain sexually straight as well. He has achieved the first, but has endless difficulties maintaining the latter, although he has pretend-dated unknowing girls all of his high school days.

      Justin, we’re led to believe, lives an active gay sexual life, but cannot, even as an apparently promiscuous college boy, escape his father’s authoritarian requirements, which are tied to Justin’s financial support, from which the boy is threated to immediately be cut if he doesn’t continue to meet the criteria.

  

    How he has managed to remain friends with two or three individuals, including Brooke Zimmerman (Beth Dodge)—whom the movie hints may be a lesbian—is almost inexplicable, particularly since he is nearly suicidal (the film argues he’s simply prone to intentional accidents like jumping out of his second-story dorm window and running into walls, usually after a phone call his father), and has built up a wall of wise cracks around him which presumably make him loveable to those who want only to laugh away their being gay.

      For some reason, Justin becomes infatuated with his male nurse, Michael Garner (Bjorn Anderson), who also just happens to play piano at the local bar. He begins flirting with him the moment he encounters him in the Emergency Room—even though he has no evidence yet that the man is actually gay—and doesn’t stop until he has stalked him and fulfilled three nearly impossible challenges from Michael: 1) That he make Michael defy gravity, 2) that he bring him a purple ghost orchid, a very rare plant that grows only in Cuba, and 3) that he take him to the seven wonders of the world.

 

     How Justin achieves those three requests, a bit like Harry Potter or the characters of the Wizard of Oz, takes up the first half of the movie, and supposedly disarms Michael’s initial dislike of Justin even if it doesn’t quite answer for our abhorrence of this character. The two fall in love and, of course, finally face off with mom and dad, Greg (Dennis Wells) and Cynthia Johnson (Gina Summers)—perhaps two of the most unloving and unsympathetic parents ever represented on film outside of Snow White’s dreadful step-mama. Why their son hasn’t long ago ditched them—financial support aside—is nearly incomprehensible.

     Even more difficult to wrap your head around, however, is the script’s suggestion that these gay boys date for two months, and even take a trip to the ocean where they share a bed before finally having sex. This simply doesn’t read to me like any male gay relationship I’ve encountered, although I admit I am of the old school when gay men took anyone in pants home to fuck.

     But Michelle Leigh clearly sees her film as a feel-good movie, determined to make you realize that difference is good, and steam-rolls on with her picture as the now loving couple of Justin and

Michael finally get the nerve to tell off the Johnsons, putting them, evidently, out of their son’s life forever—the couple being so homophobic that they cannot even imagine the concept of gay love, let alone tolerate a kiss between two men.

 

    I will say that by film’s end Justin’s obnoxiousness finally wears you down, and you’re even tempted to forgive him—along with the rather bland but certainly nice Michael and the always there-for-her-friend Brooke—for his endless one-liners and his inability to grow up and give up his family’s financial carrot-on-a-stick.

     Justin finally learns that there is such a thing as financial aid for students, perceives that his daddy is just not a nice person, and marries his lover. And everyone lives happily ever after—apparently even the Johnsons who seem overjoyed to get their son out of their lives.

 

Los Angeles, March 1, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).

Michelangelo Antonioni | L‘Eclisse (Eclipse) / 1962

a tear is the fault of the dress

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio Bartolini, and Ottiero Ottieri (writers), Michelangelo Antonioni (director) L‘Eclisse (Eclipse) / 1962  

 

If watching Antonioni’s great films L’Avventura and La Notte did not make it clear, then Eclipse of 1962 certainly reiterates that this director’s films are not at all about narrative fiction. Plot truly does not matter, and the events of his films might often be somewhat shuffled. His films, rather, are psychological expressions—so psychological that Antonioni might almost have been a surrealist, had he not chosen to use what appears as or pretends to be a realist world instead of employing dream-like surrealist images. Even Antonioni’s rooms in these three films are mirrors of the owners’ personalities rather than places to be actually inhabited.

 

     Time and again, the characters move into spaces where the owners have gone missing. Landscapes generally are empty and barren as in L’Avventura, or are pockmarked with the detritus of civilization, half-developed fields littered with preposterous constructions such as the mushroom-shaped water tower early in Eclipse or the seemingly never-to-be-completed new building near the female character’s street. The characters, in turn, move around these spaces as if they are, in fact, sleepwalkers.

      In the first long sequence of Eclipse, for example, Monica Vitti as Vittoria wanders backwards and forwards in and out of rooms while her lover Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) sits for long periods of time as if he were a statue. She smokes, drinks, and rearranges nearby objects, unable to properly express her intense emotions, while Riccardo serves as kind of Buddha, a figure mirrored by the nearby whirling fan, both frozen in the repetition of nothingness. No matter what has happened previously, we know the clash between the two is irreclaimable. He is a publisher, a man of books and the words within them, she a creature unable to express her mind.

 

    The director’s camera, almost mimicking Vittoria’s fidgety movements, darts around the same space, fragmenting furniture and faces, at moments moving to her legs beneath a chair before zooming up to a mirror or peering out, as she herself has a few seconds before, from the corner of a window. It is almost as if everything is moving in a languorous ballet, choreographed to express the uncertainty and awkwardness of the human beings within. It is this quite careful manipulation of movement that brings many viewers to describe Antonioni’s filmmaking as “mannered.” And in some senses, they are correct in their evaluation, for the entire scene is an expression “in the manner” of what we pretend are real experiences, but which, in truth, appear as something more out of Kabuki than our real everyday actions. Yet perhaps they reveal those everyday actions more faithfully than we might have ever imagined.

       Antonioni, however, is not attempting to express the everyday, and never pretends to be. His “characters,” as beautiful as they are, represent little more than stick figures, pushed and pulled through their daily actions by the rising industrialism, politics, greed, and, yes always, love without being able to solidly take hold of anything. They seldom make choices, and, even when they do, they are generally mistaken ones. For that reason, none of them will find what we might call satisfaction.

      Leaving her long-time elder lover, Vittoria is like a straw in the wind, her willowy body and diaphanous hair insubstantiality tilting against the city backdrops, a sun ready to be blotted out the bold black-and-white world in which she lives.  She is obviously a figure of the wind, as her brief, exhilarating airplane trip through the clouds with her neighbor and her pilot husband reveal. Vittoria is clearly overwhelmed by the experience.

     Yet there is also a kind of primitiveness about her, as her sudden determination to imitate a dancing Kenyan native in the apartment of her new acquaintance from Kenya reveals. But the same act also tells us that she has no comprehension of politics or even the dangerous implications of her spontaneous acts. Her friend Anita is quickly irritated by and embarrassed for her racist, “negro” mockery.

 

    Time and again, Vittoria shifts in her tracks at the very moment she might actually be moving toward a destination. Suddenly while trying to track down her new Kenyan friend’s escaped dog, she is distracted by the sounds of poles blowing in the wind. Leaving the stock exchange after an awful day in which her stock-playing mother has lost a great deal of money, Vittoria follows an even bigger loser, who appears to possibly be contemplating suicide, only to discover a napkin on which he has drawn several flowers. Vitti almost literally floats through the Rome of Antonioni’s Eclipse.

      Only one “thing,” after her breakup with Riccardo, seems to temporarily catch her attention or offer even a location where she might briefly settle: the beautiful face and fierce intensity of motion she perceives in the stock trader Piero (Alain Delon). With his dark hair and long, almost too feline eyebrows, Piero is exactly  the opposite of Vittoria. If she wanders, he moves with the direct intention of a man who knows what he wants and generally gets it. The scenes of him and his peers at the stock exchange represent humans as a pack of lions frenetically pacing back and forth between the phone cubicles, from where they get orders and glean information from other stock exchanges, and the bidding circle, where they shout out their stock purchases like desperately growling predators—which indeed they are! Money is an entry to the game played by those who hate and fear their fellow kind, a slightly paranoid reality expressed by Vittoria’s mother (Lilla Brignone) as well.

     The first moment this man of purposeless action spots Vittoria, it is inevitable, as so much is in Antonioni’s world of coincidence, that he will stalk her. The very same day, Piero throws over his call girl friend (a former blonde who has just changed into a brunette) and paces back and forth between Vittoria’s window, only to have his Alfa Romeo stolen by a stumbling drunk.

      His reaction to the discovery of the car, the body of the drunk within in, further emphasizes the differences between them. From a poorer family, Vittoria has no interest in finances, while he, the son of an obviously wealthy Roman family—who grew up in a house, we later discover, filled with great art and expensive furniture—excitedly uses others to make even more money and buy more possessions. He’ll sell the Alpha Romeo, he boasts, for a better and newer car. Even a stolen kiss between them ends with Vittoria’s torn dress. Her passive answer: “A tear is the dresses’ fault.”

      We recognize that nothing can come of their explosive relationship, which ends in Piero’s office, where he has temporarily removed all the phones from their cradles in order not to be disturbed.

       As all lovers do, they promise to meet again that night, and the night after, until the end of time. But as Vittoria descends the stairs to leave, for a second turning to look back to what we know has become a pillar of salt, we can only doubt their promises.

    Antonioni ends his Kabuki show, once again, with—from a realist perspective—an apparently mannerist conceit; but through the dream perspective of this nightmare vision of a world where humans increasingly feel dissociated, alienated, and displaced from each other and the world around them, he quite brilliantly conveys, his major, and perhaps only theme. Through a series of quick montages of various hours of the day from sunrise to sunset, the director takes us to all the spots where the couple has previously encountered one another. Strangers pass through the streets, going about their business, but neither Piero nor Vittoria show up. They too, like the unoccupied rooms and spaces they have throughout the film entered and wandered away from, no longer exist for one another. And even if they might ever come seeking each other out, there will surely be no one at home.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2011).