Terence Greenidge | The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama / 1925

the fire of burning fanaticism

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evelyn Waugh (intertitles), Terence Greenidge (director) The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama / 1925

 

After having lived a life of wild carousing and extravagant expense for few years at Hertford College at Oxford, Evelyn Waugh earned only a Third Class Degree in History which, as Duncan McLaren writes, “his father thought wasn’t worth formally receiving by going back to Oxford to satisfy the university’s residency requirements.” His father, Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh wanted him to get a job immediately in order, in part, to help pay back the bills he had racked up through his university years.

 

    In July of 1924, accordingly, Waugh was very much betwixt and between, having no likelihood of income and torn away from his friends, and yet having no money to keep living as he had grown accustomed to from his upper-crust acquaintances.

     Having returned to the family house at Underhill in Hampstead, close to Golders Green, a semi-rural area of dairy farms, market gardens, and woods at the time, he spent much of his now spare time with his current male lover, Alastair Graham—he’d previously had romantic affairs with Hugh Lygnon and Richard Pares—until Graham departed for Kenya. In the meantime, perhaps just to entertain themselves his friends Terence Greenidge and others each divvied up a small sum to produce a silent movie for which Waugh wrote the intertitles, the script evidently being extemporized as they moved along. Much of the film is shot at Underhill.

      Its impetus, in part came out of their youthful satirizing of their recent university days. Although Waugh had once been deeply involved in the Anglican Church, by the time of his days at Oxford he’d pretty much abandoned religion and, as a member of the Hypocrites’ Club with his friends such as Harold Acton and Brian Howard took up a life of heavy drinking and homosexual activity. Waugh and his Hypocrite friends took an active disliking to the Dean of Hertford, C. R. M. F. Cruttwel—particularly after he took Waugh aside to advise him to correct his ways—describing him as being sexually attracted to dogs, at nights barking, as McLaren notes, “seductively in the quadrangle below the Dean’s rooms.” As McLaren continues about the Dean of the nearby college Bailliol, who would become a central character in the film, Waugh and his group had no positive feelings since he closed down their Club and stole Waugh’s first boyfriend, Richard Pares from him.

       The film, The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, presents the Dean of Balliol as being “a leading Catholic layman of England” who is involved in a burgeoning homosexual relationship with the Prince of Wales. Dressed in a blonde mop of a wig, looking somewhat, as McLaren describes him, like Andy Warhol of later days, Waugh plays the role of the over-attentive lover who, missionary style, would love to convert the Prince to the Catholic position, literally a “hands-on” project which means that Waugh can hardly keep his paws off of the Prince (played by the director’s brother John Greenidge, also later a director and actor).

      The film begins, however, in Rome where the Pope Septimus Nixon (Guy Hemingway) decides to deploy the clever Cardinal Montefiasco (John Sutro) to England to begin a campaign to convert the Prince to Catholicism. Much is made of his relationship between the Pope and the Cardinal’s mother, Chiara Montefiasco (played by Evelyn’s elder brother Alec, who had been previously kicked out of his preparatory school for homosexual behavior and had gone into the military after). The major characteristic of Chiara is that she is a complete lush, drinking down bottles of wine as quickly as the Pope can provide them. Almost everyone, except the Dean and the Prince, drink profusely throughout.

       Reaching England, Montefiasco and the Dean plot the overthrow of the Anglican Church by first attempting to solidify the relationship between the Dean and the Prince, but also by stealing King George V’s (Derek Erskine) ring to help sustain their activities.

       They succeed in getting the ring off the dozing King’s finger, but the Prince seems increasingly bothered by the Dean of Balliol’s constant attentions and sends his “entertainment secretary” Lord Borrowington (also played by Waugh), to the noted Bohemian chanteuse Beatrice de Carolle (Elsa Lanchester). Asking her if she might be interested in a dinner engagement with the Prince. The two hit if off immediately, and after several evenings together the Prince no longer has any interest at all in the Dean and his homosexual past.

       Foiled at what he does best, the Dean sends his friend Father Murphy, S. J. (Terence Greenidge) to Beatrice’s hovel to award her with the King’s ring now hung upon a necklace. She is so stunned that she puts it on immediately for her date with the Prince that evening.

       Father Murphy, however, has fallen head-over-heels in love with Beatrice and cannot do without her.

       After dinner as the Prince and Beatrice drink their champagne in the restaurant garden, her date suddenly spots her necklace, recognizing it as it as his father’s stolen ring, and immediately rises from his seat casting her away from him forever (“Good God, my father’s ring! Leave me you thief!”)

 

     Distressed by his female companion, he now allows himself to be taken away by the Dean and the Cardinal for religious atonement and some much-needed libations. But it appears that he is none too excited about returning to the Dean and his homosexual advances.

        Beatrice is heartbroken and spends a troubled evening with the Cardinal lying at her doorstep, awaiting her exit so that he can describe his sudden love. She finally rises early, after the sleepless night, and calmly steps over his body as she moves off in a London park in despair. When he sees that she has left, he quickly attempts to follow her, the long chase serving as a highly comical routine as every time he tracks her down, he takes a few moments to drop to his knees and thank God for having found her, at the same moment, accordingly, losing her yet again.

        Even little boys taunt her, and finally, having lost all hope, she prepares to jump into the river. But glimpsing her from afar the Cardinal rushes toward her, telling her of his love, and saving her life. The poignant moment of his final rush to her as she stands on the ledge of the footbridge to save her is played all over again as in a rewind and repeat of the most significant moment of the film.

         The two, now charmed by one another, wander throughout the day together. But at one point, as they sit together, Father Murphy bemoans the fact that it is sad that she is a Protestant, perhaps among those who will soon die in the attack of the Roman Catholic faction who plan that night to kill major Protestants throughout the country.

         Shocked by the news, Beatrice rises and hurries off to the King with the news. The King’s aids, particularly the Earl of Kettering (William Lygon) plan to rid the country of the Catholic faction just as they have previously removed the Communists.

          In pretense of discussing the divisions between Protestants and Catholics, King George invites the Catholic delegation of the Dean, Montefiasco, and others to the palace where he secretly poisons their wine, all falling immediately dead.

          In the very last scene, we observe Father Murphy evidently now working with children, suggesting, perhaps, a pedophilic future for him.

          If what you might describe this “student-made film” is irreparably silly and amateurish, it is also quite funny at moments and charming over all, particularly in connection with the Pope and Chiara Montefiasco’s alcoholic relationship, the Dean’s desperate attempts to woo the young Prince of Wales, and most notably in the performance, her first film role, of Lanchester in her disappointing relationships with both the Prince and the Father, two men with which any such relationship was doomed in any event.

     Hardly anyone saw the film at the time—and even today, although it is streamed free to Britishers by the British Film Institute—is nearly impossible to view for Americans, both North and South, without VPN service—but must have provided a few entertaining weeks before those who made it were forced to face quite different futures, Waugh temporarily enrolling in Heatherley’s, the London art school in the autumn only to drop out and take a job as a teacher in a boy’s preparatory school in North Wales.

      The film is interesting also in terms of Waugh's own future, particularly since in 1927 he would marry Evelyn Gardner, "converting" evidently to heterosexuality, an issue that also troubles me as well in his Brideshead Revisited; I do not comprehend homosexuality as a "passing phase" resolved by marriage and children, although many an Englishman apparently underwent just such a shift in their lives. E. M. Foster's Maurice shows us another such situation. And in 1930 Waugh converted to Catholicism, despite that fact that his fictions were time and again described as blasphemous.

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

Adrian Brunel | Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery / 1925

cutie and petite

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrian Brunel, Edwin Greenwood, and J.O.C. Orton (scenario), Adrian Brunel (director) Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery / 1925       

 

Boxed in between what is described as a “heavy handed humour about boxing styles” and “a fascinating [boxing] pastiche of all things Russian, with Brighton Pavilion standing in for Moscow,” is what might be the very first true example on celluloid of openly gay camp humor. By 1925, the date of Adrian Brunel’s strange little film Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffoonery some serious bows had already been made to the LGBTQ community, particularly in films which featured recognizable gay figures such as Mauritz Stiller’s Vingarne (The Wings) (1916), Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), Ralph Ceder’s The Soilers (1923), and Carl Theodore Dreyer Mikaël (Michael) (1924). Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920)—long before the much touted first gay porn film, Surprise of a Knight (1929 or 1930)—had already represented explicit gay sex on film, three times, with both male and female couples and a masturbating male servant. 

     In Roscoe Arbuckle’s Coney Island of 1917, “Fatty,” about to dress as a woman bather, addressed the camera in a manner that surreptitiously winked to the audience the self-conscious cross-dressing action he was about to take. But in most of these films there was a quiet—and I am not just observing that these were silent films—assertion of a reality that was still not openly spoken.

       But with the sudden appearance of Cutie Cannaro, “the nicest man in boxing,” and his adversary, we have a full-blown gay man bowing to and throwing kisses at his seconds, his opponent, and evidently his royal lover in the audience, Lord Pifford (the director playing the role). And suddenly we perceive that are witnessing for the first time a gay figure who truly expects us not only to recognize him as a homosexual but through his display of satirical gay stereotypical actions that he is a queer boxer mocking his own identity.

      When he and his boxing partner, Le Petit Beurre, go for the opening handshake, it becomes a hug which the referee (Miles Malleson) must quickly attempt to break up, time and again, as the two gentlemanly sluggers seemingly seek to prove that they prefer clinches to punches. At several points the two men wrap their arms around each other’s heads and move into more of a traditional waltz instead of the dance of a boxer’s deflection.

 

    Cutie’s lovely ringside attendees show their horror whenever a punch is pulled, and hover over their man like chorus boys over a resting tenor when the round is finished. Cutie takes tea.

 

   To everyone’s shock, particularly to Petite, when they return to “fight,” Cutie actually dares to hit his friend several times, resulting in his opponent’s settling on the floor in a half-sitting position and refusing to get up despite the referee countdown. Clearly, he is not playing fair, although, of course, Cutie is declared the winner. But who cares. This little match is about a much longer affair.

        The British Film Institute has posted this portion of Brunel’s film online separately, with good reason. But I wish that they had included the entire short film, if for no other reason than to spotlight its oddity in the annuals of gay filmmaking. For Brunel is not truly mocking his homosexual boxers as much as they mock themselves for the very fact that they are performing on screen in the most savage of heterosexual sport challenges. Their representation of that defines gay “camp” decades before Susan Sontag stumbled upon the concept. And this film gives new context to later gay boxing films such as Dudley Murphy’s The Sport Parade (1932) and Marcel Carné’s L’Air de Paris (1954).

       Upon discovering this little-known gem, I felt a rush of feeling that this changes everything!

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2021).

Louis J. Gasnier | Parisian Love / 1925

the thief of love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lois Hutchinson (screenplay, based on a story by F. Oakley Crawford), Louis J. Gasnier (director) Parisian Love / 1925

 

Louis J. Gasnier’s silent film of 1925, Parisian Love is a highly crafted film that is also one of the strangest works of cinema of the period. Through the device of a sexual and class-structured ménage à trois of a woman named Marie (Clara Bow), her lover Armand (Donald Keith), and a doctor/professor Pierre Marcel (Lou Tellegen), Gasnier’s adaptation of a story by F. Oakley Crawford interweaves Apache dance and gangsterism with upper-class tangos of thievery that often seem to be indistinct except in the locations of where the dance is held. While all seek innocence and purity, the methods they use to obtain what they desire are filled with mendacity and violence. And finally, while the men seek out heterosexual love, they attain something close to what they most seek in their homosexual love for one another.

      The film sets the tone almost immediately in its first frames in a seedy French bar which wealthy tourists haunt in order to catch a glimpse of the Paris underground Montmartre life.

       Marie, Armand, and their partner “the Knifer” (Jean De Briac) give them the performance of a lifetime, as Marie and the knifer begin a rendition of the Apache, he bringing her close to him in dance for a few moments before throwing her to the floor, pushing her off, kicking and then dragging her, as she gradually staggers back to standing position, moving toward, and entering into a deep kiss at the very moment that the seemingly jealous Armand appears, pulling a knife and charging at the male dancer only to be stabbed to death; the police are quickly called in as the patrons rush out of the café in horror, leaving some of their possessions behind—only returning to their meals when the “actors” have been swept “off” to backstage safety, where they change their clothes and gloat over their successful performances and whatever loot they have uncovered. One of them has also found a dropped business card of one of the patrons, Pierre Marcel, whose mansion they suddenly determine to rob that very evening, presumably because he appears to be spending a night on the town.

      The gang checks out the place, Armand and the knifer climbing to the bedroom balcony while Marie, dressed as a man, waits below on guard. Hearing noises, Pierre rises from bed and hides in the shadows as the two men enter his room, hoping by suddenly turning on the light he may scare them off.

       When he does so, however, “the knifer” pulls his switchblade ready to kill and rob Pierre, but almost inexplicably Armand stops him, fighting him to protect Marcel from murder as the knifer leaps out the window, now both he and Marie being chased by the alerted police. The police shoot and kill the knifer, and think they have wounded Marie, who instead tricks them by returning to female garb and walking past them, hitting up one cop with a request for a drag for her cigarette.

       The police, meanwhile, attempt to arrest Armand, but Marcel lies for him describing his as a friend posing as a decoy; and, in fact, he does appear to recognize the young man, but also quickly discovers that Armand has been gravely stabbed in his attempt to wrestle away his cohort’s knife. Armand falls into a coma, and a doctor is called, a long period of recuperation following.

      From the very beginning there is a look of deep longing and sexual desire for the criminal expressed in Pierre’s facial gestures, glances that Armand clearly does not quite know how to interpret.

      As Armand recovers, he admits that he had once taken a course with the noted scientist, but that his life as a student had radically been changed when he was mistaken for a thief, choosing to actually become one in retaliation. And yes, there was a woman involved, a woman with whom he is still desperately in love.

      You can almost see Pierre (through Tellegen’s excellent acting) suffering through this revelation. This is no coded film, and he realize that he has quite obviously fallen in love with Armand, and has no intentions of giving him up to some woman from the street. Yet, perhaps just to satisfy Armand’s heterosexual desires, he does arrange for him to meet a proper lady of the upper class, a beautiful young woman whose attentions, if not directly leading to Armand falling in love with her, are nonetheless pleasant to him.

      When the young man has almost healed, Pierre “sentences” Armand to stay on with him another six months. And it is apparent that Armand is also willing to remain with Pierre, if not precisely as a lover, clearly as an intimate friend. Indeed, their deep friendship reminds me somewhat of that between the two men in Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil of the very next year.

     Armand begs only a single hour of complete freedom before he commits to what appears to be a kind of conjugal relationship with Pierre, which the elder, with some hesitation, grants him.

      Meanwhile, Marie has taken a job as Pierre’s maid so that she might determine for herself what her lover’s situation is. Mostly she finds her job consumed by keeping away from the advances of Pierre’s socialite friends. When she sneaks into Armand’s room, she is interrupted by Pierre’s introduction to Armand of Jean D'Arcy, with whom, as Marie hides in the closet, Armand appears to strike up a relationship.

      When she hears from others in the Apache gang that Armand has been sent by Pierre to England in a business matter, and—as they joke about the obvious relationship that has developed between the two men—it wasn’t she who Armand kissed goodbye, she becomes furious, plotting revenge.

      Angry about the turn of events and tired of living with the snuff-consuming, wine guzzling Madame Frouchard (Lillian Leighton) and her alcoholic husband, she takes off—at the very moment when Armand comes to visit her in the old apartment, hoping to find his lover and possibly to renew their relationship. He leaves on his business trip to England believing that his affair with Marie is permanently over.

      Marie, meanwhile, steals money from her gang to front Frouchard and herself as a wealthy aunt and niece, relative to one of Pierre friends who has just died. The two, living at the Regent, create a comical sequence of events wherein, despite a series of outrageous faux pas enacted mostly by Frouchard, she successfully seduces Pierre who, obviously without his male lover around, believes in her innocence enough to determine to marry her. Apparently, like so many other homosexually-inclined gentlemen of the day, a heterosexual marriage is still a necessary cover. And before we even assimilate the fact, the plot reveals their nuptials are completed.

     Marie now reveals to Pierre just how she has tricked him and the financial rewards she now expects to release him from her treachery.

     At that very moment, however, Armand, having successfully finished his business negotiations, returns to find Marie married to his new male companion. Both Armand and Marie quickly realize that they are still in love with one another, but once more it is apparently too late, as the Apache gang takes their revenge on Marie for absconding with their stolen money, shooting her while in Armand’s arms.

     As the somewhat ludicrous plot will have it, Pierre, realizing that he has himself become a thief, not of money but of love—having stolen both Armand and Marie for his own desires—goes on the lam, taking the first steamer out to America. Marie, although seriously wounded, must now also go through the long process of healing, but in Armand’s arms.

     Evidently, both of the younger, lower class thugs must symbolically die before to being  reborn as people of wealth and class, a position provided to them by Pierre, who has left his house and fortune to the normative heterosexual couple.

     Parisian Love, at least in Gasnier’s hands, is not so very different from early 20th century English love or American eros: even if this film has been utterly honest about the homosexual desires of Pierre and Armand’s passive receptivity, “true” or normative love inevitably must win out over the “perversity” of that love. Same sex love once more must be sacrificed to the sexual “normality,” the outsider culture must be abandoned so that the wealthy might survive. The queer is no match against the social order of the status quo, even if the lovely effete Tellegen gave it his best.*

 

*Not only does Tellegen appear as an effete aesthete in this film—somewhat like Oscar Wilde—in the 1915 interview with Djuna Barnes, published in my collection of Djuna Barnes Interviews, he reveals himself to be precisely that; he even quotes Wilde.

 

Los Angeles, June 28, 2021

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

Simone Marino | Il difetto dell'astice blu (The Oddity in the Blue Crayfish) / 2023

major transformations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sara Mancini, Simone Marino, and Luca Murri Fabiano (screenplay), Simone Marino (director) Il difetto dell'astice blu (The Oddity in the Blue Crayfish) / 2023 [16 minutes]

 

Suffering from premature hair loss, Edo (Alessandro Cantalini), is determined to cure the problem before his boyfriend Federico (Nicolò Folin) returns to Italy from wherever he has been for a long year.

     The first scene shows Edo, hair covered by a cap of tinfoil with his head in the oven, convinced that if he keeps it there for a period of time it will resolve his problem. His good friend Luigi (Alessio Farinella) times him, while his mother (Rossana Gentili), disturbed by her son’s lunacy turns off the over light. She takes him instead to a specialist who diagnoses as alopecia, and gives him some drops to rub into his hair, warning him that his body is also likely to get sticky or even gummy in the process.

     The result is far worse than expected, his entire body literally oozing a sticky substance, with Edo even pulling a hair out of his mouth and vomiting. The mother calls the doctor at a late hour who simply suggests that the process is working, and indeed, in a day or so, much to his surprise, Edo has a full head of red hair again, with no signs of balding.

     A day later he meets up with Federico, who hardly recognizes him with his new head of hair. But, it appears, his old boyfriend can stay with him only for short while; he has another event to attend. Perhaps he can see him later before he leaves, he suggests.

     Rightfully, Edo, who has long been waiting for his lover’s return, objects, only to have Federico explain that their relationship is over.

      Excusing himself to piss, Edo enters the toilet, crying and pulling strands of his newly grown hair, bringing blood to drip down his face.

      As he enters his home, his mother attempts to stop him to see what has happened, but he refuses, entering his room where Luigi already awaits him. Something is finally happening to Edo’s blue crayfish which, as Luigi has previously commented, has previously only sat quietly, without moving under a rock in its small aquarium.

      Now the crayfish is sitting out in the open, bit by bit, attempting to shed his old blue exoskeleton, a process which before their very eyes it finally accomplishes. The boys look on in wonderment, Edo finally realizing that he too has to shed his old skin, rid himself of his illusions

of love for Federico. It is also clear that his attention will now turn to the young man who has been long waiting form him to notice him, Luigi.

      This short comic film by Italian director Simone Marino, makes no profound statements, but quietly reveals the life of a young gay man in change, accompanied, I should add, by an excellent score by Francesco Saverio Orfino.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Unknown filmmaker | Phak Dee (Good Mouth [People Who Sound Arrogant]) / 2017

preferring her brother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Director unknown Phak Dee (Good Mouth [People Who Sound Arrogant]) / 2017 [2 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

A young boy enters a class room where another cute boy sits, the first boy clearly angry. He wants to know whether or not the other made his sister cry.

   The second boy wants to know, in turn, if the other boy is the kind of guy who thinks of women as a toy. The first boy grabs him and pulls him up, telling him he sounds “arrogant.”

     The second comments that even if he’s arrogant, he’s serious about everything, slowly and gracefully moving forward into the other’s territory as they stare, almost lovingly at one another, eye to eye.

      He tells the other boy that he told his sister to forget about him, that he doesn’t think of her like that. “That I prefer her elder brother,” he finishes, all the time moving closer and closer almost into a gentle kiss.

 

     Suddenly, he backs off a little from other’s face, noticing his lips and asking, “What’s this?”

     Immediately, he gets out his lip balm and gently applies it on the other boy’s lips, when he finishes, dropping it into the boy’s school-uniform front pocket.

      A second later, school bag on back, he begins to stroll out of the room, turning back to say, “Be sure to use it regularly so you’ll be sure to know what my lips feel like.” He walks out of the room.

      The narrator continues: “Even if you’re arrogant. No matter how rough they are, they’ll turn soft.”

     At the same moment, the first boy, left in startlement, puts his hand to his mouth in memory of the soft kiss-like touch.

    As the camera pans over, we see a clutch of five girls who have just witnessed the entire scene, almost moaning in envy and desire.

      A note tells us that the word Phak dee literally means “good mouth” (“people who sound arrogant.”)

      The cute remaining boy gives the camera a kiss.

      Surely only a Thai commercial production company could imagine making a sexy advertisement for Lip Care balm centered around boylove.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).