Richard Wallace | Starvation Blues / 1925

cold art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Laurel, Sherbourne Shields, Frank Terry, H.M. Walker, and Richard Wallace (screenplay), Richard Wallace (director) Starvation Blues / 1925

 

From 1918 to 1963, Australian born comedian Clyde Cook performed in at least 110 feature and short films playing mostly comic roles or, in the later talkies, a cockney figure. His famed mustache and rubbery facial expressions along with his frail stature brought him great popularity. His further acrobatic skills meant that he was perfect for the second banana or the fall guy, or in the LGBTQ films in which appeared, the “much put-upon queer boy” as in The Dude Wrangler (1930, playing “Pinkey Fripp) or feminized husband as in What’s the World Coming Two? (1926, in which he acted as “the Blushing Groom”).

      British comedian Syd Crossley played in an equal number of films, sometimes with the same directors and actors with whom Cook worked. Because of his height he often played the first comic or in authoritative roles such as constables and ungainly butlers.

      In Richard Wallace’s 1925 comic short (he replaced director James W. Horne, for reasons unknown) the two work together in a string of skits with them performing as a pair of hoboes caught in the severely cold weather of Chicago, the two attempting to survive as street musicians, Cook playing a gigantic tuba and Crossley a portable organ. The moment the two try to set up for a performance they are chased away by an unsympathetic cop, and much of the film is devoted to a cat and mouse game between the two and the policeman who is determined to closed down their only source of income.

      Throughout all of this we are made aware of just how impossible it is to survive in the freezing weather of the huge city located on the edge of the cold waters of Lake Michigan. Starvation is always near, yet the two manage endlessly to make us laugh. At one point Crossley, observing a wealthy man with a stuffed wallet of bills, has grown so hungry that he decides to follow and pickpocket the gent. But as he stands behind the gentleman on a streetcorner, signaling back to Cook of his intentions, the man moves on, a policeman replacing him. According when Crossley carefully slides his hand into a pocket, it is the into the policeman’s pants. No matter how Cook attempts to signal him of his horrible mistake, he does not catch on until it is predictably too late, and the two are once again set of the run from the law. One might almost imagine that the only way these hoboes resist being frozen—although at one point Cook actually does turn into a human icicle—is in their constant calisthenics caused by the cops. The image in one frame of the frozen Cook, the confused policeman, and the tuba which the impossible tall Crossley is supposedly hiding underneath them both creates a quite surreal vision.

      At another point they come upon the café coat check girl who has just been stood up outside the church by a café dandy who has promised to marry her. The boys take on this nearly frozen body in an attempt to cheer her up.

      In between their predictably failing efforts to survive, the movie takes us inside the popular café, also patrolled by a policeman determined to ferret out any dining “wets,” those patrons hiding a bottle of booze under the table.

      The film, in fact, begins with a view of the busy café filled with customers, the owner pushing his hands up in despair as the enforcement agent enters his establishment. A dancer spinning round almost like a Turkish dervish is just finishing her act, and if you look quickly you can spot the famous female impersonator of the day, Frederick Kovert (in this film performing as he sometimes does under the name Frederick Ko Vert).

       The café, which evidently welcomed local musical talents such as Cook and Crossley is immediately closed down, which is why the musicians have been forced back into the street. But later, when the café finally reopens, they return as the band.

        Scheduled to perform his famous “The Dance of the Seven Casabas”—perhaps one of the numbers Kovert danced on his long traveling tours in Mexico—he suddenly has a temper fit, pulling off his dress and wig as he moves away to dramatically pout in a tizzy. Cook goes on for him in the same dress, performing with one large ball which he moves about his body but gradually gets attached under the dress to his behind, the image creating the sexual pun that “he has a ball in his butt.”

 

      The owners, however, are delighted with the performance, noting that he has the same legs as “Pavlova—a right one and a left one”—putting Kovert into further melodramatic despair, and causing him instead of returning one of the helium-filled balls, to toss back a lamp globe, hitting Cook in the head, which results in a series of dizzying falls throughout the rest of his maniacal dance.

       Once more the cop lurks about trying to spot any “wets,” which ends, of course, in him discovering Cook in the midst of a dance; meanwhile the dandy, returned to the café, slugs the cop, all of which ends once more in the closure of the warm café.

       Cook and Crossley are forced into the local mission for the night, just to warm up even if it means setting on fire both their feet and heads.

        Why Kovert played such a frustrated artist in this work is not explained, but perhaps it gives us an insight into the great female impersonator himself as we witness him half in and out of his female persona.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

F. W. Murnau | Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe) / 1925

enlightened nightmares

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Mayer (screenplay, based on the play by Molière), F. W. Murnau (director) Herr Tartüff (Tartuffe) / 1925

 

Director F. W. Murnau always recognized a good play which he might adapt to the screen, and Moliere’s Tartuffe from 1925 was clearly one of them, as was his next work for cinema, Faust. I use the word “cinema” here more emphatically than I usually mean it, for Murnau’s filmmaking, from the very beginning, was not only an attempt to take dreaming into the everyday lives of movie audiences, but to uplift them; to put their subconscious joys and fears into a near delirious mix of imagination and spiritual uplift.

     Using images from visual art and combining them with detailed realistic settings, yet unafraid of theatrical tropes and melodramatic scenes, Murnau—a gay man who, if he’d lived beyond 1931, might have produced radically gay-oriented, even campy films worthy of James Whale, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and others—turned Molière’s classic on its head, so to speak, revealing the hypocrisy in all of society instead of just its religiously-inclined central figure.

     Today, in fact, this film has even more significance than it might have at its original showing. It represents, after all, a figure of amazing power—a man who could transform the happily married and clearly bourgeois Orgon (Werner Krauss) into a penitent who, upon his return home wants to remove every object of luxury, including his beautiful wife, Elmire (Lil Dagover), from his house.

      Although Orgon's and Tartuffe's relationship is not at what one might describe as gay—certainly is not sexual—it is most certainly a queer relationship, and even more obviously a perverse one. And one cannot help but wondering moreover what has happened between these two men in Orgon's long absence from home that brought him so fully to fall under the spell of the unattractive Tartuffe that he is suddenly willing to give up his heterosexual relationship and his personal wealth only to wait literally hand and foot on the religious zealot. It almost reminds one of the cult-like followers of men such as Jim Jones, Ted Haggard, Eddie Long, Marshall Herff Applewhite, and others who were involved with homosexual relationships with some of their cult or church followers or whose beliefs involved a struggle with their own homosexual desires—although Tartuffe himself seems, in his interest in Tartuffe's wife's cleavage, fully heterosexual. 

 

     One by one, the wonderful Emil Jannings—one of Murnau’s favorite actors—reveals himself as a complete fraud, despite the small booklet of his spiritual prescriptions pasted almost always in this film to his face. Never was an actor more obscured from the busy work of the camera than in this picture. Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride are, one-by-one, trotted out to reveal the vile nature of the man to whom Orgon has sacrificed his former life. This film is a kind a Faust in fomentation, a satiric version of the black contagion of his later villain.

      To save her husband from his new “religious mania,” Elmire dons her best dress and attempts, quite successfully, to arouse Tartuffe’s not-so-very-hidden passions. Yet even what he might easily observe before his very eyes is overlooked by Orgon, apparently unable any longer to see the truth—always a wobbly thing in Murnau’s movies.

     The hero of this story is actually Orgon’s now unbeloved grandson, who having discredited himself by becoming an actor, returns home to find that the house has been taken over by Orgon’s equally hypocritical housekeeper (the wonderful cabaret singer Rosa Valetti), who with a wink of the eye reveals both her hate and obsequious love of her master, who is now about to leave her his entire fortune. The scene in which he writes his will while she pretends to dust and clear up his desk, watching him with wide-eyed worry and pleasure, is one of the many charming moments of this movie.

      Murnau, from his childhood on, was characterized by his friends as a dreamer, a man who almost daily described to his brother the intense nightmares and dreams he had had the night before. Films, art, and theater were clearly manifestations of his desire to return to those sometimes pleasant tales and nightmares he experienced in his sleep. In this film the “actor” (André Mattoni), who quickly deduces what is going on and, donning a costume out of his stock, becomes a mustachioed film-producer, this time by showing the film-within-the-film of Tartuffe revealing the perfidy of both the “saintly” Tartuffe and Ogron’s housekeeper at the very same moment.

      If Orgon’s wife almost disappears from the film, it nonetheless is clear that the handsome young grandson, a mirror we might say of Murnau himself, takes center-stage, resurrecting the chaos around him, and moving through the film-within-a-film his fictional characters and his real uncle back into social order—an outsider gay man, somewhat ironically, restoring heteronormative reality. Just so for Murnau does the light and dark of cinema return meaning to everyday life.

      As film critic Tristan Ettleman writes:

 

"The frame story hammers the point home a bit too clearly, but nevertheless, it’s a fun bit of metafictional business with technical significance. André Mattoni’s grandson addresses the camera directly with an intertitle, at one point, asking the audience if they had seen what just took place. It’s a fun gag, and in this point, Tartuffe illustrates the power of cinema itself."

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2019).

 

Nick Corporon | Last Call / 2009

missing out on life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Corporon, Johnny B. Dunn, and Gareth Dutton (screenplay), Nick Corporon (director) Last Call / 2009 [17 minutes]

 

Having just made an appointment to meet up with his ex-lover, and while driving to the location to meet him having run a red light and caused a serious traffic accident, Gavin (Travis Dixon) shows up at a bar, where a friendly bartender (Jody Jaress) inexplicably knows his lover’s name, Mark. Terrified, Gavin attempts to leave only to find himself re-visiting the bar through another door. We have entered the “twilight zone.”

     “Now, how ‘bout that drink?” the bartender calls out.

     All Gavin wants to know is how to get out of there, but the bartender serves up three shot glasses, explaining, “For the longest time you’ve used drinking to forget. Tonight you’re going to use it to remember.”

      The first drink takes us to an earlier, happier time when the two, Gavin and his younger lover Mark, were still very much in love, although even here Mark is aware of his companion’s alcoholism, a drink perched on the ledge of the tub in which he’s taking a bath.

       By the second drink, it’s clear that he and Mark have serious problems. Gavin returns home with alcohol on his breath the night before the couple, now obviously married, is planning to go for an interview about adopting a child. Even Gavin has second thoughts about the possibility of an alcoholic and a “kid” who sits around playing a guitar all day of being responsible parents. And surely no sane adoption agency would permit such a child to enter such a house—but that is not an issue which with this short film concerns itself.

       Gavin leaves the house again, declaring that drinking is what he’s best at, while Mark tears up, realizing the hopelessness of their situation.

       Indeed, so we soon discover, Gavin left the relationship that day for almost one and a half years, only to make the appointment to see Mark again, finally admitting to the bartender that in the accident he died. “For a moment,” Gavin declares, “I had it back, but fate had something else in mind.”

      The bartender tosses out the alcohol in third shot glass, declaring that he’s wrong. 

      She pours him out something else instead, which he drinks, discovering himself back in the car as in the first frames of the movie, on his way to possibly make it up with Mark.

       As he approaches the meeting place, however, he discovers Mark with a child, a little girl calling him Daddy, and soon after, another man entering to pick up the child to take her away as Mark plans his visit, he tells the child, with “an old friend.”

        Mark has clearly gone on to make a new life with another partner. And now Gavin has no choice but to turn away, realizing his mistakes were irredeemable.

      Back at the bar, he realizes that Mark had no other choice, despite their love. And when that realization comes, as the bartender puts it, “you just have to let go.”

       Gavin does so, opening another door into a kind of heaven, only to discover he’s been given the chance to start all over again, as he meets up with Mark for the first time.

 

      This is a professionally filmed student work, with excellent acting. It’s just too bad that its script is so centered upon a basically Christian presentation of a moral conte, taking it into the science fiction framework that I hinted at in my first paragraph. Perhaps centering the work on the actual relationship and developing the characters and situation in which they discover themselves instead of focusing on the hokey “after life” perspective, might have enriched the plot to give it the dark beauty of this film’s visual elements.

 

Los Angeles, June 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

 

 

Douglas Messerli | Plastic Paradises [Introduction]

PLASTIC PARADISES

by Douglas Messerli

 

Since LGBTQ experiences generally lie outside of heteronormative definitions of sexual and social behavior to describe gay or lesbian films as sometimes representing compulsive actions is almost beside the point. Indeed, it once almost stood as a definition of LGBTQ sex—perceived by the medical profession and the public both as something that was a compulsive disease, something that the individuals suffering from the various psychological conditions simply could not properly control, and accordingly a cure was always proffered by the heterosexual community as being associated with methods of controlling and delimiting sexual desire.

      To mention, accordingly, that the septet of films on which I write below, produced from 2005-2020, generally reveal compulsions previously unrecognized by the central figures of these works might be said of hundreds of LGBTQ films. Yet there is something notable in all these cinematic shorts, the way the characters compulsions often lie outside of their previous experiences, that they occur in strange places to which they’ve previously never visited, and they reveal bizarre behavior in which they’ve never before engaged that compels me to read these films in the context of one another. The characters, in almost all cases feel like visitors to the worlds in which they suddenly discover themselves, almost like tourists who have a more common compulsion of wanting to snap photographs or to uncover tokens or mementos which might help define the eerie territory into which they’ve just entered. And while in almost every instance in these seven films the central figure is attracted to another male, there is often a third or numerous other persons, male and female, in the background—judging or evaluating the heroes’ actions and, in general, attempting to control them.

      A great many of the figures in these films are young, not yet of full age, so that both the danger and perversion of the acts involved are made even more apparent. These mostly gay figures are willing to give up almost everything to fulfill their sudden desires which help to make for the surreality of the tales these films witness. And it is no accident that two of these can be described as horror films, and the movies involved include serial pick-pocketing, breaking and entering, abduction and bondage, exposing oneself sexually in public, potential incest, and in three cases child abuse. The least transgressive of these concerns a man bartering for a way home by paying with drugs and stolen goods who is finally granted his wish only if he sits for hours head-on hugging the body of the motorcyclist, his preference I might add. Although I would argue that almost all the characters involved are loveable or at least redeemable, none of them might be described as a member in good standing in society, unless you want to count the various cops and guards scattered through these works whose actions have little effect on those they might seek to restrict and restrain.

      It’s not that the figures of these short films do not recognize that they are seeking merely plastic paradises that are delusional and unobtainable, but that they simply have no choice in the matter: they were born queer.

      The films included here include works by directors from around the world: Spanish director Antonio Hens, Doors Cut Down (2000); Philippines director Mark V. Ryes, Last Full Show (2005); the German Til Kleinert’s, Cowboy (2008); the British Dominic Leclerc’s, Nightswimming (2009); the Venezuelan Carlos Alejandro Molina M’s Red; the US Dave Solomon’s Photo Op (2015); and the Greek Vasilis Kekatos The Distance between Us and the Sky (2019)

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Vincent Fitz-Jim | TommyTeen18

too old to be so young

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vincent Fitz-Jim (screenwriter and director) TommyTeen18 / 2017 [16.24 minutes]

 

One of the issues that I have not yet brought up that makes it even more difficult for young LGBTQ individuals coming of age in the 21st century is the fact that on cellphones and computers they can observe gay sexual encounters in great detail and even join a dating app that allows them to enter the sexual world of their choosing, yet they are frozen out by the laws of the countries in which they live.

      In Vincent Fitz-Jim’s fascinating short film TommyTeen18, a young boy Tommy (David Berkman) has clearly realized, despite the fact that seems to still be “dating” a female classmate Eefie (Linde van Dorp), that he is gay. The film, indeed, begins with an image of him kissing himself in the mirror, a strong metaphor of the Narcissus “condition” which even this young 15- year-old perceives signifies his love of a male other.

 

     He is already masturbating to gay sex videos on his laptop, and he has obviously visited several of the dating sites on his cellphone. And like most young people, he cannot imagine fulfilling his sexual desires with his classmates—the process of determining their sexuality, of their accepting it, and their being equally attracted to him being far too much for a neophyte to face, along with the fact that, just as I did, it is hard imagine that one might find like-minded friends among one’s own seemingly heterosexual classmates—he begins to find himself attracted to elder males, at one point even cruising an older man at the bowling alley where he is gone on date with Eefie.

     Already, he is beginning to pull away from Eefie in small ways, growing short with her constant outward signs of affection, showing impatience with her flirtatious behavior. It is apparent that the two get on well together, but she is seeking something he has begun to realize he cannot offer.   

     The frustrations of knowing all about gay sex, already having a knowledge and language for the acts of gay sex and the possibility of observing them in action become even more apparent for someone of 15 who lives in a country where sex is permitted between and adult only at age 18. It is as if one’s entire world of desires were to be floating just on the horizon three years—an eternity for someone of that age.

 

   Like most of the young boys in these films, Tommy attempts to take things in his own hands, hooking up with his cellphone moniker of “TommyTeen18” with an older man, Sergey (Oleg Kovalev).

      Dressed in dark glasses with a hoodie covering his head, Tommy and Sergey seem, at first, to hit it off, Tommy providing oral sex before breaking off into a passionate kiss. But it is just at that moment when hoodie as slid down and glasses have been removed that Sergey realizes that his lovely sexual moment is being provided someone much younger than he expected. It is doubtful in most such situations that the elder would, as Sergey does, immediately demand to know the boy’s age, and realizing that he is in the company of a 15- or even possibly a 14-year-old, open the car door to send him on his way. But Sergey is obviously a law-abiding citizen as were most of the other men in these stories.

         Frustrated, but not to be deterred, Tommy finally does break up with Eefie without explaining the situation and goes in search of Sergey by stalking out his own house.

       Shocked to find the boy at his doorstep, Sergey sends him away once again; but when Tommy threatens to cause a scene, he pulls him in and attempts to find the source of the boy’s compulsion. Reading what Tommy has written on the site, that he hopes to suck off his friend before the elder, in turn, brutally fucks him, Sergey attempts to help the boy realize what his words truly mean by asking him does he really want an older man to destroy his ass, to tear open his virgin muscles? Tommy and boys like him talk about things they have never experienced and do not seemingly comprehend the implications, dangers, and even pain of the actions they have witnessed between experienced men of the screen.

      Evidently having come to terms with the reality of the situation, Tommy, in the film’s last scene, is observed trying to regain Eefie’s friendship. Perhaps a little more exploration of heterosexuality before the transformation into the gay work, this film seems to suggest, is not such a bad thing. Or perhaps he will be able to open up to Eefie about his sexuality and she serve him as so many women are forced to do as his confidant, what used to be described a “fag-hag” or a gay-friendly female friend.

      But frankly I think the film, if it is arguing for either, is a little ingenious. For we all know that “out there” in the gay dating apps world a great many men exist just waiting to meet a Tommy, and that such a meeting may end up hurting or even destroying him or, hopefully, helping to introduce him slowly into the world of gay sex. We also know that once one has “come out,” which appears to be what Tommy has done all on his own with the help of his cellphone and computer, there is no honest way of turning back, and that the years of frustration he now faces may be the worst punishment of all.

     How do we deal with laws faced by young boys who have simply grown more mature and aware through the knowledge the computer than did young men of other pre-computerized generations? The age of maturation might well have once been 18, but perhaps is no longer viable today.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

 

 

Lasse Nielsen | Fødselsdagen (Happy Birthday) / 2013

getting what he wanted

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lasse Nielsen and Bent Petersen (screenplay), Lasse Nielsen (director) Fødselsdagen (Happy Birthday) / 2013 [24 minutes]

 

Danish cineaste Lasse Nielsen’s 2013 Happy Birthday is, like Birthday Time a comedy also concerning a boy soon to come into the age of legal sexual consent, in this case a 14-year-old Thomas (Mathias Hartmann Nicalsen) about to turn 15, which, as I previously mentioned, is the age of consent in Denmark. But as I observed above, like Olav he is highly impatient for the magic event, particularly since he is sexually excited by his hunky next-door neighbor (Jos Gylling), whom he often observes lounging shirtless in the neighboring yard.

      Fully recognizing that he is gay, Thomas has just signed up for the website “Boyfriend” where, stating that he is 18 seeking an older male friend, he hooks up with a user named Gentle Man who mentions that he is soon to have his 35th birthday party. With youthful anticipation, Thomas writes back “Am I invited?” with the Gentle Man suggesting that perhaps they should first meet.

       The next day they make an appointment to meet up at the “Ruins,” evidently a gay gathering spot in a nearby park. Thomas bicycles up to the designated location only to find his handsome neighbor waiting on a bench. Recognized, in turn, by the neighbor who asks him what he’s doing in such a spot, the boy responds that he’s looking for his dog. When he turns the question back upon his neighbor, the man reports that he is waiting for someone.

      With hardly a pause, Thomas sits down beside him, gradually moving closer and closer until his hand is touching the other man’s knee, who stands the instant of contact, suggesting that the kid should be getting along home to see if his dog might have returned, in response to which Thomas resolutely gets on his bicycle and moves off, frustrated that the secret “meeting” has not ended the way he hoped it might. 

     He dares not answer the next communication from the Gentle Man, but noticing the next day that his neighbor is driving away, he illegally enters the man’s house, checking out his large library, noticing in the hall a photograph of his neighbor with his arm around another man—whom we now come to realize was his former companion, who died we can only presume of AIDS—before he comes upon the dinner table nicely set for a small party where he sits down, pretends to pour himself a drink, and toasts birthday greetings to his imaginary friend, before entering the man’s bedroom, lifting up a pair of shorts, sniffing them, and tucking under his own shirt. For the boy it is like an imaginary fairyland which he may someday—in his mind far too long in the future—be able to experience love.

 

   Back on the “Boyfriend” sight, Thomas again queries whether his friend is home; he responds that he is, but is not writing to him because he has lied about his age. The boy apologizes but notes that we will soon be 15, but the Gentle Man immediately cuts off further communications. He might be arrested, we can imagine, even if he was seen to have been encouraging the underaged boy to engage in a relationship.

     Thomas tries again: “Can’t we just be friends?” And after a few moments his neighbor writes back: “All right. Friends.” Thomas slyly smiles.

      In the very next scene, we see Thomas with his bicycle in his own backyard, his beloved neighbor calling to him over the fence. The boy’s mother has evidently told him that Thomas’ birthday is on Saturday, the boy responding, “my mother will be away so I’m not having a party.” The friend suggests he come to his place in party dress, maybe a tie. 8:00. You can almost feel the boy’s racing heart as a large grin transforms his face, he uttering the Danish word for thanks, “Tak.”

      We see Thomas after his shower singing joyfully before putting on a white shirt, a cute hat, and in his imagination a tie properly knotted as he knocks upon the neighbor’s door, and a second later with a tie properly knotted against a naked chest. He actually shows up with a tie whose knot he could not complete. The neighbor gracefully greets him and ties it for him, the boy basking in in touch of the hands attending his neck.

      Thomas is invited to sit where he did all alone so many days earlier, and this time he toasts with a glass actually filled with wine to his neighbor’s birthday greetings. A gift waits next to his plate. The man thanks him for coming, and the boy thanks him for the invitation. There’s no need to show anything further. No sex necessary in this instance. The boy has come of age and whatever now happens, he is ready. And what is in that box also doesn’t matter, for this boy has gotten everything he wanted.

 

Los Angeles, May 23, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2021).