Denis Liakhov | Les corneilles blanches (The White Crows) / 2023

the conspiracy

by Douglas Messerli

Denis Liakhov and Arthur Cahn (screenplay), Denis Liakhov (director) Les corneilles blanches (The White Crows) / 2023 [17 minutes]

 

In this simply plotted but beautifully filmed and acted short movie, Russian-born director Denis Liakhov (working in France), tells the story of the evening of the return to his small home town by Vlad (Vladislav Botnaru).

    Vlad, who has been attending the university in Moscow, has come home on vacation to see his parents, only to be shanghaied by his brother Arsène (Adam Carage) and his friends Serioga and Liokha, who are intent on celebrating Vlad’s return by visiting a local spa where they will drink heavily and be sexually serviced by a prostitute, Kristina (Yulia Antoshchuk).

   What Vlad’s macho brother doesn’t perceive is that Vlad is now gay and wants no part of their machinations, but Arsène and his friends simply ignore the young man’s pleas to take him to his parent’s house and he is forced to enter into their rowdy drunken spree, particularly after his brother takes him aside and makes it clear that he and his friends have arranged this special evening just for his return, his comments also conveying something of a threat.

      The prostitute shows up, with Vlad’s brother insisting that his younger sibling go first. Vlad has already retreated to the pool, but the girl, not easily intimidated, enters it and begins to fondle him. He quietly begs her to stop, the others watching on and curious why he doesn’t seem to be more receptive.

       I should perhaps interrupt this narrative to reiterate just how homophobic Russians are generally and remind the reader how Putin and others have basically banned most LGBTQ organizations while removing almost all rights to protect gays. Vlad’s own brother, we later learn, has hinted that if he found that his little brother was a fag, he’d kill him.

      Finally, Vlad is able to whisper into the girl’s ear that her appearance is not the problem, but that he is gay. Almost immediately, she perceives the situation and pulls him away to a back room where the others presume they are going to have sex. Arsène is finally proud of his little brother.

     Meanwhile, the two, prostitute and university boy, in an unspoken conspiracy, sit on and later lay in the bed discussing their various situations. Kristina, who reveals her real name as really being Anna, at first castigates the beautiful young gay boy for feeling superior to her and looking down on her actions. She’s a tough woman, however, and after several denials that he in any way feels superior, she admits that she is also attending the local university, studying history. She has sex with just such rowdy men—she’s seen far worse than her brother and his friends—just to make enough for her tuition and other costs. A lot of her friends, she admits, do the same thing.

      At another point the two discover that they have attended the same school, and shared the same teacher. Although neither remembers one another from those years, it nonetheless creates a bond between them, particularly now that Vlad perceives that Anna is herself a kind of outsider.

     But by this time, however, Vlad’s brother is already pounding at the door, waiting to take his turn with the prostitute.

      Soon after Vlad leaves the room, Arsène eagerly entering it. The other friends appear too drunk by this time to be able to make use of the girl’s services.

      As Kristina/Anna goes to leave, Vlad accompanies her to the car, asking if she might drop him off at his parent’s house. Arsène stands at the door of the spa, begging his brother to return to the group, as Vlad gets into the car which speeds off.

      Clearly, Arsène suspects something is not right, and it is apparent that there will be some explaining to do. But at least the gay boy has escaped for another night, now feeling most unwelcome, surely not very safe, and clearly disgusted by the behavior of his own brother, ready to return to Moscow at the earliest opportunity while recognizing that he, along with Anna, are  indeed “white crows,” the Russian phrase to describe a misfit or oddball, someone who doesn’t fit in.

 

Los Angeles, September 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

   

 

Fred Guiol | 45 Minutes from Hollywood / 1926

the woman who stole his pants

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Roach, H.M. Walker, and Walter Lantz (screenplay), Fred Guiol (director) 45 Minutes from Hollywood / 1926

 

Fred Guiol’s 45 Minutes from Hollywood once again stars the handsome Glenn Tryon, who this time plays the “just” out of town hick, Orville, desperate to get to see Hollywood and watch a movie being made. Both Oliver Hardy, who plays the Hotel Detective, and Stan Laurel who has a small role as a starving actor who has evidently permanently retreated to bed, are also this film; but the director has yet imagined them as a team, although in less than a year he will pair them in roles similar to their famous coupling in Duck Soup.

      Orville’s poor family are desperately behind in their rent, and his mother (Charlotte Mineau) has just received notice that if the fee is not immediately paid in person, the office apparently being located in Hollywood, they will be evicted from their home.

      She first assigns the task to her father, Grandpa (Rube Clifford) who has dreams of breaking and entering an elderly star’s mansion for a little fun and sex. But Orville is desperate to travel into the city and pleads with his mother to let him go, who finally relents, sending all her family members, Orville, Grandpa, and Orville’s sister (Sally O’Neil) off on the 45-minute journey. But by the time they race to the train via bicycle—clearly not built for the 3 of them—they have almost missed the train, requiring them to jump on the already moving locomotive, and although Grandpa makes a valiant attempt, he finally falls off and is forced to remain behind.

 

      The sister simply disappears from sight for the rest of the movie, as Orville takes a Hollywood tour bus which presents the film’s audience with what is perhaps one of the earliest of Hollywood movie self-promotions, giving us quick glimpses of Theda Bara, the Our Gang players, and the Hal Roach Bathing Beauties. Somehow Orville keeps missing all the announced stars and sites, and when they finally observe a bank robbery in progress, which they all believe is merely a film shoot, he and the others jump off the bus to get into the picture, so to speak—precisely what the real robbers hoped would happen in order to help cover their tracks. The bank manager however refuses to hand over the money, and in front of the tourists the crooks, caught in the act, must rush off as the police chase after.

       Observing what he believes a female actor on the run, Orville joins in the chase; he is shocked, however, that the movie is so very realistic, the film police using real bullets, the evidence of which is manifested in the holes in his hat. The escaping female criminal enters a hotel, and selects a room in which to hide, Orville following.

       Once inside, the two hear a man in the bathroom shower, Orville supposing that it must be the woman’s husband, a delusion she encourages. When she seems to signal the boy that she’s sexually interested in him, he’s more than a little surprised even if intrigued. By the time he sits down next to her on the bed, she’s hit him over the head with a heavy object and begins to attempt to pull of his pants, presumably, we realize by now, to change out of her drag costume back into male attire.

        Orville briefly awakens to discover his pants half-way slid down his legs, chastising her for her eager desire to get him undressed for sex, particularly with her husband in the next room. The thief manages the transformation by hitting him over the head once again. Now dressed in Orville’s pants, in the pocket of which sits the role of bills he was to have delivered for the payment of their house, the robber rushes off, leaving Orville dressed in the female costume the crook abandoned.

      The bathing beauty in the next room is the house detective (Hardy) who, at the very moment he exits the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his substantial girth, is met with not only a strange woman in his bed but his returning wife Em (Edna Murphy), who, despite all his insistence upon his innocence, will not believe a word he says and proceeds to violently attack both the intruding harlot and her errant man.

       So begins a series of chases, with Orville attempting time and again to return to the room from which he has been ousted to help the police find the thief and explain that the woman stole his pants, while Em chases them both, and the police chase everyone in sight.

       Orville ends up in a trash bin set on fire. The Police Detective appears the hotel lobby with a cat clawing its way up his body under the towel, while the police run in and out of bedrooms— including the one in which Stan is attempting to get some sleep—all ending up in chaos. Orville finally gets his clothes and money back, the detective restores his innocence and the temporary love of his wife, and the police get their woman/man; but it really doesn’t matter because by the time this movie ends we’re all rather tired of the mad mess of movie.

      Both producer and director hoped that Tyron, who had become popular in previous shorts, might through this vehicle become a star. But today this short is remembered primarily because it is one of the few pre-Laurel and Hardy films, in which the duo both performed. In this case Stan, who had been writing for Guiol, was asked to substitute for another actor who had become ill, contrary to Laurel’s contract with another studio for which he was then performing. But the role is so small and his fake moustache so large, you might miss him if you weren’t on the lookout. And today, alas, the pretty boy Tyron is nearly forgotten.

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).    

Fred Guiol | Along Came Auntie / 1926

two husbands wrestling in a bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carl Harbaugh, Stan Laurel. James Parrott, Jerome Storm, Beatrice Van. H. M. Walker, Frank Wilson, and Hal Yates (screenplay), Fred Guiol (director) Along Came Auntie / 1926

 

Oliver Hardy’s roles before he was properly paired up with Stan Laurel might be described as the most extreme of physical comedy. He spends most of his time throughout Fred Guiol’s 1926 comic short Along Came Auntie, for example, straddled over the body of the much leaner actor Glenn Tryon, sometimes hinting of a more physically queer situation than the plot avers. But then the plot, the creation of 8 writers (one of them Stan Laurel), doesn’t always know where it’s going.

     In this slapstick work, Hardy plays the former husband of the heavy-spending wife, Mrs. Remington Chow (Vivien Oakland), now married to a vacationing husband (given her behavior, it is quite comprehensible why Mr. Chow vacations alone), Remington (Glenn Tryon). In his absence Mrs. Chow has come to owe so much money that an Under-Sheriff (Tyler Brooke) has been given a writ to possess her property.

     She somewhat successfully eludes him with use of a mechanical dog and a great deal of door slamming. In the meantime, she determines that it’s come time once again to let out a room, much to the consternation of her maid Marie (Martha Sleeper) who recalls that the last time they did so she had to fight off the unwanted attentions of the renter. And this time, as the new roomer arrives, he brings with him a fiddle, a bass drum, a bass fiddle, and various other instruments, promising to be a very noisy intruder. And already he has appeared to sum up the maid’s measurements with the verdict, “Perfect.” She has no way of knowing that it was his parrot who evaluated her looks, but she has no intention of waiting around to find out, packing her bags and leaving her employment.

      Mrs. Chow, however, recognizes by the sounds of violin which the newcomer is already intoning that it is none other than her former husband, Vincent Belcher (Oliver Hardy). And given the state of her second marriage, she is more than happy to see him.

      At that moment, of course, Remington returns from Florida, she having to admit that she has spent so much of his money that the Sherriff is still at the door and she has taken in a boarder. For some reason, she also failed to read her mail, and when her husband observes a letter still sitting by the front door, she discovers it is a letter from her wealthy aunt Alvira (Lucy Beaumont) who has heard that her niece has remarried and, if it is true, she intends to cut her off from the promised gift of $100,000 and quarts of diamonds.

       How convenient for her that Vincent has returned. But before she can even “cook up” a proper scenario of deception, the aunt arrives, demanding to know whether or not the rumor she has heard is true. Obviously, Mrs. Chow denies it, pulling Vincent from his rented room as proof of her constancy, while signaling Remington to play long.

     But he is not all ready to play second fiddle to a rank amateur fiddler, and the two are soon rolling across the mansion floors, locked in one another’s arms when not chasing after the other. Fortunately, in their struggles they manage to entwine the intruding Sheriff in the strings of a music room harp. But the niece has no choice to explain to the aunt the “strange man” who Vincent is chasing is an old buddy with whom he always plays these rambunctious games.

      It’s clear that Aunt Alvira is sweet on Vincent, but she cannot tolerate such a wild heathen of a visitor as her niece’s current, for more handsome mate, and takes every opportunity she can to sweep Remington downstairs and, if she could, out of the house.

     To fool her aunt, the niece finally conceives a plan whereby, as the couple retire for bed, the two men will sleep together, Remington dressed in her bed clothing while Vincent pretends to be his/her husband. It’s a similar situation to the later 1940 film by Wesley Ruggles, Too Many Husbands. But in this case, the husbands not only are asked to sleep together but to play the roles of husband and wife, an unbearable diversion which Remington cannot abide, the two men again jumping upon one another and attempting to throttle the other to death the moment they lay down side by side.

       Hearing the ruckus, Auntie gets up to inspect, resulting in a long series of absurd events, in one of which Remington is forced to play his sleepwalking wife who after a long voyage around the house returns to bed only to be caught, when the aunt peeps through the key hole, being strangled by Victor, which results in the Aunt’s attempt to rectify his behavior with a gun. Ultimately, they are forced to reveal the truth to Alvira, if for other reason than survival.

     As I have mentioned previously, a great number of early silent and talking films seem to revolve around a relative whose promised money resulting in queer goings on. But Along Came Auntie is surely one of the most physically violent of them all. And unlike some of the other such films, nothing in this work is apparently resolved.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

 

Mark Pariselli | After / 2009

fantasy and fugue*

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Pariselli (screenwriter and director, suggested by a poem by Dennis Cooper) After / 2009 [12 minutes]

 

Back in 1996 Diet Coke ran an ad (a series of many similar commercials) titled “11:30 Appointment,” with music by Etta James, “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Evidently at precisely 11:30 a bevy of women office workers signaled one another to their windows to watch below a beefcake hunk take his Diet Coke break, as the works stripped off his shirt to reveal his pecs while sipping on the can. In some respects the short gay film I describe below reminds of that popular commercial during which I am certain many a gay boy at home looked over the office women's shoulders. However, this gay appointment with a hunk has far more serious implications.

    Canadian director Mark Pariselli’s 2009 short film After, inspired by the poem “After School, Street Football, Eighth Grade” by Dennis Cooper, presents the rather kinky gay sexual fantasies of three boys, Arthur Tim, and Jacob (Matthew Armet, Andrew Holland, and Cole J. Alvis) who daily sit on the front porch of one of their homes to watch older boys, in particular Lukas (Jamieson Child) play a scrimmage game of football in the park across the way.  

     Like a murder of crows, the three boys alight upon to stoop precisely at the moment the game begins, sitting in a triangle of delight as they watch their hero flex, leap, and fall to the grass with others piling atop. As they sit there in rapt attention, the football comes clattering across the road to fall at their feet. The best-looking boy, who sits at the bottom of the triangle shyly stands to retrieve the ball, bringing it forward to Lukas in a slow exchange that feels something like a sacrificial offering, the hands of the boy and player meeting in almost a shudder of sexual excitement. Both smile as the boy returns to his place as a watcher while their hero crosses back to his fellow team-players.

     That touch of the hands begins a series of private fantasies between the football player and each boy that exist somewhere between kinky sex acts and S&M behavior.

      The first boy of the upper left point of the facing triangular grouping is evidently a Catholic altar boy who imagines himself in the dark confines of a church-room with candles lighting up the space. He enters in red underwear, sits in a red chair, and strips off his skivvies, masturbating. The football player sneaks up behind him and puts a momentary strangle-hold to his neck before picking up one of the votive candles and slowly pouring wax upon his chest to the ecstasy of 8-year-old.

      The second boy with the red blazer obviously imagines that he might one day be a doctor. And in his fantasy, the football player lays on a partially raised doctor’s bed, the young boy applying mercurochrome to a knee wound the older player has suffered in a tackle. He reaches up toward his patient’s crotch but quickly moves to the back of the bed masturbating as he looks down upon the supine player who seemingly approves.

     The red-headed cutie in the front has a rather odder masturbatory fantasy as he sits in a tub of water to which guppies have inexplicably been added. Naked, he enters the tub, and soon after the football player enters the room, bending to the side of the tube to momentarily lick the young boy’s toes before himself stripping off his clothes and joining the boy in the tub as the two touch and prepare to make love.

 

     At that very moment the young hero in the park catches a pass in the street. But as he turns he

is suddenly faced head-on by an approaching car which crashes into him, killing the player immediately.

     The boys rush up to the site of the accident, looking down at the body in horror.

     Suddenly, in unison, they find themselves in the church-like room with the sheeted corpse laid out on the floor. The three of them fall to their knees to pay respect to the dead player. But the red-haired boy pulls off the sheet, revealing the bleeding head of the footballer. The other two boys immediately arise and turn away, while the red-headed boy bends closer, touching his hands to the dead boy’s lips and laying his head against his chest. We quickly realize that what has seemed their fantasy has been real, and the scene returns to the street, the two friends pulling the boy away from the corpse, turning, and leaving.

      But the boy continues his fantasy, which we now have no way of knowing whether he is truly acting out or only imagining. As the other two stumble away in distress for what they have witnessed, the last boy again lifts the sheet and crawls under it, laying down beside the football player’s corpse.

     

    The objects of their previous fantasies can be seen decaying, the water of the tub having turned brackish and black, worms crawling through the spaces, the world gradually fading away as the red-haired boy lays there with his now dead lover.

      What was a series of fantasies has turned the boys themselves into ghosts, the past something which will probably now never again allow them to share the present.

 

*Fugue: 

1. A musical form or composition in which a theme is taken up and developed by the various                  instruments and voices in succession according to the strict laws of counterpoint.

2. A state of psychological amnesia during which a patient seems to behave in a conscious and                rational way, although upon return to normal consciousness he cannot remember the period  

of time nor what he did during it.

3. A state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's 

usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022)

 

Kilian Feusi, Jessica Meier, and Sujanth Ravichandran | Pipes / 2022 [animated short]

new applications for old tools

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kilian Feusi, Jessica Meier, and Sujanth Ravichandran (screenwriters and directors) Pipes / 2022 [4 minutes] [animated short]

 

Bob the plumber has just been called to a business location to fix a broken pipe. Now we all know the stereotype about plumbers, how they are big and burly men who as they bend down to fix the plumbing, dressed as they are in outmoded jeans, often reveal their ass cracks. Over the years there must have been dozens of porn films in which the plumber is called, ogled, and eventually fondled by young willing boys and their dads.

     But this Bob is just a little teddy bear who has entered what he might describe as a visual hell, a gay leather fetish bar in which the figures are engaged in all sorts of kinky sex and dressed up in gear that sometimes seems to be from outer space.

     After witnessing the denizens’ behavior, Bob can only imagine his every action on the pipes to be similar to the so-called human interchanges being performed around him. Pulling a small drainage valve is associated with what he’s observed of men pulling and sucking on each other’s nipples. A mallet pounded into iron, becomes a slap stick applied to a bargoer’s butt. Sawing through the metal is quickly turned into images of raw fucks and sucks, fists going in and out of willing asses. Peeking into an open pipe turns into an eye-to-eye encounter with a cock. The leaking values might as well be the customer’s penises pissing upon the floor and one another.

    He’s soon swimming in the liquids of cum, piss, beer, and other alcohol consumed and expelled around him. Clearly, it’s time to pull the plug! But in his imagination that is like being sent into the sewer and spitted whole from a bar attendee’s ass.

    The men gather round him in consternation. Finally, he figures it out. He plugs up an open hole in the pipe with a dildo, he closes of a valve with a nipple ring. The men suddenly get excited by the art of his trade.

    It’s hard to imagine this brilliantly animated Swiss film being popular with any viewers save a very open-minded gay audience with S&M tendencies.  But that’s too bad. This is a work of comic genius that uses the nearly all the fetishes of gay leather men to other uses than bodily torture and pain.

    In the film, the human pipes of cock, ass, ear, nipple, and mouth become blurred with the pipes that keep us warm and cold and sweep our human excretions away from our ordinary space.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

 

 

 

Robert T. McGowan | Baby Clothes / 1926

battling age and gender dysphoria in our gang

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Roach (screenplay), Robert F. McGowan (director) Baby Clothes / 1926

 

In the 1926 Our Gang series episode titled Baby Clothes nearly all the male gang members are asked to switch gender, age, and personalities as William Weedle (William Gillespie) and his wife (Charlotte Mineau) buy children through the building bellboy (Ed Brandenburg) as a pretense to acquiesce with the demands of William’s rich uncle (William Orlamond).

      For several years now the uncle has been paying the Weedles $50 a month because they have reportedly produced two offspring, male and female. Now the uncle has announced he’s arriving to enjoy the pleasures of an uncle who has long been supporting his nephew and niece for succeeding in their familial duties. Full of that love for children that only a clueless bachelor could possess, he arrives to coo and babble to the youngest of his own flesh and blood.

       Of course, the bellboy, paid a princely sum of $25 for his efforts, gathers not only two but three members of the Gang: the mean-spirited Joe (Joe Cobb) who’s been fighting with all the neighbor kids so consistently that his mother, tired of his incendiary behavior, has dressed him up in baby clothes to teach him the error of his childish ways, and Mickey (Mickey Daniels) has been forced to dress up like a girl, while the local cigar-smoking little man (Harry Earles) also dresses up in baby clothes to join the gathering just out of meanness. The Bellboy has also brought along Mary Kornman perhaps simply to further confuse the situation, while the dog Pal also tags along to join in the human fun.

      The uncle arrives hugging, cooing, reading, and talking down to these tough Our Gang figures, while Harry steals quick puffs on a cigar, accidentally swallowing it when he almost is caught in the act. Mickey does his best at being a girl, although he can’t help flirting with Mary, who finds it most strange to be attracted to another girl; nonetheless Mary attempts to keep some semblance of order as other kids such as Jackie Condon and Farina (Allen Hoskins) also don baby clothes to get in on the adventure and share in the promised cash.

        When the Weedles discover themselves blessed with even more offspring than they had expected or could possibly have produced in the brief years of their marriage, they announce each new child as a “surprise” they have been saving to tell their uncle in person. But when black child Farina joins the group and Mickey’s pants fall down from under his dress the uncle finally gets the message, awarding a surprise to his nephew and niece as well by cutting off the payments upon which they have come to depend.

        Surely we are disgusted with the Weedles’ greed, buying up children and changing their gender and dispositions willy-nilly as if children had utterly no rights of their own. And clearly Joe’s mother is also to blame for insisting her young battler go back to babyhood. The little person Harry is just obviously fed up for being treated as a little boy. We must finally admit that the Little Rascals were forced by writer and director Roach and McGowan to personally suffer age and gender dysphoria, the poor wee folk.

        In this instance, we celebrate the Rascals for getting once more into deep trouble, which this time puts all the patriarchal and domineering adults to shame.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).