Willard Maas | Image in the Snow / 1943-48, released 1952

the dream of unhappiness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willard Maas (screenwriter and director) Image in the Snow / filmed 1943-48, 1952 released

 

Poet and filmmaker Willard Maas was an absolutely fascinating being. Married to fellow experimental filmmaker Marie Menken who, despite his regular extramarital sexual relations with other men, seemingly tolerated his homosexuality, the two held regular salons to which they invited a wide range of intellectuals, visual artists, writers, filmmakers, poets, and others. For many years he was a faculty member at Wagner College in New York, involved with the New York City Writer’s Conference, held at that college.

     Despite their sexual tolerance, however, the couple were notorious for their shouting matches, particularly when they both were drunk. Andy Warhol described them: "Willard and Marie were the last of the great bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank—their friends called them 'scholarly drunks'—and were involved with all the modern poets."

      Fellow filmmaker Kenneth Anger has described them as possibly being the models for George and Martha of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—certainly possible since Albee was a writer in residence at Wagner.

      Maas’ 1948 film Image in the Snow, a film he apparently worked on over a five-year period before its release in 1952, is very much the kind of “coming out” film in the manner of what I have designated the A version of that genre, exemplified by Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Curtis Harrington’s Fragment of Seeking (1946) and  Picnic (1948), Gregory J. Markopoulos’ Christmas, USA (1949) and his Twice a Man (1963), James Broughton’s Adventures of Jimmy (1950), John Schmitz’s Voices (1953), and A. J. Rose, Jr.’s Penis (1965), among others.

      In Maas’ narrative, as in most of the films above, a handsome young man is lying on a bed asleep or half between sleeping and waking. We soon discover that this young man is living with his mother well past the time when most men of his age have married and pursued their own lives, and he is anxious to break the ties he has with her.

     In his dream he sees himself climbing down from a rooftop water tower, apparently the same water tower he sees outside his bedroom window. On the rooftop he goes over to peer down into a small rectangular space in the midst of the brick building in which lives, apparently a space used as a burning pit. He spies a body spinning into that space.

      Meanwhile, he has not yet noticed that a well-fit man, clearly a bodybuilder dressed only in work-out shorts, has begun his poses. Observing him, the man  leans slightly back as in awe of the figure as he continues to display his muscles. The boy’s eyes attend immediately to the crotch and just as suddenly the body-builder disappears into thin air.

       Again the boy turns to look into the pit, watching another body spin through the air to its death. When he turns back, he sees a lithe, young man without a shirt and dressed in white sheer pants climbing down the fire escape. The vision suddenly leaps into the rooftop arena and begins to dance, jumping, twisting, and turning in various positions to Ben Weber’s marvelous twelve-tone score.

        Just as suddenly, the dancer also disappears, and the boy is left alone, puzzled by his visions.

      A final vision appears as a woman (“a princess”) holding an urn which eventually she hands the boy. Within is a dove which the boy holds lovingly for a brief while before letting it fly free to join other birds in the night sky.

       The camera turns back to the boy back in his bed, as he rises, dresses, and joins his mother in the kitchen where she is frying him eggs for breakfast. She serves them up on a plate and he turns as if to eat, but finally with growing frustration and anger resulting from his dreams, he throws the plate to the floor, puts on his coat, and leaves the house, the mother looking out the window with a tear running from her eye, knowing that he has left home forever in search of happiness and love.

        Before I proceed, I should mention that so far this young man’s visions parallel those of the other bed-bound dreamers of Anger’s, Markopoulos’, and Schmitz’s works, in which just such a bed-bound being faces his past ties to women, his attractions to the male body, and his relationship to them. As in these films as well as those of Harrington, Broughton, and Rose the dreamer ultimately must turn his back on those images in order to face a future of his own making.

       And in this case as in all of the filmmakers’ works I mention above (with perhaps the exception of Broughton’s) that future, however, is seemingly futile, a dark world which does not allow entry—indeed at one point, as in Schmitz’s Voices Maas’ young man stares into a window like a voyeur only to realize he does not belong to the world he witnesses therein—ending inevitably in a sense of total loneliness, isolation, and a death associated with traditional religious iconography. In short, there is little hope for the man dreaming of a life with other men. In coming out, the creator reveals his own fears of societal and religious rejection leading to an empty bed of the kind that Mark Gaspar spoke of in his 1989 film by that title. In short “coming out” ends, in these fearful early films, almost always in a symbolic death.

        It’s a terrifying viewpoint, belied by what he have to presume were other realities that most of these young gay men found available to them. And, obviously, it is a viewpoint of young gay men who in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s who held very romantic notions about love and, by extension, life itself.

       But never was this made more apparent than in Maas’s almost maudlin poetry which accompanies his film. Whereas the others’ films expressed these concerns, fortunately, mostly in the silence of their images, Maas’ central image of snow, alas, does not result in a quiet covering over the dying world, but in an accompanying noisy recitation of his hot-house poetry that might remind one of a fin de siècle-like gay writer such as James Branch Cabell representing a homosexual world filled with fairy queens, princesses, and heroes in shining armor.

         After the preface, read as the screen is dark, to the quite arresting first images he creates, Maas verbally intrudes with an endless series of tremulous poetic lines that turn the modern angst of his black-sweatered mid-century hero into a doomed figure of the past who apparently cannot escape “the iron lock of love,” warning us of even the man’s loving mother:

 

             Mother, mother, your chains of flower twine like a hangman’s chord.

             Alone the lonely seek the happiness happiness is.

     As our young gay hero climbs down from the water tower to look into the pit of what he fears will be his life, the poet in Maas cannot help but send him verbally spinning out of control:

 

“Down the ladders of dream the boy descends into the sweet country where joy triumphs in the wish and anguish bearing the scar of the kiss takes fire in a vision of love whose vision are the lonely pictures of pleasure, fairy princesses, crowned hero...” etc.

 

    The fairy princess, in fact, shows up: “In a dream the princess comes bearing a fairy urn of blessedness. Within is a dove.”

        As our unhappy young man discovers the dove, finally letting it free, the poet recites:

 

             From your hand the dove flies high

             Joining doves in the night sky

             Fly, fly, high in the sky

             Fly, fly with the stars before dreams die.

             Before overall, the cold snow falls.   

                 

       Finally, as the young man leaves his home for what seems like a permanent search of the streets of New York City, we get another despairing stanza to see him off:

 

           Where is the door through happiness comes dancing

           As the terror of day is lost in the tinkling of stars.

           Through the walls of loneliness the dreamer goes

           The cross of his longing burns through the shadows of sorrow

           And always the spectral angel haunting the meadows

               of want and the snow, the falling snow.

     Maas’ images of that new world, mostly of dark and dreary streets, abandoned buildings (which appear as well in Schmitz’s and Rose’s work), backlots of litter and ruin, and finally a cemetery with reliquaries and shrines where he finally curls up as if he were making a snow angel on the ground before being buried up by the snow itself—are all quite striking and explain the interest in his films by critics such as Jonas Mekas. But, alas, I can’t separate Weber’s powerful music and Maas’ fascinating imagery from the sentimental viewpoints expressed in the filmmaker’s poetic endeavors.

      We realize that for many artistically inclined young post-war boys suddenly facing a world without the normative familial and cultural structures of life must indeed have terrified them regarding their futures; but how I wish, at times, for the wisdom of another gay man living in New York at the very same moment, Frank O’Hara:

 

            Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.

 

Los Angeles, May 18, 2021

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

 

 

Joseph Losey | The Big Night / 1951

going haywire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Losey, Stanley Ellin, Hugo Butler, and Ring Lardner, Jr. (screenplay, based on the novel Dreadful Summit by Stanley Ellin), Joseph Losey (director) The Big Night / 1951

 

The burly owner of a local bar, Andy La Main (Preston Foster) is planning a special night at a boxing match for his son George’s (John Drew Barrymore) birthday; he’s even bought him a birthday cake with candles. But the youthful, book-loving George, who has just been pummeled by a local gang, can’t even get up enough wind to blow them all out, director Joseph Losey, hinting, as he does in so many of his films, that there is something a bit “different” about his likeable character, both in his seeming tenderness (babies immediately love him) and in his demeanor (he’s far too gentle, it seems, for the bar and boxing world his father inhabits). Without saying it, the director hints that his protagonist, a boy without a mother, is perhaps gay. As Losey, himself bisexual, has one of his other characters express it: “I mean, each of us has got secret things deep inside, and if we don't have someone we can share them with, we usually go all haywire.”

     A few minutes into this first scene upon witnessing a noted sportscaster, Al Judge (Howard St. John) entering the bar with his henchman to demand that Andy bare his chest so that he might severely beat him with his cane, the boy bursts into tears. Why didn’t his strong father fight back he demands to know from the bartender, Flanagan, who has evidently lived with the father for 16 years since Andy’s mother left. Soon after, when George pockets a gun kept for protection behind the bar and races off into the night, we recognize the subject of this film will be the discovery and vindication of the young’s boy’s manhood.

      The journey he takes in his “big night,” is, quite naturally, led by an alcoholic professor, Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), the standard pedant of anatomy fictions, who after buying George’s second ticket to attend the fight (a fight, incidentally that Losey doesn’t even bother to show us, and ends after only a few moments into the first round), takes us into the late-night noir underworld of jazz clubs and after hours bars that Cooper inhabits and where George hopes to be able to confront his father’s attacker.

 

     Under the professor’s corrupt tutelage, the boy meets Cooper’s unhappy girlfriend, Julie (Dorothy Comingore), a corrupt cop, and a beautiful black singer (Mauri Lynn, singing Lyn Murray’s and Sid Kuller’s appropriate composition “Am I Too Young”), and finally, Julie’s sweet sister, Marion (Joan Lorring), while embarrassing himself as he compliments the singer’s beauty with a racial sidebar beginning with “despite the fact….” Clearly George is too still too young and unknowing to get along in this world; and besides, for the first time in his life he becomes drunk, awakening to be told by Marion that he has spent a long while getting to know the stairs.

      Nonetheless, by the close of his big night, he does meet up with Al Judge, only to discover that the woman whom his father was seeing, Frances, who had suddenly disappeared from their lives, was Al’s sister, who committed suicide when George’s father refused to marry her. When Judge turns George’s shaking gun on the boy himself, it goes off, presumably killing Judge; but rather than being an intentional act, this time it is only accidental. George fails, it appears, even if he succeeds.

      Returning home, he admits what he has done to his father, discovering that Andy could not marry Frances because the boy’s mother is still living and he is still married to her, having refused to get a divorce. More sentimental than George has ever perceived, Andy remains in love with the woman who has left him for another man.

      Inevitably, the police arrive, believing Andy has tried to retaliate for his beating, but George, finally proving himself as an adult, screams out the truth from his bedroom window, confessing to the act. It appears that, in fact, the shot only grazed Judge, without killing him. And Andy insists that he be the one to go to jail for a short time.

      The New York Times critic of the day, Bosley Crowther argued the story, based on a novel by Stanley Ellin, is “presumptuous and contrived.” But I think Crowther, given the rest of his rant against the film, simply misunderstood the work.

     Losey is not truly interested in the standard noir themes of strong men and their loose women, but uses the scene, rather to explore what it even means to be a man—or woman, for that matter—in a world that demands penance for being someone other. Losey’s film can easily been seen in a long line of Menippean satires filled with stock figures of both high and low worlds. George is young and gentle, a bookworm instead of a street tough; Andy, still pining for his wife, has evidently taken up with his bartender; Cooper is a man unable to face up to the cruelty of the world, and his girlfriend is a kind of sadist in her love for him; even the pure-minded Marion realizes that, despite the gentle kiss she receives from George, that she is too old for him.

       In short, Losey’s film is not truly about boxing, guns, and macho wise-cracks, the staples of the genre in which he has set his character types, but about outsiders, those who truly do not fit into that world. Ultimately, it is not they who have gone haywire—although on the surface it appears they all are quite crazy—but the world around them that miscomprehends, perverts, and destroys their decency and love.

      If later Losey found far more complex representatives of his vision in actors such as Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, and Michael York than in his early films of green- and blond-haired boys, it is still utterly fascinating to see how consistent his vision was. And, in the end, I admire this 1951 film for what it attempts.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

 

Don Roy King | Jonah Hill Dating Andy's Dad / 2008 [TV (SNL) episode]

a fractured fairy-tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Seth Myers (head writer) Don Roy King (director) Jonah Hill Dating Andy’s Dad / 2008 [TV (SNL) episode] [4.17 minutes]

 

The March 13, 2008 show of Saturday Night Live began with a meeting with guest performer Jonah Hill and regular SNL cast member Andy Samberg, with the former announcing that since

they met up at a friendly dinner party relating to Hill’s guest performance on the show, Hill was been dating Samberg’s dad.

     Well, it’s a bit more than simply “dating,” it quickly becomes clear. They’ve been having an affair, which quite understandably disturbs Samberg, particularly given the images that the skit calls up, deep tongue kissing and hand holding between the two of them, including Hill’s suggestion that Samberg’s Dad is one of the most fascinating men he’s ever met in his life.

      Understandably, Samberg wonders, “Is this a joke?” Of course, it is, but in the reality of Saturday Night Live-land, it isn’t, and in the myth of the TV fantasy film world in which SNL exists, Hill is truly having an affair with one of the player’s Father.

      “My Dad?” Samberg, shaking his head, inquires.

  “Yes, your Dad, my boyfriend, whatever….”  A moment later, he announces: “It’s gotten extraordinarily physical.”

      “I got to be honest with you. I’m really not cool with this,” Samberg predictably responds. We are, after all in a TV time warp where such impossible things might actually happen.

      “You’re dating my 57-year-old father.”

      “Why is everyone freaking out about the age thing. You sound like you mom right now.”

    Andy’s father suddenly shows up, gives Hill a kiss, and turns to his son: “Andy, I’ve been meaning to tell you…. Jonah and I are dating.” Hill explains that he has already told him, to which the father responds, “Blabbermouth,” Hill rejoining, “I know, I’m the worst.”

      All we need is Bill Hader to show up, and wonder how Samberg happens to know “them.”

      “Ah, he’s my Dad.”

      “Small word,” Hader announces, “We’ve been fucking.”

      Where do you go after an opening skit like that? You’ve entered the strange dimension of time called “the Twilight world of SNL.”

      Of course, gay humor has been a standard of the long-lived comedy show, but this burns down in close to the supposedly private lives of the actors themselves, during a season when, due to a writer’s strike, everyone might have wondered whether or not there would even be a show.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

     

Jacqueline Audry | Olivia / 1951

grace

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pierre Laroche (screenplay, based on a novel by Dorothy Bussy), Jacqueline Audry (director) Olivia / 1951

 

Jacqueline Audry’s Olivia of 1951 reminds me some of Leontine Sagan’s 1931 film Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform). Both take place in well-to-do private girls’ schools, and both involve teachers who compete with each other for their students’ love. Yet, almost immediately, the comparisons quickly fall away. The caring gentleness of one of the head mistresses, Fräulein von Bernburg, interpreted as love by one of her young charges, although filled with lesbian possibilities in the 1931 movie, has none of the more openly queer coding of Audry’s film.

    

     In Olivia—named after the young British girl who arrives to the freethinking and open-minded French establishment directly from a restrictive rather religious institution—the innocent neophyte is almost immediately required to take positions with regard to the two women, the beautiful, pampered, and manipulative Mlle. Cara (Simone Simon) and the pleasant and loving, if more authoritarian Mlle. Julie (Edwige Feuillère), who together run the school, and who apparently were lovers until a young protégé Laura (Elly Norden) came—unintentionally so it appears—between them.

     We’re never completely filled in with the details of how these two charming and caring women suddenly pulled away from one another; we know only that, according to the young girls who try to explain things to Olivia, the school is now divided into “Julistes” and “Caristas.” Olivia, after her rather harsh learning experiences of the past, would love them both. But Cara, who seems to be endlessly suffering from migraines, and as often as she calls her young admirers to her, just as quickly sends them away, gradually takes second place to the far more outgoing Julie, who engages each of her students in very personal ways (vaguely recalling the manner of the influential teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, prognosticating her student’s futures). Julie describes Olivia’s major asset as “grace.”

     Yet it is her teacher’s voice, as Julie nightly reads scenes from Racine and others, that first enchants Mlle. Julie’s impressionable pupil. The first time Olivia hears her teacher read she quite literally falls into a kind trance, the other Julistes snickering that the new girl has quite definitely joined their “camp.”

     But it is also the little things that Julie does, regularly asking Olivia to sit in the chair closest to her as she reads, commenting somewhat positively about Olivia’s quick mind, and, finally, taking her on a semi-educational day-trip to Paris which ends up, on the train home, with Julie gently touching her knee and stroking her student’s hand.

     If all the girls in Sagan’s movie cannot wait for their nightly kiss from Fräulein von Bernburg, for Olivia the gentle kiss proffered by Mlle. Julie sends her into near ecstasy and a heady spin into an off-kilter world that we can only perceive as something deeper that a typical school-girl crush for a caring teacher. Time and again throughout Audry’s brilliantly filmed work (cinematography by Christian Matras), we recognize that the relationship between student and teacher betrays, as reviewer Caden Mark Gardner wrote in Hyperallergic Weekend that the girl’s “attraction runs deeper, is knottier” than others who feel for their beloved teacher.

     When Laura briefly returns to the school for a visit, Olivia asks her whether she loves Mlle. Julie, to which the girl replies “yes.” Olivia continues, “but doesn’t your heart stop beating when her hand touches yours?” No, responds Laura, “I love her; “nothing more, “it’s just that simple.”

     Soon, after, Laura again leaves the school with the belief that it would be “better for Mlle. Julie,” signifying that Julie’s love towards her continues to stand in the way of Julie’s and Cara’s relationship. But it will be no better with Laura gone, suggests the Italian teacher to Olivia, because now there is you.

   This movie’s climax occurs during the school’s annual Christmas party, when select girls in remarkable costumes pair up with other girls dressed as young men, together dancing at the seeming pleasure of the two school masters sitting near the tree.

   Despite Olivia’s stunning Indian garb, it is Cécile, dressed in the stars and stripes of her US homeland, a dress she herself has designed, that receives Julie’s praise, ending with an intense kiss to the girl’s neck.

      Observing Olivia’s jealousy of seeing another girl elevated from her own place in Julie’s affections, Mlle Julie whispers into Olivia’s ear that after the party she will visit her room, bringing her bon-bons. Olivia is so delighted in the prospect that she cannot even sleep; yet Julie never appears, the teacher telling the student the next day, while resisting with great difficulty placing her hands upon Olivia’s waist to comfort the child, that she is sorry she has hurt her last night.

 

                    I always try to do my best. My best for you, and for me.

                    [she goes to the door, and turns her head back into the room]

                    I like you, my dear. More than you think.

 

     The next day Julie announces that she is leaving the school for a new teaching position. But we know that the true reason is Cara’s jealousy and the temptations that Olivia presents, all fanned by the flames of Cara’s quite evil minion Frau Riesener (Lesly Meynard), who is currently caring for a new round of migraine’s her mistress is suffering.

     Exhausted, the elderly teacher temporarily gives over Cara’s care to Reisener’s arch enemy, the always hungry and somewhat comic figure, Mlle. Dubois (Suzanne Dehelly). Julie travels to town on business—presumably, after what we hear near film’s end, transferring all of her financial interests in the school to Cara.

     Soon after Julie returns, Cara is found dead.

     Through a brief series of questions by an intruding patriarchal panel, who put suspicion on both Mlle. Dubois and Mlle. Julie, we perceive that Cara has taken up the key which Dubois has mistakenly left behind, and overdosed on her medicine.

      As the children gather about Cara’s door, hoping to see her body, Julie stridently demands they leave. Cara is the only one she ever loved, she declares, let me be alone with her coffin tonight.

      So is Olivia sent home, to her haunted world of religiosity in which the joys and pains of love which the girl has experienced would surely be described as “unnatural,” but which our protagonist unapologetically declares in a printed quote at the beginning of the film: “Love has always been the key matter of my life. May the Gods grant me not to have profaned such a pure and cherished memory.”

      Mlle. Julie, true to her intention of leaving, will soon follow.

      Cara has left the school to Riesener in her will, but with only a few, if any students remaining, the harpy is left with little support. Even the magnificently earthy cook, Victoire (Yvonne de Bray), who begins this film with observations of the joys the school experienced in the “old days,” determines it is time to move on.

      Audry made 13 feature films after working for years as director Max Ophüls’ assistant. Olivia, one of her most outstanding works, has now been restored, and finally can be recognized as one of the most important films made about lesbian love.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).