Lewis Milestone | Two Arabian Knights / 1927

ritual baths

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace Smith and Cyril Gardner (screenplay, based on a story by Donald McGibney; George Marion, Jr., titles), Lewis Milestone (director) Two Arabian Knights / 1927

 

Lewis Milestone’s 1927 film, Two Arabian Knights was long thought to be lost, even though it had won the Academy Award for best Comedy Direction in 1929 (before that category was deleted). But upon Howard Hughes’ death in 1976 a copy was discovered in his collection, he having been one of its producers along with John W. Considine Jr.  The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive working with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2016.

     Fortunately the film was saved, primarily because it is an excellent comic work with particularly good acting by his heroes, William Boyd*—best known for his late 1930s and 1940s role as Hopalong Cassidy—playing W. Dangerfield Phelps II and Louis Wolheim—who later performed in Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but was perhaps best known for his earlier Broadway roles in The Hairy Ape and What Price Glory?—as Sergeant Peter O’Gaffney. Mary Astor plays the Saudi Arabian princess Mirza, but she serves only as a female interest for the two men, in part to establish their heterosexual credentials. Boris Karloff, in one of his first roles, plays the minor character of a ship’s purser, and you might miss him if you blink.

      Moreover, this work, like Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? of the year before, is a “buddy movie” par excellence, a genre that has remained extremely popular over the years, more recently growing into the bromance movies of the 1990s to the more recent bromances such as Phil Lord’s and Christopher Miller’s 22 Jump Street (2014), works centered upon the deep camaraderie and love between two heterosexual men.

      But it also an extremely important film for LGBTQ film history, since such relationships often actually revealed the stirrings of the queer heart.

       The genre perhaps goes back to the 17th century—Alexandre Dumas’ 19th-century fiction about the 17th-century The Three Musketeers immediately comes to mind—or even earlier since we might define Homer’s description of the warriors Achilles and Patroclus as representing such a genre in literature. Such relationships are generally described as developing from the close relationships established in male military confinement and later in the locker rooms of sports events. In the case of Homer, the two were merely “tender” friends, but in other literature and legends they were lovers, a situation paralleled in Hebrew literature in the story of David and Jonathan. In the film history leading up to Milestone’s movie, we have already witnessed such instances of male bonding that veers over into possible queer sexuality in John G. Blystone’s Dick Turpin (1925), Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), and in that same year as Milestone’s film in William A. Wellman’s Wings. In the first instance, the two “friends” were both highway bandits, but in the latter pair it was the military that brought the men together. And the following year, in William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains the location would be extended the all-male institution of prison. Hitchcock, in the 1927 film Downhill hinted that it such friendships might also be established for adolescents in all-male schools. 

        But Milestone’s version does not suggest anything more than deep male bonding; the few sexual teases come only in the form of a prison de-lousing process which, as in Wellman’s film, openly features male dorsal nudity, and in a later scene where their stolen Arabian thobes, after being exposed to the cold snow and icy water, curl up as if they were wearing dresses or the kind of entari and tennure worn by Turkish Dervish dancers.

     At one point Phelps wears O’Gaffney’s military pants under his own, but before you imagine that this is similar to sheepherder’s Ennis Del Mar’s shirt worn under his fellow sheepherder Jack Twist’s own blouse in Brokeback Mountain, I need explain that in Phelps’ case it is only a ploy to keep his friend away from the Arabic girl, Mirza, whom they have just saved from drowning and both of whom on intent upon romancing.

       There is one final strange moment with possible sexual resonations, but I shall speak of that later.

    Throughout most of the film, Milestone goes out of his way to make it clear that Phelps and O’Gaffney become friends only in the heterosexual sense and even that mostly out of necessity. Indeed, they begin the movie by hating one another, both trapped in a World War I trench hole in German territory. Assured that there is no way that they can survive, Phelps throws over his rifle in order to beat up the Sergeant who has made his life hell until that moment. 

     Phelps, we soon discover is an intelligent fellow with apparently a quite proper upbringing—his father’s name, he later tells O’Gaffney will get them into the American Consul’s Office in the Saudi city in which they are trapped—while the Sergeant is a foul-mouthed ex-con arrested so his rap sheet suggests for molesting women. Moreover, Phelps is an attractive fellow, with a sly smile, while O’Gaffney is a heavy-set thuggish figure, even if from time to time his face breaks into puggish look of a teddy-bear.

        Before the two can settle their grudges, however, the Germans have surrounded them and marched them off to a northern German prison camp embedded in deep snow. Because of his service record, O’Gaffney is once more put in charge to Phelp’s despair. But when the Sergeant gets caught holding a caricature of one of the German soldiers sketched by Phelps, the always chivalrous Phelps admits that he was the artist, saving his enemy from punishment. And at that very moment the two lower their ruff, becoming such fast-friends that you can almost see, even in black and white, O’Gaffney blush, shyly admitting to a real liking for Phelps almost in the way a young girl might express her appreciation for the attention of an older boy—perhaps another of the film’s sexually teasing moments.

         But their friendship remains a competitive heterosexual romance, the kind we’ll see soon see in the films of Laurel and Hardy (who also often cross the sexual line), Abbott and Costello, and ultimately Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their many On the Road movies from the 1940s and 50s. Indeed, Two Arabian Knights might be described a far more sophisticated model of the Hope-Crosby tours of exotic locations, since the boys in this case chose to escape their German camp in white thobes they steal off the bodies of two latrine-going Arabs in order to better blend in with the snow.

       From a cold pond where they hide from a German calvary troupe, they escape back into the hands of German soldiers leading a group of Arabs to a train whose destination is Constantinople, from where they jump near the Turkish capitol to hide in a haycart whose contents, in turn, are dumped into the hole of a ship sailing off to Arabia. 

       On deck they manage to escape the chains of the surly Skipper (Michael Visaroff), save an Arabian woman from a small, capsized boat headed to deliver her to the ship, and once their clothes have dried off, attempt to woo Mirza as she hides behind her requisite veil.

       Obviously, only Phelps is pretty enough to get her to momentary reveal her beautiful face and get himself and his friend in trouble when the Skipper and Mirza’s male companion observe that she has broken with all decorum.

        Having used the little money he’s hidden in his shoe to pay for their own voyage, Phelps and O’Gaffney have no money when the Skipper demands the same for Mirza. Beating up and robbing the ship’s Purser (Karloff) they manage to free the girl, but once again must dive into the ocean and swim off to save their own hides.

       When they finally attempt to visit Mirza and her father, the Emir’s (Michael Vavitch) palace, they are arrested and taken off the be killed for having dared to look into the face of beauty. Upon reading the note Mirza has tossed down to them as they entered, they suddenly realize they are facing a sentence of death. Once more they make a miraculous escape, with Phelps leading with his intelligence and O’Gaffney cleaning up with his brawn.

      Worn out and starved from their numerous exploits, the ex-Sergeant is ready to take a well-deserved rest, but Phelps calls upon his deep friendship yet one more time: they must go back to the palace, he insists, to help Mirza escape from her unwanted wedding. For the first time, O’Gaffney momentarily resists, but his sentimentality for his “deep friendship” finally wins him over, and he’s off for yet another adventure, even berating his pal for his “cracks about splitting up.”

         This one as well promises to be a disaster, as Phelps is caught in Mirza’s quarters by Ben Ali and challenged to a duel. He offers a choice to two pistols, one without bullets the other one filled with rounds. Phelps chooses and when Mirza strikes the gong three times shoots first. His gun was apparently the empty one, and Mirza, unable to bear the inevitable, leaves the room, with Ben Ali finally pulling his trigger.

         Phelps, however, still stands, Ben Ali admitting that he wouldn’t have chanced his own life with such a “dog,” but also knowing that Phelps and his friend will be taken care of by the palace guards and that Mirza, having heard the second shot, will suppose the American dead.

         So he’s off the claim his prize, having ordered up a coach to take her off to wedding somewhat like an Arabian Cinderella out of A Thousand and One Nights. True to form, O’Gaffney appears at the window with guns he’s stolen from the guards who tried to arrest him below at the very moment Phelps is about to be led away, accordingly allowing for their inevitable escape.

         In the penultimate scene Ben Ali and Mirza are about to enter the carriage only to discover a gun-toting Phelps already inside, Ben Ali commenting in his own chivalrous manner that he should at least be thanked for escorting the woman to the American.

         Mirza steps inside as O’Gaffney as the driver sets the horses off on a trot. Finally, we realize, his last actions on behalf of his love for Phelps result in the closure of their friendship. In a more conventional story, he might even get all teary-eyed. But here something strange happens as he spots and for a few second focuses on something just out of camera range, the camera finally following the line of his vision to reveal a man in an Arabian robe standing alone in a dark alleyway, papers in his hand, staring back at O’Gaffney’s gaze.

          Surely this is one of the strangest images with which a movie has ever closed: a question mark seemingly without a possible answer. Is O’Gaffney, now having lost his best friend and companion to another person’s love, seeking for a replacement? Does he find this stranger somehow attractive, having become so used to male companionship that he can no longer imagine having success with the female gender? Is the incident related to his suspicions at a man staring at him in the café—in reality Ben Ali playfully observing the two for whom he has just sent his soldiers? In that instant, when he asked Phelps why the man staring at him, his friend suggested, off handedly, that it was probably Mirza’s eunuch, a word which was definitely not in O’Gaffney’s vocabulary; when Phelps whispers the definition in his ear—clearly words that cannot be spoken aloud to the film’s audience—his friend’s mouth drops open with amazement. Has he suddenly found his own eunuch, someone with whom he might sexually engage without requiring reciprocation?

           Looking into that face, with its startled large-lips, a bulbous nose plastered into its center, I wondered, just in passing and with no surety of recognition, whether it might be Victor McLagen, who played the equivalent of Wolheim’s character in the hit film What Price Glory? the year before. Critics have long compared the two movies, Philip Kemp, for example writing about Milestone’s movie in the World Film Directors, Volume 1: “The film’s cheerfully coarse tone and bickering buddies were clearly inspired by What Price Glory?, Raoul Walsh’s recent smash hit.”

And Wolheim played the very same role on Broadway years earlier. Just perhaps the writers and director decided that having just lost his beloved buddy, they needed to offer O’Gaffney a new best friend. If McLagen performed this cameo I think it might have been one of those marvelously self-mocking, post-modern moments that happen with great regularity in the On the Road series. And it would be yet another example of how “buddy” films often take off in totally unexpected directions, the most notable example, perhaps, being Thelma and Louise’s automotive leap off the lip of the Grand Canyon in Ridley Scott’s 1991 film. 

Photo of Victor McLagen

        Amateur commentators and professional critics alike keep referring to pre-1934 movies as being “pre-code,” but I’d argue that is a serious misnomer. Hollywood films had always had unspoken codes, and open expression of homosexual behavior was just not possible in US films. By 1927 the studio heads had already issued a list of “Does” and “Don’t,” and although homosexuality was not specifically talked about, it was clearly presumed to be included under the provision on “sexual perversions.” In 1930, as I write elsewhere in these pages, Irving Thalberg met with Martin Quigley, editor of the film trade newspaper Motion Picture Herald, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, who together had already submitted a code of standards to the studios, to establish what was described as the Hays Code; and studios did, in fact, attempt to keep relatively close to those guidelines, which partially explains the sudden appearance beginning in the 1930s of “pansy” figures, featuring brief appearances of stereotypical gay types for the purposes of humor and to remind us, perhaps, that such poor fragile creatures did indeed exist outside of the confines of movieland reality.

       The shift that everyone describes as “The Code” took place only because the members of the Hays committee were relatively fair and open-minded until 1934 when the insatiable sex reformer Joseph Breen took over. In short, we can recognize that if there had been no code whatsoever and directors and writers had been open-minded about homosexual behavior, far more of the buddy movies might have gone over the cliff of sexual transgression. While a German director like Dieterle could tell his gay buddy story rather straight forwardly—although it still ended sadly—Blystone and Wellman coded their tales, filling it in with potential and actual heterosexual relationships for its central figures which deflected their audiences’ attention away from the gay relationships which were at the heart of their films. When Laurel and Hardy got so chummy with one another that their relationship became suspect, the directors could always point to the tradition of comic cross-dressing, which had never inevitably had anything to do with sex.

        Milestone clearly didn’t intend to even consider the idea of positing the notion that these deep friends were anything other than heterosexual guys who bonded because of their need to survive. Yet even his work moves naturally into some strange territories other than what I have described as the film’s “sexual teases.” The film’s major structural motif consists of a series of seeming ritual baths which begins with our friends being forced to shower before their prison camp delousing, which is followed by their jump into a freezing pond to hide from the German calvary, a dive into the ocean waters to save Mirza, and a final leap into the ocean waters to escape the confines of the ship on which they have been sailing to Arabia.

         These bathing ceremonies have absolutely no religious connotations, but do require, each time, their stripping off their clothes and standing around together almost naked as they wait for them to dry. At one point when O’Gaffney would like to scurry off to flirt without Mirza without the presence of his buddy, he pulls down Phelps’ drying clothes, runs a bathtub of water, and soaks his military duds in it before hanging them up again to dry, purposedly forcing his “friend” to remain in his long johns for a while longer, representing an earlier version of Phelps’ later robbery of O’Gaffney’s outer pants.

         A baptism, derived from Greek concept noun βάπτισμα ("washing, dipping"), also carries with it the connotations of complete immersion or “going under” which hints at what the two men have done in pledging their eternal friendship, a kind of private initiation or symbolic “marriage.” By reenacting this “pledge” time and again throughout the film’s narrative, they reestablish their commitment to one another, a tie which is broken only at film’s end when we recognize that Phelps will soon be making a new commitment to Mirza as his wife, hence leaving the film’s loveable dumbbell with the problem of having no friend with whom he “carry on” into the future the film has promised.

        The director, realizing his dilemma, chose to hint of at least one possibility with the film’s comical last scene, jumping off the cliff of cinematic logic to make, if my theory is correct, a pop-culture reference. The form simply demanded it.

        Milestone’s wonderful “dramedy,” accordingly, is the perfect example of why the “buddy genre” is so important for queer film lovers. It allows even straight men to enter the room of same sex relationships without necessarily having its characters pull off their clothes (although they certainly do that often in this film) and lie down in bed together.

 

*I should add that although Boyd married 5 times, he was also long rumored to have replaced Gary Cooper as Howard Hughes’ (the producer of Two Arabian Knights) male lover. The “Gay Influence” blogspot, for example, reports what was recounted in a couple of Hughes biographies: “Bisexual actor Richard Arlen was hosting an all male nude beach party at a secluded cove on Catalina Island, and Hughes asked William Boyd to tag along with him. Somehow a photographer got close enough to snap nude photos of Hughes and Boyd, which became the talk of Hollywood. RKO, Boyd’s studio, was having apoplexy (an interesting aside is that later, in 1948, Hughes took over the reins at RKO and ran it into the ground; they were out of business ten years later).”

 

Los Angeles, February 8-9, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February 2022).

Paul Czinner | Doña Juana / 1927 [Difficult to obtain or Lost film]

a man without whiskers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Béla Balázs (screenplay, based on Don Gil of the Green Breeches by Tirso de Molina), Paul Czinner (director) Doña Juana / 1927 [Difficult to obtain or Lost film]

 

Soon after making The Fiddler of Florence Paul Czinner and Elisabeth Bergner paired up again to film Doña Juana for the German company UFA, with a script by Béla Balázs based on the Baroque playwright Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil of the Green Breeches. 

 

     Since this film is unavailable, we have no idea how faithful Balázs’ version is to the original Spanish play or know how much of the screenwriter’s work actually made it into the final film by Czinner since Balázs later sued the director and producers for not remaining true to his screenplay, asking that his name be removed from the credits.

      In the original Don Gil de las calzas verdes, Juana follows a man with whom she had a relationship, Martín, from her home in Valladolid to Madrid, where he intends to marry a rich woman named Inés. He appears in Madrid under a false name, don Gil, so as to hide his engagement as Martín to Juana. Meanwhile Inés has promised to marry another man, Juan.

     Dressing in male clothes, Juana herself meets with Inés pretending she is Gil. Both Inés and her cousin Clara fall in love with the young delicate stranger. And when Martín, also pretending to be Gil, shows up, he is confused to hear that Inés has already met a different Gil, a “little Gil without whiskers.”

      By act II, both Inés and Clara have fallen in love with the female Gil, which causes yet further confusion and almost ends with Juana and Inés’s unlawful marriage. At one point even Clara dresses up as Gil. By Act III, however, after Juana has revealed herself, all three end up with their right partners, Juana with Gil (Martín), Clara marrying Antonio, and Inés returning to her beloved Juan.

      The character of Gil (Martín) is apparently renamed Don Ramon is Czinner’s film, performed by Walter Rilla. Hertha von Walther is Doña Ines and Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel plays her cousin Clara. Further, in the Czinner version it appears that Doña Juana (Bergner) was raised by her father as a boy, helping to explain her various drag manifestations or perhaps being simply the manifestation of her own gender confusion.

      In any event, it is clear that gender transformation and confusion is very much at the center of Czinner’s film, just as it was in The Fiddler of Florence and will again be in his and Bergner’s 1936 production of As You Like It.

 

Los Angeles, June 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).

Wes Hurley and Nathan M. Miller | Little Potato / 2017

nobody wants karaoke every night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wes Hurley and Nathan M. Miller (directors) Little Potato / 2017

 

It’s hard to know in Wes Hurley’s and Nathan M. Miller’s truly startling documentary when to laugh or when to cry. The complete absurdity of life is expressed in a surprisingly and utterly straight-faced telling of what might be perceived as a semi-tragic tale.

     Little Potato, as he was called, (Hurley, represented in his childhood by Benjamin Jakupcak), and his mother lived in the last days of the Soviet Union in one of the most Moscow-distant and corrupted of the major Soviet cities, Vladivostok, located on the Golden Horn Bay by the Sea of Japan.

     There Hurley grew up, vicariously watching television as his father regularly beat his mother, forming a frame around his eyes, as he himself represents it, to pretend that what he was seeing was not real but a movie or a television comedy.

      His forceful mother (Elena Bridges, her younger self portrayed by Darlene Sellers) left her husband, taking her son with her to her mother, who was not at all sympathetic to the divorce and, as Elena makes clear, felt that it was the husband’s right to beat his wife.

      Meanwhile, without even perceiving that he was different, Hurley began to grow up in the last days of Communist regime, where his biology books expressed the dangers of masturbation, a sin (since his mother was still a believer in the Russian Orthodox religion), a sickness, and crime which he confessed to his mother, who was relieved to be able to tell her little “Potato” that there was nothing wrong with it and that his text books were filled with outdated lies.

      At the very same moment—I was visiting the Soviet Union in those very last days—the Communist regime was collapsing. And at first it brought joy and tears to everyone’s eyes. One of the most memorable moments of this short 14-minute work is when suddenly US movies began to appear on a hitherto nonexistent TV channel, 3. The earliest films such as Jerry Zucker’s 1990 film Ghost and numerous others such as Home Alone, the second installment of The Addams Family, and Garry Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny (1991) become icons which Russians repeated to one another like a strange game of “Telephone,” each passing on the story to one another. Elena’s almost ecstatic-like comments about the last-named filmed epitomize just how sad and funny this fantastical and cruelly-real world was to those on the outside looking into the imaginary world of US cinema: “Michelle Pfeiffer’s little apartment was so cozy, and I thought I would be so happy and I would not need anything else. Certainly not Al Pacino.”

      The new Russia was not much better than the old Communist world. The former party leaders simply now described themselves as capitalists, and remained in power over a people still suffering shortages and food, electricity and other comforts. Only now the people could see that there was another world “out there” which they desperately wanted to be part of.

      As her “Little Potato” began to grow up, he also increasingly sensed a kind of difference with himself that was not permitted in the general society. “Every day of my childhood,” Hurley relates, “I heard terrible things said about ‘faggots’ or those ‘pedics’” (the Russian description of gay individuals who they saw as pedophiles). “I wasn’t even sure whether gay people were real or whether they were made-up monsters.”

      He doesn’t know why he can’t relate to “girls,” whether it is because he is a good Christian boy or something else that he just can’t fully explain. Yet when his handsome swimming coach (Matthew Cotner) was arrested for burglary, the young boy imagined himself arresting the beautiful man and keeping him under his bed. The film reads somewhat like a humorous Russian parable.

      Yet it becomes even more absurd when the mother, fearing for her son’s well-being begins to advertise herself as a Russian woman available to American men, finally hooking up with a man from Seattle, whom she visits, finding him, at first, as a gentle and kind man. She returns to Russia to reclaim her son as a married woman.

       The new husband and father is another kind of paternalistic fascist, so it appears, this time in the guise of an American religious fundamentalist, who is alternately gentle and kind, but who quickly becomes violent and abusive, just like the resilient Elena’s first husband.

       The new world, on the other hand, is a remarkable adventure for mother and son. The stores are filled with food, people smile instead of looking scowling, and suddenly, as Hurley defines the experience, there is the joy of, “just being in a place that doesn’t feel like the end of the world.”

      Yet as Elena expresses it, her new husband, was not only a determined born-again Christian, but was defiantly anti-abortion. As his new son summarizes: “He was always franting about politics and religion. He was always angry about the secular world and the state of the schools and…the gay rights movement.”

       Even Elena senses her son is going “through something,” the common heterosexual definition of the trauma a young man or woman suffers when realize that they are not sexually aligned to the society around them.

      But now in the US Hurley realizes from the media that people are fighting for gay rights and “winning” their place in the society. His mother, when he finally reveals his real problem, is amazingly relieved, but now they cannot let the father, James, know, since he might divorce her and the son and mother be sent back to Russia. Closeting now becomes a mother/son intention, a very strange predicament that is seldom documented, but probably does regularly exist.

       Strangely, the very fact that now Hurley can go on line and see the increasing representation of gay men and lesbians throughout history makes him even more angry about his own situation and the treatment of his step-father of his mother, now a more tortured condition that even in his Soviet childhood.

        Yet “Potato” is now 18, a finally is able to move out. But Elena is left with a new kind of monster. One night she calls her son crying, she has come home to see a strange woman sitting on their living room couch. That woman is her husband James, now Janice coming out to her as “the person she knew and didn’t know.”

        The “monster” it appears is transgender, terrified of her own societally rejected behavior. In this hall of mirrors, structured actually around the long and endless history of the abuse of women and young men throughout world history, finally reaches into this immigrant Russian tale in a manner that not even the great Russian storytellers such as Gogol, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Platonov or Kharms might never have quite imagined.    

        James/Janis has chosen a Russian woman because he felt she, as a conservative being, might hide and help him in his own self-deception, but Elena, as we have discovered, was perhaps the most open-minded woman he might have found. And he now finds it possible to “come out” to her, maybe the most bizarre coming out tale one might have ever imagined.

        Elena becomes, as her son describes her, “like a groupie to Janis and her trans girlfriends.” Perhaps the most hilarious ending to a film ever is Elena’s admission that Janis and her friends enjoyed karaoke. As Zamyatin or Kharms might have expressed it, if it had been in the range of their experience, “There was karaoke night after night after night. That’s when I decided it was time to divorce him. Transgender was fine with me, but nobody wants karaoke every night.”

        Life is truly far more incredible than fiction. And happy endings do not exist, evidently, only in Hollywood movies.

 

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Joseph Barglowski | Vermont / 2023

city lights

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Barglowski (screenwriter and director) Vermont / 2023 [19.50 minutes]

 

Vermont if very much a state of mind in Joseph Barglowski’s 2023 short film. The young man who has been holed up in a small cabin in a snowy few weeks in New England (Ryan McDermott) has just returned to his home in Brooklyn, where he has clearly been emotionally troubled by his experiences there.

      Throughout the early part of the film, director Barglowski shows us heavily bearded bears of men, who might have been said to have hibernated in the wild, getting the severe trims necessary for them to reassimilate back into the city.

      For our “hero” something has definitely not gone right in the isolated beauty of the frigid cold state. And the rest of the movie portrays him trying to reenter the equally harsh but stunning lit-up world of Brooklyn and New York City as if he has been dropped into a Martin Scorsese-like landscape. If these are “mean streets,” they are clearly also far more lovely to the eye than the several winter landscapes we see later in the film, reminiscent of common postcard portraiture of the winter wonderland everyone believes Vermont to be. Clearly Barglowski, along with me, prefers the hot-lights of the city over the frozen north.

   We perceive that something has not gone right from the very first frames of this film, with McDermott returning home with two of the central figures who later play roles in the movie, showing up at a party hosted by McDermott’s female friend (Kathryn Isaac). Did one of them show up in Vermont unexpectedly, shifting the relationship of the central figures?      

      Back in NYC we see our central figure trying to reassimilate into his other world. He meets up with an older man (who we also see in the early segments as undergoing a new haircut) who claims to love Vermont. He, in fact, has a small painting on his wall depicting its wonders. The two have what can only be described as cold and efficient sex, stimulated it appears, mostly by the central character’s own memories of Vermont.

      Meanwhile, the young man we have seen next to him on the subway in the first frames seems to have had sex with the other man in the same scene. And McDermott’s character visits him just as the other is leaving.

      It almost plays out as a return of the prodigal lover, both men having realized that perhaps, despite what happened in Vermont, they still love one another.

    Vermont, frankly, cannot compete with the brightly lit-up streets that cinematographer Robert Orlowski captures along with the slightly discordant piano score by Cody Boyce.

     Love is definitely better for the two major figures of this film back home in the warm lights of Brooklyn.

     

Los Angeles, October 26, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).

Shannon Deeby | RSVP / 2016

in prison

by Douglas Messerli

Shannon Deeby (screenwriter and director) RSVP / 2016

 

While searching for Vimeo’s on-line edition Laurie Lynd’s 1991 film RSVP, I coincidentally found a Vimeo streaming of another film of the same title—this directed by Shannon Deeby in 2016—which, although not as brilliantly conceived or realized as Lynd’s work and not, necessarily, connected to AIDS, was eerily similar in its narrative and themes.

     In this BeeNest production, a gay man, Devon (performed by independent director Lance Marshall) having just lost his loved male companion, Stephen, is seen driving with the urn on the seat next to him—which in the earliest frames of scene is represented by the image of his still-living lover (played by James Oxford, Marshall’s real-life husband)—as he travels to an East Hampton, New York, beach where, upon the request of for lover he is about release his ashes.

    He talks briefly to the imaginary image of his ex-husband about their love, etc., soon after pulling into the empty parking lot, whereupon he checks his cell phone to see if the others he has invited, apparently Stephen’s family members, have responded. His tears and apparent anger make it clear that they have all made excuses for their absence—excuses we can presume, particularly when we soon after discover that Stephen’s father is a Baptist minister, have to do with their disapproval of his and their son’s gay relationship.

    After another moment of sobbing, Devon grabs the urn, a bottle of champagne, and a beach blanket as he makes his way down to the water’s edge settling into the sand. He begins to drink directly out of the bottle, hinting that he may be headed for a real bender before he gets around to tossing what remains of his lover into the ocean. He toasts the bottle:

 

                     To Stephen. In your eyes I was able to see my purer self. And in

                     your memory I will eternally be held in the warmth of our love.

 

     Slowly another man comes running from the distance down to stand beside Devon. The man, Stephen’s younger brother Thomas (Ryan Jonze) apologizes, as the email message apparently had, for his parents’ inability to attend, their being “swamped with the revival” being held that weekend. Stephen’s devastated partner hardly bothers to answer, turning away.

     “Can I...may I join you?” He asks. “That’s why you were invited,” answers Devon, again turning away. Thomas sits beside him. “Sorry, I didn’t reply myself.” An uneasy silence settles in between them, which the brother finally breaks:

 

                 Yeh, he got out ya know. But..Dad disowned him but we was the

                  lucky one. Just wish I...I’d been stronger. And stood up to him.    

       

     So surprising is this short confession that Devon, pausing a bit, asks him “Are you gay?” “Oh no, no. Married. Kids.” Thomas responds, before nervously amending his comments, “I mean married to a woman. The kids...with her.” It’s a fascinating restatement of the obvious, as if he might have actually imagined the other possibility, which suggests his commitment to the normality of his life is not a total immersion, particularly when he follows this with stating that his father can really be a “prick.” “Sometimes...I can take it, but mom....I don’t know.” After another long pause, he adds, “Can’t say I didn’t envy his ‘get-out-of-jail-free card.’”

     Devon’s one-word interjection, “Wow!” is appropriate given his and our sudden perception that the father’s religiously-embedded homophobia has affected not just his homosexual son, but the entire family, delimiting the life of his wife and his heterosexual son as well. The inability to accept sexual differences is connected to the inability to accept the role of women in society, the different values—however minute—of even the heterosexual heir. The patriarchal world Stephen’s father represents admits no one.

     The film closes with a strange admission from Devon of his own lover’s limitations within this same context: “You know, I don’t know if he saw it that way. I wish he had.”

     I don’t know whether Deeby ever saw Lynd’s film or was in any way influenced by it, but the desolation that lies behind both of these films was powerfully expressed decades earlier in Christopher Isherwood’s (1964) novel, A Single Man, reinterpreted by Tom Ford’s 2009 film of the same name. You may recall in that work the lover, George Falconer, was not allowed by the family to even attend the funeral of his lover, Jim, killed in a car accident. One might suggest, in the context of this film, he was not even permitted to reply.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2020).

Laurie Lynd | RSVP / 1991

shouts in the dark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Laurie Lynd (screenwriter and director) RSVP / 1991

 

In terms of dialogue, Canadian director Laurie Lynd’s 1991 short film RSVP is almost a silent film. Nearly all of the spoken words we hear throughout this film—with the exception of a few murmurs of the students in the high school hall who almost point with interest or perhaps even with pride to the homophobic message “Sellman is a faggot” which they or other of their friends posted upon the classroom door of their English teacher, along a few words recalled to memory by Sid (Daniel MacIvor), Andrew Sellman’s lover when Andrew (Ross Manson) returns to retrieve his sweater as they are about to embark on a visit to the doctors—are spoken through the telephone, most of them which we hear from a friend of Sid’s (Stewart Arnott) and, at the very end of the work, from Andrew’s father (Gordon Jocelyn) spoken over the couple’s answering machine.

     Yet, the human voice, in this case opera singer Jessye Norman’s* glorious rendering of Berlioz’s “La spectre de la rose,” a song evidently requested by Sellman before his death to be played on a local Winnepeg radio station dominates the 24-minute movie.

      We first hear it when Sid returns to the couple’s empty apartment, soon after his lover’s death, unable to even imagine the possibility of answering the telephone message left by his friend. He enters the kitchen, opening and quickly closing the refrigerator after he discovers it mostly filled with pill cannisters that had obviously become part of Andrew’s regular regimen. Hearing the announcement of the song by the radio announcer Sid immediately, if at first unsuccessfully, attempts to record the aria.

     We hear the entire work as Lynd briefly transports us to various scenes of the workplaces of Andrew’s friends: a library, an AIDS support center where we witness a man clipping Sellman’s obituary from the newspaper to add it on a wall posting of dozens of others, and a bookstore—places obviously regularly visited by the literate, dying man.

      The very next scene features Sid at work, painfully tossing Andrew’s pills, personal toiletries, and clothing into a box. He saves only the beloved sweater. Checking their record collection, he discovers the original LP recording of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été which includes “La spectre de la rose,” in their own record collection and, we discern later, again requests it to be played over the radio, this time telephoning Andrew’s sister (Ferne Downey) and his lover’s mother (Judith Orban) to tell them when the piece is about to be aired.

       We observe the sister listening to it, breaking into sobs, and watch Andrew’s mother, after serving her husband his dinner, attempting to find the station of their antiquated radio.

       The last telephone message from the father is a particularly painful one which we hear recorded on the machine before Sid returns home after the funeral, the elder clumsily expressing his regrets that they had not been able to talk more after the funeral, but that he knew how good Sid was for Andrew, how he looked after him. It is apparent that the father had not been very receptive to the men’s relationship and perhaps had even refused to talk to Sid or even keep in close touch with his own son. The short call, accordingly, is almost a shout in the dark of his love after years of rejection and regret.

      Film critic B. Ruby Rich argued in her influential essay “New Queer Cinema” of 1992 that RSVP was one the many new films of the period appearing in the Gay Festival circuits by queer-identified people that used radical aesthetics to fight homophobia, to struggle with the issues surrounding the AIDS epidemic, and to discuss LGBTQ issues with regard to race. I don’t entirely disagree with her, particularly regarding the films outcry against homophobia. Yet, I’d also argue that Lynd’s film belongs more to the long tradition of quiet Canadian films that reveal their LGBTQ sentiments in a realist tradition that does not necessarily require overt commentary, a work in the tradition of Stanley Jackson’s Cornet at Night (1963) as opposed to his compatriot John Greyson’s far more radical works such as Lilies of 1996, along with US directors whom Rich also identified or would soon be connected with “New Queer Cinema” such as Cheryl Dunye, Gregg Araki, and Tom Kalin.

 

*Lynd sent a tape to Norman to obtain her permission to use her recording in his film. She was so impressed and moved by the film that she attended its first screening, holding the director’s hand for much of the film’s run.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2020).