Vincente Minnelli | Bells Are Ringing / 1960

circumstantial evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Betty Comden and Adolph Green (screenplay, based on their stage production, with music by Jule Styne), Vincente Minnelli (director) Bells Are Ringing / 1960

 

The last musical collaboration between Vincente Minnelli, a closeted gay man despite his marriage to Judy Garland, and Arthur Freed whose MGM music unit was described as Freed’s fairies, was the 1960 recreation of the Jule Styne Broadway musical Bells Are Ringing.

     Freed himself evidently wasn’t gay, but nearly everyone around him, particularly Roger Edens who worked closely with Freed and Minnelli in musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Easter Parade (1948), On the Town (1949), Show Boat (1951), An American in Paris (1951), Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953)—three of these being Minnelli, Edens, and Freed collaborations—and Walter Plunkett, the costume designer who worked with Freed on Show Boat, Singing’ in the Rain, and Bells Are Ringing, among others were quite openly gay.

     Little of the plot of Bells Are Ringing—which concerns the now archaic subject of a Brooklyn telephone answering service, Susanswerphone, where the phone is answered by the film’s star Judy Holliday, Jean Stapleton, and Ruth Storey, with Holliday (playing Ella Peterson) getting far too involved with her customers, including the man with whom she falls in love, Broadway librettist Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin)—has anything to do with LGBTQ life.

      There are, however, two nominally gay characters: a dentist, Dr. Joe Kitchell (Bernie West), who simply can’t contain himself from writing popular musical numbers on his air hose and through Ella’s help gets a stint at a nightclub performing his song “The Midas Touch,” which, again through Ella’s intercession, becomes also the name for Jeffrey Moss’ newest Broadway show.  

     West, who was not gay in real life, becomes a mad fairy as he excitedly directs his own numbers and somewhat limp-wristedly dances out his tunes as Hal Linden (who had been in the original stage production playing Moss) belts out the cheesy song Kitchell has created. Later in his life West became a regular writer with Norman Lear of TV shows All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and other spinoffs.

    The second fairly obvious gay figure is Carl (Doria Avila), a delivery boy who supposedly is dating Ella’s co-worker Gwynne (Storey). In this film he plays a man who is not only a dancer who teaches Ella how to Cha Cha, but seemingly knows all the classical musical recordings, particularly that Beethoven only wrote 9 symphonies, despite the fact that the pretend record company created by J. Otto Prantz (Eddie Foy, Jr.), who also shares space in Susanswerphone’s basement office, have announced a recording of a 10th symphony in their attempt to use their record company as a front for their bookie service, memorably celebrated in the movie's wonderful song “It’s a Simple Little System” (which also gives us a look at a couple of possible lesbians, one being Asian).

     Avila, who had studied dance and performed with many notables including George Balanchine, Volonine and Olga Presobajenska in Paris, and worked in modern dance with Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Merce Cunningham, Alwin Nikolais, the New York City Opera, and the New York City Ballet, later ran a major dance school and revived Mexican Folkloric and Spanish-Flamenco Dance in South Texas. He was killed, at age 78, through blunt force trauma, afterward his body being burned, apparently by a 25-year-old gay lover who reported he often stayed overnight in Avila’s house.

      Well, there might be one further semi-gay figure, the detective assistant of Inspector Barnes (Dort Clark), a meek and very unsuspecting and somewhat effeminate underling who believes in Ella’s innocence, Francis (Ralph Roberts).

       Roberts, after several small roles in movies, went on to become a major masseur for Hollywood actors. Perhaps his most notable client was Marilyn Monroe, with whom he developed a close friendship and about whom he became very protective, arguing she was not depressed at the time of her death and was planning to share dinner with him that evening. Other famous clients included Carol and Walter Matthau, Eddie Albert, Ruth and Milton Berle, Shirley Jones, Julie Harris, Maureen Stapleton, Judy Holliday, Betty Comden, Phyllis Newman and Adolph Green, Felicia and Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Arthur Laurents, Ellen Burstyn, Montgomery Clift, Helen Hayes, Richard Burton, David Merrick, and many, many others. Apparently he did not ever marry.

  When we talk about the major lead in this musical, moreover, things get slightly more complex. Holliday began her career performing in the late 1930s as part of the nightclub act called The Revuers, which included Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Alvin Hammer, John Frank, and Esther Cohen, with often Leonard Bernstein playing the piano. The group, which broke up in 1944, performed at several major New York clubs including the Village Vanguard, the Blue Angel, the Rainbow Room, and the Trocadero in Hollywood.

      In the early 1940s Holliday had a lesbian relationship with Katherine Hepburn before living with a policewoman. In 1948 she married Leonard Bernstein’s former lover, classical musical clarinetist David Oppenheim, upon Bernstein’s suggestion, as a “beard,” a female willing to share in a relationship to represent heterosexuality to the public while permitting homosexual relationships out of the public eye. Bernstein, in fact, before marrying Felicia Montealegre Cohn, had considered proposing to Holliday.

    During the red scare of the 1950s, Holliday was called to testify before the Senate Security Subcommittee to relate her own ties to communism, a situation which apparently arose because of her girlfriend Yetta Cohn who the FBI had been investigating. Like her character in Born Yesterday, Billie Dawn, Holliday played dumb, refusing to reveal anything about anyone while protecting herself.

        The greatest song in this musical, "The Party's Over," is a musical lament to the gay experience, Ella having so long pretended someone who she is not, finally recognizing that her "mask" has slipped, that the relationship with Jeffrey Moss she is seeking is an impossibility. That song and its lyrics represents what every gay or lesbian being has experienced several times in his or her life, and the work is a plaintive testament to the feeling of desire, of not being able to participate in normative sexual life:

 

             The party's over

             It's time to call it a day

             They've burst your pretty balloon

             And taken the moon away

             It's time to wind up the masquerade

             Just make your mind up the piper must be paid

 

             The party's over

             The candles flicker and dim

             You danced and dreamed through the night

 

             It seemed to be right just being with him

             Now you must wake up, all dreams must end

             Take off your makeup, the party's over

             It's all over, my friend

      Later in her career, Holliday was involved in a long relationship with the famous jazz musician and arranger, who oddly enough appears as her date in Bells Are Ringing, Gerry Mulligan. She supplied the lyrics to his theme music for the 1965 film A Thousand Clowns.

      When Holliday died of metastatic breast cancer in 1965, Mulligan began a relationship with actor Sandy Dennis.

       In short, this frothy musical of 1960 is pure family entertainment, but at the edges is filled with gay and lesbian contributions, the way so many films secretly were. If nothing else, it serves as a sort of icon of just how interlinked the New York and Hollywood gay societies were, and how they developed through mutual private connections.

    Even when I declare a movie is not gay, accordingly, I am not speaking the whole truth. The circumstantial evidence makes it clear what Judy Garland once said on a TV interview: “Without homosexuals there would be no Hollywood.” And one might certainly say the same of New York’s Broadway.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

 

 

 

 

Arun Fulara | Sunday / 2020

the male touch

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arun Fulara (screenwriter and director) Sunday / 2020 [10 minutes]

 

Indian director Arun Fulara’s short film Sunday is remarkable work in its quiet, almost meaningless patter of dialogue. Kamble (Shrikant Yadav), a middle-aged married man escapes to the local barber, the handsome young Jaan (Prakash Joshi) on many a Sunday, sometimes as on the day the movie portrays, simply to get a shave and a marvelously sensuous face massage.

     Flirtatiously Jaan offers his seemingly heterosexual customers what they also secretly seek out in the restricted society in which they live: the touch of a male hand. Fulara makes clear that the gentle attentions of the young barber are more than what they might first appear, as they offer up sexual sensations that men such as Kamble deeply desire but can find no way to engage except in their public interactions of tonsorial attentions.

     When Jaan even suggests that Kamble might someday wish to shave his mustache, the married man returns home to imagine in the mirror how he might look without it, wondering if he might not really be more attractive, certainly something which his wife might not even imagine commenting on.

     This is an emotionally moving tale of forbidden sexual desires played out simply by Kamble’s weekly need to have the barber put his hands upon his face if only for a few minutes. Sex has been sublimated into the furtive touch.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Elijah Moshinsky | Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]

some questions to ibsen about his ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Henrik Ibsen (writer), Elijah Moshinsky (director) Ghosts / 1987 [BBC TV production]

 

I must presume that nearly everyone who has and is currently reading my USTheater, Opera, and Performance website and the many volumes of my annually produced My Year will know something, and may even have possibly read Ibsen’s 1881 drama, which had its premiere in, of all places, Chicago, Illinois in 1882, performed by a traveling Danish theater company, made up of mostly amateur performers.

     This play, if you recall, is not a work about tragic figures who are punished for their refusal to live up to the society’s moral values, but are brought down, quite ironically, by their refusal to break the strict values of the late 19th century provincial world in which they live.

      In particular, the seemingly saintly Mrs. Alving (quite brilliantly acted in this BBC production by Judi Dench), after long enduring her husband’s “degeneration”—which consists, evidently, of wine and women, including bedding the house maid Johanna—she rushes into the arms of her local pastor, Manders (Michael Gambon), for advice and, so it seems from her later confidences, perhaps even for love.

      Insisting that she return home to help her husband defeat his devils—a common dictum even today among hypocritical spiritual advisors who order women to remain in the bondage of abusive relationships—she has been forced as a young inexperience woman to fend for herself. Given the intelligence and fortitude Mrs. Alving naturally possesses, she returns, sending her young son, at a far too early age, to Paris to study art, she taking over her disinterested husband’s financial affairs which, upon his death, has made her a wealthy woman.

     Now, years later, she is able to build an orphanage in his name, partly a tribute to her guilty conscience and, at the same time, an attempt to close all debts, emotionally and morally, she may feel she still owed her entrapped husband—particularly after she has come to realize that as entangled as she was in a relationship of deceit, so was Captain Alving ensnared by close-minded values of those around him, including herself.

     Into this hothouse of sorrow and guilt, her son Oswald (Kenneth Branagh), after having some success in his artistic career, returns to the isolated, always darkened but immaculately kept house, presumably to help celebrate the new orphanage, but actually because he is having difficulty in seeing which has sent him to a doctor who, as close as Ibsen himself is able to speak the truth, is diagnosed as having a “softening of the brain”—or, in modern parlance, the young man is suffering from inherited syphilis and will soon become blind.

      All of this is complicated by Manders’ visit to the Alving manse to deliver a speech for the opening of the orphanage, a time when Mrs. Alving also chooses to reveal to him that her husband was the father of the beautiful young woman now working as her housemaid Regina (Natasha Richardson), not the often drunken and truly hypocritical Engstrand, who by cozying up to the pastor has hoped to get his “daughter” to return to town with him, where he plans to open a “home for wandering sailors” with perhaps a little grant for his new enterprise as well.

      As if things were not bad enough, Oswald appears to have taken a romantic liking to Regina, who unknown to either of them, are half sister and brother.

      Now that I’ve refreshed your memories a bit, I have two major questions to ask, both of which, have troubled me since I first read this play in Norway as a 16-year-old.

    Let me begin, Mr. Ibsen, with the problem of Engstrand (Freddie Jones), who is also the first character of your dark drama to express his chicanery. The savvy Regina immediately sees through his proposals to create a home for sailors, particularly when he insists that she come “home” to help him run it. The “home” clearly is to be a whorehouse, and the feisty woman whom Mrs. Alving has helped to educate wants nothing at all to do with it. Besides, it is clear that she has her eyes on the young son of the Alving family, who has previously promised to take her back with him to Paris. In secret she has even learned French. Indeed, Regina is quite openly embarrassed by her “father,” and several times insists he leave her and the house immediately.

     Engstrand, while later pretending a newfound religiosity, invites Manders to lead the nightly prayers, a ceremony he claims he has instigated for the betterment of his fellow carpenters.

     Even a 16-year-old boy could see through his plot. As the candles are lit for the prayers, flames are ignited by the fresh sawdust of the construction, and the would-be orphanage quickly burns to the ground. Engstrand, certainly the firebug behind the orphanage’s destruction, can now freely, if somewhat subtly, bribe Manders into making sure that he receives some of Mrs. Alving’s remaining funds for his sailor’s home project.

     Given Regina’s immediate recognition of her father’s intentions and Mrs. Alving’s knowledge that he is only the titular father of her husband’s child, how can Manders or anyone else—including Regina, when she finally learns of her true parentage, determines to become a prostitute in the tradition of her mother by returning to town with Engstrand—want anything to do with this scoundrel? Why, Mr. Ibsen, has Mrs. Alving, knowing what she does, even hired him, evidently paying him well, to work on the construction of the orphanage?

     And, of course, you carefully reveal Engstrand’s multiple deceptions—at one point even convincing Manders that in taking in Johanna, while ignoring the money she had been bequeathed by Mrs. Alving, he married her simply out of love and caring for a girl in her predicament.

     Hardly does Manders enter the Alving house, when he appears scandalized that Mrs. Alving is reading contemporary fiction, seriously warning her against their effects, although he has admittedly read none of them.

     A short while later he convinces the benefactress that if she were to buy insurance to cover the new orphanage she (and more particularly he) might be subject to local talk about the necessity to insure something that stood for a godly belief in the betterment of the society around them, both town and country.

     Later, he is outraged by the fact that Oswald has not only regularly dined with his artist friends, many of whom are unmarried and fathers of children, but that Oswald speaks out so strongly for the natural morality of his friends as opposed to church teachings.

     When we finally learn of his long-ago advice to Mrs. Alving and his refusals to accept her desperate love for him, we can only ask, Mr. Ibsen, what on earth was behind Fru Alving’s attraction to this hypocritically babbling idiot in the first place? Even she, when Manders becomes convinced of Engstrand’s defense of his marrying the Alving’s housemaid, calls him a “baby.”

     Dear Mr. Ibsen, why has she even allowed him—given her own self-revelations and her growing investigation of the narrow culture in which she lives—into her house? Letting him run her financial affairs with the orphanage is almost inexplicable. Throughout much of Elijah Moshinsky’s brilliant production, Dench is forced to sit in silent observation of this fool who seems more out of a comic opera or a play by Molière than one the great Norwegian characters of the past drawn from your prolific pen.

     In the end, I feel the Manders figure is almost a statement of your failure, Mr. Ibsen, in this play. If the events of Ghosts with its series of recurring patterns that apparently cannot be contained by its characters suggests a truly contemporary tragedy, its stock figures such as Engstrand and Manders to not feel appropriate to a work that so dutifully explores the intelligent and inquisitive performances of actors such as Dench, Branagh, and Richardson.

     Beyond the revelations of Mrs. Alving and the hard-hearted realism of Regina—we eventually learn that Oswald wanted her to remain close to him so that, when the time came when he would lose his sight, predicting that she would have grown tired of having to deal with such an invalid, Regina might willingly and mercifully have injected him with the morphine he brought back to Norway with him—my only possible justification Engstrand and Manders inclusion in Mrs. Alving’s and Regina’s hearts that the two would-be seers, each in their own way, are also quite blind.

     It is only Oswald, unable now to see even the sun along the horizon of daybreak, who can truly perceive that for all their failures he now must die. His cry of “the sun, the sun” might almost be read as emanating from a kind of new Christ, crying out “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they did.”

     The only choice for the indecisive Mrs. Alving, syringe in hand, is to become a kind of errant Mary, helping to kill her immaculately-birthed* child.

 

*I use this phrase because in Ibsen’s play, Mrs. Alving, who would have certainly passed on her son’s syphilis, seems to be free of all its symptoms.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2020

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (July 2020).

John Ford | Upstream / 1927

the faith keepers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Randall Faye (screenplay, based a story by Wallace Smith), John Ford (director) Upstream / 1927

 

By the mid-20s 90% of all commercial pictures screened around the world were made in the US. One of the last stops of the US distribution shipments was New Zealand, and when they finished showing there, those distributors expected that either the copies would be destroyed or shipped nearly 7,000 miles back to the US. But New Zealanders, fortunately, did not listen much to the distributor’s expectations, and many of them fell into collector’s hands, ending up eventually in the New Zealand Film Archive, where at the turn of 21st century, film archivists found hundreds of canisters, unlabeled and even mis-labeled, containing numerous US films that were destroyed or deemed lost to decay in the US.

      Among those “lost films” was noted filmmaker’s John Ford’s early silent work from 1926 Upstream which along with some 176 films shipped to the US for preservation, was finally rediscovered by American audiences at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences showing in 2010.

      The film revealed a somewhat different Ford, far more experimental and influenced by unlikely figures such as F. W. Murnau and working in a comedic genre. If there is a hero here, it is the aging, slightly academic Shakespearian actor, Campbell-Mandare (Emile Chautard), penniless as all the others, yet allowed to stay in Miss Hattie’s (Lydia Yeamans Titus) “resting” house simply because of his long-ago status as flame-keeper of great Shakespearian theater. At one point in the work, in pure faith he lights candles to both the great interpreter of Hamlet, Edwin Booth and to his young mentor, Brashingham.

      What it does share is Ford’s later ability to gather a fairly large cast of character types but yet invest each with enough depth that we see them basically as individuals rather than the mere stereotypes.

      All of the figures in Miss Hattie’s house are second or even third-rate has-beens who work throughout the US on brief tours of vaudeville and burlesque, with only the elderly actor already mentioned and the “Star Boarder” (Raymond Hitchcock) having ever performed in legitimate theater. Hattie is particularly fond of her Star Boarder who, although equally poor, flirts shamelessly with Hattie and with any other woman upon whom he casts his eye, particularly The Soubrette (Jane Winton) with whom he regularly attempts to play “footsie” at the dinner table.

      Juan Rodriguez aka Jack La Velle (Grant Withers) is a knife thrower who works regularly with the lovely Gertie Ryan (Nancy Nash), both of whom have temporarily taken on a new member, Eric Brashingham (Earle Foxe), mostly because they feel sorry for him because of his absolute lack of talent and the fact that he has been ostracized from the great acting family of the Brashinghams.

      Hattie’s menagerie also includes a juggler, a sister act (Lillian Worth and Judy King) which the titles tell is closer related as mother and daughter than most such sister acts, and a black servant, who later gets involved in the knife-throwing act.

     Two of the most important tenants, due to their role with regard to the film’s central themes, are the “brother” dancing duo, Callahan and Callahan (Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen), who as film commentator Hope Anderson confirms, in case anyone missed it, “are most certainly not brothers,” which suggests that the two, sleeping in one bed, are more likely gay lovers. Neither, moreover, are they both Irish, a fact that Hattie uses to threaten them for their non-payment, showing an advertisement of Cohen’s character in a before/after shot of rhinoplasty. The threat is not for their co-habiting as gay men but is an anti-Semitic threat. Jews were even less welcome to “rest” at most such establishments than a gay couple.

      The central subject of this film, however, is the trio of lovers Brashingham who appears to be in love with Gertie, Gertie who is most definitely in love with the fairly handsome untalented actor, and Juan or Jack (depending upon which day they are acting out a Spanish theme) who truly loves Gertie.

       Out of the blue, a theatrical agent, Al Forest, appears. For a moment everyone at the table imagines that he is visiting on their account, but all are shocked when he requests a meeting with Brashingham, who he is willing to hire to play Hamlet in London just on account of his family name.

       From a simply self-centered nincompoop, Brashingham’s transformation to a pompous ass is revealed by Ford through a few remarkably caught poses before the boarding house hall mirror. It is a brilliant scene which demonstrates all we need to know about his thoughtless villain of the piece, who keeps promising Gertie that he has something to ask of her before he leaves.

       She is certain that he will plead with her to join him or even ask her marry him on the spot. But when the time comes his “profound” question is, “Can you loan me 50 dollars?”

     Yet the disappointed troupe are pleased for his sudden, if undeserved opportunity, Campbell-Mandare even offering up to teach the fool—who at the table quotes Hamlet’s famous lines to Horatio “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio,” as “Alas poor Yorick, he knew me well.”—everything he knows about Shakespeare in one night.

     And evidently what he teaches Brashingham is brilliant, since just before going on stage the terrorized actor wishes that his teacher were there to remind him and calls up his mentor’s ghost instead of Hamlet’s father to help him get over his stage fright, another memorable cinematic moment in this excellent film. His performance is declared to be masterful and he is recognized even with a nod from the royal box.

       The brash young man becomes famous, traveling back to New York to throngs of followers who acclaim his performances. But the sad troupers at Hetties receive not a word, not even, in Campbell-Mandare’s case, a simple thanks.

       In the meantime, they all go on tour and return just as broke as they left, several pretending to have mailed Hattie checks, none of which, shockingly, has she received. Even Callahan and Callahan return, welcomed by Hattie and the others with open arms.

      Having completely recovered from her temporary infatuation with Brashingham, Gertie realizes she really loves Jack, and when Jack asks her to marry him quickly accepts with the entire troupe of actors applauding their celebratory kiss and planning their wedding with a boarding-house ceremony.

     All would be well and end well if Brashingham’s brazen agent, Forest, hadn’t suggested that his client pay a visit to the boarding house where he began his career began as a publicity stunt.

      Of course, as required in such plots, Brashingham arrives at the very moment that the couple have declared their vows and imagines that the snap of the camera is for him instead of the couple. The wedding party suddenly is represented, through the actor’s perverted logic, as a celebration for his return. Even Gertie’s bridal bouquet is usurped as flowers intended for him. His old friends can hardly get in a word to describe what is truly happening, both in real time and with regard their feelings about him.

      When Campbell-Mandare compliments him on his performance of Hamlet, hoping that perhaps we might finally be thanked for his contribution, Brashingham declares that his audiences do not come to the theater to see Hamlet but to see him!

     Along with Gertie—furious with her former heartthrob’s return on this special day—the old lover of the bard retires to his room in disappointment and anger.

      Still misconceiving all events, Brashingham even attempts to join the wedding dinner until finally, Jack tells him the truth, while noticing that the now famous Hamlet fraud has also sneaked away from the table to join Gertie in her room.

    Furious, Jack storms toward his new wife’s bedroom, with the now drunken Callahan duo just behind him as support, recognizing presumably what it feels like to be an outsider as Juan/Jack still is by societal definitions. “Honor of family at stake——Callahan and Callahan not foun’ wantin’,” they declare. It is strange perhaps, but maybe inevitable given that they have no family but the actors with whom they board, they become the staunchest of supporters for their friends’ heterosexual love. Ford transforms them into heroes of a different sort.

     But it is Campbell-Mandare who joins the others in this final show-down who truly gives Brashingham a comeuppance, even if the actor is too in love with himself to be affected by his words: “You, on whose unworthy shoulders fell the mantle of Booth, by accident—you, whose conceit is as great as your ignorance——You, in whose power it was to bring joy to thousands! You have degraded your great gift. Get from me! Go!”

       And with that they not only toss him down the staircase but out the front door where he rolls into the row of now several cameras arrived to get a picture of this now infamous celebrity.

       As Ford will achieve time and again through his career, he has restored moral values without diminishing those who may not live precisely according to the societal norm. The outsiders who “rest” at Hattie’s house have found a haven in their mutual concern and love.

     Oddly, Ford’s inclusive view is not so very different from the queer kinds of family love revealed time and again in films such as Rebel without a Cause; The Boys in the Band;  It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives; You Are Not Alone; My Father, My Mother; La Cage aux Folles; Parting Glances; Young Soul Rebels; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Boys on the Side; When Everyone Knows; Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train; Relax...It’s Just Sex, and so very many others, wherein the moral ground of family life is utterly redefined.

 

Los Angeles, April 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).