Reinaldo Ferreira | Rita ou Rito? / 1927

nest of ninnies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reinaldo Ferreira (screenwriter and director) Rita ou Rito? / 1927 [Intertitles in Portuguese only]

 

Portuguese director Reinaldo Ferreira’s short comedy Rita ou Rito? is a kind of throwback to the teens of the 20th century in its combination of crossdressing, black face, and, in this case, the occult, all of which make for a great deal of hectic rushing around the grounds of the Palace Hotel in Aveiro.

      Evidently based on a true story, so one source claims, the film begins with an evening dinner at the hotel dining room attended by retired Army Colonel, Peixe-de-Espada (meaning literally “Swordfish,” played by Alberto Miranda), his wife (Leticia de Miranda), his young daughter Gabriela (Fernanda Alves da Costa), Doctor Pilulas (literally Dr. Pills, performed by Antónia de Sousa), a doctor who attempts to solve all ills by handing out pills which she herself has created, and a male guest Conde Pastel-de-nata (Manuel Silva), who attempts throughout the dinner to accost Gabriela to whom he has evidently taken a liking.

     Throughout the meal the “Swordfish” lectures the others about his numerous wartime adventures, at one point exiting to retrieve a prosthetic arm relating to one of his stories.                                            

     Meanwhile, in the kitchen the black cook Papusse prepares a fish covered with a wax paper coating that has evidently attracted flies. When he goes to serve it, the Colonel dishes up only the paper and the flies, falling into a rage over what he discovers on his plate and simultaneously throwing over all the other platters.

     Soon after dinner, another woman arrives and is introduced to those remaining at the table—Dr Pills, Gabriela, Conde—as Rita, and who has evidently taken over the operation of the nearby post office.

      Actually, Rita is Gabriela’s boyfriend Rio, who has dressed up in drag simply to find a way to spend the holiday with his lover, hidden from the ferocious eyes of her father. Dr. Pills, apparently a lesbian, seems attracted to the new Hotel guest, even showing interest in her the next day at the post office.

      But Conde is suspicious about the costume and determined that no one will interfere with his designs on Gabriela. Throughout he acts as a kind of watchful spy whose presence in the hotel hallway forces Rio, who has spent the night in Rita’s bed, to remain hidden away while Gabriela dresses as a male to take over in his post office duties.

     Meanwhile, all the guests run in and out of the bedrooms as if they were are interconnected, racing hither and from in response to Conde and his hallway behavior, the insistence of Dr. Pills that there is an intruder in Gabriel’s room, and Rio’s own decision to suddenly dress in black face which results, rather inexplicably, with Conde chasing him into the  kitchen where he faces off with the cook Papusse, who is made even more terrified by the sudden movements of the goat head which Rio dons as yet another disguise. At another point the black arm is used by Rio to scare off Dr. Pills who seems convinced that it has something to do with the occult, particularly since it seems impervious to the heat of candles she put beneath its outstretched fingers.

      As in a purposeless farce, everyone runs endlessly in circles until finally Gabriela pulls away Rio and runs off to a nearby chapel where the couple are suddenly married, forcing the angry parents, Conde, and Dr. Pilulas to stop in their tracks and accept them as they truly are.

      Ferreira made four films apparently in 1927, but if this work is typical of them, it’s no wonder that he isn’t better known today. A racist and occult sex farce does not make for great entertainment.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Gérard Corbiau | Farinelli / 1994

a milk bath with opium

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marcel Beaulieu, Andrée Corbiau, and Gérard Corbiau (screenplay), Gérard Corbiau (director) Farinelli / 1994

 

The tale of Carlo Maria Brosci (Stefano Dionisi) and his brother Riccardo (Enrico Lo Verso) are not truly at the center of current LGBTQ interests. But I am sure that if the tradition of the castrati had remained into the 21st Century, there would certainly be a C among the LGBTQ+ alphabet mix.

     Fortunately, the practice stopped somewhere in the 18th century, when talented and well-trained operatic countertenors took their place.

    Carlo, known on the opera stage as Farinelli, at least as this film portrays him—despite having been castrated as a child by his presumably loving brother Riccardo who didn’t want to lose the voice for which he composed music—was heterosexually interested, wooing the women into his bed only to have his raunchy and sexy brother Riccardo take his place to engage the now sexually excited women in full sex. It was the ideal switch and bait situation. You might say it was the perfect relationship, except for their other serious problems.

       For one, Riccardo has lied to his brother, describing his castration to have been the result of an injury while horse riding. Secondly, as Carlo begins to perceive, his brother’s music simply plays to his spectacular soprano talents (the real Farinelli could evidently move with ease from the highest of soprano notes to the lower ranges of a tenor), long held and trilled notes at the highest of registers, which makes the females faint and brings in gay males hidden behind face masks to hide their identity, who equally swoon from the pure embellishments of his talent. Even George Frideric Handel, the greatest opera and oratorio composer of the day, wants Farinelli to join his company, a desire dearly desired by Carlo but absolutely and quite meanly refused when the young talent insists the deal include his beloved brother Riccardo.*

       Throughout the film, Carlo is haunted by images of a young castrati who warned him of the future dangers before jumping to his death and his own vague memories of an opium-laded milk bath which resulted in the castration.

     In a long series of flashbacks within flashbacks—the major structure of this overwrought but beautifully filmed and aurally delightful movie—we grow to learn of the deep love between brothers, perhaps more sexually interesting as an LGBTQ theme than the castrato condition that Carlo suffers. And equally we discover just how competitive and mean, particularly on Handel’s part, the operatic scene of the day was.

    Handel’s Covent Garden (then called the King’s Theatre at Haymarket, later the home the flowerseller Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady) opera house controls London’s scene, bringing the competing Opera of the Nobility, sponsored by the Prince of Wales and directed by Carlo’s old vocal teacher Porpora (Omero Antonutti), into near bankruptcy.

        When the beautiful Alexandra Lerris (Elsa Zylberstein) lures him to London and he and his brother into her bed, she invites him to join the company, which he does with great success, closing, at least for one night, Handel’s theater. Handel, himself, is overwhelmed by the young Farinelli’s singing and, at least according to the myth of this movie, faints like the many women in the audience, never to compose again. That never happened in reality, but is perfect for a movie that now requires his revenge, particularly after Handel perversely tells Farinelli how his own brother really was the source of his castration—also apparently an historical inaccuracy.

       The movie itself thrills with the singing of Farinelli (performed by soprano Ewa Malas-Godlewska and countertenor Derek Lee Ragin), but challenges our narrative credulity as it moves constantly in and out of time, ignoring, in fact, the most important aspects of the real Farinelli’s career, his long involvement with the Spanish Court where he became at first a favorite of the Spanish Queen Elisabeth Farnese and soon after her husband King Philip V, who believed the castrato’s voice might cure his severe depression. Carlo was named the chamber musician for the King and Queen in 1737, providing him with an enormous salary, a position that only increased when the musician-lover Ferdinand VI, Philip’s son who ascended to the role of King. His wife was a highly accomplished harpsichordist for whom Dominico Scarlatti wrote many of his sonatas, and under the couple’s rule Farinelli became the Director of the Court Opera and Knight of the Order of Caltrava, allowing him an even larger salary and providing him with a huge residence where he was visited by figures such as Leopold Mozart and his son Wolfgang Amadeus, and even the author, adventurer, and mythologized libertine Casanova.

       Gérard Corbiau’s movie merely hints at some of these things, while focusing instead on, first the breakup of the Brosci brothers, and then Carlo’s gradual reacceptance when Riccardo finally finishes his long-promised opera for him, Orpheus. Together the brothers again come to share the love of Alexandra, Riccardo leaving her pregnant for Carlo to raise the child up as his own son, presumably to become a sort of normative heterosexual, at least in the eyes of his public.

      Belgium director Corbiau’s film is often a beautiful epic drama, but it’s condensation of reality with sensationalism weakens its force, and its pretentions to great art suffer from its disruptive representation of the real drama of Farinelli’s truly remarkable life.

      

*A far more interesting LGBTQ film might have been centered upon Handel, who was presumably gay, mean, wealthy, egotistical and talented beyond belief, a man who refused upon visiting the other great composer of the period. John Sebastian Bach upon visiting his hometown.

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).