Fred Guiol | Duck Soup / 1927 || James Parrott | Another Fine Mess / 1930

renting out agnes

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screen titles based on the 1908 play Home from the Honeymoon by Arthur J. Jefferson) Fred Guiol (director) Duck Soup / 1927

H.M. Walker (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur J. Jefferson), James Parrott (director) Another Fine Mess / 1930

 

Fred Guiol’s 1927 silent film Duck Soup with actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy was long thought to be lost, and for years, until it was rediscovered in 1974, critics thought that it consisted primarily of skits by Laurel with Hardy playing only a small part. What they discovered was that, in fact, it is one of the first real pairings of the duo similar to what a year later they would be performing for the rest of their careers together.

     In this film the pairing represents a much rougher view of the two, presenting them as determined thieves instead of the confused but basically well-meaning down-and-outers which they often later play, but as the Movies Silently blog writer argues, that already in “the quieter moments with Stan and Ollie just interacting demonstrate that something magical is happening.”

      Even the film’s details in comparison with its 1930 talking-film remake Another Fine Mess show how the script by Arthur J. Jefferson, Laurel’s father in which Stan performed on stage as a child, was later finessed to shape them as more likeable fellows. In this early version they are hobos, Hardy in particular unshaved, sitting in the park where the fire rangers are rounding up their kind to help the fire department put out a fire which evidently another hobo started. Such enforced labor was common in the early part of the 20th century, and is still used today with prison inmates called to some unruly blazes.

       The pair, observing the others being rounded up by the cops, escape via bicycle through heavy traffic to wind up in a mansion where their bike breaks down and whose open door invites them to enter. We have just witnessed the manor’s owner, Marmaduke Maltravers (James A. Marcus) abusing his butler (William Courtright) and his maid as he plans to leave on vacation. The boys overhear the servants, who have been asked to rent out the mansion in their master’s absence, the servants planning their own escape for the weekend.

      Since the rangers have by now surrounded the house, Stan and Ollie have no choice but to stay where they are, immediately taking advantage of the kitchen larder, a meal interrupted by the sound of doorbell, at the other end of which stands Lord Tarbotham (William Austin) and Lady Tarbotham (Madeline Hurlock). Quickly costuming themselves as Hardy’s recreation of Maltraver’s character, Colonel Blood and the maid Agnes (Stan), they greet the would-be renters and attempt to show them around the place, the Colonel taking the Lord in search of a game room and pool, while Agnes chats with Lady Tarbotham, is asked questions about fleas and mice, and ultimately asked to draw her a bath, in which Stan as Agnes nearly drowns.

        The jokes here are for broader and the action more frenetic than in their later works, particularly when the real owner Maltravers returns unexpectedly to retrieve something he has left behind observing that Stan and Ollie have hired a moving truck and are already busy packing up trunks of his possessions. Pulling out a gun, Maltravers shoots at everyone, our boys and the would-be renters, as he chases the gang of interlopers around the house before the forest rangers enter and cart the two off.

     Director Fred Guiol obviously didn’t quite perceive the “magic” he had created by putting the two together as a team in Duck Soup which was released in March 13, 1927.  For later that year in a July release, he had again cast them in unrelated roles in his Why Girls Like Sailors (which I discuss below) in which Hardy, totally bearded this time, plays a mean captain keen on stealing away Laurel’s girlfriend, forcing Stan, in yet another cross-dressing role, to play a woman who seduces most of the male crew away from their duties of guarding his kidnapped girlfriend.

      By 1930 in Another Fine Mess, however, they had truly become the Laurel and Hardy we know today, and producer Hal Roach was determined to remake the earlier film into a vessel more in line with their new characterizations, piloted by director James Parrott.

      This time the boys also are living in the park, making their home on a pair of benches where they also curl up for the night. But it is the police who come after them, one policeman at least, terribly offended when after telling them to leave their temporary reside, Stan has tipped his hat and called him “Ma’am.” In this case the clearly homophobic cop is truly mad, and calls up all his buddies to track down the two, who again in their attempt to escape, enter a Hancock Park mansion, just after the owner, Colonel Wilberforce Bucksot (James Finlayson) leaves for his vacation, leaving the estate’s rental in the hands of his servants, the butler Meadows (Eddie Dunn) and his maid Agnes (Gertrude Sutton) who when the master’s away determine to play on the beaches of another vacation spot.

      That once more leaves the costumed Ollie to play Colonel Buckshot and the always put-upon Stan to again don the maid’s costume to become Agnes. The British renter in this case, Lord Leopold Ambrose Plumtree (Charles K. Gerrard) who plays a toothsome constantly giggling upper class Britisher type that might make Reginald Gardiner’s—channeling Noel Coward in his The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)—imitation of Lord Cedric Bottomly envious. 

      Plumtree insists upon Buckshot showing him the billiard room, while Lady Plumtree (Thelma Todd) sits down for a strangely touching chat with the by now almost “whacky” Agnes, who keeps insisting when she utters ridiculous sentences that she’s simply nervous. Nonetheless, the Lady is so taken with Agnes that she insists that the maid come with the rental of the mansion.

      Instead of attempting to steal the mansion treasures, Hardy as Buckshot rents out the place for a few dollars a month, throwing in the maid for a few more quarters. But as before all is thwarted with the return of the real Colonel who has forgotten his bow and arrow, who finding so many strangers in the house, summons the police and also takes out a gun.

     In this instance, our daffy duo attempt their escape once more on a bicycle followed by a whole squadron of cops who chase them into a railroad tunnel, Stan and Ollie exciting on unicycles, obviously having their vehicle severed by the train met head on.

    This film wasn’t the last time Hardy would attempt to rent out Stan as Agnes, the maid; in the 1940 (filmed in 1939) release A Chump at Oxford, Agnes gets totally drunk, spills a whole tray of hors d’oeuvres upon her employer’s dress, and strips down to her panties in order to “undress the salad.”

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).   

 

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).