Fred Guiol | Why Girls Like Sailors / 1927

nobody’s perfect

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Roach (screenplay), W. H. Walker (titles), Fred Guiol (director) Why Girls Like Sailors / 1927

 

Actually, neither of the two “girls” in this forgettable short directed by Fred Guiol for the Hal Roach Studios—and staring, before they had fully become a team, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy—ended up liking sailors. We have to presume that this work’s title, Why Girls Like Sailors, was ironic.

     Hardy, sporting a scruffy beard and described by an intertitle as "a bully, the nastiest crew member, after the captain of course," is almost a lookalike to that captain (Malcolm Waite), who is just a little taller and stouter, but also features a scruffy beard. Although this basically forgettable comic short of 1927 is generally only sited in lists of LBGTQ movies for the reason that Laurel plays a crossdressing woman (the second of the “girls” I mentioned), the mean men, who endlessly argue like a ship-marooned husband and wife, are a kind of same-sex couple. The “nastier than his nasty underling” captain of “The Merry Maiden” (a name. moreover, that reminds us of the silly sailors in W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore) even allows his first mate to occasionally use his razor and chastises him early in the film for using it too often, in short suggesting that his First Mate has become what one might describe as “too familiar.”

     If nothing much else is made of their relationship, the very fact that they look so much alike characterizes them as a highly temperamental “pair” from whom the other sailors on board try keep their distance. 

     Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are not both seeking out someone of the opposite sex. Even in the pre-code days of filmmaking, sailors, although known to bunk down with one another aboard ship, were generally stereotyped as womanizers once they had reached land. At one point the Captain, planting a kiss upon Willie’s face, even says “I haven’t kissed a woman since we left Africa,” probably an inside racist joke in 1927.

     But this film immediately has other gay fodder on its mind.  Inexplicably aboard a nearby boat in Sugar Bay, where the “Maiden” is now docked, are a seemingly heterosexual couple, Willie Brisling (Laurel) and his fiancée Nellie (Viola Richard).

     Surely this may present us with an image a loving couple—Willie has even just bought his Nellie a lovely necklace—but his gentle kiss of her cheek sends him immediately into a kind stupor that leaves him spinning through their cabin, knocking over a chair and falling into a bed where, with his eyes blinking into empty space and his tongue tied as tight as a noose that is so goofy that even a commentator on the “Laurel and Hardy Central” site describes him as being in “Pixie mode,” as he flits around and makes funny faces, my dictionary describing the word “pixie” as meaning a fairy or, as a second definition, a “petite vivacious woman or girl.”

     The intertitle suggests that “In little Nellie’s eyes, Willie Brisling was the most handsome man in the world. Others saw him in a slightly different light.”

     Prowling their boat is also the Captain of the “Maiden,” who once he spots Nellie is determined to kidnap her and take her back to his own quarters. Entering the loving couple’s room, he instantly begins to court Willie’s girl, who pulling away, introduces the stranger to her lover, who she declares has his own boat; “Show him Willie.”

      Willie pulls open his shirt to reveal a tattoo of his ship, “the Periwinkle.” A periwinkle, in case you’ve forgotten, is a blue flower, often described as the flower of death, supposedly because its glossy vines were often woven into headbands placed upon criminals on their way to execution and children who had recently died. We can only suspect that the filmmaker or his writers, at least, are telling us that any trip with Willie—even to the altar—can end only in a kind of frozen netherworld.

      The Captain quickly douses Willie’s dreams of any voyage by pouring an entire jug of water down his blouse, the liquid ballooning about his belly as if he suddenly had become pregnant.

      In fact, soon after the Captain does abscond with Nellie, Willie’s previously empty head—I should add that just before this he has attempted to scare away another would-be girlfriend poacher by portraying a “headless man”—conceives of a solution to his situation: he will dress as a woman, seducing the four sailors and then the captain himself.

       How he achieves this consists of a rather boring repetition of luring each sailor, one by one, around a corner where in conks them with a cudgel which sends them, in turn, spinning around the next corner to where the First Mate is standing watch. When they, in turn, collide with their superior he angrily tosses them into the ocean. When their own motions no longer take them around that corner, the “new girl” literally dances them toward the First Mate, sometimes posing them into positions of tentative attack. One by one the sailors are disposed of. And now Willie, reborn as a wild, flirting sex fiend, can turn her/his attentions to the Captain by sitting on his lap, recklessly tweaking his check, and even placing her arm around his shoulder.

     Enter the Captain’s wife, longing for more than a month of martial bickering, and just in time to observe his new sexual shenanigans. She’s ready to shoot him as well as the other woman, but Willie as the easy woman, tells her it’s all just been a test to make her jealous.

     Escaping, at least momentarily, the wife’s wrath, Willie hops off to save his Nellie, the two of them, now like girlfriends walking off into the future—but not before the wife, spotting them through the porthole, shoots the clothes off their back, leaving the two to walk away in their under garments both with an utter hatred of sailors and their landlubber wives.

     Rereading what I just wrote I realize I’ve made this double reeler sound much funnier than this movie truly is. The short was thought to have been lost until in 1971 the Cinémathèque Française announced they had a copy, but critic Roland Lacourbe, after reviewing it, found it simply “mediocre.”

     A private Danish collector later was also found to own a 16mm print, and helped it to be re-released in Copenhagen. After Laurel and Hardy author Glenn Mitchell saw that version he observed "Why Girls Love Sailors is one of several instances where the status of a 'lost' film has been reduced by its rediscovery."

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

Ben Benjamin | Where Does the Love Go: An Opera in Five Parts / 2019

where o where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Tamaren (music with Thumpasurus), Ben Benjamin (director) Where Does the Love Go: An Opera in Five Parts / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

If you might have thought Lucas Tamaren’s strutting wide-open butt of the 2021 video Sruttin’ was sexually transgressive—which it most certainly was, as well as highly entertaining—but you also might want to go back a few years in time to visit their full 17-minute “opera” tribute to closeted gay actor John Travolta. This is not just a tribute to Travolta by a fan musical group, but a full statement of his career, as it moves in part 1 from its longingly sung lament about the lost love of his earliest years as an actor, re-enacted in the first part of this “opera,” wherein they sing almost endlessly of “Where does it go, where does the good love flow?” as the video presents numerous scenes from Travolta’s early works.

     The film reminds me of the rumors of how homosexual writer Gore Vidal moved just to be near to him. Whether true of not, Travolta was long rumored to be bisexual, with a great deal of evidence, despite his and other highly protective friends’ fierce denials.

     In this opera by Thumpasaurus it doesn’t truly matter. The operatic performance is in love with him, decrying the fact that the deep love has gone, and relating its history.

      The second act, “Without Your Love,” details the part of his career where Travolta’s love interests had turned entirely into the heterosexual world of Two of a Kind (1983), Staying Alive 1983), and other files of the decade in which he seemed to have lost his role as a slightly gay icon

in Saturday Night Live, Urban Cowboy, and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble of the 1970s. The dominant song here is “I’m in Love with Her, Where Did It Go, I Cannot Know.” We are presented with shots from his major films of that period

      It gets worse in Act III, “Hell…and the Abyss,” where we enter the nadar of Travolta’s 1990 films such as Look Who's Talking Too (1990), Look Who’s Talking Now (1994), and from the gay perspective even his successful films such as Pulp Fiction (1994) and Get Shorty (1995) and Battlefield Earth (2000). He now had become a clearly heteronormative figure, and the lover, at least from the Thumpasaurus perspective is seemingly forever lost as a Bosch-like figures. He had become so closeted as a member of the Church of Scientology that he now appeared truly in a hell where no gay person might love him, even when in 2012 when two former masseurs accused him of homosexual demands.

     There is only a kind of echo music in this section of the work, with the heavy thump of Henry Was’ drums. The visuals, however, from Ben Benjamin’s direction, are truly quite spectacular.

     The dog/duck sneaks back in for the Fourth Act, titled “I Will Get the Love Back,” in which Travolta returns to film as truly loveable figure through the film’s graphics, playing a French horn on the Ellen DeGeneres Show before he transforms in the last Act, titled “Love” as the heavyset worried Baltimore mamma of the musical version of John Waters’ absurdist musical, Hairspray, playing Edna Turnblad, the woman all transvestites wanted to be as overweight men.

       This love story to Travolta might be the sincerest, although quite campy and silly at moments, tribute to any Hollywood figure; I hope John, if he still can, jizzed into his tight bluejeans of decades before upon viewing it.

        The graphics in Benjamin’s film say everything except for the endless questioning chorus of lyrics: “Where does it go where does the good love go.” Evidently into just such a video.

       I’m still surprised that there is so little out there about Lucas Tamaren and Thumpasurus; Wikipedia does even provide a full entry.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

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.