Robert Little | A Good Son / 1998

a view from the roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Little (screenwriter and director) A Good Son / 1998

 

Very little actually happens in Robert Little’s 1998 film, A Good Son, yet, to use an anaphoric paradox, everything happens. A young man, Tim (Eddie Ebell), having drowned out the world on his headphones as he reads a book, is sitting in the stands with father (Ben Martin) at a Southern California University diving meet; the diver is his brother and sitting next to him is his brother’s girlfriend, Christie. His father attempts to return him, as he describes it, “to earth” in with the hopes he might observe the expert leaps and spins of the divers as they hit the water (both divers performed by the Olympic winning brothers Justin and Troy Dumais, the later listed as “Justin” in the credits).

     Suddenly Jack (Drew Bell), a USC student which we as suddenly recognize Tim to also be, sits down near to him and begins to talk with the boy, mostly asking questions such as what book he’s reading, what music he’s listening to, etc. They exchange the names of their favorite poets, Tim enjoying Eliot while Jack prefers Rimbaud, while recognizing that they are a year apart in the university, Jack being a senior while Tim is a junior. Before long Jack asks if Tim might be interested in joining him for a coke, and Tim, agreeing, tells his father that he’s taking a short break.

     The boys continue talking, Tim finding Jack to be an agreeable and knowledgeable person with whom he appears to share many interests. Before long Jack has managed to lead to him the roof—a place usually closed and unknown to most students—in order to take in a remarkable view of downtown Los Angeles.

    There the two boys, after taking in the view, sit down next to one another and continue their conversation. Just as suddenly as he first appeared to Tim, Jack leans over and gives Tim a kiss on the cheek.

      For a long while Tim just sits in place, Jack finally standing and walking a few feet away while Tim remains sitting in apparent astonishment. He doesn’t bolt, even when a janitor suddenly appears on the scene asking why the boys are there yet allowing them to remain a short while longer before he closes up the rooftop door. It is as if Tim has hit a pane of glass like a bird dropped in his tracks to consider how to recover before taking flight.

      Finally Tim stands, Jack asking if they might at least change phone numbers. Tim claims he has a poor memory for numbers. They have no pens or pencils, so Jack says he’ll give him his e-mail address, but as they begin to go back down to the swim meet, Tim suddenly suggests they leave separately—after all his whole family is waiting below. It is almost as if the two have had sex and may prove the fact by appearing together in public immediately after.

      He returns to find his brother, his girlfriend, and father all standing by their car, the father suggesting they were ready to leave without him.

      As they are about to drive off, Jack again appears, the car slowing down, the father apparently wondering if the stranger has something more to say to his son, but seeing no sign of recognition in Tim’s expression, Jack says nothing, and the car drives off.

        It’s a sad story actually. Two obviously gay boys might have started a relationship had it not been for the evident reluctance on Tim’s part to assert a friendship with the other boy. Yet we also know by his refusal to give himself away even a little, in his near-desperate insistence on remaining the “good son” to his father, that something momentous has just happened, something that he has changed him forever. We now recognize Tim is no longer the “good son” compared with his athletically-achieving brother who has found a serious girlfriend. Tim is now a different person than he previously was.

         This is not really a story about a new relationship between two boys, but concerns one boy’s new relationship with himself. If Tim does not meet up with Jack again, there will be other such young men in his future.

         Finally, this is a story about a father who not only will soon no longer recognize his son, but a man who perhaps has never quite known his child. Had he been less attentive to his other son’s athletic achievements he might have noticed that Tim went off with Jack and that, in the boy’s final refusal to recognize his new friend, something of great significance had happened between  them. It is almost as if his son, turning back to look at where he had just been (a sudden vision of Sodom), had been turned to stone. The son named Tim whom the father drives back home is no longer the same boy he drove to that event. Nothing has outwardly changed, but inwardly everything has. 

 

Los Angeles, May 8, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).   

 

 

Damian Overton | Arlo and the Sea / 2023

message without evidence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Damian Overton (screenwriter and director) Arlo and the Sea / 2023

 

Recently I have been encountering a great many LGBTQ short films that instead of using dialogue have returned, quite strangely, to the techniques if silent cinema, employing narrative voices instead of intertitles.

      These are often very lovely to look-at works, as is Australian director Damian Overton's Arlo and the Sea, with quite lovely-to-look-at actors, who remain voiceless, thus not giving us a real clue to their acting abilities. Perhaps it’s simply cheaper. You buy pretty boys for their looks instead of their acting talents.     

      The pretty boys, as in so very many gay movies these days, lay out on the beach and smile, sometimes pretending to engage with the other.

     Consequently, since we have no voice involved we are dependent entirely upon the storytelling-like narrative, which frankly, in most cases, is quite empty. Arlo (Ruben Russo) a young man who loves the sea, falls in love with Finn (Paris Moletti). How they meet, what is the basis of their love, and most importantly since this is the film’s apparent theme, why Finn leaves him is absolutely and almost insistently not established. This reads like a fairy-tale of disappointment and resilience.

      Poor Arlo goes into a deep depression, as in many a gay 21st century gay films bathing fully clothed in a bathtub under whose water he sinks for endless minutes.

      Despite the funk into which Arlo retreats after the disappearance of his magic lover Finn, life goes on for Arlo, who, we are told, will eventually discover another lover.

      The end. Good for the myth, but how this film empties out everything else but pretty pictures and an overly-annunciated narrative voice (Kieton Beilby) doesn’t give me a clue why I should care about anything that happened to Arlo or what he might do in the future.

       This film, along the several others of these narrative-told movies, are some of the emptiest cinematic productions I have ever encountered. I never much liked the New Critical Theory dictates, but I certainly must agree, in this case, that a story should show us instead of tell.

       And I have to admit, like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, frankly Arlo, I don’t give a damn.  

 

Los Angeles, November 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Anette Sidor and Jerry Carlsson | Längs vägen (Along the Road) / 2011

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R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli | A Wanderer of the West / 1927 [Lost film]

out with the boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Hoerl, W. Ray Johnston, and Victor Rosseau (screenplay), R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli (directors) A Wanderer of the West / 1927 [Lost film]

 

After a couple of years of trying to track down this film, mentioned by Vito Russo in his The Celluloid Closet, I determined to treat it more like a lost film, writing about it from others’ commentary. Even as this book goes to press, I am still seeking a copy, although some now list it as “lost.”

     Nonetheless, one can get a good idea about this film, which is perhaps not so very interesting except for its one major “gay” scene.

     Overall, this movie apparently is not at all interested in LGBTQ themes. The central story involves the attempt of a local rancher to take control of the nearby Lazy Y Ranch, which, as in the Australian film Rangle River (1936), controls the water rights for the local area. In order to take over that ranch, that rancher kidnaps the daughter of the Lazy Y, but the ranch foreman (Kermit “Tex” Maynard) manages to foil the plot and win the girl.

     The reason this film is of interest to Russo and other LGBTQ commentators such as me is one scene in which he meets Clarence (Al Rogers) in a bar. Clarence—a name often assigned to gay figures*—is described in an intertitle card as “One of Nature’s mistakes in a country where Men were Men,” assuring that the audience will be quickly able to interpret his reactions to the lanky ranch foreman. Clarence amply ogles the cowboy, prissily brushes some lint from his shirt, and, leaning on the cowboy’s shoulder asks, according to the title card, “I wonder if you’re going out with the boys tonight?”

     The foreman, after a quick double-take, irritatedly pushes the annoying sissy away.

    Without seeing the entire film one, obviously, cannot know whether this is simply a normative put-down, or whether it represents a more exuberant acceptance of “nature’s mistakes.” But the very fact that the authors and directors chose to include such a figure, presenting him through a series of frames, demonstrates, if nothing else, their interest in the “other.”

     The available pictures say more than words can express.

 

*According to the blogger of the British website “Streetlaugher: A Gay Cavalcade Comic Stereotypes,” Clarence and Leonard were names that signified gay characters in early film history. You might recall that in North by Northwest the villain’s devoted male secretary in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was named Leonard (the character played by Martin Landau, clearly in love with his employer Phillip Vandamm [James Mason]).

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Alfred Schirokauer | Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth) / 1927

in heaven

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reinhold Schünzel and Alfred Schirokauer (screenplay, based on the play Der Doppelmensch by Wilhelm Jacoby and Arthur Lippschitz), Alfred Schirokauer (director) Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth) / 1927 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Although Alfred Schirokauer’s Heaven on Earth is apparently still available, and was recently restored and shown for competition in the Berlin Film Festival Teddy Awards, this 97-minute silent film has not quickly made its way to the US; at least I was unable to find a copy to view.

     The story however is fairly transparent. Petty politician Traugott Bellmann (played by the co-writer Schünzel) is a strong critic of the moral decline of society in general, and, in particular, the local notorious nightclub “Heaven on Earth.” On the day in which the film takes place, which happens also to be his wedding day, he is appointed the president of the Moral Decency League.

    The same day he receives an inheritance from his deceased stepbrother, along with the very nightclub which he has taken on as the representation of societal evil. Not only does he now own the club but is promised a sizeable sum of money if he spends every night from 10:00 to 3:00 a.m. in the morning in his newly acquired “den of iniquity.”

            Suddenly his is forced to escape his seemingly endless wedding reception, deposit his new bride in their bedroom without so much as a kiss, and rush off to “Heaven” to keep the required deadline. Over the next few days, he must sustain his new “shame” in secret, keeping any evidence of involvement from both his bride and his reformer friends who keep calling at his flat in between visits from the club’s hot Negro jazz band, a bevy of Ziegfeld-like showgirls, and a performing monkey.

       Despite the film’s representation of the art deco designed club filled with the kind of faces that populate the art of the Weimar painters such as George Groz and Max Beckmann, the members of the club are apparently mostly heterosexual and the club’s activities are relatively innocent compared with the legendary general Weimar Berlin goings-on. 

        The film’s LGBTQ credentials are centered primarily around Bellmann’s attempt to escape being seen in the club. To succeed he is forced—somewhat like the politician in Édouard Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles (1978)—to dress in drag, during which he is continually propositioned by his lascivious father-in-law who is also the head of a major liquor distillery. One commentator describes Schünzel as “a chic female impersonator” in a film that functions as “a jazz age gender bend.”

        The film’s actors, other than Schünzel, include Charlotte Ander, Adele Sandrock, and Otto Wallburg.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Curtis Harrington | Night Tide / 1961

loving a mermaid

by Douglas Messerli

 

Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director) Night Tide / 1961

 

Having already written about several of Curtis Harrington’s films in this volume, I queried a friend who had just seen a revival of Night Tide about its gay content, having myself previously read several comments that made it appear as if this film was exceptional in Harrington’s career for its lack of LGBTQ subject matter. He verified the fact that there was nothing about homosexuality in this film.

     But obviously that didn’t prevent me from viewing it, even if at first given its subject of a woman who believes she was formerly a mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson) who falls in love with a sailor, Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper in his first major role), seemed to suggest this was an entirely heteronormative work.

      As I began to watch this movie, however, I became more and more fascinated with the woman’s presumed delusion, encouraged, in part, by the role of a mermaid she performs in the carney show run by Captain Samuel Murdock (Gavin Muir) on the Santa Monica pier, where she also lives above the pier’s famed merry-go-round.* The mermaid has played a major role in the literature of nearly all cultures from ancient times onward, and was associated often with the siren—the myth this film embraces—who lures men such as Ulysses in Homer’s The Odyssey to their deaths.

      In Night Tide it is rumored by the merry-go-round operators, Ellen Sands (Luana Anders) and her grandfather (Tom Dillon), that Mora has been involved with the death two of her previous lovers, and they quickly warn Johnny of the fact after he meets Mora at a jazz club and almost immediately falls in love.

      I was intrigued not only by the long history of the mermaid through mythical tales and literature, but, obviously, by the more modern reappearances of the mermaid, the most famous of which appears in Hans Christian Andersen’s (who was gay or least bi-sexual) renowned story “The Little Mermaid” of 1873, itself influenced by the fairytale novella Undine by German author Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.

      Why, I wondered, had Harrington chosen this strange myth in which to weave his story about the beautiful and utterly innocent sailor played by Hopper, just the kind of figure with whom you might imagine the filmmaker to have fallen in love? Even more strangely, although the couple are obviously attracted to one another, they seem to never engage is sex. Johnny’s visits to her apartment result with him even curling up on her couch to sleep, but he never moves into her bed.

       The movie ends with her quite inexplicably inviting him to go scuba diving, where she appears to cut his breathing hose, although he manages to struggle back to the surface, she disappearing from sight.

       Almost as in the Andersen story, however, there is a kind seemingly tacked-on ending where after that event, Johnny discovers her body back in the tank of the carney show, Captain Murdock later admitting to police that he had killed the other men who had grown too close to Mora. When he found and adopted the young orphan, he implanted the idea of her being a mermaid in order to keep her close, and later made her feel responsible for the deaths of her previous would-be lovers. Yet he denies knowing anything about the dark “Water Witch” (Marjorie Cameron) who also seems to haunt Mora’s life, and who Johnny has noticed several times.

      What was Harrington in his story turned into a filmscript trying to tell us? Was Mora secretly in a lesbian relationship? And what did she mean by loving the ocean but also being terrified of it, particularly with the strange almost coded message that rings out from her words: “I guess we’re all afraid of what we love,” reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s line from The Ballad of Reading Goal, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” Like Val Lewton’s 1942 film Cat People there are some women who are inherently dangerous, despite Johnny’s intense skepticism of Mora being able to hurt him or anyone else.

    Upon further rumination I suddenly realized that the mermaid is the perfect metaphor for a transsexual, a woman who cannot provide her man vaginal sex (or as Bette Midler performing as the mermaid Dolores Del Lago boldly belts out: “The question before us is where’s her clitoris”), having her lower half covered over with fish scales. If Mora is not literally transsexual, she is metaphorically so, kept away by the man who controls her life and is willing to kill all others who come too close and might dare to undress her and discover her secret.

     The film made in 1961, in order to properly distributed (and even then it was held from general release until 1963) had also to offer a possible heteronormative ending, as at the close Johnny promises to come back and visit the true woman who pines for him, Ellen, who operates this merry-go-round of this movie.

     Harrington’s movie is not at all a horror film, but seems like one, layered with images that hint of darker meanings, accompanied by the wonderfully moody jazz score by David Raksin. Instead, it’s a love story that cannot openly speak its subject.

 

*Coincidentally, I am told that my friend Paul Sand actually lived above the Santa Monica Pier’s carousel.

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Stéphane Marti | Allegoria / 1979

the kindest use the knife

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (screenwriter and director) Allegoria / 1979

 

Experimental filmmaker Stéphane Marti was born in Algiers in 1951, and became beginning in the mid-1970s a director who critics identified as one of the major protagonists of “body art,” who, having studied with Dominique Neguez, dealt with issues of gender identity disorder and various views of the concept of desire. He quickly became a central figure in what was dubbed “the School of the Body,” as his films focused on the bodies of his central figures as they both suffered and explored their sexualities.

     Allegoria is truly an allegory about many things: desire, gay sexuality, the satisfaction of homosexual infatuation—and as so very many films of the 1970s still revealed, the failure to satisfy those sexual inclinations—which ended generally in dissatisfaction and death, symbolic and sometimes real.

       The bathtub bound, fully clothed Aloual (the Madagascar born actor born in 1952 and who died in 2014, who appeared in several of Marti’s movies) is already bleeding, suffering from the breakup or actual murder by his lover, a white boy, who as either broken his heart symbolically or actually stabbed him in the heart physically. Does it matter?

       The black man is bleeding and dying, a victim of love and probably as well social injustice, who even when his lover seems to return, both of them made up with facial masks of intense make-up and glitter, have destroyed the other in their relationship.

        Time and again, we see the dying Aloual, half clothed, falling down a long flight of public stairs as if he were is some Eisenstein movie, with a broken or stabbed heart, unable to continue his voyage to wherever he might have been going.

        Their love is replayed for us but ends, over and over again, with his white lover stabbing him, followed by the twist and turns down the Odessa-like staircase.

         Despite our desires or even Marti’s attempts to re-reel the tape as if it might provide an alternative solution, sex has resulted in death, eros ends in thanatos. That this film was released just a few years prior to the AIDS crisis is highly significant and almost visionary. Marti survived, but most of his characters died for love.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).