Ella Shields | Ella Shields: The Captain of the King's Navy / 1929

sharing with the captain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ella Shields: The Captain of the King’s Navy / 1929

 

     In the same year as “Burlington Bert,” Shields sang her famous patter song, “The Captain of the King’s Navy,” a work that surely owes its entire sensibility of Gilbert and Sullivan. In this work, as in many of her later works, the lyrics clearly put the male impersonator in the position of being a lesbian lech, who is after the women which, at times, she won’t let even the Captain share.

      One of my favorite stanzas includes an upbraid from the Captain of King’s Navy himself:

 

When alongside the old gay key

I slipped off conspiracy

Stayed on shore an hour more

And met two charming girls.

I slinked them all around the two,

Spent all I could afford.

But what a blooming row there was

When I got back on board.

And the Captain said straight to me

Well my lad this is mutiny

You had two girls, golden curls,

Slinking round all day.

And he cursed and swore for the crew to see

And whispered when they’d gone to tea

Next time you’ll save one for me

Or I stop you serving in the King’s Navy.

 

      Shields dances quite delightfully in a manner that might remand some of Popeye the Sailor Man.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Ella Shields | Ella Shields: Burlington Bertie from Bow / 1929

when royalty gets hurt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ella Shields: Burlington Bertie from Bow / 1929

 

The first of these short films, with Shields performing her signature song, is perhaps the least memorable. The full song, which has numerous stanzas, not all of them equally clever, ends rather successfully:

 

… I'm Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten thirty

And Buckingham Palace I view.

I stand in the yard while they're changing the guard

And the queen shouts across "Toodle oo"!

The Prince of Wales' brother along with some other

Slaps me on the back and says "Come and see Mother"

But I'm Bert, Bert, and Royalty's hurt,

When they ask me to dine I say no.

I've just had a banana with Lady Diana

I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow.

 

    The song influenced many other performances, including Julie Andrews’ performance of Bertie in drag in Star! and, more importantly, Irving Berlin’s “A Couple of Swells” performed most memorably by Judy Garland and Fred Astaire in Easter Parade (1948).

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Douglas Messerli | Ella Shields: A Quartet / 1929, 1930, 1937

ella shields: a quartet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beginning in 1929, British Pathé released four short films featuring male impersonator Ella Shields.

     Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1879 and educated in South Bend, Indiana, Ella Catherine Buscher (her birth name), Ella Shields began her career in 1898 singing vaudeville song-and-dance numbers with her sisters. In 1906 she married songwriter William Joseph Hargreaves in Lambeth, London, and by 1910 was already appearing at the London Palladium as a male impersonator.

      Legend has it that attending a party in which several musical halls performers were asked to perform, half a two-man act was out sick, Shields standing in for the second trouser. After that performance she rarely wore a dress on stage again.

       In 1915 Hargreaves wrote the comic ditty about a penniless Londoner who effects the manner of a well-heeled gentlemen, “Burlington Bertie from Bow,” which quickly became Shield’s signature song. She performed it until her death, including with a very young Julie Andrews in 1940, who has suggested it may later have been an influence on her performance in Victor/Victoria. Indeed, the septuagenarian Shields died while performing the number in August 1952.

      Already by 1916 Shields had separated from her husband, Hargreaves, divorcing him in 1923. By that time, she was well known primarily as a male impersonator, her songs filled with lesbian references and double-entendres.

Douglas Messerli | Two Porno Firsts [Introduction]

 

two porno firsts

by Douglas Messerli

 

In the very last year of the second decade of the 20th century, according to movie lore, small audiences caught glimpses of what might be described as dubious first-time events, the very first gay porno film and the first sex porno animated movie. In both instances I doubt the claim of these particular works representing the earliest examples of their genres, particularly since already in 1920 Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly displayed in a single movie, heterosexual, lesbian, and gay sex acts as well as male masturbation.

 

   But if you’re fascinated by the idea of being “first,” these two probably fit the bill as well as any others we might later discover. The works under discussion include the pseudonymous The Surprise of the Knight from 1929 or 1930 which is generally hailed as the first all-gay film; and Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, what is probably the first pornographic cartoon to depict male on male sex.

  Clearly, they were not the last, although immediately due to the increasing pressure of studio heads fearing precisely what did happen, and the actual arrival by 1934 of a strict censorship code, such activities were not publicly available again to run through a public projector for several decades. Of course, such films continued to be made, but were sold not only “under the counter” and hidden away from the prurient prying eyes of anyone who might be even the least sympathetic to censorship or government sexual oppression. You might even go so far as to say that with the issuing of these two works, LGBTQ sex was banned from public consumption for the next thirty years, not to become available again until the 1960s, and even then, mostly in underground and foreign cinema. For many Americans, the horror of depictions of same sex relationships of any kind is still with us. As I will argue later in these volumes, even among the most liberal of LGBTQ supporters among heterosexuals, there is still very little interest in actually having to witness movies about queer relationships and sex, even though every queer movie goer has seen hundreds of heterosexual movies and probably enjoyed many of them for their depictions of love and love-making.

       Enough said. These movies tell their own stories.

“Oscar Wild” | The Surprise of a Knight / c. 1929

the chameleon

by Douglas Messerli

 

“Oscar Wild” (pseudonymous director) The Surprise of a Knight / c. 1929 [Difficult to obtain]

 

The Surprise of a Knight was released under the pseudonymous attribution of “Oscar Wild” in 1929, a film which many proclaim to be the first USA gay porn film devoted exclusively to homosexual intercourse. Given the several short films I’ve seen from the early part of the century, there was a certainly a history of this long before in Europe. Moreover, even though it also portrays heterosexual sex, Le ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920) most certainly does portray scenes of exclusive gay male sex. But I’ll accept this as the first American gay porno film, for whatever value one wants to make of that designation.

      Although the film has apparently been shown on the online film site, Mubi, it was before the time that I subscribed and now seems to be basically unavailable, although it is definitely available at the Kinsey Institute Collection of the Indiana University. However, I have not seen this film, although I’m not certain actually witnessing it is necessary to fully describe it or appreciate it, and I have been able to find stills from the picture, reproduced below.

       For all of its so-called exclusive male credentials, evidently the film begins with an elegantly attired short-haired woman who is completing her dressing as she awaits a visitor. She lifts “her” skirts to reveal a think patch of pubic hair, powders herself, and enters a drawing room where she offers “her” gentleman caller a drink. He refuses, so she drinks it instead. After a brief conversation, they engage in intense kissing, as in many such heterosexual encounters the “lady” pushing away his hand whenever the attempts to touch her breasts or genitals, finally coyly slapping him as to say, “You dirty man!” But apologizing for her coyness she begins to suck him off.

      Our “lady” friend finally lies face-down on the sofa, presenting her buttocks for his delectation, in the process revealing that she is wearing no undergarments.

      The gentleman begins to copulate—although the film does not show any actual penetration. After a few moments, the man withdraws, sitting back on the sofa for a brief rest. The “lady,” gyrates her buttocks, inducing the gentleman to mount her anally once more. Both reach orgasm and the gentleman pulls up his pants and walks off.

       The “lady” stands, raising her skirts to reveal “she” is really a “he.” At least, that’s the standard interpretation. But today, obviously, we might question whether this individual identifies as a female or male, and ponder whether or not this is really a representation of homosexual sex or sex between a transgender individual and a cis male. Obviously, if that is what we are observing, it would be a far more significant “first.”

      However, the film apparently wishes to argue for the gay-sex interpretation since the gentleman caller suddenly returns to help his lover remove his/her skirt and all apparel, as the younger individual dances about briefly as a nude young man, jump-cutting to a frame of him dressed in male business attire, winking at the audience and walking off screen.

      More recently there have been several different interpretations of this male-on-male sexual film. Critics Thomas Waugh and Linda Williams have both argued against the standard notion of the piece actually comprising a porn film. Williams argues that such hardcore pornographic films were primarily concerned with nudity and were focused on the display of genitalia and penetration during intercourse, while in this work costume becomes the central element. As Waugh argues, “The costume spectacle either steals the show or becomes a grotesque distraction.” And the fact that it represents a central character in drag merely reinforces heteronomy. The joke is the “surprise,” which of course would have been utterly no surprise for those who purchased the under-the-counter porno. I doubt that fact might transform the film into a work of “faux homosexuality,” since the penis is finally revealed and we recognize, if only after the fact, that the two lovers were both men; perhaps it was simply felt to be a safer way to temporarily “cloak” the subject. Males might, at least subliminally, imagine that the gentlemen (and themselves) had been deceived.

     The following year saw another such porn film, titled A Stiff Game, in which an African-American male engages in fellatio with a Caucasian man without any pretense of drag. But evidently there were no more such movies (although again I have my doubts) until the 1970s.

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

Unknown director ("E. Hardon") | Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure / c. 1929

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Austin Bunn | Campfire / 2023

the lost boys of peter pan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Austin Bunn (screenwriter and director) Campfire / 2023 [17 minutes]

 

One of the many benefits of visually and mentally traveling, as I have done, through so very many thousands of LGBTQ movies, particularly the short cinema works, is that despite the fact that a great number of them were cooked in the living rooms, bedrooms, and dorms of highly imaginative MFA and MA students, they often took me to places where I might never have imagined ever existed, let alone have ever traveled to see in person.

    This defines precisely what Austin Bunn’s film Campfire accomplished, a film which began as imagined documentary of one of the oldest gay campgrounds in the US, the Hillside Campgrounds of New Millford, Pennsylvania, which became gradually a fictional journey to the site by an older married man, Carl (Mark Rowe) who has clearly arrived at a point of some sort of late crisis, and in quiet desperation seeks out a farmhand, Marty, with whom, 30 years earlier, he had a love affair, perhaps even after he married or before he sank bank into the closeted heterosexual world where so many of his kind retreat given the lessons of their upbringing and the rural, sexually unforgiving and forbidding worlds which they inhabit.

    This film, using the actual Millford site as its backdrop, shows us what is now a world of aging trucker, S&M devotees, and ancient hippies—one couple have haunted the place now for years going about daily in the nude. This is not a political film, but one might imagine these elderly, beefy “bears” as being a kind of secret gay world who might possibly have voted for someone like Donald Trump, a fact difficult for the LGBTQ community to digest.

     But, in fact, it’s hard to explain or even characterize this lost queer world, off the map of almost any but those in the know. These men are sociable and kind, willing to embrace nearly anyone who enters their dark green gate, as long as they close it behind them, for it is a sacred world even more apart from the heteronormative limits than someplace like Fire Island. If you are the kind of person to want to share and enjoy this community, you have suddenly found home. And we can only try to imagine what it might have meant, in its halcyon days, to a young farmhand like Carl’s Marty, who kept trying to get his then lover Carl, 30 years before, to visit it with him.

     Carl, a “good ole boy,” American flag posted on the window of his SUV, lies to his daughter that he’s in Roscoe helping a buddy doing engine work. But clearly he’s on an adventure where no one, including his wife, might have imagined that he’s moved on/back to a world that doesn’t at all include them.

      As he checks in, he asks the question that will become the key to his Romantic adventure: “I’m looking for a friend. He used to come here a lot. His name is Marty Cardona.” The desk clerk can obviously not reveal such information, but another of the campers, who has overheard his question, says that everyone knows Marty, and that he’s hosting a party that very night.

      “How will I know where to go?” Carl asks.

      “Oh,” proclaims his new neighbor, “You’ll know.”

 

      The party is clearly the event of the week. And Carl, attempting to fit in, visits the local S&M country boutique, buying himself a leather harness just for the event.

       He moves into his tent, stokes up the heat, and is ready for party night, which everyone seems to be attending. Carl eats a grilled steak, dresses up in the costume he’s purchased and attends Master Marty’s party.

      In between these fictional events, Bunn has posited other true testimonials of people who regularly inhabit the campsite, many of them couples who have been together now for many years, others who give credence to the fact that this was and still is a world which is not only off the map to the normative heterosexual world, but has long been an paradise to men at a time when being gay in the general US world, particularly given their rather straight, masculine seeming identities, was nearly impossible. This camp, they all equally claim was their salvation. Most of them were once married, and have grown children, but found their new lives in this isolated Pennsylvania spot.

    At the party, dressed in his leather halter with a plaid shirt, Carl makes his way through a crowd of dressed up drag queens and S&M performers as he attempts to seek his way back to the boy he knew so long ago. We get glimpses of the beauty every now and then, a stunning Hispanic man who we can well comprehend night have caught the eye of lean farmer, the two developing what Carl describes as a “special relationship.”

     A local, George (George Hoxworth) guides him into the Danteseque landscape to meet his ex-love, Marty, now Master Marty, as they cross through various spaces, all in variations of hot neon-lit colors. Finally reaching the inner sanctum, he meets a graying old man in a jock strap, clearly not the Marty he remembers of even imagined. Neither of them recognizes the other—and obviously this is not Carl’s “Marty.”

     Reeling away from the sight, Carl screams out his horror, letting all the others know just how deluded they are as well. He suddenly realizes he has returned to a world which might have been wonderous years before, but is now an old-aged home for losers, like himself, who haven’t found a proper way out from their closeted lives.

     By the next morning Carl is ready to leave; yet the residents realize that he has misunderstood their world and his own presumptions. Jerry (Brian Keane) is called upon to guide him to the real Marty, a man to whom he, himself, was married. But Marty, the real Marty Cardona, died in a motorcycle accident years ago, and is now memorialized in a small Hillside park where all those who died of old age, AIDs, and other mishaps are celebrated with small stone places, relics, and symbolic gravesites.

     Carl slowly takes in the loving care in which these now lost beings have been offered in this strange camping ground. And, finally, his missing love, he realizes has found a home which he could not offer him. Carl unpacks his bag and much of his emotional baggage along with it, to stay on a little bit longer before returning to the closed-off world he has chosen for himself.

     This is a difficult film of fictional memory and actual gay liberation, issues which come together in a way most of us might have not expected. But once more, as in the numerous stories about farm boys and farm hands such as those represented in films like Clay Farmers (A. P. Gonzalez, 1988), Alkali, Iowa (Mark Christoper, 1995), Fishbelly White (Michael Burke, 1998), God’s Country (Francis Lee, 2017), as well as Far West (Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2003), Silver Road (Bill Taylor, 2006), Heartland (Mark Christopher, 2007), Between Us (Daithí Ó. Cinnéide, 2016), It’s Still Your Bed (Tyler Reeve, 2019), Farm Boy (Kahil Haddad, 2019), Magnetic Harvest (Marine Levéel, 2019), Fire at the Lake (Pierre Menahem, 2022), Lie with Me (Olivier Peyon, 2022) and Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar, 2023) to name just a few, we are made to realize that the so-called Rainbow Community shines on regions of culture which we never might have imagined.

     Urban living is not necessarily the only center of the gay experience. The world’s farmlands are also filled with young and older gay men and women desperate to discover their loves in a queer identity that is often difficult to express in their more isolated neighborhoods of the world, but fully exists nonetheless.

     In this unassuming film issues of ageism and cultural isolation come together to make it clear that you can’t count out anyone from the larger gay community as they struggle to make their love known and remembered. Perhaps our current gay leaders might turn their heads away from their endless struggles to put broader social issues as their major concern and look instead to those individuals which exist behind the screen of political objectives. This film and so many others helped me to perceive that my womb of urban gay protection was not the only or necessary lens in which I might best view the issues of LGBTQ cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).