Mitchell Leisen | Easy Living / 1937

innocents lost in a cynical society

by Douglas Messerli

 

Preston Sturges (screenplay, based on a story by Vera Caspary), Mitchell Leisen (director) Easy Living / 1937

 

Gay film director Mitchell Leisen began his career as a costume designer, dressing the likes of Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Natacha Rambova, Douglas Fairbanks, and many others. He then moved on, through working with Cecil B. DeMille, to become a notable set designer, including devising the look, as critic Cláudio Alves describes it, “of such opulent productions as the deliriously vulgar Madam Satan and the orgiastic hedonism of The Sign of the Cross. Had he been working primarily in the pre-Hays Code days before 1934, Alves wonders “what lewd camp spectacles he would have created otherwise.”

     His transformation into a director was rather by accident, but also emanated from the belief that perhaps the facile and multi-talented Leisen could do anything. New to film, Broadway director Stuart Walker was hired to direct a couple of films, the studio heads hiring on Leisen as co-director. Leisen, in fact, almost took over those productions for the inexperienced Walker. And soon after, he was given a chance to helm his own production with Cradle Song (1933) staring actor Leontine Sagan of the earlier lesbian drama Mädchen in Uniform.

      In 1934, he directed Death Takes a Holiday and by 1937 had moved on to the screwball comedy under discussion in this essay, a work with a script by later director Preston Sturges. Alves suggests some of the reasons why Sturges ended up most unhappy with Leisen’s direction and points to a series of comments from Sturges, Billy Wilder, and others that for years helped to disparage and led critics and audiences to ignore Leisen’s rather remarkable directorial abilities.

 

“While scripted by Preston Sturges, Easy Living's less hurried and more sincere than any of that man's brilliant directorial efforts. Unfortunately, the future maker of The Lady Eve and Sullivan's Travels didn't enjoy the edits Leisen did to his work, the streamlining of plot points, the pruning of excisable minor characters.

     Preston Sturges, who wrote other films by Leisen including Remember the Night, would call him ‘an interior decorator who couldn't direct,’ more interested in frocks than good screenwriting. He went so far as to name the director as one of the people whose incompetence made him want to direct his own scripts. Unfortunately for Leisen, Sturges wasn't the only one who felt this way. As the war years approached, Paramount assigned some scripts by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett to Leisen, starting a tumultuous partnership that left no one happy. When David Chierichetti wrote Mitchell Leisen: Hollywood Director, he interviewed several people who had worked with the man, including Wilder. He had this to say: ‘All he did was he fucked up the script and our scripts were damn near perfection, let me tell you. Leisen was too goddamn fey. I don't knock fairies. Let him be a fairy. Leisen's problem was that he was a stupid fairy.’"

     As Alves puts it, “One need not be a genius to read homophobia in Wilder's words or Sturges' pithy comments.”

     In many respects, Leisen was of an earlier generation, a romantic closer to someone like Ernst Lubitsch—who Mary Pickford had earlier described as a “director of doors”—than to the cynical cleverness and frenetic paced films of Sturges and Wilder. Yet while Leisen believed in the basic goodness of even his so-called villains (death included), his films nonetheless seldom demonstrate the open sentimentalism of some of Sturges’ works which, at moments, particularly in Sullivan’s Travels, but also in Hail the Conquering Hero veer dangerously close to Frank Capra territory. And although he certainly did encourage his art directors Hans Dreier and Ernst Fegté to come up with grand interiors for the film’s grand mansion and the Louis hotel room, he also wasn’t afraid to fall back on the pie-throwing, prat-falling antics of the silent film days, which also helps further ground this screwball comedy in the Depression even more so that Gregory La Cava’s more sophisticated work, My Man Godfrey (1936), with which Easy Living is often compared.

     And despite Sturges’ slightly homophobic comments, one might argue that, at heart, his script is a kind of “fairy tale,” beginning when an ordinary working girl, Mary Smith (Jean Arthur), riding on the top level of a double-decked bus is suddenly buried under the riches ($58,000 to be exact) of a sable coat which financier and banker J. B. Ball (Edward Arnold) is furious to find his wife has just purchased, despite a closet full of other fur coats.

      Playing something like hide and seek with his wife Jenny (Mary Nash), Ball finally catches her and the coat, tossing off the balcony of the penthouse, an action which ends in his wife immediately leaving Florida.

       Mary, on her way to work at the Boys’ Constant Companion, is so honest that she is willing to be late to find the owner of the coat, who, as she begins to go door-to-door in the row of wealthy townhouses by which the bus was passing, she quickly meets up with as he leaves the building on his way to work. He not only insists his chauffeur take her to work, but that they stop by a milliner to get her a new hat to replace the one destroyed by the coat. The coat is also hers to keep, he insists, she totally confused by the gesture, but not knowing its real worth or his identity, finds his generosity impossible to refuse.

       Evidently the dour folk overseeing the boys’ magazine are not able to see the humor of the situation, and fire Mary Smith for ostentatious behavior and lying, even as she speaks the truth. No one wears such a coat, in their prurient minds, without something naughty going on. One might wonder whether one should have wanted one’s boys to have such constant companions.

       The milliner, Van Buren (Franklin Pangborn), however, is not only perfectly aware the price of such an expensive coat, but is delighted when Ball choses one of the most fashionable of their hats, and recognizes Ball’s name when he presents his card for the billing, rushing out into the street to tell his friend Louis. 

        How Leisen ever got Joseph Breen and the Production Code Administration (PCA)—who in 1933 had banned all pansies from films, and was a stickler about all sorts of issues that arise in Easy Living—to approve the prissy gossip which Van Buren represents is something I still need explaining—let alone how the board could ignore hotelier Louis Louis’ (Luis Alberni) spooner-like contortions of the English language such as, “I'm a man like this, I don't beat around de bush to come in the back door. I tell you, this is where you belong and this is where you have to be.”

      True, in this role Pangborn is perhaps prissier than he is sissier, but it comes down to the same thing, even if his doesn’t use as many hand gestures or sashay through any doors, it’s quite clear that he’s a swish, as so many dress and hat designers were represented to be in the pre-Code days. Perhaps he was one of the “excisable minor characters” who got some pruning, but his role here is still far more substantial than sissies were generally permitted in the early 1930s. Here he is not only the source of the gossip about Mary being Ball’s mistress, but in passing his interpretation of events on to Louis and others, he later becomes involved with further visits to Mary’s hotel suite, permitting for the first time in years a sissy to actually become a central player in the story. At one point he enters Mary’s suite with a handful of so many dresses and hats it appears that he is himself attired in the female costumes.

      In short, he serves the purpose in this film of the Mercury who reports to others what Hitchcock calls the McGuffin, the event that sets the entire plot in motion and keeps it rolling almost until the end of film. His “queer” reading of the situation and his sharing that piece of news with Louis, whose empty grand Louis hotel (based on the Waldorf apparently, which when it first opened could find no customers to fill it) is in debt to J. B. Ball who is prepared to foreclose, upends the lives of all the film’s central characters. If Louis can get Mary into his finest hotel suite, how can Ball close him down?

      And when Louis, in turn, passes the news on to the gossip columnist Wallace Whistling (William Demarest) that Ball’s mistress is now living in his hotel and that Ball (again quite by accident) has chosen to stay for night in the hotel, his actions further result in Mary suddenly being offered an automobile, jewels, and an entire wardrobe—proving the Depression-era adage that financial gains are awarded only to those thought to be privileged, never to those who were most need them.

      In fact, Mary demurs regarding almost all these lavish offerings, but the givers are so insistent and Arthur’s character is presented as so wonderfully clueless and overwhelmed by the magnificent presents that she cannot resist, and she ends up somewhat flustered with a world of possessions she has no need of. What she most needs early on in this film is simply something to eat. She now has a glorious place in which to sleep, but with only a few nickels she’s stolen from her piggy bank, she has nothing to put into her belly. Even at the local automat she can afford only a piece of pie.

     It is there, by the Dickensian coincidence of all such comic plots, that she meets John Ball, Jr. (Ray Milland), who in one of the first scenes of the film has become so frustrated with his father’s over-protecting financial control of his life, that he has determined to leave the house and find a job. He now works as a busboy in the automat, and is so taken by the poor girl in a sable coat that he attempts to obtain free food for her by pushing open the automated doors, a comic device that will appear over the years in numerous other films such as That Touch of Mink with Doris Day and Cary Grant (1962). Here, John junior is immediately found out and caught, but in an attempt to outrace his arresting pursuer—much like his mother’s race throughout the house that morning with his father on the chase—total chaos consumes their universe, eventually through the struggle opening up all the automated food slots and, after a diner shouts “free food” to the people in the street, ends up in a food fight where everyone is eventually engulphed in consumables on the automat’s floor.

 

     Only John and Mary escape, Mary asking whether he has somewhere to sleep the night, and inviting him up to her palatial hotel room. Once again, the Hays board seems more than bountiful in allowing them to spend the night together, permitted perhaps through Leisen’s clever architectural arrangement of a bedroom couch where they lay together in opposite directions toe to head. But that doesn’t mean they first don’t share a bath, in this case a huge conch-shell construction for which they cannot even figure out how to turn on the water, achieving the fountain’s effects only by accident while being fully clothed.

       Given everyone’s mistaken perception that J. B. Ball, staying, again by coincidence, in the hotel, has shared the night in Mary’s room, and the fact that his son really has spent the night there, one might argue that Easy Living is one of the raciest movies that has even gotten through the Hays Code restrictions without notable cuts. 

       To add to the general confusion of the central figures, who know nothing of the numerous scandals in which they’re involved—and applauded for—an investment broker sneaks up to the suite to see if she might be able to find out from the Bull of Wall Street via his mistress if steel is going up or down. When Mary asks her own “Ball,” he offhandedly jokes that since it’s going to rain, it’s going down. So the couple unknowingly send the market for steel into a plunge at the very moment that J. B. is buying, certain the price is on its way up.

       The disaster finally ends in his temporary financial ruination, in Mary being tossed out of the hotel, and in John discovering that the sable upon his now beloved Mary was given to her by her father. By the time they reach J. B. to resolve the crisis, he has reached such a fever pitch that all he can do is shout, which does indeed so dominate the other busy comings and goings and smaller gags that it truly results in some displeasure as noted by several commentators.

      The return of his wife finally quiets J. B. down somewhat, and Mary’s arrival finally convinces them that the only way out of the predicament is to have her call back the stock broker and report that J. B. now says steel is going up. It works, providing enough joy to permit all these loving innocents to explain whatever needs explaining, which is practically everything since everyone has imagined the worst. All of them being innocent and clueless at heart—even the bull-headed J. B.—is what makes Leisen’s film so pleasurably different from Sturges’ later films where, in fact, the beloved innocents are really found to be truly guilty. Which explains, perhaps, why there is something giddy, if not gay, about all of Leissen’s motion pictures.

       In his review on Zekefilm, Justin Mory very nicely summarizes Leisen’s ability to marry the high and the low, humor and drama, art and slapstick in this film:

 

“In all, balancing the sharp edges of the script with a seasoning dash of romanticism, Easy Living remains 1930’s entertainment at its zenith, with keen intelligence and lowbrow humor often co-existing in the same scene. And while one might assume this comic synthesis derived exclusively from the involvement of Preston Sturges at the scripting level, who later joined slapstick and satire to masterful effect in the high society nonsense depicted in, say, 1941’s Lady Eve, one of the most surprising revelations in….Kat Ellinger’s audio commentary [to the film] is that director Leisen himself developed the malfunctioning Automat food riot that ends up being one of the simultaneously broadest and breadlines-era incisive scenes in the film. Precisely the sort of thing Sturges might have dreamed up himself had it occurred to him first. ….A viewer today finds a perfect fusion of artistic sensibilities in Easy Living despite the later comic director’s dismissal of his earlier artistic collaborator….”

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Archie Mayo | It’s Love I’m After / 1937

standing by his man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenplay, based on Gentlemen After Midnight by Maurice Hanline), Archie Mayo (director) It’s Love I’m After / 1937

In the tradition of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, and William A. Wellman’s Nothing Sacred, the 1937 film It’s Love I’m After is a splendid example of the US screwball comedy. The reason you may not have heard of the last one is that its director, Archie Mayo, directed dozens of interesting films but seldom managed a truly significant work, unless you want to include his somewhat stultified version of the stage play The Petrified Forest (1936) or the soap-operaish Four Sons (1940). Despite often wonderful casts—in this instance Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—Mayo simply didn’t have the golden touch, relying more on stock situations and involuted plots than focusing on the talents at hand.

       In It’s Love he’s forced to rely mainly on dialogue from old melodramas and melodramatic renditions of Shakespeare’s plays, which actually works well for Howard playing a comic ham actor and veteran womanizer Basil Underwood in a deeply committed love/hate relationship with fellow thespian Joyce Arden (Davis) who is given the opportunity to let loose with every angry invective she might ever have wanted to as Margo Channing in her later film All About Eve. A young, 21-year-old de Havilland, in only her third year of making movies, gets to play the impetuous lover that Carole Lombard perfected (Lombard was in two of the films I name above), and, working quite against character, does a credible job when the mad duet of Howard and Davis aren’t tossing barbs at one another. But more than the splendid acting of these three professionals, Mayo this around had a special treat for his audiences: Eric Blore playing the role he plays best, the intimate and impertinent gentlemen’s dresser and personal confident, in this case named Digges.

        In fact, nearly all the real humor of this work derives from his dialogue with his employer Howard. So I’ll quickly kill off the rest of the plot to get to the heart of his LGBTQ gem by summarizing. Basil loves Joyce, but they are actors who spend their entire time together battling out their love through the melodramatic gestures and sentiments of the dramas in which they perform, allowing little time in between to kiss, make up, and promise to get married, the latter of which they nonetheless have, as Digges puts it, come to the “precipice” of twelve times. Presumably they’ll never actually marry, nor really make up, but will wake up one day realizing that they have all along been a couple truly in love, despite Basil’s dozens of tawdry affairs, of which he forces Digges to keep count, weighing them against any good deeds he accidently accomplishes; he remains always in the negative according to Digges faithful tallying up of the scores.

        Yet this quarreling couple, a cleverer Punch and Judy might have lived on in perfect stasis had not the young romantic dreamer Marcia West (de Havilland) happened to see Basil in his tights playing Hamlet. Although she’s engaged to be married to a perfectly nice young man, Henry Grant, Jr. (Patric Knowles), the problem, as her aunt Ella Paisley (Spring Byington) puts it, is that there is no problem with Henry who is, after all, perfectly nice; and the perfectly nice girl suddenly wants a little nastiness in her life.

        A quick visit by Marcia to Basil’s after-show dressing room does nothing but rouse her girlish instability, forcing the foolhardy Henry to seek a solution to a problem that might have resolved in a few days—after all, as Marcia later puts it to Basil, “I was in love with Clark Gable last year, and if I could get over him, it's a cinch I could get over you.”—if he’d not insisted that Basil visit Marcia and her family, playing such a cad that she will be cured of her romance, the plot of one of his most successful plays.

        Inevitably, just the opposite occurs: the more he demeans her, the more she adjusts to the situation and falls even more fervently in love, until Basil ponders:  “I say, Digges, you don't suppose I've aroused her slap-me-again-I-love-it complex?”—something like the behavior I bemoaned recently in my discussion of the 1925 film My Lady of Whims. Whatever her condition, she so insistently maintains her innocent adulation of the actor that even he becomes confused, wondering, when looking into the dreamy eyes of this fresh young person, if he might shift his role to that of ardent lover instead of the blaggard, at which point Digges has no choice but to call his regular savior, Joyce Arden herself. Yet this time out of anger she only further confuses the mess into which her lover’s got by pretending to Marcia to be his wife realizing that she must give him up to his greater happiness. Meanwhile, reminding Basil that with Marcia he will have “love in morning, love for lunch, and love for dinner,” she awakens him to a terrifying fate of freedom from Joyce’s venomous bites.

       But, of course, everything eventually works out, with the very nice girl going off her very nice beau, and the loving couple spitting out the hate for one another happily ever after.

       In between and before, and surely later, we have the real heart of the story, the love—with either the audience or the character actually realizing it—Basil is truly “always after”: that of his constant companion Digges. Even if by this time Joseph Breen and the Hays Code had blackballed pansies, they somehow left Eric Blore behind to look after men like Howard’s Basil Underwood and Edward Everett Horton’s Horace Hardwick. who always seem to prefer his company to the women they are supposedly busy chasing. Whether he be named Digges, Bates, or Cecil he whistles out his sibilants to include the nominative of the possessive pronoun “we,” a communal utterance which marries the men he dresses to himself more thoroughly than any marriage vow might. 

        Mayo visually established the hierarchy of Basil’s relationships with Digges and Joyce quite early in the film, with both simultaneously observing Marcia leaving Basil’s dressing room. Bigges stands next to Basil in the foreground, while his fellow actress and lover Joyce stands behind, having just left her own dressing room on the way to visit Basil.

        Throughout this film and so many others, Blore as Digges, in this case, reassures his permanent companion time again not only that he stands by him—

 

Basil Underwood: Down in the street below, a great carnival of people... happy together. And up here, one man, miserably alone.

Digges: I'm here, sir.

Basil Underwood: Oh, you're always here, Digges.

Digges: Yes, I thank you, sir.

 

—and that he truly loves him.

 

Basil Underwood: Digges, why is it no one loves me?

Digges: But I love you, sir.

Basil Underwood: Don't confuse the issue. Am I really such a bad fellow as she thinks?

Digges: Oh, please, sir. Don't let's go into that now.

Basil Underwood: There's loyalty for you. Alone in the city.

 

    At another point when Basil questions his loyalty to Joyce, wondering aloud if he hasn’t made his love clear, Digges interceding with the phrase: “Not unless you’ve been cheating on me sir,” the me being the indeterminate pronoun whose identity the dresser always assumes.

    In their constant acting out of scenes, Digges time and again plays the female to Basil’s male leads, “The girl from Venice enters. “Kiss me!”

    Once ensconced in the West estate, Digges reads Basil his daily letters from his female fans, which when Marcia’s naughty little sister Gracie (Bonita Granville)—clearly a cousin to Tracy’s Lord’s sister Dinah in The Philadelphia Story—overhears by listening through the keyhole, she naturally assumes they are speaking of their love for one another, describing them very much as they truly are to her pedestrian family members:

 

Gracie Kane: ...there's a couple of crazy men in the room next to me.

Mrs. Kane: How do you know?

Gracie Kane: Oh, I peeked through the keyhole. I always do. It's very educational.

 

     I’m sure it is. If nothing else, it’s significant that such men also always share their rooms with their dresser, sometimes even living in different suites apart from the women to whom they are supposed to be in love or to whom they are married. Even on the precipice of heterosexual marriage, Digges toasts “Well here’s to our wedding!” And the puns of their conjugal relationship go rolling through the films with no one to deny or dispel their suggested meanings. Even when the story gets a bit repetitive or boring, we will always have Blore to straighten our ties, pack our suitcases, and take care that we behave as such gentlemen are wont to behave.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).

Yiorgos Mesimeris | αγόρι μου (Agori mou) (My Boy) / 2025

a letter sent to the sidewalk

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yiorgos Mesimeris (screenwriter and director) αγόρι μου (Agori mou) (My Boy) / 2025 [9 minutes]

 

Starring Xaris Karydis and Christos Tzovaras, My Boy is more of anguished memory than a structured narrative.

   A man finds a letter on the Athens, Greece street and reads it. It is a letter from a military boy to his male lover Nikos back home, in which he reiterates his love, while also hinting that perhaps his lover has begun to forget him. He meanwhile is seeking a temporary leave so that he might visit his lover.

    Was the letter ever received by its intended recipient? Or was it dropped before it was even delivered. Whatever the answer, it leads to an emotional upheaval in the reader who in this short 9-minute Greek film, remembers his last meeting with his own lover on a beach.

     The narrative, such as it is, is based on a letter he suddenly begins to write to his long-lost lover, an epistle which he suggests might never even be mailed, ending up like a whisper of sheets in the wind like the one his has found on the street.

     There are several lovely picture-perfect moments, a brief quote from the gay poet Constantine P. Cavafy, and lots of accompanying music, but little here, alas, of real substance. The film is inspired by real events that are evidently so personal that, except for the imagined images, we are permitted no entry, leaving us with the experience of briefly looking over the shoulder of the lover at a metaphoric scrapbook.

Los Angeles, October 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).

Jean Grémillon | Gueule d’Amour (Lady Killer) / 1937

a love the lover cannot explain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Spaak (screenplay, based on the novel by André Beucler), Jean Grémillon (director) Gueule d’Amour (Lady Killer) / 1937

 

French director Jean Grémillon is perceived in his home country as one of the most respected of the pre-New Wave directors alongside with greats such as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Jacques Becker. His important films during the war years such as Remorques (1941), Lumière d'été (1943), and Le ciel est à vous (1944)—brooding yet spiritually luminous works—were highly popular with the film-going audiences of their day, following in the success of his earlier works Gueule d’Amour (1937) and L'Étrange Monsieur Victor (1938). His three great works of the war years has recently been collected in a Criterion Eclipse disk, receiving significant attention when released. Yet today Grémillon still remains unknown to US audiences, particularly when compared to Renoir and Carné.

     Renoir’s esteemed position given the extraordinarily high quality of his oeuvre speaks for itself. And Carné’s works remain international favorites, mine as well. Yet, particularly when viewed in the context of the latter, Grémillon’s movies can now be seen to be in touch with contemporary filmmaking, and at times in the impulsive actions of their characters and the radical camera shifts in which, at moments, the narrative, played out in images of light and dark or simply revealed sans actors, have far more in common with films of the New Wave and in their sometimes obsessional and tortuous relationships between male and female, spiced with wit, almost remind one at times of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou or François Truffaut Jules et Jim.

      The ironies of those New Wave films, if nothing else, are played out quite beautifully in Grémillon’s Gueule d’Amour, best translated as Lady Killer—where the doe-eyed soft-spoken Jean Gabin as Lucien Bourrache, a popular star in his day who could match Jean-Paul Belmondo in sex appeal in the 1960s—plays a dashing soldier of the Don Juan mold, said like Casanova to have a lady waiting for him in every city and village.

     We certainly witness that in the city of Orange when the military force marches through the streets, the women racing to their windows and balconies simply to catch a glimpse of the “lady killer” who all hope to catch his eye. He can hardly visit a café or restaurant without every woman ogling him.

     The “Gueule d'Amour” is even reprimanded, with secret admiration, by his superiors who have received complaints from males who have temporarily lost their lovers and wives as he sweeps through their towns. Yet, our hero denies that he has any interest in the woman whatsoever.

     As he tells his innocent friend René (René Lefèvre)—who a little like a young puppy throughout the film gently touches, almost in fond admiration, the older and experienced man—he is more interested in the camaraderie of soldiers than the women he encounters along his way.

     We might almost believe that, but he too is enchanted with his own reputation, keeping a photo of himself in full regalia in his barracks. Moreover, although he is soon to leave his service, he finds numerous ways to sneak off on tours to nearby cities wherein he continues to embellish his reputation as a woman slayer.

     Having received a small inheritance of 10,000 francs from his aunt, he is permitted to travel overnight to speak to a lawyer in Cannes, but once there finds himself, soon after, trying to write a telegram to his commander to explain that he has missed his train—and probably will continue miss his trains throughout the day.

     It is at the telegram office that he encounters the beautiful, disdainful, and rather mysterious Madeleine (Mireille Balin) who, somewhat like Proust’s small lemon and orange-flavored cake, sends him reeling through his memories of past and present loves; if he has been unfilled previously in his affairs with women, he is completely obsessed with Madeleine.

         She has come to the telegraph office to request more money, having lost everything she had gambling at the casino, and as he attempts to wine and dine her in the adjoining hotel, she—oblivious to or haughtily dismissive of the stares of the dining room’s females—cautiously accepts his offer of his new-found money to take another chance at roulette.

     She loses once again. Distressed, she asks that they leave for a leisurely walk before taking a taxi to her home where, without even so much as a goodnight kiss, she locks him out.

     So begins a painful series of events which result in Lucien, now discharged from the military, following her to Paris. Finding work as a printer, he runs into her again at the opera and follows her to her villa, attempting to reconnect.

      This time she is somewhat more receptive, and they find moments to share sex, while Madeleine still keeps him at a distance, planning dinners which she suddenly cancels, and making plans for the cinema or simply a walk for which she fails to show up.

      What quickly becomes clear is that she is a kept woman, whose butler and mother help her to keep Lucien at bay. A bit like Bates, Edward Everett Horton’s fastidiously correct butler in the Fred Astaire musical Top Hat of just two years before Gueule d'Amour, a good deal of the picture’s humor derives from le valet de chambre’s (Jean Aymé, best known for his role in Louis Feuillade’s 1915 Les Vampires), aloof put-downs of the would-be lover as he attempts to keep him as far away as possible from entering Madeleine’s domain uninvited.

      When finally Lucien, against all decorum, barges in, he is met with Madeleine’s mother, who while comically chowing down an entire gourmet meal cooked up just for her by the valet, makes it quite clear to Gabin’s character that, while her daughter’s wealthy benefactor may permit some sexual dalliances, they can be only occasional and temporary; Madeleine by no means can go with him on vacation in the country as he desires. Lucien retreats, now realizing the full truth of Madeleine’s sexual commitments.

     Still obsessed with her, however, he is determined, after what he has imagined to be a shared love, to get an answer from her directly. This time the mother calls the patron, who soon after appears to claim his financial prize. Standing on either side of the fat financier, Madeleine and her mother make it clear that Lucien, no longer the handsome “lady killer” of his military days, has no real role to play in their lives.

      Quitting his job and Paris, the former soldier returns to Orange where he opens up a small country bar, without making an attempt to contact his former friend, René, who has since leaving the military become a respected doctor in the city.

       Through a visit to a former restaurant he and Lucien once frequented, René discovers that his friend has returned, joyfully meeting up with him and describing that he now has himself discovered love in the form of an impulsive woman who has changed his entire life. He invites his dearest friend to meet his fiancée, Madeleine, the very next evening.

       Yes, Lucien suddenly perceives, it is his former Madeleine with whom René has fallen in love. He arrives at René’s home early, before Madeleine. The scene that follows is almost an inverted idyll played out with the two males, as René takes the now decimated “lady killer” around the small villa he has been reconstructing, describing to his friend the different flowers and gardens he has planted, his dreams for new additions to the house, and his future dreams. He has indeed created the perfect world in which to live with someone he deeply loves. Alas, we know what these two heterosexual males cannot: that together they would both come to life and love in such an ideal space. René, as Lucien had so often before, receives a telegram saying that his lover cannot join him.

      When Lucien arrives home to his bar, Madeleine is waiting there, the camera capturing her silhouette, while her now aged and ailing former lover is represented only through his shadow. When the two meet, it is as if they have performed the scene over and over before and know the lines well before they say them, she insisting that she has come to Orange only because of her love for him and that she wants to resume their relationship; he reprimanding her for having so taken advantage of the childlike believer René.

     Insisting he is simply jealous of her meaningless attentions to René, she phones René telling him that he has never meant anything to her and that their relationship has come to an end.

     So too, however, has Lucien’s love for her; but his statement of that fact only results in her further taunts, suggesting that she will use René as a pawn to get her long-ago lover back, torturing the innocent man in the process with her pretended love.

     The Don Juan now becomes the murderer he was always meant to be, exorcising her not for himself so much as to protect his friend—a man with whom he cannot even explain to himself that he loves in a way he could never have this plotting femme fatale.

    Showing up at René’s door Lucien has no rational explanation of what has just happened, putting himself entirely in his friend’s hands—which only reminds us how earlier in this film René had so innocently yet lovingly stroked Lucien’s knee and face.

     His friend, it appears, now perfectly understands what truly has happened, buying Lucien a ticket for Marseille and from there an escape to Africa where he will be safe. At the train station—while Lucien Bourrache (which means “borage,” the blue herbaceous plant which symbolizes power and courage) stares forward awaiting a destiny he cannot comprehend and perhaps having lost any memories through Madeleine’s murder he may have had of the past—René kisses Lucien gently on the cheek, not in the way another Frenchman might greet another friend or to say goodbye, but with a shy intensity we comprehend means something far deeper.

     As the train moves away with Lucien on it, René, like the hundreds of lovers saying goodbye, runs after it until it has sped away from his fruitless attempt to call his lover back.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (October 2020).       

 

 

 

Sergei Eisenstein | Бежин луг, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) / 1937

a living picture book of boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Isaak Babel, Sergei Eisenstein, and Aleksandr Rzheshevsky (screenplay, based on a story by Ivan Turgenev), Sergei Eisenstein (director) Бежин луг, Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) / 1937

 

The film finally awarded Eisenstein after his return from Mexico and the long five-year ostracization, as we have already discussed in my essay on Battleship Potemkin was Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow).

     In this instance we have only fragments of the film, yet here too we can easily perceive that despite the film’s story, central to those who hired Eisenstein, the director himself focused time and again upon the young boys’ beauty in opposition to their fathers and the other elders who would destroy their own youth in revenge for familial betrayal. Just a few clips make it clear how Eisenstein’s camera was focused, quite brilliantly, upon homoerotic images of the young boys he hired from the peasant farmers on location, something so obvious here that I recognized it even before reading Nestor Almendros’ revelatory 1991 essay, particularly since the political tale is so diluted within the fragments available.

    In the first frames of the film Eisenstein already sets up the opposition between the old order—the kulaks (the prosperous landed peasants under Czarist rule) and the church priest who, as one of the “young pioneers” puts it, would all like to return to the past of the Czars—and the Soviet newborns by outlining the deathly battle between the 11-year old Stepok (Vitya Kartashov) and his brutal and psychotic father (Boris Zakhaya) who before the film has begun beaten the boy’s mother to death because, Stepok explains, “she understood me.” In short, if his father belongs to the old order, out to destroy the new, Stepok begins the movie as an outsider, something akin in Eisenstein’s more mythological rather than party-line version of what today we might describe as a queer individual in the sense that he has broken away from the traditional, familial society. Surely that is not the message the Communist youth group and leaders intended, but it was clearly etched out in Eisenstein’s intent. The following pictures beautifully represent the opposition that is sustained throughout the film, even if the “young pioneers” soon after take over the church, oust the kulaks, and take control of the fields and horses.

    At first, the boys are also presented as figures who are kept out: out of the bar, the church, and the society of elders; but gradually as they come to take on greater and greater communal responsibilities they become accepted, welcomed into the larger farm-sharing society in which they exist. Yet the images of the early part of the film truly reveal their “outsiderness,” which is some respects is continued throughout the film simply because Eisenstein determines to place them in scenes in which they function and depend primarily upon one another.

     Before and even during the major events of the film—the community takeover of the church, the communal struggle to put out the fire set by the kulak saboteurs of the corn depot, the kulaks’ arrestment, the boys’ night with horses, and the final struggle with the escaped saboteurs during which Steptok’s father kills his son—the director almost turns his film into the huge picture book akin the 232-page work by Georges and Ronald C. Nelson found among Michael Jackson’s Neverland book collection in the 1993 police raid for suspected pedophilia, The Boy: A Photographic Essay.

      As I mentioned, Eisenstein also presents pictures of young peasant girls, mostly of the plump side, and even creates a scene depicting a heterosexual teenage romance; but for the most part, the stills we have left, other than beautiful nature scenes, are lovely photographs of young boys and men got up in various garb, some from vestments found in the church when they attempt to turn it into a club and others suggesting the wild pelts they wear, not unlike Mickey Rooney’s costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, during their night with the horses. To prove my point I have selected more than a dozen examples, sprinkled throughout this essay.

   We know for certain that by this time we have entered the cinematic world of someone like the later François Reichenbach of the 1950s.

     If commentators now wonder how Eisenstein escaped the censorship of the Soviet leaders for his Battleship Potemkin, we can be rather assured that particularly after his Mexican activities, they did not miss the fact the director had turned the tale of a pioneer youth hero into a study of the faces and sometimes full bodies of beautiful boys. And surely much of the mysterious shutdown of the filming of Bezhin Meadow and the director’s recanting had to do with the obvious homosexual, almost pedophilic film he was attempting to make. I think one can safely argue that they censored this film because of its homosexual content, even if they could not ever admit that was the reason and Stalin would, nonetheless, later embrace Eisenstein’s propagandistic Alexander Nevsky.

    In short, Eisenstein probably was censored for his homosexuality. But lest we immediately shed tears over that fact, it is probably useful to remember that the director also survived through his own cowardice, his refusal to admit that he was gay and his willingness to continue as a Soviet propogandist. As the critic Almendros argues,

 

“To me, the more questionable of Eisenstein’s submissions were not the humiliations he endured while pursuing subjects that censorship would (and, in many cases, ultimately would not) permit. It is more disturbing that he implicitly tolerated the worse fates of others: the banishment of his beloved teacher—“my second father,” he used to call him—the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold, who died in Gulag in Siberia; the murder by the NKVD of his close friend and collaborator from early theatrical days, Sergei Tretyakov; the dispatching of his onetime screenwriter Isaac Babel, and about half of Eisenstein’s students at the Moscow School, to the Gulag, where many perished....”

 

     Accordingly, we can strongly protest the director’s behavior and even accuse him, as younger Soviets have, of lying to later generations; but we cannot simply dismiss his remarkable images and filmmaking, much of which was generated through Eisenstein’s closeted and not so closeted homosexuality.

      Herbert Marshall, Eisenstein’s English ex-disciple at the Moscow Film School, compared his mentor to a Russian Matryoshka doll, the doll that within contains various other dolls of diminishing sizes: “Outside [Eisenstein] was a Soviet Russian[;] inside, according to some, he was a Christian, to others he was a Jew, to yet others a homosexual….”

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).