William A. Wellman | Wings / 1927

kisses and poses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton, screenplay, based on a story John Monk Sauders; titles by Julian Johnson), William A. Wellman (director) Wings / 1927

 

You might argue that William A. Wellman was one of the first Hollywood directors who seemed to actually care about representing a diverse selection of American society in his films. True, these figures were often rooted in simple types, but over his long career a diverse representation of social, political, and sexual figures appear in his works, pointing to numerous lesser-discussed aspects of the mythical melting pot that American culture had long been perceived to be.

       His first major film, winner of what might be described as the first Best Picture Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts, is a perfect example.* Although most of the film focuses on the mass of humanity into which war generally transforms individuals, Wellman—despite the complaints of some critics including the usually perceptive, but with regard to this film seemingly myopic Daniel Egan in his book on the National Film Registry—spends the first fourth of his movie establishing archetypal figures such as the good looking All-American boy, Jack Powell (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) souping up his car to become the hot rod “The Shooting Star”; the pesky tomboy-girl next door, Mary Preston (Clara Bow) who’s loved Jack since she was and he were kids; the ethereal “outsider,” new-to-town beauty with whom Jack imagines he is in love, Sylvia Lewis (Jobyna Ralston); and the handsome, suave, rich boy, David Armstrong (Richard Arlen), with whom Sylvia is truly “in love.”

     Along the way, Wellman introduces further types, including the fairly obnoxious immigrant stereotype Herman Schwimpf—played by the German-born actor who performed as the mumbling, bumbling Swedish “Ole” under the name El Brendel, but here seems also to be doubling as a Dutchman—and numerous others.

       Yet, typical for this director, the molds into which these types are generally bound are all quickly broken, as we discover the complexity of their true beings forged through an introduction to the wider world and their interrelationships with one another, which is really what Wings and other Wellman’s other films are very much concerned. Whereas directors such as Frank Capra or even Charles Chaplin might have left these types as he found them, for Wellman the “cast” is cracked in order to transform his figures into the four-dimensional human beings they become. Even the most stubborn stock figure, El Brendel, is transformed as in the film he develops into a talented and very capable mechanic who very much cares about the air pilots and their machines he looks after.

       In this particular film, set against the backdrop of international events, the focus is almost entirely upon the male characters. Even actress Clara Bow realized from the start that she was not an important figure in Wellman’s scheme of things: “Wings is...a man's picture and I'm just the whipped cream on top of the pie.”

     Yet this was a “man’s picture” in a far different manner than Hollywood had ever seen males depicted. The cameo feature of Gary Cooper as Cadet White, an experienced air pilot who meets  up with the younger trainees for the World War I version of the Army Air Force, establishes the archetypal heterosexual male figure: the quiet, determined he-man who sleeps for much of the time that he’s on the screen, catching-up on lost hours when he’s been flying, and who when called for dawn patrol, introduces himself and readies to face the daily odds of survival, gently dismissing the two new trainees’—Powell and Armstrong—dependency on protective tokens such as the tiny childhood bear David carries with him and the silver locket wherein lies Sylvia’s picture that Jack wears around his neck.

       The suggestion is already posited that Jack and David are somehow less masculine that Cadet White, different in their obvious weaknesses, including the fact that, despite entering training hating one another, but through a boxing match coming to respect and truly like one another and forging a “close” friendship as the two bunk together. White obviously goes it alone and faces up to facts, proven by the moment that he enters what the film describes as the “heavenly sea” when his plane crashes back to earth killing him.

       The incident is also Wellman’s first indication that his film, while often seeming to glorify battle, belongs also to the growing tradition of films that will reveal the horrors of war.

       Wellman, who himself served during World War I as a combat pilot—when he isn’t busy wowing his viewers with his remarkably ability to provide his audience with true ariel film footage imitating the real dangers and terrifying encounters of airplane battle, which many have argued is what this film does best—turns his attention to that different kind of heterosexual male for whom friendship becomes something more than a handshake, smile, and collegial pat on the back or ass, but spills over into something that gets messy, coming dangerously close in the loving relationship between the boys that hints at homosexual feelings. No, these boys apparently—although we can never be certain—don’t have sex and, given half a chance, can’t wait to put their arms around a good looking girl to give her a smooch.**

      Yet Wellman’s camera catches the beautiful young men side by side on ground, in their tent, or other barrack quarters almost swooning over one another. As Vito Russo splendidly summed it up in his The Celluloid Closet:

 

“In William A. Wellman’s Wings...Richard Arlen and Charles Buddy Rogers have a more meaningful relationship with each othes than either then has with Jobyna Ralston or Clara Bow, both token love interests whom male adolescents all over America correctly identified as “the boring parts” of the movie. In fact Arlen and Rogers have the only real love scene in Wings, and Rogers learns the true meaning of love through his relationship with his buddy.....”

 

      Already in December 1926 and January 1927 Clarence Brown—another filmmaker who dared to hone-in on character stereotypes which he might expand into complex human beings—had given the audiences of the period a vision of soldiers loving the same woman (in this case made even more complex given actor John Gilbert’s notorious offscreen affair with Greta Garbo) who, by film’s end, realized that their love for one another was far more important than dueling over a woman. Even eschewing incidents and language from novelist Hermann Sudermann’s far-more homoerotic fiction on which the film was based, Brown establishes—as Garbo rushes out to stop her lovers from their duel and drowns in the cold water on her journey to their “sacred” island—that the two have developed something far deeper than a strong male-bonding as they embrace and walk off together into the future.

      Wellman, basing his May 1927 film on a story by John Monk Saunders appears not to go as far Brown had, finally awarding Jack, when David dies, the girl next door Mary as his lifetime companion. But Clara Bow was certainly on to something when she described that final kiss allowed with the fall of a shooting star, as nothing but whipped cream. For it’s already been established not only that Jack doesn’t know whether or not he “truly” loves Mary, but he doesn’t quite know what love between a man and a woman is all about. While he confesses to Mary that he has (maybe) had sex with a French woman in Paris during the war—later in his life Wellman, who was married four times in the US, confessed to having had an earlier French wife who died during the War—what he doesn’t know is that it was really Mary in his hotel room who, a female soldier herself, had come to sober up her boyfriend so that he could return to camp as required. And they had no sex since he was more interested in champagne bubbles than in the bodies that produced them.

       And, although by film’s end he finally kisses Mary—something she’s been trying to get him to do all throughout the film—he has already far more intensely kissed his friend David on the lips as he was dying in a French ruin, after being shot down by Jack who, since his friend was flying in a stolen German plane, he believed to be the enemy. That deep kiss on the lips might be described as others have argued, as the first genuine queer male kiss in US cinema history. He carries him off, moreover, in a manner that suggests the pietà, which will later become a trope of the early gay “coming out” films.

     But even before that occasion in the movie, discovering that on the back of Jack’s precious photograph of Sylvia, she had inscribed, “With love to David,” David had torn up the picture incurring Jack’s wrath. But in so doing, Jack had also, symbolically speaking, destroyed the object of his own heterosexual desire, proving instead his homosexual devotion to Jack. And even Wellman, a product after all of his own society, could imagine no other future for his young hero than death. Almost immediately David has the feeling that his time has come, asking Jack to be certain to deliver up his medal and beloved mascot to his parents back home, Jack scoffing at David’s dark prognostications.

      In that day’s foray against a monstrous German airplane Gotha, Jack succeeds in shooting it down while David takes on the two smaller Fokker E.III Eindecker’s accompanying it, one of which eventually shoots him down in German territory. David survives, only to steal a German Fokker plane and attempt to fly back to the Allied line on the day beginning the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, when Jack shoots him down resulting finally in his death. As Jack later packs up his loved one’s possessions, he discovers the torn-up photo as well as Sylvia’s letter declaring her love for David, suddenly realizing that he was not loved as he imagined by Sylvia, but was loved deeply by David.

     If “normality” is restored in this film, we recognize it will be only a cover for one true love Jack has ever known, that of David who sacrificed himself for the sake of his male lover. If love has meaning in this work, it is defined only by the relationship and “friendship” of Jack and David.

     Wellman has not truly “coded” this film, representing that love through the concept of pure and unsullied male comradeship, something heterosexuals have superficially accepted throughout history and was permitted when it came to cinematic depictions of cowboys, athletes, soldiers, and prisoners, locked away in worlds where women were forbidden or in short supply—related as Russo hints to the Peter Pan myth where male comradeship was not yet necessary given the “lost” boys’ refusal to grow up and take on heterosexual male responsibilities (which also explains, in part, why male/male sexuality is sometimes overlooked in the rom-com movies of raunchy teenage adventures and angst, sometimes moving terribly close to gay “coming out” sagas). Yet our society to this day refuses to identify that “comradeship” as being fully homosexual or queer. And as Wellman continued to explore these issues in later films such as his movie of the following year, Beggars of Life, he realized he would need to “code” or hide similar homosexual and even lesbian tendencies in his cinema.

       There will be countless readers, surely, who utterly dismiss or at least feel highly uncomfortable with readings such as mine, Russo’s, and the numerous other critics, gay and straight, who have observed that in this film Wellman took the male bonding from the shower room into the army cot. Surely, I can hear them argue, Wellman meant nothing of the sort. What he represented was merely a close friendship which young men away from home often forge in

wartime situations when they are forced to rely on their fellow soldiers for their very survival—certainly my father’s words if he had deigned to even respond to my sexual insinuations.

       Yet Wellman has well prepared for that, underlining his homosexual depictions with a wonderful scene in a large Paris bar where his camera on a crane brilliantly tracks straight through tables of the room’s various habitués catching them in brief tableaux to indicate their various relationships: a heterosexual couple arguing, a sailor and his girlfriend, a male and female appearing be making some exchange of valuable items, and a lesbian couple, dressed in suits, in which one of the women gently reaches

up and over to stroke the cheek of the other, all before his camera settles itself upon the table where we see Jack drunk sitting next to a whore and other soldier friends and their recently obtained girlfriends. In his study of queer cinema Screened Out, Richard Barrios suggests it may have been Wellman’s “way of condemning French liberality, but most likely...meant simply as a bit of spicey scene-setting.” Quite the opposite, I argue that it was one of the numerous subtle ways Wellman had of telling his audience that he was serious about the issue of same-sex love. Here were yet other “types” whose molds waited to be cracked open, the butterfly of their lives escaping into celluloid reality.

     Similarly, and perhaps less subtly, early in the film Wellman presents us with male nudity in the background of the induction center where El Brendel signs up. And in one of the film's very first frames, Jack, sprawling out on the grass, unexpectedly and inexplicably raises his legs over his head to expose to the camera his butt. When the two boys receive their French medals for heroism, the director's camera focuses several moments on the procedure as the officer giving out the awards kisses each man on both cheeks, as if to emphasize that there is a significant difference between the French cultural expression of greeting and friendship and a long kiss on the lips which Jack awards his beloved David. In each of these instances the director emphasizes the male body and male relationships in a manner in which no other US director had previously explored. Wellman's positing of a fully loving relationship between his two hometown airmen, in short, is not an anomaly, an oddity, or even an abnormality, but another reality, another tableau in the vast array of human experience.  

      It is also notable that when Jack finally gets up the courage to visit David’s dour parents to present them with his companion’s sacred objects, the medal and the tiny teddy bear from his childhood, David’s mother refers to Jack as John—the first and only time this character is addressed by his given name—to reiterate his relationship with her beloved son, signifying the biblical connections with David’s love of Jonathan, the love that surpasses the love of all women. Is it any wonder that Jack almost breaks down in the tears not usually allowed male leads of any kind, particularly not a war hero of the significance of “The Shooting Star.” Surely Cadet White would never have shed a tear.

     I argue that Wellman’s work, along with Mauritz Stiller’s similarly titled film The Wings (1916), Richard Oswald’s Different from the Others (1919), Theodore Dreyer’s Michael (1924), and Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), is one of the five most significant LGBTQ films of early, silent movie history.

     Let’s be honest, Wings impressed its audiences and won awards for Wellman’s truly impressive aerial photographer and his ability to amass Cecil De Mille-like crowds to portray the endless battlelines of World War I warriors. And his film makes equally important statements about the hellish crucible of war, that destroys lives and forges new relationships between both men and women.

     His depiction of male love, however, could never after be erased from cinematic history and its influence over the years, in films as various as William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains (1928), Leontine Sagan’s Girls in Uniform (1931), Dudley Murphy’s The Sport Parade (1932), Jean Grémillon’s Lady Killer (1937), Victor Fleming’s Test Pilot (1939), Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), to name but a handful of films focusing on same sex love in worlds separated or isolated from the opposite sex. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005) might be described as the great-grandchild of Wellman’s Wings, if we were interested in imagining movies spawning celluloid babies.

     I have to admit, I’m not fond of war films, but I cried at several points along the way while watching Wings. But then, after all, I’m not a manly man and have permitted myself to cry whenever I feel like it.

     The restoration of this film was made possible through the discovery of a spare negative in Paramount’s vaults used in the 1950s reissue of this film across the US. Suddenly, I realized that other than the great musicals Oklahoma! and Carousel that I had shared with my parents in the early 1950s at an Iowa drive-in theater at age 6 or 7, I had long had a vague memory of a wartime air movie with a lot of airplanes in it, which must have been that reissue of Wings. My father had served as an Air Force bombardier in World War II, and loved to watch any movie with airplanes in it.

 

* In fact that first year there were two top awards, one for outstanding production and another for “artistic” production. F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise won the latter, while Wellman’s Wings won the former

** Arlen was a skilled pilot when hired for his role, and Rogers, pioneering the territory that today someone like Tom Cruise occupies, learned how to pilot his plane for the film stunts.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).  

 

 

Clarence Brown | Sadie McKee / 1934

giving her all and taking what she can get

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Meehan (screenplay, based on a work by Viña Delmar), Clarence Brown (director) Sadie McKee / 1934

 

Poor Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), the mother of the wealthy Alderson family’s maid. The son Jack (Franchot Tone), now a lawyer, returns home, glad to see his childhood playmate Sadie. And for few moments they reminisce in a way that almost suggests he might be interested in her as a future beau. But when he sits down at the table with his family, he quickly reveals his intolerance of a young local boy who worked for the Alderson family where he got into some kind trouble, evidently not of his own making. Young Jack is convinced such people are always criminal and shouldn’t be given a second chance, while his father is contemplating doing just that. Speaking out at the dinner table, Jack’s opinions infuriate Sadie enough that, helping out as a server, she cannot resist finally speaking her piece, particularly since the topic of their discussion, Tommy Wallace (Gene Raymond), is the boy she loves.

     Now disgraced in the Alderson household, and with Tommy without a job, she determines to join him, at the last moment, on a train to New York to begin their lives over, free from the old prejudices of the small town in which they grew up.

      The couple, nearly broke before they have even begun, meet up with a hard-talking chorus girl, Opal (Jean Dixon) in an automat. She quickly befriends them, suggesting her boarding house might have a room, despite its being a dump. They’re happy with the rent, whittled down by the kind landlord to $6.00 a week, but confused about what to do about the single bed. By 1934 it was again dangerous to suggest that they might abandon propriety for the night, even if they planned to marry in the morning. Tommy volunteers to sleep sitting up in the chair, but these young lovers just can’t resist a goodnight kiss, which we all know leads to…what director Clarence Brown’s camera doesn’t hang around to give evidence of.

      Sadie’s off early the morning to find a job, reminding Tommy that they have a wedding date at city hall at noon, and inviting Opal to be her bridesmaid. But before she can even get turned down from a job or two, Tommy has connected up with the household seductress, Dolly Merrick (Esther Ralston) who convinces him that his banjo playing and singing is good enough to go on tour with her.

      At the marriage bureau Sadie and Opal sit out a more than a dozen quick marriages while waiting for her no-show lover. At about ten of four, with Opal asleep and Sadie with her arm resting on the bench around her, a cop approaches asking: “You two girls wanna get married?” a question that could have been asked in the general or the specific, the latter of which, oddly enough is almost want happens at the end of Sadie’s saga, when Opal and she move in to keep a house together with Sadie’s mother.

      Returning to her room Sadie realizes Tommy’s clothes are gone and she’s left high and dry alone without a cent in one of the most unforgiving cities in the nation. Opal takes her with her to her chorus-line job, the two raking men through the coals on the bus trip there, but at the same time Opal admitting they have what women want and every gal has her price, a clear foretelling of what happens next.

      Listening in, all ears, is a sour-faced woman who with her black bow-tie and hat pulled down over her ears looks something very close (she hasn’t a Pince-nez and we can’t tell whether or not she’s dressed in a suit) to the stock figure of the pre-Code lesbian.

      Sadie is now dancing in a cheap bar, however, a wonderful trio of Gene Austin on piano, Candy Candido on bass, and Otto Heimel, better known as Coco, on guitar who play some wonderful jazz. Good thing, because the night’s guest is the multi-millionaire Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold) with his lawyer, who spots Sadie in the chorus and calls for her to come out and join him. It so happens that his lawyer is none another than Mike Alderson, who Sadie has not yet forgiven for his comments on Tommy. And just to spite him, as he keeps reminding his client that it’s late and the girl he’s chosen to join him in champagne is probably a gold-digger, she hangs on to the loveable drunk far longer than any such scene should last, eventually even tagging along at his insistence to his mansion.

      Almost before she knows it, and despite Alderson’s endless pleas that she leave the gentle, good-natured drunken rich man alone, she finds herself married, coifed in the finest clothes, and ensconced in a house which even she hasn’t fully yet toured.

      Showing Opal around the place, she knows she’s hit the jackpot, but she likes the guy who asks so little of her and gives her and her friend anything she wants. Her only punishment is having to spend many a night out drinking with him, undressing him, and along with his faithful butler Finnegan Phelps (Leo G. Carroll in one of his first roles) getting him into bed, and when he’s fully drunk, taking a punch on the jaw.

      The war continues between Sadie and Alderson, who can’t believe she could care for Brennan and is even more distressed when the doctor announces that if he continues to drink as he has, he’ll be dead in a few months. Firing the doctors, who haven’t helped him in the past, and dismissing even Finnegan after she discovers that he has slipped a bottle of bourbon under the dying man’s pillow, Sadie is perceived by the both the staff and Alderson as planning to help him to die so that she might inherit his millions. Alderson is particularly convinced of the fact given that Sadie has kept up with Tommy’s vaudeville career and even visited one of his performances in a distant city.

      She finally convinces the household cook, maids, and even the butler that she is determined to help her husband kick his habit, and when she achieves it, even Alderson has to change his mind about the woman who has shown him up for being so cynical about human behavior. 

       Despite the tough talking, hard-headed woman she has since become, Sadie remains, if nothing else, honest, finally admitting to the cured and sober Brennan that she still loves Tommy and has just discovered that Dolly has dropped him in the act because he has grown sick with what soon discovers is tuberculosis.

       Brennan, still the kind and loving fool, quickly grants her a divorce. When she finally tracks Tommy down in a hospital where he lays dying, what she doesn’t know is that Alderson has long been paying for Tommy’s care and helped him get into the hospital hoping he might be cured. He dies in her arms, forcing Crawford to take on yet fourth or fifth persona, the hard-working woman living in peace with Opal and her mother in what looks to me very much like an unofficial version of the marriage the cop asked them about in that early scene.

 

                          Mike: You three girls are pretty snug here.

                          Sadie: Yes, we have a lot of fun.

        Surely, just to keep the censors off their backs in the years which Joseph Breen and his Production Code hacks came down hard on all of Hollywood cinema, we discover that Alderson has been a regular visitor to their dinner table, and the film ends with his successfully blowing out his birthday candles wishing what we can only imagine is that he finally join her comfy household. After what she’s been through, I can only wish him good luck. He might remain a regular visitor but like so many of Crawford’s best roles, she’s now devoted to her career, and perhaps to Opal’s wonderfully tough-witted wisecracks. And frankly I don’t believe that for Sadie the mild-mannered Franchot Tone has any longer got what it takes to make her happy.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).

Robert Milton | Bella Donna / 1934

the confirmed bachelor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vera Allison (screenplay, based on the play by James B. Fagan and H. Fowler Mear and the fiction by Robert Hichens), Robert Milton (director) Bella Donna / 1934

 

Bella Donna began its nefarious life as a 1909 novel by Robert Hichens. That work was brought to film in a 1915 silent film produced by Charles Frohman and the Famous Players—Lasky, with Pauline Frederick starring as the evil wife, Chepstow Amine. That film is now lost.

      Even before that, in 1912, the great Alla Nazimova, histrionics intact, brought it to the Broadway stage where it ran for 72 performances. And it was rendered into film again in 1923, starring Pola Negri as Chepstow and Conrad Nagel as her unfortunate husband, Nigel. A print of that film is supposedly is held in the Gosfilmofond Archive in Moscow.

       For many long years, it was thought that the 1934 version, starring Mary Ellis and Conrad Veidt as the villains, was also lost, before being discovered in a dubbed Czech version, the one you will have to watch today if you want to hear any of the dialogue.

   Although this film quickly moves to the exotic world of Egypt, it begins, strangely enough, in England, with Lady Harwich (Jeanne Stuart) paying a visit to Dr. Meyer Isaacson (Cedric Hardwicke) to inform him that Mary Chepstow (the book on Conrad Veidt’s life, which has a fairly long description of this film’s plot, lists the major character as being named Mona instead of Mary) has set her claws on her brother-in-law, Nigel Armine (John Stuart). Since the doctor is a dear friend of Nigel’s she hopes he might talk to him, warning him of Mary Chepstow’s history.

      Hardly has she left his home office, however, before Mary (Ellis) herself pays a visit, pretending to have an undefined illness, but mostly attempting to find an ally in him, as one of Nigel’s closest friends, against the family’s refusal to even see her. He promises no such thing, but does assure her that their meeting will remain private and the next time he encounters her it will be for the first time for all others.

      He hardly has long to wait, since the very next day Nigel has invited the doctor to lunch, hoping to introduce him to Mary, who “just happens” to be dining the same restaurant alone. For absolutely no apparent reason, the doctor quite forcefully reminds his friend that he is a “confirmed bachelor”—in other words, that he has no interest in women, obviously suggesting he is a homosexual. But, of course, it is not to Nigel whom he is presenting this information, but the audience, who almost immediately is asked to perceive that his and Nigel’s relationship may involve, as old school friends, something deeper than mere friendship, an issue that will be of great importance later in the film.

      In the meantime, Nigel simply wants, just as Mary has previously sought, his approval, and later that evening, he stops by doctor Isaacson’s house for a drink and to beg him to visit Mary the next day so that they might become friends. When she suggests that she intends to visit Egypt, and that Nigel has work he the Fayoum district, Isaacson declares that if Nigel is going to Fayoum he strongly suspects that he is not going there to work. Mary cannot comprehend his meaning, as the doctor explains that Nigel is not like most modern men; he has very old-fashioned notions of what a woman is, and Isaacson does not want his friend to be hurt.

       Mary suggests that what he is hinting at sounds very rude. But he continues to put it to her rather bluntly, suggesting that she is not truly in love in Nigel and that he doesn’t want his dear friend to be abused.

       Although, it quickly does become apparent that Mary is marrying Nigel because of the family inheritance, it soon after becomes equally clear, when they receive a letter explaining that Nigel’s older brother has twins, that there will not be a great deal of money left for him, the reason of her interest in the somewhat sexually deficient man whom she has made her husband.

      But before we discover this, the two, Nigel and Mary, do quickly marry and travel to his villa in Egypt, where both seem for a while to be perfectly enchanted. They soon, however, meet the wealthy Egyptian business man, Mahmoud Baroudi (Conrad Veidt) whose dark looks captivate Mary just as her representation of a wealthy white virgin captivates him. By the time that Nigel actually plans his voyage to Fayoum, Mary is already itching for husband to get lost.

      Bored and lonely, Mary is now quite ready to run into the arms of Baroudi, but at first his servant reports that he too has left for the Fayoum district—a strange piece of information that I truly don’t know what to make of. Might it be somehow related to the reason why Isaacson has declared that Nigel is not seeking work in the Fayoum region. Does he have a male lover there, perhaps even Baroudi? Nothing is quite clear in the film’s insinuations.

    But Baroudi soon returns and Mary rushes into the Egyptians arms, even though she quickly discovers what we already know, that he not only is served by a number of dancing girls but has an Egyptian wife, whom he immediately commands to leave his bed so that Mary might replace her.

       As if we needed any evidence that Mary is truly sexually experienced, she gladly accepts his wife’s place in the bed as the two plot Nigel’s death without creating a scandal.

       When Nigel returns with the intention of taking her down the Nile in a large boat house, so to does Baroudi follow them in his own boat.

        Over this long period, Mary and a local doctor (obviously recommended by Baroudi), Dr. Baring-Hartley (Michael Shepley), has been slowly feeding Nigel small pellets of lead in his daily coffee, and much like Alicia Huberman in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious, Nigel begins to suffer from headaches and disorientation, which Mary and the doctor both claim is due to his receiving too much sun, just as in the Hitchcock film.

       Back in England, Dr. Isaacson has received a letter suggesting that all is well, while Harwich has received an epistle that describes something far different. Worried about the discrepancies and the welfare of his friend, Isaacson makes his way to Egypt.

       But when he finally meets up with Mary in the houseboat, she suggests that her husband is being well looked after by Dr. Hartley, and when Isaacson demands to see his friend Nigel, she argues that Hartley has insisted that he must not have company, and refuses him entry.

       Isaacson quickly tests the remains in Nigel’s morning coffee cup, and confronts Hartley, who quickly seeing the course of events, backs down and refuses to have anything more to do Nigel’s case.

     Taking over, Isaacson rushes to his friend’s side, who is delighted to see him. He forces Nigel to take a drink that might correct some of the damage and insists that he should no longer take any drink or food from anyone but himself.

       Observing the change of events and terrified of the results, Mary confesses her crime and declares that she no longer loves her husband, having long ago chosen to share of love with Baroudi.

      She quickly rushes off to Baroudi to tell him that she is now his alone; but when she explains what has happened, he orders her off of his boat, insisting, as he has always, that he cannot allow himself to be involved in any scandal.

      Mary returns to Nigel’s boat at the very moment that he demands the door and windows be closed, Mary is left on the outside, allowed only to peek in through the wooden slats. It is clear Nigel has returned to the side of his bachelor friend, bringing Nigel back into his man’s world without the troubles provided by a “beautiful woman,” proffered with homosexual affection if not actual sexual acts.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Jesse James Rice and Mike Macdonald | Never Gone / 2020

a ghost never laid to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cameron Becht, Mike MacDonald, and Jesse James Rice (screenplay), Jesse James Rice and Mike Macdonald (directors) Never Gone / 2020 [6 minutes]

 

Although the movie itself simply credits this film to Jesse James Rice as both screenwriter and director, IMDb adds other names to this short work about a grieving man. They also seem to have a list of other characters who do not appear in the film. So, I can imagine there might have been a remake or a later, extended version which I have not seen.

    Shane (Jordan Sorenson) arrives back home with groceries, greeted by his gay companion (Brian Sounlath) who is busy cooking. Yet we quickly realize his lover is there only in his memory, that the apartment is actually empty.

     In a fury Shane throws his groceries to the floor, only to turn back into the living room, again filled with his former companion’s presence as he announces a TV movie he wants to share with him.

     As Shane attempts to escape into yet another room, his partner declared he has just douched for sex.

   There is clearly no escape from his memories, and he finally falls apart, wailing and crying, as the dead ghost of his lover tries to comfort him about the accident which killed him.

      Soon, however, he realizes he is alone yet again.

      A friendly neighbor knocks and the door, and insists that she enter just to be with him for a while in order to comfort him in his time of deep pain.

      This is a truly simple statement of the suffering a gay spouse, just like straight couples, encounter when their loved one disappears suddenly from their lives.

      There is nothing astounding or innovative about this film. It’s simply a statement how a room filled with the other’s presence is gone and missing, even while the survivor realizes the memories will never leave him and that he must suffer the experiences now missing from his life over and over again.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).