Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) / 1972, USA 1973

the bed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenplay and director) Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) / 1972, USA 1973

 

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, first performed as a drama and then redone as a film, is one of the central works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In some respects, all of his major tropes and structural forms are represented in this drama and film.

     In may be helpful to perceive this work as utilizing several patterns from one of Fassbinder’s favorite fictions, Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. Petra’s sad affair with Karin parallels the lesbian relationship of Nora and Robin in the Barnes book, and the constant fear Nora has about her lover leaving—or in Nightwood’s case, being taken up by someone else – is very much at the center of both works. Similar to Nora and Robin’s home, filled with circus props and dolls, Petra’s house has several manikins whose placement might be said to parallel patterns in the relationship, and symbolize the shadow lives lived by Petra, Marlene, and Karin. Karin’s later statement of having had sex with a black man calls up Nora’s early encounter, through Dr. O'Connor's story, with Nikka, a performer of the Cirque de Paris.

   The most important relationship is Fassbinder’s use of highly elevated language—in his case represented in a mostly melodramatic, even operatic phrasings that references Barnes’ use of Elizabethan-like word choices and emblematic linguistic patterns. In Petra, as in others of his films, the director also calls up a kind of Douglas Sirk-like world in which the everyday problems of the characters, particularly of Sirk’s women, represent larger-than-life issues, dramatic situations that reveal major cultural concerns, including everything from racial relationships, frictions between man and woman, and issues of homosexuality, to religious piety and the disobedience of bourgeois cultural norms.

      Perhaps the most obvious of Fassbinder’s devices, again a motif in Barnes’ work, is the centrality of Petra’s bed. Awakened by her secretary, Marlene, with whom she shares a sadomasochistic relationship, Petra spends most of the first scene dressing, making herself up and donning a wig in preparation for her day. When her cousin Sidone comes to visit, it is upon the bed the two women sit to discuss primarily male relationships, in which it becomes apparent that Sidone prefers to hide behind her feminine wiles, while Petra is determined to be “honest,” whatever she means by it. Ultimately the conversation turns to Sidone’s introduction of a young woman, Karin Thimm, whom the cousin is convinced will make a perfect model. The two women, Petra and Karin, meet, the conversation continuing upon the bed. Obviously, Petra is attracted to Karin, and she quickly arranges a dinner with her shortly after.

.

      This second encounter again occurs upon Petra’s bed. When Petra learns of Karin’s difficult life, she determines to take her under her wing, so to speak, and, quite literarily, as we soon see, beds her.

     The later scene with the two of them awaking after a night when Karin has come home late, shows that the relationship has soured. Hurt, Petra dramatically attempts to maneuver the younger woman in assuring her that she is still in love; but with a telephone call from husband, it becomes apparent that Karin is determined to leave and return to him.

     Only in the final scene, portraying Petra’s descent into a kind of drunken hysteria, does she shift from the bed to the floor, a scene which again parallels Barnes’ novel, wherein, after Robin has left Nora, Robin returns to her in America to fall upon the floor, enacting the actions and behavior of a dog.

     Petra’s devolution is a near-mad descent to the lowest surface of her house, as she petulantly awaits a call from Karin. But Petra must face even a greater fall from grace in the revelation to her daughter, mother and cousin—all of whom have arrived to celebrate Petra’s birthday—that she is in love with Karin. Again, referencing Nightwood, Fassbinder has Sidonie bring Petra a gift of a blonde-haired doll, a near look-alike for Karin; and with even great cruelty, she announces that Karin is currently in Bremen. Striking out against all these women, Petra performs her bitterest scene upon the floor before returning to the bed, seeking forgiveness from her mother, and determining to find a new balance in her life.

     As the others leave, Petra, trapped in a void she has partly created, turns to her secretary Marlene, promising her a new relationship. With brilliant irony, the woman who has withstood so much abuse over so many years, quickly gathers up her clothes and few possessions, packing them away in a suitcase, and leaving Petra in total emptiness. Clearly any expression of love in a world of such abuse is intolerable.

      There are some substantial differences, however, between the original dramatic version of this work and Fassbinder’s film which slightly alter the meaning of the work. In the play, the bed is not nearly as significant, and there is no evidence, at least in the stage directions (I did not see the original performance), that the dinner with Karin in the second act occurs upon the bed; there is no stipulation that most of the fourth act occurs, as it does in the film, upon the floor.

     Most importantly, the play ends in a sort of unresolved relationship between Petra and her tortured employee, Marlene. As Marlene goes down upon her knees to kiss Petra’s hand, Petra insists that they sit: “No, not like that. Let’s sit down together. (They sit). Tell me about your life.” Indeed, the dramatic version, unlike the film’s cruelly ironic statement, is closer to what one imagines might occur after Robin performs as a dog before Nora’s demands, and suggests that there may be at least a temporary reconciliation between the two.

 

*Barnes writes in Nightwood: "There were circus chairs, wooden horses brought from a ring of an old merry-go-round, venetian chandeliers from the Flea Fair, stage-drops from Munich...."

 

** Both Dr. O'Connor and Nora speak of the centrality of the bed to defining French culture, particularly, of the unmade bed.

 

*** "The dog began to cry then, running with her, head-on with her head, as if slowly and surely to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees.”

 

**** In her last conversation with Dr. O'Connor Nora discusses at length Robin's relationship with a doll given to Nora, which ends: "She picked up the doll and hurled it to the floor and put her foot on it, crushing her heel into it; and then, as I came crying behind her, she kicked it, its china head all in dust, its skirt shivering and stiff, whirling over and over across the floor, its blue bow now over, now under." O'Connor goes on to analyze the role of dolls in women's lives.

 

Paris, May 29, 2010
Los Angeles, July 15, 2010

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (September 2010).

Alberto Mariscal | Los marcados (They Call Him Marcado) / 1971

shoot the tattoo artist

by Douglas Messerli

Antonio Aguila, Ricardo Garibay and Mario Hernández (screenplay), Alberto Mariscal (director) Los marcados (They Call Him Marcado) / 1971

 

A variation of the Spaghetti Western genre, Mexican director Alberto Mariscal’s Los marcados (The Call Him Marcado) is of a sub-genre of the violent cult Westerns which include as Guilio Questi’s Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot! (1967), Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescent (Kill and Pray) (1967), and Giorgio Capitani’s The Ruthless Four (1976) filled with violent images particularly against women and dominated by homosexual gangs whose purpose in shooting up entire villages seems vaguely focused on a combination of money and revenge.

    Yet of this quartet, Marcado seems the strangest in that the gang headed by El Pardo, of mixed-race (El Pardo means “the brown one) (Eric del Castillo) is backed up by his handsome, vicious psychopathic son The Kid (Javier Ruán) who, residing with their mostly homosexual cohorts in what appears to be a ruined ancient stone artifice, live in an incestuous relationship. Their arch-enemy Mercedes (Flor Silvestre), the head of the nearby town’s brothel, is “the Brown’s” former wife and The Kid’s mother. To speed their murder, Mercedes has hired her ex-lover, the heavily scarred Marcado (Antonio Aguilar). 

     However, the tale grows stranger by the moment as we slowly begin to uncover, without ever truly answering, what happened in this tragically dysfunctional family. The few clues we’re given lie in Mercedes’ dreamlike images of her husband and son walking with her through the wheat, small sheaves of which she keeps in vases in her bordello bedroom. Did she leave him for Marcado or, just as likely, for her apparently lesbian co-worker Remedios (Carmen Montejo); or did he leave her as he warmed up to the young body of his son?

     Whatever happened she has now become the wealthiest woman in the dreary little town of self-righteous crooks, whose major spokesperson attempts to overcharge the bordello, the most successful business in town, for the vast quantities of alcohol and spirits (300 cases of scotch, 300 cases of bourbon, 300 cases of Black Barrell, 200 cases of Cognac, and 150 cases of communion wine for a total of 32,500 pesos for which she agrees to pay only 24,000) he purveys to the august prostitution palace Mercedes runs.

     While the villainous outlaws which her husband El Pardo unleashes on the village from time to time, raping, pillaging, burning, and slaughtering everything and everyone they can get their hands on, the fine upright townspeople who attend her nightly festivals of fornication are violently homophobic, treating a well-dressed, good looking man who inexplicably shows up at the local whorehouse to participate in a pre-coital dance as if he were such an outrageous pansy that they demand he dance with them before might touch female flesh.

     Just to establish the alternative, director Mariscal begins his film with an attack of the gay psychopaths who rob the bank, shoot, and kill—the Kid eviscerating a young female shopkeeper who evidently was once his father’s lover—before burning down much of the rest of town. Somewhat as in like a Cecille DeMille spectacular hundreds of bodies line the streets with wailing ex-lovers by the time “bandits” eventually take their leave.

     Most of the remaining frames of the film are pure camp, as Mercedes pouts, scowls, and drinks away the days while Marcado plots out and gradually picks off El Pardo’s men one by one. In the meantime, “the Marked one” melodramatically cites the truism of the film to a drunken Remedios:

 

                             ...Everyone is marked. We all have scars. The wounds remain

                             under the skin. These remain open.

    In the meantime, the gang, holed up their stony edifice cruise one another—El Pardo shoots one handsome lad, who effectively evokes the lust of his son, dead—while Brown and the Kid, loll about in bed, take baths, and preen themselves in a long mirror set out on the desert floor. The Kid is wrapped in a sheet of white cloth (his favorite color is red, the color of blood; as we noticed in the town scene he was so excited pulling out a bolt of red satin that he nearly forget to kill the milliner he was seeking), while Brown wears a flannel pink shirt and brown dungarees. The red and white colors are picked up in their long “last supper”-style table covered with a white cloth, with red velvet chairs placed at regular intervals—obviously, one of their gang being an excellent exterior decorator.

 

    At one point The Kid declares it’s time for him to perform—whereby the boys gather round, knowing that their inattentiveness will surely draw the ire of El Pardo—as the boy reads Hamlet’s soliloquy:

 

                                Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow

                                of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath

                                borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how

                                abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at

                                it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know

                                not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your

                                gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,

                                that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one

                                now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?

                                Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let

                                her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must

                                come; make her laugh at that.

 

Who knew that theater was alive and well in the Chihuahuan Desert?

  

    When the gang is finally lured back to the village, The Kid and El Pardo wind up in the local bar awaiting Marcado’s next move. Again bored, The Kid demands his father shoot shot glasses off the bartender’s head as if to play William Tell aiming an arrow at his son’s head-top apple. After three successful aims, he inevitably misses, as the poor bartender drops dead.

 

   The Kid decides he wants a tattoo, so the local Chinese tattoo artist is called in, almost fainting in the pleasure of running his hand against the previously unpotted soft skin of the boy’s back. But after a few minutes of the intense pricks of the needle, The Kid can no longer bear the pain and shoots the tattoo artist is dead as well.

      Eventually, the two of them again escape to their mountaintop fortress with the Marked one on their trail. Mercedes hiding in the shadows of the stone wall has beat him there as the two wait for El Pardo to make his run. When he does, Marcado shoots him several times as he finally falls into a small pit. Similarly, when The Kid finally can longer bear the wait, he too comes to face the Marcado.

       Mercedes, dressed like Medea all in black, comes forward to hold her son in a pietà position as she cries, “Hush, my boy, Hush.”

       I might add that the incessant sound of gunfire is backed up with a sophisticated saxophone jazz-inspired score by Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2021

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

Louis Malle | Le souffle au cœur (Murmur of the Heart) / 1971

standing away and apart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Malle (screenwriter and director) Le souffle au cœur (Murmur of the Heart) / 1971

 

I first saw the Louis Malle film, Murmur of the Heart in 1971 when the film original was released and hadn’t seen it since in all these years—despite having watched many another Malle film over the decades. Certainly, I recalled many of its scenes, so it must have had some impact on me. But I have always had mixed feelings of Malle’s works as he consistently plays with intellectual concepts and toys with sexuality and crime.

    Although his characters are always lovely to watch, and his stories are well constructed, his images quite beautiful, there is something missing in the deep hearts of his art: children are callously abused and can’t basically feel deeply about others (see Pretty Baby, Zazie in the Metro, and Au revoir les enfants) and their parents, most often of the bourgeoisie, are even more removed.

     It’s not the incest between the son, Laurent (Benoît Ferreux) and his mother, Clara (Lea Massari) that I find the problem in this film—Clara, at least, deeply loves and protects him—but the sometimes more subtle abuses doled out to the 14-year-old by his emotionless gynecologist father, Charles (Daniel Gélin), his two elder brothers Thomas and Marc (Fabien Ferreux and Marc Winocourt), and the local priest Father Henri (Michael Lonsdale).

       And behind some of these abuses is a subtle homophobia. Laurent, it appears, given his subtle romance with another young boy, is being abused for his own good, his brothers trying to wake the wimpish boy’s heterosexuality by introducing him to a prostitute, and Clara, herself, redeeming him and truly introducing him into heterosexuality through her own body. Her insistence that it will not happen again but that they should look back on it remorse is nothing else but a bit self-serving, reminding me a little of some critics’ response to the father’s last speech to his son in Call Me by Your Name, basically a regret for his own lack of courage to pursue what we presume was a gay relationship. I should add that I don’t agree with these critics on that one.

     There are obvious links with Malle’s 1971 film to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, particularly when early in the film the young Laurent steals a Charlie Parker album; but Laurent, unlike Antoine, is a top student and treated as special. He might almost be the poster child for a “Mamma’s boy.” And the grittier elements of Truffaut’s film are here replaced with hotel luxuriousness. Only well-to-do women, like Clara, might declare how much they love hotels.

     The very isolation and protectiveness of hotels, in fact, might be said to color this film, as Laurent basically dodges the bullying pranks of his brothers and somewhat blithely ignores the hand-on-knee contact of the priest. Laurent is basically an innocent whose innocence itself protects him from the abuses of others. But there is a danger in that isolation as well, the lack of human contact and pain that he might otherwise feel. I know because I was just such a child. To know how not to hurt others you have first to be hurt.

      Perhaps it best explains my occasional resistance to Malle’s films by the fact that Murmur of the Heart has been described as semi-autobiographical (the incest being entirely fictional). Malle himself seems always somewhat detached in his movies, humorously observing the impetuous Zazie, and quietly accepting the fact that in Au revoir it is the Jewish boy’s friend who unintentionally betrays him to the French Nazis.

    A heart murmur, also described as congestive heart failure, occurs when the pumping action of the heart becomes less and less powerful. When this happens, blood does not move efficiently through the circulatory system and starts to back up, increasing the pressure in the blood vessels and forcing fluid from the blood vessels into body tissues. Symptoms depend on which area of the body is most involved in the reduced pumping action.

     Malle himself suffered this as a child, and, I might argue, his films often reveal that precise inability to pump up the action sufficiently that one might truly become engaged with his characters. As it is, they stand away and apart, like the lovely woman Burt Lancaster observes washing her hair through the window each night in Atlantic City or like the “second best” girl with whom Laurent spends the night after his fling with his mother. And whatever happened to that boy with whom Laurent slept at the scout camp? He simply disappears.

 

Los Angeles, March 8, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2018).

 

 

Martin Scorsese | After Hours

oz

by Douglas Messerli

Joseph Minion (screenplay, based, in part, on a radio monologue by Joe Frank), Martin Scorsese (director) After Hours / 1985

Martin Scorsese’s sadly underrated 1985 film After Hours begins with situations that suggest the film might be a romantic comedy in the manner of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. An unsatisfied computer programmer, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), working in an office in upper Manhattan, is teaching a neophyte to the company, Lloyd (Bronson Pinchot), how to enter the system and set up his program, during which we immediately perceive just through the movement of Paul’s eyes how utterly bored he is in his role as mentor. But then everyone in this working world—let us call it “Kansas”—is equally seeking a way out from where they feel frozen into space. Lloyd admits that he sees his job as only temporary, expounding upon his dreams of opening up a small publishing house. At a nearby café where Paul goes after work, the cashier (Rocco Sisto) moves in a silent pas de deux and spin, obviously practicing his movements for his study of ballet. Even later, he encounters a waitress in SoHo’s Terminal Bar, Julie (Terri Garr), who leaves him a message “Help, I hate this job.” 

    Paul is himself rereading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer which recounts Miller’s sexual adventures, far outside of anything the reader obviously has experienced. What is interesting about the autobiographical fiction, in the context of this film, is that it particularly reveals Miller’s repressed homoerotic desires which are wrapped within a dark sense of homophobia.

    At the café Paul meets another admirer of the book, Marcy Franklin (Rosanna Arquette), who joins him at his table as they discuss it. She mentions that she is staying in SoHo with a friend, Kiki Bridges (Linda Florentino), who creates sculptures, and asks if he might be interested in buying one of her friend’s Papier-mâché bagel and cream cheese paperweights. Giving him her friend’s SoHo telephone number, Marcy disappears into the night. But Paul, having written down the number, calls her and they plan for an immediate meeting in the SoHo loft: Buzz in under Bridges, she tells him, only “the Bridges is crossed out,” suggesting what we will soon discover to be our innocent hero’s fate as he quite literally finds, in his voyage into a world he has never before imagined, that he has burned his bridges to the past in the process.

    A bit later in the film Marcy tells Paul of her sexual experiences with her former husband, who was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz and could not help himself from shouting, upon orgasm, "Surrender, Dorothy!"

 

                     Marcy: Instead of saying something normal like, "Oh, God," or

                                 something normal like that, I mean, it was pretty creepy!

                                 And I told him I thought so, but he just, he just couldn't

                                 stop, he just, he just couldn't stop, he just...couldn't stop.

      Without being too literal in its connections, After Hours might be said to be an updated version of that great American fantasy, wherein Hackett becomes a desperate Dorothy after a whirlwind taxi ride that ends with his landing in a strange new place where everything he knows is turned upside down. In writer Minion's somewhat perverted and misogynist retelling of the tale, the witches are closer to man-eating S&M harridans with their flying monkeys represented by the SoHo vigilante mobs in search of a victim.

     The Scarecrow without a brain, the Tin Woodman without a heart, and the Lion without any courage are perhaps encapsulated in the one central figure, Paul, rather than split into parts. But the images of fire, air, and water which dominate The Wizard, are all here, in the mysterious references to burn victims by Marcy, Kiki, and Paul—who as a child, after having a tonsillectomy was put into the burn ward of the hospital with blindfolds so that he wouldn’t have to witness the misshapen patients—as well as Gail who wants to burn off some of the Papier-mâché  debris attached to his skin, and, of course, the first stanza of Peggy’s Lee’s famous song “Is that All There Is?” which closes the movie.

    The miserable rain-storm which Paul must endure and the overflow of the bartender's Tom's toilet, along with the numerous glasses of the liquid he is served and offered throughout the film clearly serve as reminders of H2O.

     And the wind’s robbery of his $20 bill early in the film, and the air-headed desperation of waitress Julie and the mad Mister Softee truck driver Gail (Catherine O’Hara) send us into the stratosphere of absurdity.

     Like Dorothy, all Paul wants to do, as he explains over and over, is "to go home." But having lost the $20 bill—his only cash—and having not even enough change to pay for the fare (hiked to $1.50 at midnight) for the subway, he is unable to escape, and is forced to remain in this world that seems, as Marcy has put it, "unable to stop." No one apparently sleeps in this Oz.

     If, in fact, the original Baum story is an allegory against the Gold Standard and the greed of the Wall Street millionaires, we recognize that Scorsese's story is also centered about the haves and the have-nots. The robberies taking place throughout this SoHo neighborhood are being committed by an unlikely pair, Neil and Pepe (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong), who are clearly just attempting to survive—although in Minion's satiric version, even they, like nearly all the citizens of this neighborhood, are intensely seeking art:

 

                                Pepe: Art sure is ugly.

                                Neil:  Shows how much you know about art. The uglier

                                          the art, the more it's worth.

                                Pepe: This must be worth a fortune, man.

 

     If art is money in this world, it appears that it is only through "art," in a creative re-envisioning of the world, that one can find a way "out," the way to survive. The trouble with Paul is that he has no imagination—in short no brains, no heart or empathy, and no moral courage—although, as in the original tale, he eventually proves that he has all these qualities. His ridiculous attempt to find an easy "lay" ends up in her death and his own entrapment. The SoHo figures may look ridiculous, but in their S&M outfits, their 1960s hairdos, and their Mohawk haircuts, they are at least attempting to remake themselves into something other, creating a kind of kitsch—or we might say, populist—art. In this world, Paul is nothing, like his almost empty apartment, is too bland to survive.

     The problem of the film is how the inhabitants of the brave new world into which he has stumbled will be able to show the normative-thinking Paul how to think, love, and find enough bravery within himself to hike his way back to 91st Street. 

 

      The SoHo-ites, through their very differences from anyone else he has met help him to open his mind simply in order to comprehend what his happening. When the entire community begins to suspect that he is the criminal who has stolen their treasures, he is forced to cunningly find ways to escape. The dozens of coincidences that befall him teach him to make connections and resolve contradictions in order to show him how in this world people are interrelated: the Marcy he meets and who commits suicide upon his sudden abandonment is the same Marcy who the bartender Tom—who offers to give Paul the money for his fare home—loves and who may or may not have been the same  “boyfriend” Marcy has told Paul raped her for six hours; Paul’s desperate would-be lover Julie is the same artist and poster-maker who has plastered Paul’s likeness throughout the area, calling him out as the villain.

     Helping Paul to find his heart is perhaps the most difficult of the SoHo inhabitant’s tasks. Oddly, this heterosexual runs from nearly every woman he meets, Marcy, Kiki, Julie, and later Gail, finding them all too strange and complex to remain with them for even a single night of sex. The promise of “romance” is made meaningless in his new environment. Oddly, it is the males who succeed in showing him what love and caring truly is. The bartender’s offer of money demonstrates a kind heart. The two Tom of Finland-like leather boys endlessly kissing on the nearby barstools also show a deep empathy with Tom when he discovers that Marcy has died. The man (Robert Plunket*) who Paul unintentionally “picks up” is ready and willing to be gently introduced by the stranger into the mysteries of gay love.

    If there is a Glinda in this tale, a Good Witch, it is the near-invisible June (Verna Bloom), who sitting each night drinking in the raucous noise and filth of the Club Berlin, lives in a basement apartment beneath it. Trapped by his inner criminality, Paul dares to return the Club which threatened to transform him into one of them, and for the first time employing his brain, opens his heart to the lonely and lovely June, communicating true sympathy with her through a shared cigarette and a quiet dance. Touched by Paul's seemingly inexplicable kindness, she takes him into her cavern, transforming him from a human being into an artwork that looks similar to Kiki's Edvard Munch-like image of The Scream. Of course, Paul, entombed by these layers of Papier-mâché (images of which are repeated throughout this film), is screaming out for help, but, when June covers his mouth to protect him from discovery, he is finally silenced. The robbers snap him up the moment June has left the room, Neil proclaiming the absurd truism of this world: "a television is just a television; art is art!"

 

    Undergoing another cyclonic voyage, Paul, now as an artwork, falls from the truck precisely where he has begun his journey, at the front gate of the company where he works. Like a mummy come to life, he cracks open his shell, marching to his desk to be greeted, like a friend, by his computer: "Good morning, Paul!" Surely he must ask—after what has had to be the longest night of his life—as Peggy Lee does in her song played in the film only a few moments earlier: "Is That All There Is?" Surely he will return, either in body or in spirit, to the world in which he was greeted by real human beings.

 

*After playing in another couple of small film roles, Plunket wrote the highly acclaimed picaresque fiction, My Search for Warren Harding in which the central character is a gay man trying to get more dirt on the love affairs of the so-called “worst” president in history.

     

Los Angeles, October 16, 2011

Revised Los Angeles, December 21, 2020

Reprinted in My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).