Hal Roach | An Eastern Westerner / 1920

east / west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank Terry and H.M. Walker (screenplay), Hal Roach (director) An Eastern Westerner / 1920

 

As some film writers have noted, Harold Lloyd’s 1920 film, An Eastern Westerner, directed by Hal Roach, is not his funniest, and, at moments, entirely loses its comic edge. But for me, that is just what makes this short so very interesting.

     The film does have some extremely funny sets, including a long scene where, forced into a poker game, Lloyd, with a perfect hand, leaves the table briefly, using his time to create a mustache as he gets drinks for his fellow players, checking out their hands as he serves them, and, confident in his winning, puts in all his chips—only to discover that the crooked player next to him has switched hands.

     An early scene in New York, shows Lloyd at a large dancing hall whose patrons are celebrating “700 cocktails before the probation hour.” The only thing that seems to be actually prohibited in this hall is “The Shimmie,” a dance with its close bodily contact was thought by many to be obscene, and was banned in many dance halls.  Warned several times for dancing “The Shimmie,” Lloyd seemingly cannot resist repeating the dance’s movements, often with the unintentional help of other patrons.

     Some of this film’s Western chase scenes are as good as anything in Chaplin’s early films.

     But some of the best humor comes from intertitle cards, written Frank Terry and H. M. Walker. Late to arrive home, Lloyd’s parents sit up waiting for him, the mother suggesting “Don’t be harsh on him dear. I’m sure he’s just at the Y-M-C-A”; the card provides her husband’s reply: “He may have started to the Y-M-C-A but they moved the building.”

     When the evil cowboy bully, Tiger Lip Tompkins (Noah Young) is introduced, the intertitle describes his as having broken 8 of the 10 Commandments, and as having “twisted” the other two—which, obviously, forces us to reimagine those commandments to wonder which two he might wanted or even been able to “twist.”    

     But in this film there are even darker elements. First of all, our “hero,” such as he is, is not the middle-class achiever, who Lloyd plays in many of his roles, but a snobby rich boy who tries to get away with whatever he can—the very reason why his frustrated wealthy parents pack him off to his uncle’s ranch in the west.

     We never meet the uncle nor have the opportunity to see the ranch. What we do encounter is a small western village where “you’re not allowed to shoot a man twice on the very same day.” Not only does Tiger Lip Tompkins pile up the bodies in his free-wheeling bar that appears to be more like a Berlin cabaret than a Western saloon; but he lusts after his newest employee, The Girl (Mildred Davis), who has only taken the job to help her dying father and her to survive. Tompkins locks away the old man until he will agree to give his daughter permission for him to deflower.

     Of course, upon his arrival into this den of sin, The Boy (Lloyd) immediately falls in love with her as well; but he’s hardly a capable foil—at least at first—to Tompkins’ violent and gun-toting crowd. Throughout the film, Lloyd wears a suit and tie which, despite the dust, seems unfazed.

      But even worse, when he finally does succeed in procuring the key to release The Girl’s father, Tompkins calls out what is described as “the Masked Angels,” a posse dressed in Klan like masks that seems to include all Tompkins evil coven.

     After escaping the evil “Angels” again and again, sometimes by using them as his own shield and, at other times, by diving into barrels, covering himself with sheets, etc., Lloyd manages to outwit the entire band, rushing after a train which he seemingly catches. The Girl who has also chased after him, cannot get aboard, and, sadly, watches her only salvation speed off to his own survival.

      But the final scene reveals that he has exited from the train from the other side and is awaiting her arrival. A bit like Chaplin’s tramp, The Boy and The Girl walk wearily, but deeply in love, down the railroad tracks.

      Of course, we know that, when he and she finally find their way back East, they will be greeted with open arms and allowed a large inheritance. This time Lloyd’s extravagant antics have not been able to save him from himself.

      And the myth of the two Americas, one a civilized, if slightly naughty world of wealth of privilege, the other of a wild, brutal and violent force that constantly needs to be contained, was repeated and extended even to comedy.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2017).

 

 

Guillermo del Toro | The Shape of Water / 2017

betwixt and between

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vanessa Taylor and Guillermo del Toro (screenplay), Guillermo del Toro (director) The Shape of Water / 2017

 

It is the early 1960s in Baltimore, at the time still somewhat segregated, and, like the rest of the nation, a city very much involved in the Cold War, in heavy competition with the Soviet Union in what authorities characterized as a battle for military and scientific superiority. These very real issues are simply the backdrop, played out in rather stereotypical terms, for Guillermo del Toro’s sci-fi based fantasy, The Shape of Water. Del Toro’s film replaces the military heroes of the day who typically attempted to eradicate outsiders in sci-fi films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and well-intentioned but intruding scientists such as those in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) with everyday figures—in this case an elderly gay advertising illustrator, a mute working woman, and her black cleaning-woman friend—who side with the monster and work together to undermine the power of both the military and scientific work, both now brutal forces at work to control the world.

     I also have always felt that the early 1960s represented some of the most repressive periods of 20th century history (despite even McCarthy’s terrible attempts to control thinking in the 1950s) and have written about it throughout my My Year volumes.

     Yet, I somehow resent del Toro’s presentation of suburban living of the period, particularly as represented by the villain, Colonel Richard Strickland’s (Michael Shannon) family. It’s difficult, at times, to see Strickland as the despicable villain he is meant to be—although Shannon does a remarkably credible performance—given that this man, who would literally prefer an America as a terribly “strict land,” is presented as such a stick figure of complete consumer capitalism, including his purchase of a brand-new Thiel colored Cadillac.

      As a counterweight to his simplistically constructed villains, however, the director infuses his everyday heroes with deeper complexity. The mute worker, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is given a complex background as a foundling with strange markings on her neck (perhaps suggesting some sort of violence in her childhood, which has also resulted in her inability to speak). Elisa, who fortunately can still hear and communicate through sign language, lives a rather delimited life—she rises early to get to her cleaning job at a government installation somewhere near Baltimore—but enrichens her hard-working life by taking care of her neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins), who has recently lost his job as an illustrator, who shares with her a life-long love of old movie musicals. Jenkins, worried about old age and the natural decay of his body, has some of the movie’s best lines including his early advice:

 

Giles: Oh! God, to be young and beautiful. If I could go back.

[Elisa Nods]

Giles: to when I was 18—I didn’t anything about anything—I’d give myself a bit of advice.

Elisa: [in sign language] What would you say?

Giles: I would say: Take better care of your teeth and fuck, a lot more.

[Elisa smiles and gently nudges him]

Giles: Oh no, no, that’s very good advice.

 

    The third of this trio, Zelda (Olivia Spencer), is similarly just as hard-working as Elisa, but also must cope at home with a lazy, non-working husband; she also translates for Elisa at the office and stands by her friend, holding a place in line for the check-in even when Elisa arrives late. 

    Each of the figures, unlike most of the rest of the secret research staff, share empathy and kindness.

   On the day in which the film begins, Strickland has brought in a strange container which holds an aquatic monster (Doug Jones) he has discovered in the Amazon, and whom he has tortured with a cattle prod on their trip back to Maryland. The “monster” has gills and a beautiful and colorful coat of scales, and stands, when not swimming, on his hind feet in a human-like stance.

     Other scientists, such as Robert Hoffstetler (the excellent Michael Stuhlbarg) want to study the beast and discover what he might reveal about survival which could help travels in space or simply in difficult environments, Hoffstetler, particularly, because he is also a Russian spy, and hopes to reveal what he discovers to the Soviets.

     But Strickland warns that the gibberish speaking beast is not at all like a human made in the image of God and hopes to simply kill the thing the local natives see as a god, vivisecting him to discover how he is put together. A visiting general agrees.

      Meanwhile, Strickland, who continues to torture the beast, suddenly loses two fingers as the beast strikes back, and, after bleeding profusely, calls in the two women to clean up his blood. In the process, Elisa views the monster through a glass panel and becomes fascinated with him; the monster himself seems transfixed by her, and they longingly stare at one another, recognizing something neither the military or scientific men have perceived.

     Before long, the two have formed an attachment, she bringing him eggs and signing the word for them, he quickly learning and communicating back the image. And when she accidently overhears a discussion of the higher-up’s plans for him, she becomes determined to kidnap to save him.

     Giles, however, attempts to dissuade her, but she will not bend, explaining her friendship with the water-living beast:

 

Giles: [interpreting Elisa] When he looks at me, the way he looks at me... He does not know, what I lack... Or—how—I am incomplete. He sees me, for what I—am, as I am. He's happy—to see me. Every time. Every day. Now, I can either save him... or let him die.

 

     A still reticent Giles finally gives in, as they plan for him to drive the get-away truck. The plan nearly backfires until, seeing what they are up too, Hoffstetler steps in, killing the guard who has stopped Giles’ truck. Hoffstetler also briefly blows a circuit board long enough for them to make a getaway. His acts will eventually cost him his life, but once again, del Toro suggests that even as a Soviet spy, he too is a kind of unsung hero. Outsiders are the ones who achieve the impossible in this film.

       By this time, most of the audience perceives where this is going, as Elisa falls in love with the beast she keeps in her bathtub—at one point even flooding the bathroom in order to swim with the aquatic creature in the nude, as the two make love. It may be a difficult to swallow this inter-species sexual ritual, but by this time del Toro has taken his fantasy into such extravagant territory that it almost reads as a cartoon; and, after all, the Creature of the Black Lagoon had his Rita, and King Kong his miniature Fay Wray!

      Like the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, Strickland, after first dismissing the idea that the “women wash up piss” could have possibly achieved such a miraculous kidnapping, he soon tortures a dying Hoffstetler and discovers the truth, ready to take out his revenge on Zelda before discovering through Zelda’s timid husband, where the beast is now housed.

      Warned by Zelda that Strickland is on his way, Elisa and Giles attempt to rush her beloved “friend” to the docks, which now filled with rain,” will be open to the ocean beyond.

      For once I’ll spare the reader from a complete revelation of the remaining story. Let’s just say if we’ve already gone beyond the credulity of most fantasies, we move even further into pure cartoonish bathos      Warned by Zelda that Strickland is on his way, Elisa and Giles attempt to rush her beloved “friend” to the docks, which now filled with rain,” will be open to the ocean beyond.

      For once I’ll spare the reader from a complete revelation of the remaining story. Let’s just say if we’ve already gone beyond the credulity of most fantasies, we move even further into pure cartoonish bathos, in which a human being finally transcends her bodily ties becoming one with the myth.

     If del Toro’s cinematographer, Dan Laustsen, beautifully captures the colors and, yes, even shapes of water throughout, costume designer Luis Sequeira deserves a special place in heaven for the creature’s diaphanous scales, and Alexandre Desplat’s music, as always, is a delight, I, nonetheless, am not as enthused by del Toro’s kind of fantasy. The director always seems to have one foot in the real world and other in the fantastical, making it difficult to comprehend his notions—always at the heart of his films—of good and evil. It appears that in a typical del Toro film, the evil is always the real world (or, at least, his facsimile, equally fantastical, of the real world), while the fantasy world is inherently defined as not only “good,” but preferable and better. In del Toro’s vision, it appears, there are no simultaneities, no inscrutable realms wherein good and evil might overlay each other and in which there are simply no easy answers. The imagination is always good, while reality is always bad, which makes our lives, I would argue, as impossible to comprehend or even meaningless, unless we are dreaming.

      These comments may be strange, indeed, coming from a writer who often scoffs at realist drama. But the problem, I would argue, is that del Toro’s work, like Gabriel García Marquez’s and other magic realists, lies in a world that is never truly honest, existing as it does betwixt and between. Lovely as the fantastical stories del Toro tells, they don’t truly have much to tell us about our own much messier and complex lives.

     As several of my friends responded, but “I want to believe in such a world.” And I respect that. But over the years I have grown doubtful of religion or myths, and this one particularly does little to satisfy any desire for any mystical order one might have sought. Even García Marquez’s earth-eating survivors, despite their ability to escape the patriarchal society in which they live, seem to have more humanity.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2018).

Pier Paolo Pasolini | Edipo re (Oedipus Rex) / 1967, USA 1984

look homeward, angel

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini (screenplay, based on the plays of Sophocles, and director) Edipo re (Oedipus Rex) / 1967, USA 1984

 

There are several directorial intrusions and flourishes in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of the Oedipus Rex story, but the most essential difference is that, somewhat inexplicably, he begins the story in the 20th century, with the birth of a young boy to a handsome father who is a member of Mussolini’s militia. The loving mother, Jocasta (Silvana Mangano) attempts to placate her husband’s immediate hatred of the child he feels is stealing the attentions of his wife, but without success. Perhaps these are, so the director suggests, the emotional responses of many fathers to their sons’ births—Pasolini is said to have “hated” his own father who also as a lieutenant in Mussolini's forces—and Pasolini is simply demonstrating his personal mythological link to the actual Sophocles dramas, the original "Mamma's boy."

      In any event, the film suddenly shifts to a Northern African landscape wherein, in ancient times, a child is being taken into the wild by a servant to be slaughtered. As in the Greek story, the servant cannot bring himself to kill the child, and leaves it to survive in the wilderness, with another passerby almost immediately coming to the baby’s salvation.

     The rest of Pasolini’s version is plotted very much like the original. But it is the Moroccan landscape and the amazing costumes by Danilo Donati that make all the difference, along with the strange almost ritualistic actions that the director imposes. This Oedipus (Franco Citti), growing up in the loving home of Merope (Alida Valli) and Polybus (Ahmed Belhachmi) is almost a spoiled young man, who, after hearing the terrible warning of the oracle, determines that he must leave Corinth.

       It is, of course, on the pilgrimage that he encounters the arrogant Laius (Luciano Bartoli), his real father. But unlike the original where it seems like Oedipus’ murder of Laius is the result of a sudden misunderstanding of the right of way, Pasolini presents it as a determined act of rage— perhaps in retaliation for the anger against all old men who abuse youth and reminds him of the Oracle’s legend—as the young Oedipus must battle and kill at least three other guards before attacking Laius. 

 

     By the time Oedipus reaches the huge palace at Thebes, accordingly, the handsome young man is already a kind of legend, and able to quickly do away with the Sphinx before marrying Laius’ widow.

      Pasolini, casting one of his favorite young “toughs,” Citti as Edipo, shows the young man almost as a child at play in his role of King, donning a preposterously imitation beard that seems to mock the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar, while obviously sexually satisfying the still-beautiful queen, who just happens to be his own mother. As The New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed when Pasolini’s film was first shown in the US in 1984, the actor “has the rough good looks of a boxer, but the performance is so stolid that when the camera comes in for a tight close-up of his eyes—as it frequently does—one sees only a pair of disembodied eyes.  

     The rudimentary stone palace set against a hostile desert landscape seems to reiterate the same message that someday this whole edifice, a prop of the greatest proportions, may suddenly collapse back into the sands from which it has sprung. All it takes, of course, is the appearance of Tiresias (Julian Beck) to begin Corinth’s downfall, ending in death and a blindness that is, perhaps, not so very different from the arrogant young man’s insistent innocence of his own destiny.

      If Pasolini’s telling of the great drama, at times, is utterly cold, so too are the rituals which its heroes are asked to play out. Despite the director’s general delight in his films of demonstrating the carnality of life, here the characters never truly strike fire, despite the innocent perversity of their acts.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).

 

Howard Hawks | Fig Leaves / 1926

after the fall

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton (screenplay, based on a story by Howard Hawks), Howard Hawks (director) Fig Leaves / 1926

 

The great US director Howard Hawks’ silent film Fig Leaves of 1926, his second feature, theatrically seems a bit like a combination of the worst of the numerous Hollywood chauvinistic domestic comedies of the next several decades and milder version the back-biting “women who pretend to be friends” films such as George Cukor’s The Women (1939). Indeed, like The Women this earlier black-and-white film includes a fashion show during its second half in technicolor, although in this case those scenes have apparently been lost, now screened on reels without the colored effects.

   On top of these rather unpleasant Hollywood tropes, Hawkes’ narrative bookends its modern-day characters as cartoon-like Adam and Eve figures yukking it up over incidents and jokes that even the 1960-1966 TV series The Flintstones might have tossed out, such as Eve carrying on a gossipy conversation with the snake and Adam reading the daily stone tablet newspaper about the warring brothers Abel and Cain. Coconuts are hurled into heads and a pet brontosaurus naughtily eats the couple’s favorite tree in their front yard. And, of course, Eve doesn’t have even a decent fig leaf to wear for an evening outside the garden!

     As a contemporary couple, Adam Smith (the beefy George O'Brien) is a successful plumber and his wife Eve (the willowy beauty Olive Borden) is still frustrated for not having a good dress or hat to wear in her closet, a problem she discusses at great length with her serpent-toothed neighbor Alice Atkins (Phyllis Haver), who also finds Adam quite attractive and invites him over one evening to fix her lamp and share a few glasses of cognac, obviously arousing the jealousy of her “friend” Eve.

     To balance out the sexual stereotypes of the domestic couple and their intrusive neighbor, Hawks and his writers Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton add several layers of gay-bashing, first when Adam and his oafish co-worker Eddie McSwiggen (Heinie Conklin) take turns playing husband and wife as they test out the proper response Adam should have when Eve begs for money for a new hat, coat, or dress; the sashaying female who approaches the male should evidently be properly beaten or at least seriously throttled in response to her request, suggests Eddie, as the two again rehearse the inevitable scene. But when it really happens, Adam melts with the first bat of Eve’s eyes, handing her enough money to buy herself a new hat.

     While out shopping for that hat, however, Eve is slightly nipped by a passing auto and finds herself in the gutter at the very moment a city cleaning machine passes as it waters drown the street and the fallen woman in its path.

     The car belongs to the king of king of haute couture Josef André (George Beranger), a cinema pansy of the sort we later encounter in the Fred Astaire movie Top Hat (1935) in the character of Alberto Beddini, a man who seeks out every beautiful woman’s body, not to make love to them but to dress them up in rolls of satin, taffeta, tulle, and gauze. Out riding with his equally effete friend (William Austin), the two simply have no choice but drag the wet urchin into their Fifth Avenue salon and whip up a total new wardrobe around her torso dedicated to “Spring,” reminding me of the hilarious fashion designing scene of Funny Face in which design mavin Kay Thompson demands her staff “Think Pink.”

     There is only so much a Hollywood pansy can do, however, with a hand-on-the-hip look of effeminate grandeur and disdain; and this movie demands what appear to be hours of such poses of hauteur that quickly grow stale, particularly when later in the film—after the couple has almost split up  over Adam’s attentions to Eve’s neighbor—Adam visits André’s salon to buy his wife a new dress to make up with her, which, of course, requires him and his comedic partner to further mock the same poses. Never since has a movie spent so very much time exploring how a “stock” gay man might be portrayed on film!

     By that time, moreover, Eve has become, without Adam knowing it, a regular model for André and, as the pièce de résistance of the afternoon, she so shocks her husband that he determines finally to leave her for good. Having appeared “half naked” in public and evidently caring more about clothes than his love and determination to provide for her, what is an old-fashioned chauvinist to do but to run, leaving the money in his account for her silly pleasures!

     Given the growing sexual liberation of the mid-1920s you might have thought Eve would have flapped her way to freedom, but this is still Hollywood, even if pre-code, and moral compunction demands that she slug it out with her loving pansy, and trot back home to meet up with her still loving and eventually forgiving thug Adam to attend the slewing party of Abel and Cain, presumably a coded message to the film’s heterosexual audience that they’re planning to take in a boxing match that evening where Eve can feel comfortable in any old fig leaf or leopard skin she owns.

     This work cannot be said to be in the celluloid closet, but rather is a kind of public shouting rant against feminist, gays, and anyone else who might stand in the way of the normalcy of the everlasting American Stone Age.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2021

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

 

 

Sam Taylor | For Heaven's Sake / 1926

soul kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ted Wilde, John Grey, and Clyde Bruckman (screenplay and story), Sam Taylor (director) For Heaven’s Sake / 1926

 

Harold Lloyd’s For Heaven’s Sake (1926) is a film one might describe as representing a series of felicitous accidents, the kind that Lloyd and Buster Keaton were known for. While the worlds of Chaplin’s the Tramp often collapsed upon him resulting in his constant adventures on the road and near endless hunger while being chased by bullies and police who eventually put him away in jail, the whole world might fall down upon Keaton’s sad figures without brushing a hair on his head. A bit like superman, Lloyd was able to leap tall buildings, turn the police on the run with a simple look in the other direction, and survive a beating without even knowing it was taking place.

     In Sam Taylor’s film his character Harold Manners, who has just purchased a new car to match his white pants, totals two new autos in the same day, the first simply by a fluke of chance, the second through its being usurped by the police in chase of a vicious gang on the run, and, finally, a locomotive charging into it as Manners gets out to check on the damage the bullets have caused. Of course, if one had, like Manners, an “unlimited” income, perhaps the world would  cease to be troublesome too.

     In fact, Manners proceeds throughout the rest of this film to move smoothly from his mansion and club in the best part of town into the depths of skid row without a blink, unintentionally setting fire to Brother Paul’s and daughter Hope’s coffee and doughnut stand from where they spread the word of God through deeds, buying them a new mission by the stroke of a pen upon his checkbook.

      Horrified that his name might be associated with a good deed, he hurries back to the slums to insist they remove his name from his unintentional gift, only to once again, through the evil intentions of a pool hall gang, to slip and sail into the face of the beautiful Hope, with whom he immediately falls in love.

   Before you can say “Hallelujah,” he and Hope have been put in charge of a special mission celebration, for which the love-smitten Manners gathers up the neighborhood pool-hall sinners in a way that even Damon Runyon’s Sky Masterson could not have imagined in Guys and Dolls. The calm-headed Manners simply gets every red-blooded brute in the territory so mad at him that they chase him up and down the streets, gathering up more and more of them on his way back to the mission house. Once in, Hope serves ups coffee and newly baked cakes while he promises them stories that are better than anything the daily news has to offer, and they’re hooked.

     The one pool-hall hold out, Bull, arrives to battle it out with him. But once again, while trying to rustle up some further hymnals, Manners manages with pratfall timing to tame the beast with flipping chalk-boards, loose planks of a table, and swinging light figures that forces even the meanest man in the bunch to pronounce: “Fellers, if this guy can preach like he can hit, it’s gonna be tough season for Satan.”

      In no time at all, he develops a regular congregation, finds jobs for some of his followers, and generally makes new friends of these toughs while courting the beautiful Hope, finally asking her to marry him as they lay on a tar beach under a crescent (laundry) moon.

     Uptown, however, his all-male club members worry about his sanity in giving up their company for a lowly mission girl, and determine to kidnap him in order to bring him back to his senses. Clearly, this all-male shrine doesn’t take well to Manners’ heterosexual bent along with the he-men company he keeps.

       Yet it is precisely the rude mechanicals, now all functionaries to his wedding, who remain the most loyal to him. Shocked by seeing him driving away in their car, they track him down in his old club hoping to retrieve him. But in the meantime, in their utter disappointment for his seeming abandonment, they have spent the morning drinking, and are now too drunk to do anything but save him by causing mayhem in a world of pristine order.

       To get them back to the wedding on time, Manners must shepherd his irascible flock through various hilarious adventures via taxi, trolley, bus, and auto back to the mission house showing up just in time to say “I do” and drop his bride’s ring onto the tail of the mission cat.

       Throughout all of this Manners has acted as a perfectly effete and myopic being who seems to be blind to everything but Hope’s pretty face. Except for his focus on returning his wedding party to the celebration, he seems not to have registered a single being or event among the numerous comic encounters the film catalogues. If he’s made a grand transformation in his voyage from the very best part of town to the world on the wrong side of the tracks—the dichotomy posed by the narrative itself—we’ve been privy to very little evidence of it. When and how did such a seemingly effeminate elite suddenly become an everyday man? Or, to put it another way, when did the series of “accidents” he encounters become intentions.

      For evidence of that we must recall, I argue, a very seemingly inconsequential event early on in this story, another kind of accident but of the very least importance despite the fact that the narrative spends a rather long time on it, particularly given the almost ceaseless forward rhythm of most of the rest of the film.

      When he first arrives at the mission, a thief having just emptied the contents of a women’s purse is left with a power puff and a small vial of perfume. To rid himself of these meaningless pieces of evidence he slips them into Manners’ pocket as our “hero” enters the mission. As Manners sits down next to a skid row denizen awaiting the appearance of Hope serving her newly cooked doughnuts and cakes, we notice that the vial of perfume breaks.

 

     Slowly, both men get a whiff the perfume, assuming that its fragrance is coming from the body of the other. In this early moment of this film, we see both men attempt to weigh the meaning of their olfactory sensation, checking each other out with some sense of curiosity, almost as if the perfume might naturally draw them sexually to the other, and if so, what that might mean. Both coyly smile as they ponder the implications. Finally, seeing the broken vial dripping from his pocket to the floor, Manners also discovers the power puff, which, when he pulls it out of his pocket, the other notices it also with a sort of recognition of inevitability on his face as if to say “it stands to reason that a man so well dressed and groomed might be of that kind.”

     Manners tosses the powder puff away, but it lands, so we observe, on the plate of Hope’s freshly baked cakes, which, when she offers them to Manners, he takes up the puff now mistaking it as a cake and begins to chew.

 

     It’s not only distasteful, but quite inedible, and you can see on his face the possibility that his newly beloved female might not be such a very good cook if he were to make her his wife. Yet despite the inedible thing stuffed into his mouth, Manners politely repeats his attempt to chew.

      It is almost as if he is eating up that inedible something in his past, determinedly swallowing that for which he no longer has an appetite. Love has strangely found a way to his heart with the rejection of his stomach. All the metaphors usually applied to heterosexual love have been reversed as Manners purposely rids himself of his apparently feminized past, almost playing out a battle between his sexual identifications, past and present.

    It’s a subtle scene, and seemingly out of place in this fast-moving mostly physical comic work, a piece of cinema more about machines and bodies than about the inner workings of the mind and heart. But it’s crucial if you want to make sense of how the milquetoast Manners might survive in the imaginary frames in our mind after the film goes dark.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).