Clarence Brown | Flesh and the Devil / 1926

the island of friendship

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Glaser (screenplay, based on the play The Undying Past by Hermann Sudermann), Marian Ainslee (titles), Clarence Brown (director) Flesh and the Devil / 1926

 

On the surface, Brown's film, Flesh and the Devil is the perfect vehicle, it would seem, for the matinee favorites of the day, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. In fact, the two fell in love, so it is reported, doing the shooting of the movie and moved in together, planning to marry.

     Their love scenes are well done and, at moments—particularly when the two characters, Leo von Harden and Felicitas von Rhaden meet at a party, he attempts to light a cigarette, which she quickly blows out—are romantically successful, although Brown leaves most of the sexual action to the viewer's imagination. And accordingly, many commentators have dismissed this silent film as being filled with torrid stares and longing gestures instead of dramatic action. Certainly, if heterosexual passion is what one is looking for and expecting in the film, one will be disappointed. Garbo and Gilbert are beautiful together, but do not create a significant sense of sexuality, although a later scene in which Felicitas turns the communion wine vessel to drink from the exact place from which von Harden has just drunk, might flutter some hearts.

     They hardly get a chance, in fact, to declare their love for one another before Felicitas' absent (and previously unmentioned) husband returns, a day early, to discover them in an embrace. A duel is demanded, and the young military man easily kills the count. To protect Felicitas’ reputation the two men have agreed that the duel was the result of a card game.

     The scene that portrays the shooting, however, is for more brilliantly realized—shot as distant black silhouettes—than are the love scenes. Von Harden is shipped off by the plot to Africa for five years, pleading with his dear friend Ulrich von Eltz to take care of her in his absence: "When you know Felicitas better you will love her too."

     Hardly has he left the stage than Ulrich does get to know her better, marrying her. His gift of a beautiful necklace nicely encourages her into the relationship, as we increasingly begin to suspect that Felicitas uses her beauty to acquire other things than love. If nothing else, the wealthy von Eltz is a good catch.

     The film has begun with the two male friends in military quarters, von Eltz awakening and reaching up to the bed over his head to feel for his friend, von Harden. No one is there, and it is apparent that his buddy has disappeared for the night. Yet he is willing to lie for him when the role-call comes. He is also punished, along with von Harden, when their deceit (von Harden pretends to be sick) is discovered.

     Later, upon questioning von Eltz why he refers to a small island in the lake near their castle, as "The Island of Friendship," we witness a flashback where, with a young neighbor girl, Herta as witness, the two have exchanged blood, forging the lifelong friendship we have just witnessed. This long-ago recollection might certainly make us think twice about these two friends’ long relationship.

     Von Harden was to have remained in the legion for five years, but with Ulrich's help has been freed after only three years, and now returns home, impatient to resume his love affair with Felicitas. But the "happy" widow has kept information from him once again, failing to mention that she is now married to von Eltz.

     Discovering that news brings a kind of tension between the two, creating new difficulties for von Harden who feels he must now give up not only the love of Felicitas but the love he feels for von Eltz. All of this is helped along by the busybody priest who insists that Felicitas is in league with the devil:

 

                     When the devil cannot reach through the spirit, he creates

                     a woman who can reach us through the flesh.

 

     Gradually the great beauty of Felicitas is represented more and more in the context of an evil, creating an aura of misogyny throughout the work, an issue even more apparent in Sudermann's original text. As the film progresses and von Eltz increasingly suffers over the seemingly inexplicable loss of his friend, the perceptive viewer might begin to suspect that the two men's friendship is far deeper even than their youthful commitment to friendship.

     Indeed, Lars Hanson is nearly as good-looking in his performance as von Eltz as is Gilbert's von Harden, and their scenes together are far more exciting than the early romantic interludes with von Harden and Felicitas. It is almost impossible, moreover, to imagine von Eltz having sex with his beautiful wife.

     Gradually the tension between the love he holds for von Eltz and Felicitas leads Leo von Harden to suffer what today we might describe as an emotional breakdown during which he attempts to strangle Felicitas, witnessed by von Eltz as he suddenly appears in the doorway—not unlike the Count's earlier sudden observation of Leo and Felicitas's embrace. Another duel is demanded, and the next morning the two set off to their "Island of Friendship," presumably to kill one other.

     Regretting her intrusion into their former relationship, Felicitas runs toward the island across the now-frozen lake to demand they stop the duel, but falls through a hole in the ice before she can reach them. Upon seeing each other, the men themselves realize the stupidity of their behavior, von Eltz now suddenly perceiving the reasons for his friend's behavior, and von Harden perceiving that he should have admitted his past. At nearly the same moment that Felicitas drowns, the two men embrace.

     I know some might accuse me of reading too much into this film's male-bonded ending, but I cannot help but see it—particularly after reading the far-more homoerotic Sudermann work upon which it is based—as a statement of homosexual love. It is as if the script were declaring, "now that the evil bitch is dead, these two loving men are free to come together once again." The devil is clearly a woman who has come between these two male lovers. Once we grant that, we can well understand why Brown focused less on the early love scenes. They were clearly mere infatuations! These male’s sacred "island" isolates them from the love of all others.

 

Los Angeles, October 22, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2011).

 

 

 

Sam Taylor | Exit Smiling / 1926

without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Taylor (screenplay and with Tim Whelan scenario, based on a story by Marc Connelly), Sam Taylor (director) Exit Smiling / 1926

 

Sam Taylor’s 1926 comedy Exit Smiling (not be confused with Carl Reiner’s autobiographical work Exit Laughing) is basically a vehicle for the wonderful Beatrice Lillie, who as Violet plays a  theater company gofer who serves as cook, shoe shiner, dresser, ironing lady, and occasional bit player for the ham-acting theater troupe named the Orlando Wainwright Repertory Company whose members travel by railroad car through small towns throughout the US performing forgotten melodramatic classics such as Flaming Women (which might have been the inspiration for Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures).

      More than anything else, Violet would love to get the opportunity to perform the leading lady Olga (Doris Lloyd) who, as a flapper “vampire,” woos the villain acted by Jimmy Marsh (Jack Pickford) with words of love and a tango in order to save the play’s hero Cecil Lovelace (Franklin Pangborn), whom she truly loves. Alas, poor Violet only gets the chance to play that role offstage, saving the real small-town Jimmy’s reputation by solving a crime attributed to him; but still she does have the misfortune to fall in love with Jimmy, to comically perform his role in drag on stage, and to have her heart broken when, having been saved from criminal charges by Violet’s action, Jimmy rejoins his small town girlfriend at movie’s end. As film commentator J. B. Kaufman summarizes Lillie’s performance:

 

“...The story is constructed along lines of Chaplinesque pathos. It also allows for a series of comic set-pieces, designed to show off Lillie’s comic talents: absent-mindedly ironing (and destroying) laundry while pouring out her heart in a love song; rehearsing the new juvenile in his audition scene in a rural yard, surrounded by pigs and goats; romping through the company’s current stage melodrama in male attire when she is allowed to substitute for the missing villain; and—in the film’s climactic comedy highlight—waylaying the small-town crook by hilariously attempting to replay a seduction scene from the same play. Lillie’s comic skills run the gamut from subtle pantomime to vigorous slapstick: if she can’t detain the small-town miscreant with her seductive wiles, she can always resort to a flying tackle instead.”

 

      The entire cast, moreover, particularly Pickford as the naive East Farnham boy (the town name being an in-joke reference to Joe Farnham, who wrote the titles for this and many other silents) and DeWitt Jennings as the cigar chomping curmudgeon of a boss, Orlando Wainwright are excellent.

      Playing the role of the bland hero, Pangborn got his first major film role, in which he already displays his longstanding cinematic effeminate annoyances and nervousness. In the very first scene, in fact, when he discovers that the Olga is a no-show moments before the curtain is about to rise, he gets to express his theatrical representation of the title card: “The nervous tension will positively slay me!” And later, when Violet accidently falls into his train berth, he gesturally and facially responds to the words: “How dare you! I’ve never given you any encouragement!”

      Today, knowing the pansy character and slightly exasperated sissy voice of Pangborn we can justifiably laugh at his stereotypical character and even enjoy his repeating hissy-fits. But seeing him in a silent film, for the first time, we might well understand why the audiences of the day saw him instead of a kind of mean figure as opposed to someone who now appears to us as being closer to Jim Parsons of the TV series The Bang Theory, a bit odd for his hysterical overstatements of reality just as Parsons (also a gay man) is odd, and truly funny, for his expressions of nerdy insensitivity.

      Yet many audience members of the day perhaps had not yet encountered someone quite like Pangborn, whose oral delivery was essential in order to comprehend that his statement of possibly dying from the nervousness for having to wait for his co-player to show up was not to be taken literally but as part of a worldview in which even the smallest of difficulties were perceived as being of earth-shattering significance. That a woman might even momentarily take an interest in him becomes a shocking event in his totally gay consciousness. Clearly, the work’s 1926 US viewers hadn’t yet encountered anything so close to what we now describe as “camp” humor. And the movie was a failure despite the pleasures most critics, including me, take in it today.

      One wonders what audiences made of another possibly gay reference in the film when Violet, dressed as the 20s vamp, begins to lose the beads of her broken necklace, as they pass from her neck down the recline of her breasts through the rest of her body to drop upon the floor, quite literally expressing the idea of “dropping beads,” which in gay parlance means to either intentionally or unintentionally give aways one’s sexuality through the use of highly charged or coded words (see my essay “Dropping Beads” in relation to the films of Cary Grant below). In this case it would simply refer to Violet accidentally revealing her true identity, a concept almost underlined by the sudden vision of a cat playing beneath her feet with the dropping beads, as if to suggest another such metaphorical expression “Cat got your tongue?” If these visual clues were intended to mean what I have suggested, it is another early example of film coding, a revelation of meaning not available to the majority of the audience, but only to the informed and sympathetic few.

      And indeed, Violet’s secrets are now out in the open, as she is forced, as J. B. Kaufman mentioned above, to resort to a flying tackle to keep her man from leaving the room. I don’t know the history of the first gay term, but the second phrase was in use already in the middle of the 19th century and has become archaic since the 1960s.

     With such a large number of LGBTQ references, however, it is still the heterosexual pathos of the last scenes, where having saved her Jimmy’s life, Violet returns to their railroad car home to find him packing to return to his job at the East Farnham bank and his hometown girlfriend without a clue of the grand theatrical scene she has just performed in order to return him to the normalcy of his everyday life. In this tender scene the cat truly “does have her tongue,” with only our eyes tearing up over the event in sympathy for her estate.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Jacques Demy | Model Shop / 1969

early la la love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) Model Shop / 1969

 

I have love long loved Jacques Demy’s films, but I have to admit, from the start, that his first all-American production, Model Shop, is filled with extraordinarily bad acting by Alexandra Hay as Gloria, the girlfriend of our hero, George Matthews (an appealing, if also mediocre performer, Gary Lockwood), and the numerous minor characters, whose acting seems to be out of some grade C film. The only professional among them is Anouk Aimée, who played the original Lola in Demy’s 1961 film, and admits in this work that her real name is Cécile. I have to admit that she was far more charming and energetic as the Lola of the earlier film, but then she has since been completely abandoned by her husband, who came under the magnetic charms of the fellow gambler, Jackie Demaistre (played in the original by Jeanne Moreau in his Bay of Angels), and is here forced into the porn industry simply to survive and raise enough money to return to her young son in France.

      In a sense, the bad acting of this film actually helps it, in that it makes it far more like a Hollywood soap opera, taking it out of any realistic context, and allowing for the impossible series of events in which the unhappy, former architect (totally impossible to believe) Matthews suddenly falls in love with Lola. After seeing her for a few moments in a parking lot, where he has visited simply to see if he might get a loan from the lot attendant to help raise a $100 for his overdue car payment, Lola so catches the attention of our lothario-hero that he follows her to a Hollywood Hills house, from where he catches a glimpse of the views of Los Angeles that so enchants any of us who love this city. As he describes it later, it has helped to make him realize that he truly does want to become an architect, presumably to build all the beautiful high-rises we are currently encountering, and which many citizen organizations today are determined to oppose; Matthews would even tear down the Empire State Building and rebuild it in a red copper.

     Demy, in fact, in love with Los Angeles, takes us on a fabulous tour of the city of 1969, in which you could still find a parking place on nearly any street, and the entire city appeared to be in transition, a beautiful place that had not yet become developed. It is a lovely and quite delusional place, with tawdry bars and porno shops (including the Model Shop wherein Lola works), Los Angeles is presented as a kind of over-developed suburbia which, particularly when the lights come on, it might make you imagine you are living in a vast urban world that had not yet bloomed into its true existence.  Matthews’ own house, probably in the midst of the still active oil fields of Culver City or even further south, is not at all a paradise, but is a world of constant noise: oil rigs digging throughout day and night, airplanes flying overhead, and a general noise some interference of what might otherwise be described as normal life.

      Normalcy, throughout this film, has of course to be seen through a strange lens, wherein Matthews’ girlfriend is determined to become the newest Hollywood couch baby, ready and willing to sleep with anyone to make her way up the ladder into an actual film role.

      The diffident Matthews is her opposite, a man with a good education and a regular job at an architectural firm, who gives it all up because of his impatience at having to spend perhaps 10-20 years designing water pipes before he might get a chance to really proffer up a design for a building. Besides, Matthews, like so many of his friends, lives in the terrible times, when the possibility of being drafted to Vietnam is a daily horror—and before he can even quite talk about that possible disaster, he is called up to the draft board in his native San Francisco.

      After Howard and I had met and begun our long-term relationship, I too was called up, bussed off to Milwaukee and faced the terrible possibility that I might be shipped off to the war. Like Matthews, who fights with his patriotic father, I fought with mine, who traveled from his home in Iowa to Madison, Wisconsin in order to counsel me, since I had bluffed that, if drafted, I would leave the country. All I had to do was convince the military psychologist that I truly was gay—which perceive, evidently, the moment I met with him—and I was given a 4F, meaning I was incompetent for military duty.

      But Matthews is clearly a heterosexual, and once he meets Lola and stalks her, discovering her, again, by “coincidence” in a small shop which allows its customers to take revealing pictures of their clients in tiny porn-like rooms, he falls in love—who wouldn’t?

      Eventually, after spending some of the money he has finally been loaned to pay for his car, Mathews discovers her again, convincing her to share a one-night stand—although both, perceiving themselves at a kind of dead-end, wishing it might become something different. But she is off to France, and, quite gallantly, he gives her his remaining $75 for her journey; and she, a bit older and wiser, bolts on the first plane out.

      Matthews is left with nothing—his car having been repossessed and his girlfriend leaving with the young man who will help her transit into soap-bubble commercials—finally having to face up to his own future and the real possibility of death.

       Demy had already done all of this in his 1964 movie, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), which also ended with the wrong pairing of lovers.

      But in Model Shop, it simply doesn’t seem to matter as much. First of all, Matthews and Lola are older, and realize where they stand, as he bravely reports in a telephone call to Lola’s roommate: "I just wanted to tell her that I love her. I wanted her to know that I was going to begin again. It sounds stupid, I know. But a person can always try." If nothing else, both have now attempted to start over.

     And Demy, meanwhile, has found a new exciting love in the city which both these characters, he, and I so love. Too bad Demy can’t revisit the wonderful city as it exists today; perhaps he wouldn’t love it half as much, but I love it even more in all its shimmering truly urban beauty.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).

João Pedro Rodrigues | Odete (Two Drifters) / 2005

drifting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paulo Rebelo and João Pedro Rodrigues (screenplay), João Pedro Rodrigues (director) Odete (Two Drifters) / 2005

 

The two drifters of João Pedro Rodrigues’ 2005 film, are the handsome Pedro (João Carreira) and the hunky Rui (Nuno Gil), both total romantics who, as the film begins, are celebrating their first anniversary together, Rui giving rings that celebrate what apparently is their favorite song, “Moon River.” The film begins with their long goodnight kiss, as Pedro returns home to study for one of his college exams, coincidentally hearing on his car radio the same song, which is sung, in this version, in a rough male rendition as he drives off.

       Although that song may seem, at first, as simply a gay romantic adaptation of the Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard ditty, in fact, given that this heterosexual romance was originally penned by the very gay Truman Capote, its implications are far deeper. For, soon after driving away, Pedro is killed in a car crash, and the grieving Rui is thereafter stalked by a young woman, madly obsessed with Pedro, transforming what began as a gay-based drama into a study of what it means—or might mean—to be bisexual.

       The very same night another couple, Odete (Ana Cristina de Oliveira) is breaking up with her lover Alberto (Carloto Cotta). Odete, who works for a large supermarket as a roller-skating price-checker, wants a more permanent relationship with Alberto and, even more desperately wants a baby, obsessed with the idea as much as the actress Toni Collette is addicted to weddings in Muriel’s Wedding.

       Odete, a neighbor of Pedro’s, quickly discerns that he has died, and, without invitation, shows up at the wake, perceiving that the troubled lover, Rui is quite inconsolable about his loss and that Pedro’s mother is also deeply suffering. She not only intrudes, but, when the others are sleeping, steals the ring that Rui has given Pedro off of the dead man’s finger.

    Later, Odete not only attends the burial, but creates a spectacle as she jumps upon the casket, claiming a love between her and Pedro that simply did not exist.

      It is easy, and perhaps necessary, to realize that this woman is quite insane, desperate to become a lover to someone, anyone—particularly a handsome young man whom she, apparently, has previously seen only from afar and now in photographs. Yet, Rodrigues takes this madness for more seriously as Odete soon claims that she is pregnant from Pedro, and gradually convinces Pedro’s distraught mother that she will be bearing her son’s grandchild.

        Mad love and deep grief get all mixed up in this surreal story, as Odete also introduces herself to the suicidal lover, Rui, who strangely, through her imaginary infatuation with Pedro, helps to save his life as well as returning Pedro’s ring to him, and with that, restoring a restorative symbol of his existence.

     When it becomes clear that Odete’s pregnancy is what doctors describe as a hysterical pregnancy or, what we might restate as simply imaginary (in one scene, she herself discovers that she is not truly pregnant), she seeks to become her would-be lover, clipping her hair and, since she has now insinuated herself into Pedro’s home, dressing in Pedro’s pants and shirt.

      Ultimately, grief and loss meet head-on with madness and obsession when Rui and Odete come together, in the film’s very last scene, with a truly startlingly scene where we, as voyeurs, are forced to watch Odete (now seemingly reincarnated as Pedro) fucking Rui. In Rodrigues’ film it hardly matters whether or not this might be a real experience. Love is never what it appears to be. And the lovemaking on which the audience intrudes is quite inexplicable, as always.

      The very idea of “drifting” becomes something else in this film, where the needs of lovers are redefined by their obsessive desires. Love is often like that: people often seek out people who provide them with their desires, even if not always offering them what is best for their lives. Odete and Rui appear, to me, as a temporary solution to what they both desperately need, and perhaps, if nothing else, will sustain each other long enough to allow them to move on.

 

Los Angeles, July 13, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2017).

Juan Martín Simons | K / 2005

a bedroom trot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alejandro Andrade, Luis Gamboa, Roberto Quintanilla, and Juan Martín Simons (screenplay), Juan Martín Simons (director) K / 2005 [12 minutes]

 

K (Miguel Ángel Jiménez) seems to be a pretty tough character, known well around town as a man who can get you want you want. He passes quick drugs onto friends, exchanges cash in an open meeting place at a bar and makes love to the bartender, Nelson (Álex Quiroga), all within the first few moments of Spanish director Juan Martín Simons fast-moving short film, K.

       Presumably, with a name like K, the writers wanted to convey the possibly evil and certainly powerful hustler of Kafka’s tales. And there is something troubling and possibly dangerous, if not precisely evil, in this film’s central figure. Although he asks Nelson, also his next-door neighbor, to also meet up with him for sex that afternoon—it’s Nelson’s birthday—he is soon off for pickup in a car (Jesús Paglieny), evidently one of his many clients; and he seems to have a deal going with another of his friends for some hot goods fresh in from Thailand.

      But it’s the bi-sexual Nelson who really double-crosses K, who when K shows up for their appointed sexual rendezvous is still in bed with a local girl (Yanira Farray) who’s clearly convinced herself that Nelson belongs to her. And K, who has cancelled his attendance at a meetup that evening, nonetheless shows up to his client (Javier Campillo) and has a kind a S&M sexual engagement the overweight, heavily-tattooed man. Simons counterposes their sexual rendezvous, neither of which seem particularly fulfilling for our “heroes.”

      The next morning Nelson finally shows up in K’s apartment, having not been able to sleep all night, just at the moment with Nelson is about to go to bed. When Nelson asks him if we worked last night and even goes further to ask him “how it was,” K snaps back, “Like you and that chick.”

   Nelson agrees that both were just “routine,” but obviously there is a tension between them. Nonetheless, K pulls out Nelson’s now late birthday gift, the “hot stuff” from Thailand, a new pair of sneakers, a gift obviously perfect for the young man on the move. They quickly kiss, as Nelson, fed up with K’s droning music, puts on a disc for dancing, pulling up K from the couch as the two gently engage in a kind of bedroom trot to Jorge Aníbal Serrano’s “Loco (Tu Forma de ser),” gently kissing in a manner that neither of them was able to enjoy the night before.

    Despite the blockades both have put up to keep out others, their love has broken through, symbolized perhaps by the lock that K, throughout this film, emphatically pulls open to quickly let in his lover Nelson, while keeping everyone else out. These men surely prove that true love is wherever you find it, despite any limitations put upon it.

 

Los Angeles, September 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Todd Downing | The Underminer / 2005

the perfect image of a friend i never want

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Albo (screenplay, based on his novel), Todd Downing (director) The Underminer / 2005 [6 minutes]

 

We all know such a being, or least we imagine we know such an individual, someone who claims to be our best friend but has a remarkable ability to praise our every action through a subtle, undermining attack. “You’re so healthy, if you’d only lose weight.” “I admire your ability to drink so much.” The kind of compliment that slaps you in the face.

      In this dark comic short, Mike Albo plays both the self-infatuated, endlessly dismissive attacker and the victim of Todd Downing’s film The Underminer, a title which might work better if he were changed to “Darts into the Heart”—suggesting a kind of Cupid who has the wonderful ability to put an arrow into every little prick and pain you’ve ever suffered. But there I am doing precisely what the central figure Albo does throughout, complimenting someone or something while stabbing it in the core.

     I shall resist describing Albo’s rather loudmouthed onslaught as an abrasive method of acting and ascribe it instead to the necessary tone to his wonderfully obnoxious satire. Sorry. There I go again, compulsively praising what I find so difficult to fully enjoy.

     I mean, it’s not Albo’s fault that he doesn’t give his poor other persona an opportunity to say a word, interrupting even his attempt to describe the new puppy he’s acquired. I mean, really what’s a silly pet mean when you’ve got so much more important news to convey, such as how your friend’s former lover is so much better off now that he’s found a new lover, lost all that weight, and lives in a beautiful new condo? Sorry that you haven’t yet found the opportunity to fix up your dump, although I know just how hard to do a fixer upper in an apartment building where most people don’t even pay the rent.

     Not that it’s Albo’s fault that he simply not control his glossalaliac (I don’t even think there’s even such an adjective, although it perfectly fits him) fowl mouth, and demands people talk to him even while he’s on the phone. He’s one of those multi-tasking individuals who can hear every word he doesn’t want to while dishing another person at the very same instant, tongue out and ear plugged.

     Too bad that not all people are as passive as Albo’s other self in this little movie, who in real life would have turned heel at the very moment he began his loving harangue or even punched him out.

      But that’s the joy of having just such a friend who makes us feel so much like shit every time we encounter him that we’ve been forced to block his calls, lock the doors when we hear him tread upon the stairs, and refuse to watch another moment of his forbidding acting skills as presented in this short 6-minute silly camp monologue.

      I loved the woman at the end in the cerulean dress and coral beads, but my god did you see her "Bride of Frankenstein" hair?

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).