Anette Sidor and Jerry Carlsson | Längs vägen (Along the Road) / 2011

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R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli | A Wanderer of the West / 1927 [Lost film]

out with the boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Hoerl, W. Ray Johnston, and Victor Rosseau (screenplay), R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli (directors) A Wanderer of the West / 1927 [Lost film]

 

After a couple of years of trying to track down this film, mentioned by Vito Russo in his The Celluloid Closet, I determined to treat it more like a lost film, writing about it from others’ commentary. Even as this book goes to press, I am still seeking a copy, although some now list it as “lost.”

     Nonetheless, one can get a good idea about this film, which is perhaps not so very interesting except for its one major “gay” scene.

     Overall, this movie apparently is not at all interested in LGBTQ themes. The central story involves the attempt of a local rancher to take control of the nearby Lazy Y Ranch, which, as in the Australian film Rangle River (1936), controls the water rights for the local area. In order to take over that ranch, that rancher kidnaps the daughter of the Lazy Y, but the ranch foreman (Kermit “Tex” Maynard) manages to foil the plot and win the girl.

     The reason this film is of interest to Russo and other LGBTQ commentators such as me is one scene in which he meets Clarence (Al Rogers) in a bar. Clarence—a name often assigned to gay figures*—is described in an intertitle card as “One of Nature’s mistakes in a country where Men were Men,” assuring that the audience will be quickly able to interpret his reactions to the lanky ranch foreman. Clarence amply ogles the cowboy, prissily brushes some lint from his shirt, and, leaning on the cowboy’s shoulder asks, according to the title card, “I wonder if you’re going out with the boys tonight?”

     The foreman, after a quick double-take, irritatedly pushes the annoying sissy away.

    Without seeing the entire film one, obviously, cannot know whether this is simply a normative put-down, or whether it represents a more exuberant acceptance of “nature’s mistakes.” But the very fact that the authors and directors chose to include such a figure, presenting him through a series of frames, demonstrates, if nothing else, their interest in the “other.”

     The available pictures say more than words can express.

 

*According to the blogger of the British website “Streetlaugher: A Gay Cavalcade Comic Stereotypes,” Clarence and Leonard were names that signified gay characters in early film history. You might recall that in North by Northwest the villain’s devoted male secretary in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was named Leonard (the character played by Martin Landau, clearly in love with his employer Phillip Vandamm [James Mason]).

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Alfred Schirokauer | Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth) / 1927

in heaven

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reinhold Schünzel and Alfred Schirokauer (screenplay, based on the play Der Doppelmensch by Wilhelm Jacoby and Arthur Lippschitz), Alfred Schirokauer (director) Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth) / 1927 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Although Alfred Schirokauer’s Heaven on Earth is apparently still available, and was recently restored and shown for competition in the Berlin Film Festival Teddy Awards, this 97-minute silent film has not quickly made its way to the US; at least I was unable to find a copy to view.

     The story however is fairly transparent. Petty politician Traugott Bellmann (played by the co-writer Schünzel) is a strong critic of the moral decline of society in general, and, in particular, the local notorious nightclub “Heaven on Earth.” On the day in which the film takes place, which happens also to be his wedding day, he is appointed the president of the Moral Decency League.

    The same day he receives an inheritance from his deceased stepbrother, along with the very nightclub which he has taken on as the representation of societal evil. Not only does he now own the club but is promised a sizeable sum of money if he spends every night from 10:00 to 3:00 a.m. in the morning in his newly acquired “den of iniquity.”

            Suddenly his is forced to escape his seemingly endless wedding reception, deposit his new bride in their bedroom without so much as a kiss, and rush off to “Heaven” to keep the required deadline. Over the next few days, he must sustain his new “shame” in secret, keeping any evidence of involvement from both his bride and his reformer friends who keep calling at his flat in between visits from the club’s hot Negro jazz band, a bevy of Ziegfeld-like showgirls, and a performing monkey.

       Despite the film’s representation of the art deco designed club filled with the kind of faces that populate the art of the Weimar painters such as George Groz and Max Beckmann, the members of the club are apparently mostly heterosexual and the club’s activities are relatively innocent compared with the legendary general Weimar Berlin goings-on. 

        The film’s LGBTQ credentials are centered primarily around Bellmann’s attempt to escape being seen in the club. To succeed he is forced—somewhat like the politician in Édouard Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles (1978)—to dress in drag, during which he is continually propositioned by his lascivious father-in-law who is also the head of a major liquor distillery. One commentator describes Schünzel as “a chic female impersonator” in a film that functions as “a jazz age gender bend.”

        The film’s actors, other than Schünzel, include Charlotte Ander, Adele Sandrock, and Otto Wallburg.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

Curtis Harrington | Night Tide / 1961

loving a mermaid

by Douglas Messerli

 

Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director) Night Tide / 1961

 

Having already written about several of Curtis Harrington’s films in this volume, I queried a friend who had just seen a revival of Night Tide about its gay content, having myself previously read several comments that made it appear as if this film was exceptional in Harrington’s career for its lack of LGBTQ subject matter. He verified the fact that there was nothing about homosexuality in this film.

     But obviously that didn’t prevent me from viewing it, even if at first given its subject of a woman who believes she was formerly a mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson) who falls in love with a sailor, Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper in his first major role), seemed to suggest this was an entirely heteronormative work.

      As I began to watch this movie, however, I became more and more fascinated with the woman’s presumed delusion, encouraged, in part, by the role of a mermaid she performs in the carney show run by Captain Samuel Murdock (Gavin Muir) on the Santa Monica pier, where she also lives above the pier’s famed merry-go-round.* The mermaid has played a major role in the literature of nearly all cultures from ancient times onward, and was associated often with the siren—the myth this film embraces—who lures men such as Ulysses in Homer’s The Odyssey to their deaths.

      In Night Tide it is rumored by the merry-go-round operators, Ellen Sands (Luana Anders) and her grandfather (Tom Dillon), that Mora has been involved with the death two of her previous lovers, and they quickly warn Johnny of the fact after he meets Mora at a jazz club and almost immediately falls in love.

      I was intrigued not only by the long history of the mermaid through mythical tales and literature, but, obviously, by the more modern reappearances of the mermaid, the most famous of which appears in Hans Christian Andersen’s (who was gay or least bi-sexual) renowned story “The Little Mermaid” of 1873, itself influenced by the fairytale novella Undine by German author Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué.

      Why, I wondered, had Harrington chosen this strange myth in which to weave his story about the beautiful and utterly innocent sailor played by Hopper, just the kind of figure with whom you might imagine the filmmaker to have fallen in love? Even more strangely, although the couple are obviously attracted to one another, they seem to never engage is sex. Johnny’s visits to her apartment result with him even curling up on her couch to sleep, but he never moves into her bed.

       The movie ends with her quite inexplicably inviting him to go scuba diving, where she appears to cut his breathing hose, although he manages to struggle back to the surface, she disappearing from sight.

       Almost as in the Andersen story, however, there is a kind seemingly tacked-on ending where after that event, Johnny discovers her body back in the tank of the carney show, Captain Murdock later admitting to police that he had killed the other men who had grown too close to Mora. When he found and adopted the young orphan, he implanted the idea of her being a mermaid in order to keep her close, and later made her feel responsible for the deaths of her previous would-be lovers. Yet he denies knowing anything about the dark “Water Witch” (Marjorie Cameron) who also seems to haunt Mora’s life, and who Johnny has noticed several times.

      What was Harrington in his story turned into a filmscript trying to tell us? Was Mora secretly in a lesbian relationship? And what did she mean by loving the ocean but also being terrified of it, particularly with the strange almost coded message that rings out from her words: “I guess we’re all afraid of what we love,” reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s line from The Ballad of Reading Goal, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.” Like Val Lewton’s 1942 film Cat People there are some women who are inherently dangerous, despite Johnny’s intense skepticism of Mora being able to hurt him or anyone else.

    Upon further rumination I suddenly realized that the mermaid is the perfect metaphor for a transsexual, a woman who cannot provide her man vaginal sex (or as Bette Midler performing as the mermaid Dolores Del Lago boldly belts out: “The question before us is where’s her clitoris”), having her lower half covered over with fish scales. If Mora is not literally transsexual, she is metaphorically so, kept away by the man who controls her life and is willing to kill all others who come too close and might dare to undress her and discover her secret.

     The film made in 1961, in order to properly distributed (and even then it was held from general release until 1963) had also to offer a possible heteronormative ending, as at the close Johnny promises to come back and visit the true woman who pines for him, Ellen, who operates this merry-go-round of this movie.

     Harrington’s movie is not at all a horror film, but seems like one, layered with images that hint of darker meanings, accompanied by the wonderfully moody jazz score by David Raksin. Instead, it’s a love story that cannot openly speak its subject.

 

*Coincidentally, I am told that my friend Paul Sand actually lived above the Santa Monica Pier’s carousel.

 

Los Angeles, November 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Stéphane Marti | Allegoria / 1979

the kindest use the knife

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Marti (screenwriter and director) Allegoria / 1979

 

Experimental filmmaker Stéphane Marti was born in Algiers in 1951, and became beginning in the mid-1970s a director who critics identified as one of the major protagonists of “body art,” who, having studied with Dominique Neguez, dealt with issues of gender identity disorder and various views of the concept of desire. He quickly became a central figure in what was dubbed “the School of the Body,” as his films focused on the bodies of his central figures as they both suffered and explored their sexualities.

     Allegoria is truly an allegory about many things: desire, gay sexuality, the satisfaction of homosexual infatuation—and as so very many films of the 1970s still revealed, the failure to satisfy those sexual inclinations—which ended generally in dissatisfaction and death, symbolic and sometimes real.

       The bathtub bound, fully clothed Aloual (the Madagascar born actor born in 1952 and who died in 2014, who appeared in several of Marti’s movies) is already bleeding, suffering from the breakup or actual murder by his lover, a white boy, who as either broken his heart symbolically or actually stabbed him in the heart physically. Does it matter?

       The black man is bleeding and dying, a victim of love and probably as well social injustice, who even when his lover seems to return, both of them made up with facial masks of intense make-up and glitter, have destroyed the other in their relationship.

        Time and again, we see the dying Aloual, half clothed, falling down a long flight of public stairs as if he were is some Eisenstein movie, with a broken or stabbed heart, unable to continue his voyage to wherever he might have been going.

        Their love is replayed for us but ends, over and over again, with his white lover stabbing him, followed by the twist and turns down the Odessa-like staircase.

         Despite our desires or even Marti’s attempts to re-reel the tape as if it might provide an alternative solution, sex has resulted in death, eros ends in thanatos. That this film was released just a few years prior to the AIDS crisis is highly significant and almost visionary. Marti survived, but most of his characters died for love.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024).

Wallace Potts | Le beau mec / 1979

the sexual saturation of narcissus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karl Forest and Wallace Potts (screenplay), Wallace Potts (director) Le beau mec / 1979

 

For those in the know, Wallace Potts, who directed this utterly fascinating documentary on one of the first of France’s gay porn superstars, is best known for his numerous films of Russian-born dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s performances. His ability to film all these important documentary movies came about because he was Rudy’s lover and close friend for 7 years. A soft-spoken, intensely handsome US Southern boy, Potts wowed not only Nureyev, whose immense ego he was able to balance with his gentle southern drawn and refusal to see himself at the center of events. After their breakup, he eventually attracted the great cinematographer Nestor Almendros into his bed while Almendros while he was shooting Truffaut’s The Last Metro  (previously having filmed Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales” series, La Marquise d'O...,1976, Perceval le Gallois, 1978, and Pauline at the Beach, 1983, as well as Terence Mallick’s Days in Heaven, 1978 and François Truffaut’s The Wild Child  of 1970, and numerous Hollywood films.)

      The cinematographer Almendros also helped during the same period in filming Pott’s strange mix of a gay porn film and a truly revealing documentary into the make-up of his subject in Le beau mec, Karl Forest, with the additional help of François About who shot the great gay porn epic Equation to an Unknown, reviewed in these pages in the 1980 volume.

      Mixing recreated gay porn scenes with extant interviews this fascinating docufantasy, long available only on truncated VHS transfers (one of which I watched before I rented the new version), has now been reclaimed as a DVD restoration.

       Forest, serving as a co-writer, comes off sometimes as a brash, somewhat unthinking product of provincial France. He grew up in an area where the French underground had once inhabited, leaving their active rifles and ammunition in the caves. He and other boys behaved apparently somewhat like the boys in Italian director Matteo Garrone’s 2008 Italian crime film Gomorrah, where the young play with real rifles as if they were toys. Such behavior is seemingly always involved with sex, guns and sex being the standard associations in such sexually sublimated societies.

      Sex and guns become a major sub-theme of the film, as Forest joins the military, where as an officer, he refused, with some noted regret, to have sex with any of his military associates, terrified that he might be referred to in the strict system to which he was committed, as a faggot.

      The film early on asserts its significance through the deep sexual link between men and guns, with Forest, stark naked, sprawling on the nose of a large canon. Throughout this work Potts plays with the obvious sexual relationship between guns and cocks.

      Indeed, Forest willfully plays along moving on to other obvious sexual parallels as the self-willed porn star speaks often almost ironically of his life, keeping a slight distance between his role as a sex actor and an individual: “What I do at night I don’t do in the daytime. I see that film at night. I’m the actor.”

 

      Yet, increasingly Forest moves into a sexual world of fantasy with a bit a practical realism always embedded in the rifle of his constantly sperm-shooting life:

 

“I work out for myself, like preparing myself for other things. ….I use the mirror only to help me. When I see myself in the mirror I don’t fall in love with myself, shit no, if I fell in love with myself I wouldn’t be going to the gym.

    In ten years when the body’s gone I’ll have changed completely. But right now my life is dressing up and showing off and all that. …But right now, it’s the body, sex, and money.”

       Potts alternates these somewhat self-reflective comments with a large dose of open sex, something you can’t imagine even being possible today without it being described as pure porn. Yet we recognize this very sexy movie somehow as being also a kind of soft-porn eroticism. The director is able to manage this because of the sexual openness of the times, just before AIDS, and the irony in which Forest himself is able to capture his sexual allure.

        At one point, he states “What I really like is a well-developed boy.” And in the next moment he admits his sexual infatuation “Maybe it’s unfortunate, but I see people only for sex.” Moreover, unlike most later porn stars, hustlers, and sexual tricksters, Forest totally embraces his gay sexuality, admitting that “I’m a man for all seasons. I can do anything,” explaining that he likes to fuck, be fucked, to be sucked off, and move moreover into other sexual fetishes: “Yeah, I do fist fucking both ways, give and take.”

       Fantasy might be important--“Yeah, I have a ton of fantasies”--but he recognizes the dangers of where they might take him: “But fantasies are like playing with fire because sometimes when you let them out, they become disappointing.”

       It’s this honest sexual patter that keeps Potts’ film from taking all the lusting bodies of fucking and frotting too seriously. I truly don’t think you could make such an honest sexual film today, much like the next year’s Equation to an Unknown. It becomes so clear, in watching the entertainment that we have now grown so very conservative in the gay attempt to match heterosexual expectations that the raw difference this movie reveals is simply unacceptable.

       As I discussed with a friend of mine only yesterday, AIDS changed everything, politics behind it so that we can simply no longer totally enjoy our bodies, or the sexual differences between heterosexual caution and homosexual excess.

       Love clearly has nothing to do with it: “Yeah, once I was in love. As it turns out, he wasn’t in love with me. I was in love with a boy, but since he wasn’t in love with me, it didn’t work out. I don’t know why it didn’t, and didn’t try to understand why it didn’t.”

     Yet, even in this dreamscape of sexual abandonment there is a true comeuppance, a kind of inevitable sadness that we have come to expect in all gay films, alas.

     By the end of the film Forest is 27 years of age and wondering whether or not he is “sexually saturated.” And in the last scenes of the film, he makes love to himself in the mirror, becoming a true Narcissus.

      But then that myth was always been about the beauty of the body mirrored into a duo in which anyone might imagine himself (or herself) as the other. Nureyev, himself, was long rumored to have choreographed the striptease sequences.

    The great dancer died of complications of AIDS at age 54 in 1993. Potts himself died if complications of lymphoma in a Los Angeles hospital in 2006 at age 59.

       Vito Rosso was right, as usual. Beautiful gay boys are always destined to die. But in this movie we see the beauty of their sexual energy and the vitality of their lives.

       If you’re not squeamish about gay sex, Le beau mec is a film you have to see.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2024)