Salvatore Samperi | Ernesto / 1979, USA 1983

now you are my age

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Alberti, Amadeo Paganini, and Salvatore Samperi (screenplay, based on the fiction by Umberto Saba), Salvatore Samperi (director) Ernesto / 1979, USA 1983

 

Italian filmmaker Salvatore Samperi’s feature Ernesto has to be one of the most ravishingly beautiful LGBTQ films ever made, as well as one of the most complex portrayals of a young gay boy on the cusp of adulthood; and for those very reasons it may also be one of the most frustrating of queer movies. In the Trieste post-World War I environment of this work there are no happy endings for the titular hero of this tale, Ernesto (the breathtakingly beautiful Martin Halm), for his first older lover, a day laborer who is given no name (Michele Placido), or for the even younger boy Ernesto later seduces—or who seduces Ernesto, depending on your interpretation of events—Ilio (played in drag by Lara Wendel).

     Working as a managing assistant and accountant for his wealthy Jewish uncle Giovanni (Francisco Marsó), in whose home he also lives along his mother (Virna Lisi) treated almost like a servant for her transgression of marrying a gentile who has abandoned her and the son, Ernesto is a seemingly precocious child who has early on recognized his own sexuality agreeing, soon after hiring him, to meet a laborer for a sexual encounter.

     The handsome hirsute worker is delighted for the opportunity, which Ernesto delays simply out of the fear of the pain that might result from his first anal penetration—a topic, to my knowledge never previously openly discussed in film before the date of this work’s release 1979. (It briefly becomes a topic in 1998’s Edge of Seventeen).

    By the time they actually reconnoiter, the stableman (as the script labels him) has already fallen in love with the boy and elaborately discusses with Ernesto not only his love but how he will refrain from hurting him, allowing the Ernesto to stop the process at any time if begins to hurt too much. The two meet up several times after, the worker even purchasing from his paltry pay of 1 florin a day, sweets and the 1911 version of Vaseline for his young lover.

      For his part, Ernesto appears to be a kind of rebel, insisting that he is a socialist—admittedly to irritate his hated employer—and blithely ignoring his uncle’s demands and admonitions. When his uncle determines to give up smoking, he absconds with the cigar case, presenting it as a gift to his lover. And when his uncle chastises him for having taken a hackney on his way to collect a company debt, he accepts Giovanni’s walking stick as a sort of gift to help him move about town in the manner which his uncle has demanded—on foot.

      There is, in fact, a great deal of humor throughout the early part of this film with regard to Ernesto’s endless posturing as he pretends to obey yet utterly ignores the rules set up around him not only by his uncle and aunt, but by his ex-school companions—Ernesto has clearly dropped out of school in order to work at his uncle’s warehouse—who keep insisting that their virginal friend must find a woman or, at the very least, visit a prostitute.

     Ernesto is almost charming in his often smug disobedience of societal conventions, appreciating a similar action by his older friend who, when after Ernesto has been in bed ill for a few days—a condition triggered by his over-consumption of alcohol with those same schoolboy friends—the worker visits him at home bearing a message purportedly from the warehouse, but actually simply seeking an opportunity to make contact with his younger lover.

      Soon after, the boy attempts to show off his older lover in a kind of public outing as the worker accompanies him on a boat which he has rented. But mostly, Ernesto ignores his friend, giving little evidence of their romance, despite the fact that he intensely shares eye contact with another nearby boater, whom we later recognize to have been Ilio. If Ernesto may seem to be flaunting convention in his public outing, we also recognize that he has chosen a location, as they skim across the waters, in which no one might truly recognize them.

      In fact, we quickly begin to doubt the boy’s rejection of the norms. When he overhears a discussion his uncle has with a relative that a business colleague has been discovered to have been having a secret affair with his male servant, the gossip suggests that under the circumstances such a man has only one way of redeeming oneself from the public scandal, to kill himself, which evidently the man had already accomplished.

     Upon overhearing this, the young rebel hesitantly determines finally to visit the lovely prostitute he has seen leaning from her window; yet, interestingly, he does not return even though, having paid her far too much for her services, she insists she will keep his money for payment of further visits.

       Finally, Ernesto reveals his true commitment to the status quo when, arranging for one last meeting with the day laborer, he demands that they turn the tables so to speak, the boy fucking his older friend instead of receiving his attentions. The worker has become so enamored with Ernesto that he agrees to what surely must, within his working class codes, seem demeaning. Pulling down his pants, he leans over the piles of sacks he and his friends have spent their lives unloading, to await the boy’s penis. By the time he looks around to witness his lover’s face, Ernesto has disappeared, never to return.

      Unable to face the sexual situation that he himself has helped to create and certainly enjoyed, he delivers a letter to his uncle announcing his resignation from the job. Long committed to playing the violin, Ernesto is now determined to devote himself to further studies or perhaps even teaching younger pupils.

     Furious with the turn of events, Giovanni demands a meeting during which they share a conversation that is crucial to our outstanding of the events that lie ahead. The angry uncle rushes up the stairs to his nephew reprimanding him for trying to “teach him something”: “You can’t teach me anything!” he shouts.

       When he calms down, he asks the boy whether or not he wants to leave because he feels “trapped here,” a statement with which the boy concurs. Pacing, his uncle acknowledges that he too feels trapped. “And I hate everything in here. The letter book. The sacks. The apprentice. ...I’ve been stuck here for 40 years.”

       “Why didn’t you go?” asks his nephew.

      “Go where? Where does one go?” He admits he has long been playing the stupid boss, allergic to mothballs and cigars, just to amuse Ernesto. What does the boy want to do with his life?

       “Things that would surprise you,” argues Ernesto.

   Becoming a violinist? The uncle doubts his success, suggesting that after his travels and his adventures he will come back.

          “What would you do if you were my age?”

        “I forgot, when you’re young you’re sure of yourself. Don’t worry, you’ll come to a halt all too sudden. Perhaps sooner than you think.”

        In some respects, it is a commonplace discussion played out in hundreds of such conversations between the generations. But in this instance, with the older and bitter man facing the handsome, white-suited boy of so many talents it appears to be particularly bitter, in part because we now recognize that Ernesto is not truly a rebel, and cannot survive as a being working out of the system.

       The whole scene recalls, to some extent, the work of another Italian writer, Alberto Moravia, whose book in the hands of director Bernardo Bertolucci became a study of another young man who grew up in an environment which did not conform to the society and later became a nearly desperate “conformist” before finally having to face the implications of his rejection of the past.

     In Samperi’s interpretation of Umberto Saba’s fiction we almost feel, after this bleak prognostication of the hero’s future, that Ernesto may indeed escape normative life, particularly when, at a violin concert, he meets the beauty Ilio who hires the older boy to teach him violin, while simultaneously seducing him into his bed.

        Given the freedom this child of 13 is allowed by his doting mother and father, it appears that Ilio and Ernesto’s relationship might have been easily permitted until  the younger boy was of age, and might have developed into something that would free both of them from the ever tightening coils of this dying society.

       The problem is that Ilio also has a twin sister, Rachele (also played by Wendel) who knowing what is going on between Ilio and Ernesto, determines to also seduce the violin teacher. Somewhat as in Harold Prince’s film Something for Everyone—a film released coincidentally the very same year as Bertolucci’s The Conformist—the ménage à trois might have succeeded, particularly since, as the twins insist, they used to dress up in each other’s clothes successfully eluding the detection of even their parents on every occasion.

      Yet as the elder Luzzatis begin to notice the interest of their daughter in the good-looking violinist, they take things into their own hands, and—before any of the three younger beings can work out the tensions involved in their shifting relationships—determine to announce their permission for Ernesto and Rachele to marry.

     The spin of events immediately wins the approval of Ernesto’s family, the Wilders recognizing that the Luzzatis represent more wealth and aristocratic credentials than do they, and accordingly they further push Ernesto into the whirl of parental ambitions.

     As he is about to be driven away in an open carriage to the party, Ernesto is met by his earlier lover who humbly greets him, “Ernesto, how are you?” Ernesto pretends not to know him, handing him a florin, which the worker, almost in tears, passes on to a nearby urchin playing in the streets.

     At the affair itself, the somewhat late-arriving future groom looks wan, seeking out Ilio who in anger has previously stormed off. He chats once more with his uncle who reminds him of the boy’s earlier question: “What would do if you were my age?” Giovanni continues, delivering one of the most terrifying lines perhaps ever spoken to a young man: “Now we are the same age.”

      A few moments later as the celebrants toast to the couple’s relationship, Ernesto turns away from them to look directly at the camera, closing the film with a ridiculous shrug of his shoulders.

      The New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder, writing on the film in 1983 when it was released in the US, argues “when Ernesto turns wordlessly toward the camera in the midst of his engagement party...[he]...indicates that neither marriage nor the years to come will subdue the rebel within.”

       For me, however, that shrug seems not at all to be an indication of his would-be rebelliousness but rather a gesture of his acceptance of fate, as if to suggest, “what can you do?” If I would like to imagine that Ernesto is hinting at an attitude of possibility as in “we’ll see,” given his previous actions we have witnessed he is what his former employer has confirmed: Ernesto is a conformist who one day as an old man in the future is destined to look back, like Giovanni, with regret for having denied his love of Ilio and the working friend both.

       Ernesto, like Clive Durham of E. M. Forster’s Maurice who lived through the very same period portrayed in this film, sacrifices his sexuality to societal acceptance and approbation. This young man will never feel the need to put a gun to his head, for he is already dead.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2020

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

James Broughton and Joel Singer | Hermes Bird / 1979

panegyric to a penis

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Broughton and Joel Singer (directors) Hermes Bird / 1979

 

The short films of James Broughton can be either whimsically charming or outrightly silly, the later occasionally even a little bit embarrassing. Broughton and his companion Joel Singer’s 1979 work, Hermes Bird most definitely falls into the latter category.

     One of his “Erotic Celebrations,” this 11-minute short, portraying a nude man in profile who stands perfectly still throughout the work as Broughton reads his panegyric to the male penis, portrays the Greek god Hermes’ bird—which, obviously, references the raised middle finger that signifies “fuck you,” and in urban street talk hints of a female whore or a slut. However, it also suggests, in terms of Hermes’ role as messenger, a kind of harbinger of his visit, a pigeon-like signal of his imminent arrival. 

     Hermes is associated with several things, including the boundary between earth and the underworld and, consequently, life and death. But generally, he is described as the messenger to the gods, who moves easily between them.

     Early on for those who worshipped him, however, he was also associated with the phallus, and represented a symbol of fertility, in particular for the male head of a household.

      Obviously, Broughton and Singer’s reference to him suggests their focus on the phallus, which as Broughton reads his poem, slowly and gradually moves from being soft to, by the end of the work, reaching full tumescence.

      Broughton’s poem is filled with Ginsbergian-and-Whitmanesque-like declarations and catalogic lists such as

 

                      “My soul ejaculates in time with his harp,”

 

and stanzas that apparently sing the cock into erection:

 

                       Firearm of my spirit, all that flows into flame

                       .................

                       He rises from earth,

                       He descends from heaven.

                       He is always prepared for paradise. [etc.]

 

By the end of the poem, when the penis points straight forward just before rising to a slightly higher tilt, the poet proclaims “This is the secret that will not stay hidden,” clearly playing with Wilde’s description of a “love that has no name.”

      But in the end, obviously, Broughton’s and Singer’s short is all a bit like a schoolboy joke, which the directors reiterate in their description of their naughty-boy tactics. Evidently a camera made to film the explosion of the atomic bomb had been loaned to the San Francisco Art Institute, which Broughton, a professor there, along with Singer used to film this piece, declaring that their work was “the ultimate statement of ‘Make love not war.’”

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2021 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

Rainer Werner Fassbinder | Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation) / 1979

monopoly

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (screenwriter and director) Die Dritte Generation (The Third Generation) / 1979

 

The Third Generation is one of Fassbinder’s most difficult works, in part, because it is a comedic rendition of terrorists. Rather than the dark, monomaniacal underground figures of film and legend, the director’s vision of a terrorist cell superficially similar to the German Baader-Meinhof terrorist group (Fassbinder himself knew Andreas Baader as a teenager, but later disapproved of Baader’s tactics) is quite the opposite. Here, the squabbling young middle-class members spend more time on elaborate modes of communication—reminding one a bit of Jean-Pierre Melville’s version of underground heroes of World War II in Army of Shadows (1969)—than accomplishing any direct acts of terrorism. 

     These young, often confused and always terrified anarchists—Susanne Gast (Hanny Schygulla), Petra Vielhaber (Margin Carstensen), Hilde Krieger (Bulle Ogier), ringleader August Brem (Volker Spengler), Paul (Raúl Gimenez), Rudolf Mann (Harry Baer), and Franz Walsch (Günther Kaufmann)—dance, fall in love, smoke endlessly, and, far more ironically, spend hours playing monopoly. The director, moreover, portrays their meetings with a jarring world of loud television intrusion and constant interruptive dialogue. There is hardly a moment in their lives of quietude and peace.

     Their relationships with others, some with the enemies they are seeking to destroy, are equally brutal and meaningless: Susanne works for the industrialist P. J. Lurz (Eddie Constantine) and is having a kind of S&M relationship with police-head Gerhard Gast, her father-in-law, who is protecting Lurz from possible terrorist attacks. Paul, a new recruit, assigned to stay with Hilde, rapes her, but immediately after becomes her lover. 

     Rudolf, who rents the largest Berlin apartment of the group, has taken in a hopeless drug-addict, Ilse Hoffmann (Y Sa Lo), whom the other group members insist has to go, blaming Rudolf for what they believe must be his Catholic conscience. As the group is called together for a meeting with the code “The world as will and idea” (a phrase from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer), they mill around Rudolf’s apartment, only to be met with further confusion as Ilse’s former lover, Franz, shows up with a clearly homosexual acolyte, a theorist-reading young aristocrat Bernhard von Stein. Rather than admire this young free thinker, the cell members mock him for his reading of Bakunin. Yet the evidently kind-hearted Rudolf accepts them generously also as roommates—again against the sentiments of the group.

      Fassbinder links their episodic meetings with sexual comments penned on Berlin bathroom walls. And, indeed, it appears that the coarse language of both the heterosexual and homosexual toilet statements is appropriate to the absurd sexual posturings of The Third Generation’s cell members: at one point a couple stand in an embrace while Paul masturbates to the television set and two women hold hands. 

      What this absurd group does not perceive is that their major supporter is Lutz himself, in an attempt to stage a coup so that his company might sell more surveillance computers. In short, the industrialists are supporting the terrorists in order to create a bigger industry for their own protection—with no Edward Snowden even on the horizon yet. As Ghast sickeningly pontificates: “Capitalism invented terrorism to force the state to protect it better.”

       Obviously, murder is necessary to create the proper publicity. Paul is shot dead in a Japanese restaurant, and the cell is forced to re-gather in order to find a way to financially survive and for the individuals to gain new identities. Petra and other of the terrorists rob a bank, the very institution in which her husband works. To escape she must shoot her own husband dead. Seeking new identities, the group hits up a government office, Rudolf so terrified in the process of the robbery that he pees his pants. But back at his home there is even more bad news: Franz’s Ilse has overdosed and is dead.

      Memorizing their new identities, the group scatters. Only the confused and totally innocent Bernhard remains to answer Officer Gast’s endless questions. But the policemen’s questions lead him to wonder where all the others might have gone, particularly his beloved Franz. Following August, he observes a meeting with the industrialist Lurz, who hands over more money for the group’s finances. 

      Having set up the newcomer Franz as the traitor, August tells his supposed comrade, Bernhard, where Ilse has been buried, while alerting authorities where they might find him. Despite Bernhard’s attempt to warn his friend, Franz is shot and killed. Gast makes certain that Bernhard is killed as well.

      August instructs Petra to bomb a location while warning the police of the event, where she too is intercepted. The few remaining cell-members, dressed in clown-like costumes, kidnap Lurz, who perceiving it still has part of his secret plan, willingly smiles into the camera as again and again, they attempt to tape his appeal to the world to be freed.

      What Fassbinder has established, clearly, is that the industrialist world and terrorists both need one another and are equally responsible for the other’s existence. Viewers in Frankfurt beat up the projectionist upon the film’s opening; audiences in Hamburg threw acid upon the screen. My friend Pablo, who introduced me to the works of Fassbinder, and who is a great admirer of his work, told me that after about a half-hour through this movie he got up and walked out, suggesting that he couldn’t even determine the character’s relationships; I suggested that if he had stayed for the entire film, these might have become more apparent, but I do sympathize with his feelings early on in the film.

       For me, this film, like all of Fassbinder’s work I have seen to date, was absolutely spellbinding, this one being a comedy that dramatically (even with its radically disjunctive leaps) reveals the relationship with power and those who might like to usurp it. It is after all, a mirror image. Monopoly is the name of the game.

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2016).

Mark Sandrich | The Talk of Hollywood / 1929

how to offend almost everyone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nat Carr, Mark Sandrich, and Darby Aaronson (screenplay), Mark Sandrich (director) The Talk of Hollywood / 1929

 

I truly doubt Hollywood wanted to talk much about this abhorrent 1929 movie after it was first released, or if they did talk about it surely it must have been with the same whispers and gossip to which the film distributors respond to the film within this movie, produced by its central character J. Pierpont Ginsburg (Nat Carr) who plays a Jewish film producer whose Yiddish idioms torture the English language, commenting to journalists, for example, that “talking pictures are in their infantry.”

      Soon after, director Mark Sandrich would feature a similar character in a series of shorts with names like Two Gun Ginsberg (1929), Gunboat Ginsberg (1930) and General Ginsberg (1930), so obviously this Jewish stereotyped figured became somewhat popular. Sandrich was born Mark Rex Goldstein. And at least the film producer of The Talk of Hollywood is fairly likeable, speaking of his dead wife with great love and encouraging his protective daughter (Hope Sutherland) to marry his traditionally handsome young lawyer (Sherling Oliver). In short, actor Carr portrays a fairly likeable human being to cover Sandwich’s crude comic Jewish “type.”

      The rest of this cinema-satire’s characters are stereotypes, however, mostly just to be mocked. They include a very swishy, obviously gay, leading man, Reginald Whitlock (Gilbert Marbe) about whom Ginsburg wonders, after only a few words leave the actor’s mouth—“Mr. Ginsberg I think audiences always love for the leading man and villain to have a horrible quarrel (almost rhyming the two last words)”—does he play the leading man or the lady?, soon after reminding his director “this is a drama, not a fairytale.”

       A moment before, after spotting a woman with lovely legs, Ginsburg responds that she has a lovely face and asks her to read her lines; when the girl stutters, he tells her that he’ll write her a dancing part, thus combining his male chauvinism with an attack on a common speech defect.

       A few moments later Ginsburg asks his black actor to repeat his totally racist script, which involves a cotton-picking worker returning home to ask about all his little “pickinninies.” And that’s only the beginning of his mockery of Italians, French, and any other possible immigrant type.

       The film itself appears to be a mishmash of melodrama, musical dance numbers, and black pastoral with a few love scenes in which the gay leading man courts the artificially French leading woman, the latter gaining Ginsburg’s approval through her flirtation despite the costs of her sleeping in beyond 3:00 p.m. each day and her lavish costumes.

       As if the stereotypes weren’t enough the script reads itself like a melodrama (“Oh daddy, how can I possibly leave you?” whines his daughter after she announces she’s been asked to marry her boyfriend, his lawyer, John Applegate) spiced up with a few one-liners, all performed as if the film had been stretched out to delay each response for at least three to four beats. At times you even wonder whether or not the second character will ever reply to the first. And the between scene blackouts seem to suggest that the film might have come to an end before the projector cranks back into action.

       Fortunately, Ginsburg’s first foray into the talkies suffers some of the same mishaps as portrayed in Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singing in the Rain (1952); in this case a drunken projection operator mixes ups the soundtrack so that the black racist lines are spoken by the leading man as he makes love to the leading lady, the black man rails on to his child about her betrayal, the rings of a doorbell turns into knocks, and as the hero lifts his gun to the villain’s heart, the gay actor Whitlock proclaims his undying love: “O adorable one, my beautiful angel, I’d love you on and on, on my honor, on my life, on my soul!”

      Most of the potential distributors leave the private showing in awe and shock, proclaiming how torturous it was to have to sit through the movie; but one sees it as a comedy in the manner of Woody Allen’s 1966 creation What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in which Allen takes a horribly awful Asian film and dubs it with standard Hollywood detective film jargon. The producer buys the rights and saves Ginsburg’s studio from going bust.

       I re-watched Allen’s film recently, and I might have warned that imaginative distributor that it’s still not all that funny and while watching it one still feels a bit as if one were laid out on the rack with the director yelling “stretch” to fill out the empty space between its reels.

      What is even more startling about this turkey of a film is that it was made by Sandrich, who soon after directed the major Fred Astaire films, The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937) and by the time of his early death (he died of a heart attack at age 44) was President of the Director’s Guild and one of Hollywood’s most respected directors.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).

Roy Del Ruth | The Desert Song / 1929

send in the clowns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harvey Gates (screenplay, based on the musical by Otto A. Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, nad Frank Mandel with music by Sigmund Romberg), Roy Del Ruth (director) The Desert Song / 1929

 

The film version of successful Broadway musical The Desert Song, with a book by Otto A. Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Sigmund Romberg, might have been the first talkie musical if the Warner Brothers executives hadn’t sat on the finished film for five months, allowing MGM’s Broadway Melody that distinction and helping it to win the Best Picture Oscar of 1929.

      I can’t believe, however, that this crazy concoction of a Moroccan landscape in which the Riffs are at war with the French and the choruses of Muslim soldiers back up the highly romantic ballads such as “Love’s Dear Yearning,” “The Desert Song,” and “Let Love Go” might have won any such award despite its great popularity at the time. 

      The singing by John Boles, playing the hero The Red Shadow, and Carlotta King as Margot is more of the turn-of-the-century than the Harlem jazz and other new musical crazes of the 1920s. If the “IT” girl is referenced, she hasn’t yet squirreled her way into this work. Although Myrna Loy is a sketch as the evil Arab native Azuri and Johnny Arthur is often funny as the whining news reporter Benny Kidd, most of the secondary figures clearly haven’t apparently yet visited an acting class. And the whole story, despite the pedigree of its authors, is a mess of genres and literary cliches.

       Imagine an early version of Lawrence of Arabia stolen from the newspaper headlines of a decade earlier, and then throw in the horror genre favorite of the dual personality like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, only this time the two figures represented by one man are a bit more like Superman and Clark Kent or the 1920 version of Zorro who was secretly, Don Diego Vega, the son Don Alejandro de la Vega, the richest landowner in California. If Kent is a kind of stumbling nerd and Don Diego a cowardly fop by day, then you’ll have no problem recognizing General Bierbeau’s son Pierre who is a sleepy, stumbling innocent who by night puts on a mask and red cloak and roams the desert laying waste with Riff followers to the French who treat natives like they were slaves.

        And, of course, since we are in the desert where this romantic hero roams, the writers couldn’t help but toss in a bit of Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik, who added to the stew of other stock figures The Red Shadow represents—particularly given the utter bore of the hard-working Captain Fontaine (John Miljan) who Margot is supposed to marry—makes it all clear why the woman finds the nightly desert roamer irresistible.

     It is Pierre who truly is in love with Margot, and it was her disregard for him that led him to join the French military contingent in Morocco. But when he realized how badly the native Arabs were being treated, he dared to argue with the former General and was beaten and hounded out of the military. His only solution was to create his own alternative army and to work against the very force that he once represented. Now his father has been sent to Morocco to destroy the man who he cannot imagine is his own son.

         Margot likes the awkward and dreamy Pierre, but sees him as more like a “sister” she declares, someone to whom she can tell all her secrets, instead of a potential lover. Besides she has already convinced herself that she’d be better off with the Arab villain than her own kind.

         In a sense, accordingly the play has already established the one face of the film’s hero as a “sissie,” while we soon discover that his other half, although far more masculine and capable of expressing heterosexual love, is equally a romantic, interested more in romancing a woman than in the modern methods of expressing love. As he sings of himself:

 

                                                  All my love is gentle

                                                  My appeal is mental.

 

       When he finally is convinced that she actually does desire to be symbolically “raped”—carried off on a horse through the desert—he kidnaps her not as she might imagine, riding a horse through the dark night, but in his own father’s fortress and takes her away not to some isolated tent, but to the desert palace, filled with a harem of Spanish women, owned by his friend Sid El Kar (Roberto E. Guzmán) where he treats her more like a Westerner might, as a woman who must make up her own mind, than as his Arab associates argue that all women should be treated—as a slave to be killed if she doesn’t live up to your expectations.

        We know from the first two marching songs “Riff Song” and French Marching Song” that these two will eventually march into one another’s arms and sing out their love until the final frame flickers black, the only element of intrigue being how Clark Kent will be able to reveal that he’s really Zorro without destroying his father’s career and bringing down the French military’s wrath. It just doesn’t look good if the General’s son turns out to be the warrior bandit that you’ve been trotted to out kill. But otherwise, the romance between Margot Bonvalet and The Red Shadow (aka Pierre and Marge) is basically a yawn-inspiring series of events.

     Send in the clowns, this time the secondary cast consisting of Benny Kidd the newspaper reporter who insists he came to the desert for his health but has actually been sent into this silly musical to save the day along with his secretary, Susan (Louise Fazenda), Benny’s protector and would-be lover—that is, if she can convert from being what film critic Richard Barrios describes him as: “Small of frame and beady eyed [Benny], Arthur often [seems] less of a person than a prissy rabbit nearing a breakdown.” In short, Arthur plays his character as an out-and-out Hollywood pansy, with a voice, Barrios observes, “so whiny that it probably caused early speaker systems to hum and buzz incessantly.”

     Since he is a major character, instead of simply a type who appears for no reason other than to establish that such sissies exist, by film’s end the writers and director have marry off Benny as well, even if his final surrender to Susan makes absolutely no sense. By 1935, when the Hays Code began to be strictly enforced the 1929 version of the film cut was no longer able to shown due to Arthur’s character and other sexual innuendos. A “cleaned-up” version was finally re-released in 1943, and another version was issued a decade later, but I can’t imagine how uninteresting those two films must have been.  

      Arthur’s Benny provides the major reason to watch this relic. In his very first scene, after falling off his horse into the bottom of a giant sand dune where the Riffs capture him, Red Shadow’s lieutenants debate what to do with their discovery. The scuzziest of the two argues that he’s a spy and they should kill him, the other strapping Arab simply trying to get him to speak up and identify himself. Benny’s answer as he dusts himself off: “How’s everything, big boy?”

 

                  First Riff: He’s a spy—let’s kill him!

                  Benny: Stop! Don’t do that! Do you want everybody to hate you?

                               Don’t be so effeminate! Where do you think you are,

                               in Chicago? .........

                  Second Riff: What are you doing in Morocco?

                  Benny: Nothing. Make me an offer.

                  Second Riff: Search him.

                  (The first Riff moves his hand into Benny’s back pocket. Benny

                  flinches and jumps.)

                  Benny: Ohhhhh, don’t do that—I’m funny that way!

 

    Before long he’s got them both involved in a long telling of his life story, playing off the better- looking one against the other by declaiming, every time he makes an illusion to an attractive man or woman or a sexual pun to the first “You wouldn’t know what I mean,” before turning to the other and hinting, “You would” or “You might.” Of Pierre, for example, he notes to the first, “You wouldn’t like him,” and to the second, “You might,” and again turning to the first Riff, “No, you wouldn’t.” A rather ironic series of comedic lines, since as The Red Shadow’s trusted friends, they both very much love him, and know his secret. The Red Shadow himself finally intervenes, eventually returning to the French fortress with Benny in tow.

       Despite the fact that Benny, having now actually seen The Red Shadow, has something to report, he soon determines to leave Morocco having evidently received a bill he cannot pay.

        Susan, startled by seeing him packing up and ready to go, results in his insistence that he has to go away on a trip. Susan cries out in terror, “You’re not leaving without me?” “Well now, that’s one of the big features of the trip,” Benny replies. “What about our engagement?” “Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’s off. There are times when a man would be cruel if he were kind. And this is one of those times.”

        Too bad the story writers keep having to wheel in the two Pierres, Margot, and Fontaine, who the General wants her to wed. Fortunately, when Billy is offstage, director Roy Del Ruth interrupts the regular goings on with the real spy of his film Azuri, who discovering The Red Shadow’s  identity, gradually arranges to punish both Captain Fontaine for rejecting her over Margot and the General for trying to throw her out of the French quarters. She arranges for The Red Shadow/Pierre to be rejected by the French for having kidnapped Margot and the Arabs for involving them in the kidnapping of a Western woman. Meanwhile, she and her native girlfriends perform a kind of conventionalized version of a belly dance, as Loy lights up the screen with her sultry anger whenever the script gives her an opportunity.

          When Azuri finally leads the General to The Red Shadow at Sid El Kar’s palace, he challenges the young dashing hero to a duel in which obviously the son cannot engage. No matter which of them wins the battle, a father or his son will die. The refusal, however, to enter into such a challenge in the Riff world represents a cowardice so unforgiveable that he who refuses is sentenced to be sent off into the desert without food or water, with only a broken sword to fight for survival.

       The ruthless and cruel control of the region by the French, moreover, is revealed when the General sends Captain Fontaine to go in search for him and kill him, despite the fact that The Red Shadow is now defenseless. Margot begs with him to change his mind, but he refuses. Fortunately, the vain Fontaine doesn’t kill him but drags his prize back to the Fortress in order to hang him.

        There The Red Shadow finally reveals, in a private moment, his identity to his father. Utterly unbelievably, General Bierbeau, to save face, claims that he’s not sure that he could really have been his son and since no one else knows he will pretend ignorance, while recognizing that he might be able to use a man like The Red Shadow to help mend fences with his Arab subjects.

         Margot, finally admitting that she is in love with The Red Shadow joins the infidel in a song fest that assures us that the couple will soon be married; just how the “Shadow” intends on living with a wife pretending he is not the incompetent Pierre is something the movie doesn’t even try to explain. But in gay cinema several transgender men have hidden their sexuality to their Western husbands, so perhaps if he keeps on makeup and mask on for the rest of his life, he will be able to convince Margot of his legendary existence, for revealing the truth would mean the end of his father’s life as he knows it.

       Benny, who in the meantime has been sentenced to death for daring to enter Sid Al Kar’s harem, decides to wear Susan’s clothes in order to escape, she joining him on another desert adventure, where our sissy inexplicably gets the urge to kiss his secretary. And that’s all Susan needs, not even the kiss, to hear before she has them heading down the aisle to the altar. Even in 1929, before the Hays Code had been developed and enforced, no sane director could allow a queer who played a central role in his film, to survive untouched. Even if absolutely no one believes it, the pansy, by film’s end has to go by another name, like a rose. Evidently the film studios felt that US viewers simply could not survive the shock of a queer comedic hero, demanding its audiences leap across a chasm of total incredulity to believe Johnny Arthur was a heterosexual at heart. It’s what’s called a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

 

Los Angeles, October 5, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).