Ed Wood | Glen or Glenda / 1953

fully attired

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ed Wood (screenplay and director) Glen or Glenda / 1953

 

Let me begin my discussion of Ed Wood’s 1953 film Glen or Glenda by asserting that it is not in any way, as Richard Barrios and many others have described it, “funny.” Because of its atrociously bad script and acting, it is certainly, at moments, laughable, something that might make one even giggle while rolling his or her eyes. But Wood’s work is utterly serious in subject and intent, and to describe it as merely “funny” is to miss the occasion of seriously discussing one of the very first US films to actually attempt to tackle of the subject of transvestism and transgender sexual orientation—two very different issues—both.

     Neither is this a work consisting of what might be described as a “camp” sensibility. There is no irony in Wood’s narrative about the heterosexual man, Glen (Ed Wood) who loves to wear women’s clothing. Camp depends upon portraying or saying something that we know to be an overstatement or an outrageous presentation of a real situation. Camp winks at its audience, asking for its conspiracy in pretending to be serious while it satirizes or exaggeratedly portrays events. At the heart of camp is an agreed upon disbelief, a lie which when blown out of all proportion reveals a truth or several related issues surrounding it. Camp is artifice performed for the love of theater, not an attempt to explore or study what we believe to be real—although it certainly might poke at truth or reveal its buried remnants. Tim Burton’s wonderful film based on the life and career of Ed Wood is filled with camp incidents and imbued with camp sensibility. But Wood’s own work, particularly Glen or Glenda, is the director’s attempt to speak as honesty as he can, even if in so doing he reveals his naivete and outright ignorance and, most appallingly, his complete lack of rhetorical and dramatic writing talents.

     As Danny Peary argues in Cult Movies 3, Glen or Glenda is truly radical, despite its utter ineptness, a personal revelation that is far more revelatory and important to the society as a whole than exists in many of the most respected auteurs’ films. Although it is difficult to keep a straight face while Glen as Glenda strolls up and down the Los Angeles boulevards in her beloved angora sweater, he’s telling you a story that the narrational structure demands you attend to as a “truthful telling,” as the early credits shout. Unlike most films which provide a disclaimer that their story has anything to do with real life, Wood’s film declares the opposite from the very start. This is a true story to which its viewer needs to attend. The people you are about to see are real human beings who suffer from being rejected by those they love and arrested by the authorities for something they feel is utterly out of their control.

      Contrary to the film’s refusal to disclaim its association from true life experiences, I must begin with a disclaimer, admitting that I am no first-hand experience about subjects I am about to discuss. As a cis gender homosexual, I have never suffered any of the obsessions or bodily dysphoria that Wood’s characters express. I have no psychological education, although I feel I am fairly perceptive when it comes to some forms of what has been long described as “sexually deviant behavior.” By watching the thousands of films I have and written about them as intelligently as I’m able I have learned a great deal about various aspects of LGBTQ behavior. But my evaluation of Wood’s psychologist Dr. Alton’s (Timothy Farrell) explanations for his various character’s behavior consists mere speculation. It appears to me that when it comes to an individual’s relationship to gender, we still have a great deal to learn.

       But before we can get to the real substance of this film, we perhaps must trim away the truly absurd melodramatic flourishes which Wood added to his movie, apparently to provide the serious narrative at its heart with cinema-world credence through the mad fatalistic gesturing of actor Bella Lugosi as the embodiment of the scientific spirit. Some of the very worst scripted lines ever put to paper are his ramblings about how the masses are controlled by forces outside of themselves, Lugosi shouting “Pull the strings! Pull the strings!” Actually the cinematic montage accompanying these words and others of their kind with views of crowded streets overlaid by the images of a superior force are rather interesting cinematically. And, as bad as the Lugosi scenes are, they are utterly fascinating from a film history point of view simply because they reveal a once great actor at the nadir of his life, a now near-forgotten drug addict grasping on to the last moments of his long film career. And in Wood’s following movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space, we catch some sad glimpses of that great actor’s early powers.

      But clearly the film would have been better without it, although that almost seems like haggling over what the very worst moments of this film represent. We might easily point to the “love scenes” between Wood and his girlfriend, Barbara (Dolores Fuller) which verge on producing guffaws. Both are such bad actors that we almost feel they deserve one another, although we can only feel sorry for her complete ignorance of Glen’s aberrations, and criticize him—despite the director’s endless justifications for his fears through his tableaux portraying her possible reactions and his dream sequences as he imagines some of the many sexual variances of human behavior, including sado-masochistic relationships (a man whips a woman, and later a woman joins another woman undergoing a kind of masturbatory fantasy and whips her), the representation of women of “loose morals,” and in one horrific tableau a dramatization of rape—for delaying his version of “coming out.”

      If, at first we perceive these melodramatic intervals like some insanely bad director’s notions of Sodom and Gomorrah, we suddenly recognize that is precisely what they are. Wood is playing out his psychological renditions of the horrors of sexual aberration in an attempt to fit his own “difference” within the grander scale of things. Like a young boy trying to evaluate his sudden urges to masturbate within his conceptions of the worst of human sexual behavior, Wood attempts to create a sort of graduate scale of sexual perversions wherein his wearing of women’s panties and sweaters appears to be a puny sin in comparison with the worst tendences of human sexual abnormalities. Indeed earlier in the film, the narrator attempts to almost dismiss the entire notion of transvestism by trying to convince us that women’s attire is simply more comfortable and accommodating to the human body than are the rough fabrics of men’s pants, shirts, and ties. What role Glen’s desires to also put on makeup, dress in women’s heels, and adorn himself with other clearly more complex items of a woman’s boudoir plays in all of this isn’t quite explained. Evidently, he goes full “court” only when he gets the urge to express himself in public, primarily window shopping and pining for the items that are difficult for him to purchase as a man.

      If the sets for these dream-tableaux seem like something cooked up by a small city TV station to represent the dangers of local tornadoes, the very fact that Wood’s film brought into discussion such a wide range of sexual activity in 1953 is quite astounding. Obviously, by 1953 we’d see far too many portrayals of female trollops and had even been presented with symbolic depictions of heterosexual rape; but although we may see hints of it in the Australian film Rangle River (1936) and Genet’s Un chant d’amor (1950), I can’t think of a single previous on-screen depiction of S&M in early commercial filmmaking. And the dozens of images of Ed and his friend Johnny (Charlie Crafts) in women’s clothing is surely the longest on-screen time devoted to transvestism.

      But the true focus of the film is not about Glen’s confession to his fiancée of his secret self, Glenda, but the visit the understandably confused but truly interested Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot) makes to Dr. Alton’s office who attempts to explain not only Glen’s transvestite tendencies but the far more complex issue of transgender identification and reassignment.

      Alton at least begins with a seemingly commonsense evaluation, that when it comes to gender issues each individual case is different. So at least he does not attempt to make grand generalizations in this film. It would seem that in explaining the desire to wear women’s clothing is prescribed far too often in his telling as a psychological condition rather than any possible genetic or aspect of body chemistry. One has to remember, after all, that the profession in 1953 was still very much shaped by Freudian psychological thought and Freud identified homosexuality itself as relating to the mother complex. He diagnoses Glen’s problem as related to a lack of love from his mother which gets played out in his desire for the attention of women in general, leading in turn to his own identification with the female sex. And his wife Barbara is told that she can help him with this by replacing the lack of love with her own. By film’s end we are told that Glen has been cured.

      I can think of numerous reasons why males might be attracted to wearing women’s attire having absolutely little to do with their relationships with their mother, many just for the fun of it, for the identification with sexual difference that dressing up as the opposite sex provides. And, of course, one doesn’t at all have to see it was something necessarily in need of a “cure”—although such behavior still is found highly disconcerting to most straight and gay males and females, who accordingly demand some explanation.

      What I find more disturbing however, is the easy slide the movie doctor makes from transvestism into transgender desire. Even the film makes clear the two are not necessarily related. Glen is evidently a cis heterosexual who simply enjoys the feel and thrill of wearing women’s clothes. But Dr. Alton immediately provides his curious-minded listener with two examples of transgender individuals, both of them related to hermaphrodism, one full hermaphrodism (with the organs of both sexes on the outside of the body) and a second concerning pseudo-hermaphrodism (with some of the organs of the opposite sex inside the body), in the second instance, the documented male raised as a female and desiring to become a woman, a process through which through hormonal shots Alan successfully becomes Anne. Today, I believe, most of the men and women desiring to change their sex are neither hermaphrodites nor merely psychologically driven to make that significant change, but describe a more profound sense of gender identification which does not align with their sex at the time of their birth. So this film’s “answers” to the reasons for such gender changes do not fully explore the vast territory that is still often inexplicable to us today.

       Yet you have to give credit to Wood’s film for opening up that discussion, and for its narrator’s advocating an acceptance of these and other sexual differences that during that same period put many in jail, ruined their careers, and broke up their relationships.

        In Glen’s case, even Barbara eventually accepts his transvestic pleasures, offering up her favorite angora sweater for his personal delectation. But in an earlier film cut, still shown in the theatrical trailer, Barbara hands over her angora sweater, tossing it to Glen in a huff.

        I haven’t read the complete biography of Ed Wood, but from the evidence of Burton’s film Ed Wood it appears that he was not at all “cured” of his enjoyment of women’s attire, and, in fact, increased the time he spent with homosexuals and other sexual “deviants” as he worked to make his second film.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

 

Federico Fellini | I Vitelloni / 1953

the great escape

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Fellini and Ennio Flaiano (screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) I Vitelloni / 1953

 

After Federico Fellini’s early film Variety Lights, which had weak ratings at the box-office, and his next The White Sheik bombed, producers and distributors were understandably hesitant about taking on his new project, I Vitelloni, in which he had cast no major actors except perhaps for Alberto Sordi, who’d had a long career, but after his performance in Fellini’s Sheik was considered to be a wash-up.

     Fellini attempted to cast Vittorio De Sica in the role of the aging ham actor, but when he described to the famed director the character’s homosexual proclivities, De Sica agreed only if the role were to be played with “a great deal of humanity,” which sounds much like the character himself, full-up on humanity but without deep theatrical talent; eventually De Sica turned the role down in fear that audiences might think he, himself was gay. And fortunately, the role of Achille Majeroni was performed rather movingly by Sergio Natali.

     Moreover, Fellini’s and his writing partner Ennio Flaiano’s script was less a unified narrative than it was a series of related and just as often unconnected episodes featuring the five “vitelloni” (best translated into English as “the loafers” or  “the idlers”) who, sponging off of their parents well past the years by which they should have established their own lives, spend their days mostly in cafés, movie houses, and walks along the Adriatic beach when they aren’t, like the local lothario of their group, Fausto Moretti (Franco Fabrizi), entertaining women, all previous to their nightly dance off hand-in-hand down the streets of the small town in which they live, dropping each other off at the respective houses. In short, they are a bit like the Pasolini “scroungers’ in his film of 8 years later, Accatone.

     Unlike the bright sunshine in which Pasolini’s characters bathe before one of them daringly drops into the river to swim across to the other shore, Fellini’s film begins in a later-afternoon celebration, the annual crowning of one of the town’s female beauties as “Miss Mermaid.” The winner, Sandra Rubini (Leonora Ruffo), is the sister of the youngest of these idlers, Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi).

     Sandra has evidently been one of Fausto’s objects of desire, who when she wins the contest is overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of torrential rains, her appreciative crowds, and the fact, we soon perceive, that she is pregnant.

     Guessing the truth, Fausto makes a fast retreat from these festivities in order to pack up and leave town—which is, after all, the desire and endless subject of many of the “vitelloni’s” conversations. But caught in the act by Moraldo and, more importantly, by Fausto’s own father (a lovingly gruff Jean Brochard), along with a threatened belting, Fausto is quickly dissuaded from flight and forced into a kind of “shot-gun” wedding, a rather desultory affair, which ends, at least, in a pleasant few weeks in Rome (nicknamed by the town’s residents “the Big Smoke”) before the couple return to their backwater home with the new-born in arms.

      In the meantime, we get to meet some of the others of these “loafers,” all seemingly bored without the daring Fausto at their side. Alberto (Sordi) is a mama’s boy (a momoni) tries to keep his mother free from the downpour of tears she daily threatens, both of whom live off the wages brings in from his sister’s nightly work as an at-home typist. The odd-looking Leopoldo Vannucci (Leopoldo Trieste) is the group “intellect” who writes poems and plays which, we later discover are pretty awful.

      Moraldo, who has already been introduced, is the group’s dreamer who can hardly sleep as he paces through the empty night streets imagining a new life anywhere but where he now is seemingly trapped.

    Fausto returns, appearing as the happy father, but almost immediately picks up again with his womanizing, first attempting to gain the affections of a good-looking woman at the movie theater while he is seated between the stranger and his wife. He even dares to leave the theater in order to track his desired conquest back to her apartment, but is—at least temporarily—rejected, while with the movie over, Sandra impatiently waits, astoundingly believing his report that he was attempting to meet someone for a job.

      His wife’s father, with whom the couple is now living, does actually find Fausto a job working with a seller of religious items—a strange avocation for someone who so totally committed to the profane. But even here, after seeing the shop owner’s wife in the different setting of the town’s annual carnival celebration, Fausto attempts to bed the signora, an effort that ultimately loses him his job and—after Sandra runs away from home for a long day and a-half—results in his own father actually using the promised belt.

      Alberto attends that same carnival party dressed totally in drag, slowly getting drunk, and ending the evening in one of the most memorable scenes of the movie as he tangos several times across the room and later, with wig removed, attempts to drag a large carnival mask home with him, while one of his friends promises to accompany him on his nearly impossible-to-accomplish trek. Utterly depressed, he observes his sister running away with a man from another village awaiting her in his car, having brought the promised torrent of tears to his mother’s eyes.

      If Alberto’s cross-dressing debut is a rather wistful affair, the final tale Fellini tells concerning Leopoldo is truly sad, although it begins with utter joy as the would-be playwright excitedly invites his friend to a local performance starring a formerly well-known actor now teetering on a freak-out of burlesque.

      If the actor no longer shows much talent, to Leopoldo he represents the possibility of finally seeing one of his efforts brought to stage. Oddly, the elderly actor seems impervious to the embarrassingly bad play of several acts that Leopoldo insists upon reading him.

      His friends gradually drift away in search of women, but Leopoldo and the thespian remain intricately involved in the endless reading, in part because the playwright has paid for the actor’s equally grandiose dinner.

     Even after enduring the unbearable torture that Leopoldo forces him to undergo, he insists upon hearing summaries of later scenes, luring the posturing intellect out-of-doors and down the narrow streets of the town, before finally suggesting they visit the beach.

     It is only when the formerly esteemed performer attempts to lure his new friend down onto the pier that Leopoldo—his head still spinning from the praise with which the elder has heaped upon him—realizes the fraud’s sexual intent. Terrified with the implications of the invitation, Leopoldo runs off, his dreams of fame totally dashed.

      At least, Fausto seems now temporarily cured of his loutish behavior. And, in a kind of miracle, Moraldo finally determines to catch the daily train out of town forever, meeting at the station the young railroad boy, Riccardo (Riccardo Fellini) who he has earlier in the film befriended. Obviously, the kid, whom Moraldo nightly meets on the boy’s way to work, symbolizes his own childish and yet wondrous views of the world, not unlike those of il babbo Fellini at the same age.

     In this scene, Fellini’s set-up might almost suggest the hundreds of romantic films that portray the one who is left behind running after the iron monster in hopes of one last look at her or his lover. Clearly, the boy, when told that Moraldo is leaving forever, seems at first a bit disappointed by the fact that he will now be without his early-morning companion; but instead of tearing up he flashes a bright smile, realizing that at last someone has made good on his determination to start life anew.

      Fellini’s long camera shot of the young boy, balancing along the rail of the track for a quite long time, says everything. This youth already has a job and will find a new balance in the world, whether he stays or goes, that most of “the loafers” can never experience.

      Add to this lovely series of tales Nino Rota’s entrancing score and the startlingly crisp black-and-white images of Carlo Carlini’s, Otello Martelli’s, and Luciano Trasatti’s cinematography and you have a film that predicts the director’s future cinematic wonders.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020). 

Joel Junior | Ice Cream and Tequila / 2018

 hold the tequila please

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel Junior (screenwriter and director) Ice Cream and Tequila / 2018 [11.40 minutes]

 

Frankly you can leave me out of this “Postcoital dysphoric” short film, that defines its major character, Jonathan, as feeling “sadness, anxiety, agitation or aggression after consensual sexual intercourse.” 

    Immediately after what seems to be a totally fulfilling sexual experience, Jonathan (Jeremy Sless) declaims that the marvel of life is “That their minds can mix two different domains, ‘art sex, space, causality and friendship, creating new laws, social relationships, and technologies.’”

    He then proceeds to again sexually entice his previous sexual partner only to proclaim: “I want it and by body wants it, but I can control it, and I don’t need it. That’s my point.”

    At this instant, I believe, I would have quickly pulled on my clothes (precisely what Cody [Justin Powell] is trying to accomplish) and left the room.

    But this short film cannot escape it’s determined subject: “The post-sex blues.”

    Cody suggest the solution: “Ice cream and tequila,” but our supposed hero—not someone, fortunately, I ever encountered—Jonathan cannot even imagine attempting the remedy before his quite beautiful and successful lover has left the room.

    All of this, I should mention, is played out in such a dark, murky color that we can barely glimpse the beautiful boys who have just engaged in this sexual act which has resulted in such a truly ridiculous response. 

    Goodbye. I’ll be off to seek someone who truly enjoys the sexual act, not just as it happens but after it as well. A Postcoital dysphoric is not someone with whom you want to stay around to hear about his afterthoughts and complaints, and this movie doesn’t even allow you to see his lovely butt.

    I know such people exist. A good friend once complained of his feelings of depression after having sex. But as someone who enjoys the long, languorous afterthoughts of sexual encounters, I turned away from the conversation as quickly as Cody slinks out the door of his pretty boy’s fuck. At least Jonathan tries the remedy, although I have to be honest, I don’t truly like Tequila.

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2025).

Don Roy King | Expedition / 2016 [TV (SNL) episode]

comedy breaks into history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Colin Jost, Rob Kelin, and Brayn Tuckered (head writers), Don Roy King (director) Expedition / 2016 [TV (SNL) episode]

 

“OK class settle down,” insists the school teacher of the Saturday Night Live May 21st, 2016 broadcast. She has just witnessed a scenario from the Albany Education Theater Festival at a local Italian restaurant, a truly serendipitous meeting—given the fact that she has recently been attempting to teach her students about “the Western expansion”—which involves the exploits of the famous duo of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, led by the Indian female Shoshone Indian guide Sacagawea. What an opportunity, to watch performers recreate the historical events right before her student’s eyes!

 

   Over the years from its 1975 premiere with the utterly unforgettable skit of John Belushi’s attempt to teach his foreign language students to “feed their fingers to the wolverines,” Saturday Night has presented hundreds of some of the most notable comic sketches on television along with thousands of empty-minded, quite boring skits—the last, a word producer Lorne Michaels abhors.

     “Expedition,” the name of this sketch. is one of this endless TV-series’ bests, as the trio of comics Fred Armisen, Cecily Strong, Kyle Mooney present their version of the never-before imagined travels of Lewis and Clark from the Missouri River into the wilds of Idaho, Washington, and directly to the Pacific Ocean, permitting Thomas Jefferson to justify his Louisiana Purchase.

     Both men are clearly attracted to the Indian “squaw” Sacagawea, but imagine their relationship to her through the lens of their own homoerotic desires, being both, and Lewis describes themselves, “athletic outdoorsmen,” Lewis obviously being more attracted to his partner “slave  owner” Clark, while he, somewhat more resistantly, is sexually drawn to him. Lewis imagines himself as top to Clark, with the Indian guide under, while Clark imagines a slightly different configuration.

     The students, all but one suddenly very interested high school boy, are confused; but as they enact their sudden Pacific Coast joys, Lewis topping Clark on a nearby desk with Sacagawea suggesting they both simply look into her eyes, the  school-bell rings for the close of the day.

     One might never have imagined that this comic trope might actually be an issue in historical studies, but, as Thomas A Foster notes, writing in 2017, “Their [Lewis and Clark’s] sexuality is recently fraught in our culture.”

 

“Last summer, We Proceed On, the scholarly journal of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation came under significant fire after historian and archivist William Benemann published two essays that speculated on the homoerotic nature of the bond between the two men.

     As Mr. Benemann explained in his introduction, ‘So intimately are the two men linked in the popular imagination that they have no independent identity. Clark lived on for thirty-two years after completion of the journey to the Pacific, serving as governor of the Missouri Territory and as Superintendent of Indian Affairs under every president from James Monroe to Martin Van Buren, and yet any mention of a post-expedition William Clark inevitably requires the designation ‘of Lewis and Clark fame’ or the average reader will not make the connection. These two men have been paired in a conjoining that is unique in American history. Certainly the nature of that coupling deserves careful analysis."

    These are strange times, when a comedic sketch can reflect actual gay cultural history, which almost any historian might describe as simple nonsense. But it’s a lovely imaginative coupling, isn’t it?, thought up evidently by the always ridiculous comic minds of the SNL cast, writers, and then director Don Roy King. As the actors recognize, they have at least finally reached out to one of the students to whom they have sought to explain their vision of history, along with the clearly confused lesbian teacher; I’d argue: “Go for it!” even if the other students run out of the room with the end-of-the class-bell with disgust.

     “I'm not invested in Benemann's interpretation of Lewis and Clark,” writes Foster, “but as I have done in past, I will similarly defend the intellectual and political legitimacy of posing questions about their relationship and even their personal desires.” Finally, I’d argue, Saturday Night Live has reached their true intellectual audience, or the audience has become truly attuned, I’d argue, to the hilariously absurd world of SNL. I can only wonder, accordingly, why I might be accused of reading into gay history!”

 

Los Angeles, February 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 4, 2025).

 

 

Jack Kinney and Jack Hannah | Father's Week-end / 1953

 

a moment of unexpected love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dick Kinney and Brice Mack (story), Jack Kinney and Jack Hannah (directors) Father's Week-end / 1953

 

The animated cartoon Father’s Week-end features Goofy as Pete, the everyman 1950s father, trying to catch up from a busy week by sleeping in on Sunday morning. The film uses the standard family man tropes of the day to mildly satirize while reifying the standard notions of heterosexual normalcy.

     As Goofy attempts to sleep late, his son Junior sneaks into bed with him, eventually pushing him off the bed as Goofy’s wife screams out for the boy to leave his father alone since he likes to sleep on Sunday morning. She follows up her vocal intrusions by immediately vacuuming up the bedroom where he hasn’t even been able to rise up off the floor.

     A run to get the papers in his bathrobe follows, as suddenly all his neighbors seem to be up and already working in their yards to observe his state of undress. A mess of Sunday papers tossed about the living room and his own slovenly attire requires sudden spiffing up as Goofy spots what seem to be Sunday visitors on the way to his front door; in fact, they’re visiting the next-door neighbors. And despite his momentary ability to fit snugly into a hammock, his wife reminds him of his promise to take Junior to the beach for the day.

     The naughty Junior and their pet dog make his drive on the suddenly busy highway nearly impossible, but worse yet are the boy’s cries as his balloon floats off and he later loses the ice cream cone Goofy has bought him to quiet him down.

     A visit to the nearby Carnival follows, with a stomach-dropping roller-coaster ride; and before Goofy can even kiss level ground again, Junior is off behind the carney stands and taking a voyage

into the Tunnel of Love, Goofy racing after.

    Like so many cartoons of the period, the creators inexplicably introduce a gay scene here, as we see Goofy coming out of the tunnel in a boat with a sailor’s arm around him and his head on his shoulder—obviously a mix up in the dark bowels of the ride. When the sailor discovers Goofy as his lover, the bemused Goofy gets a thrashing, which ends up, as he is thrown in a tattoo parlor, with a memory of the event, a full ship emblazoned upon his chest.

      After a chase through the Fun House, Goofy finally grabs up Junior and attempts to escape the beach before the rush of the crowd home; but of course, his escape is synchronized perfectly with every other beach goer’s exit, as the highway ends in a bumper to bumper, stand-still trip back home. Exhausted, he arrives back in suburbia, the narrator noting that fortunately the next day is Monday with a whole week of 9-to-5 work following where Goofy and every other working male can rest up for the next busy week-end.

      Between the proprieties of suburban living, the requirements of family life, and the responsibilities and dangers of raising children, the most thrilling and quiet moment of Goofy’s week-end appears to be that for just an instant he found himself in the arms of another man declaring his love.

 

Los Angeles, May 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).