Joshua Logan | South Pacific / 1958

carefully taut

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Osborn (screenplay, based on the musical by Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Joshua Logan), Joshua Logan (director) South Pacific / 1958

 

A few years ago I wrote a piece on New York’s Lincoln Center’s revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, South Pacific, which I titled “Confused by Paradise,” centering on the US Seabees’, sailors’, and nurses’ difficulty in handling the very different values from their own they

encountered in the South Pacific islands to which they had been stationed. The musical version, I argued, was much more explicit in the sexual variances of the characters, particularly in connection with the character Luther Billis, as well as the sexual openness of the French and islanders as opposed to the Americans, than was the film.

      After hearing the other day of actor John Kerr’s death, I determined to revisit that film, a movie I first saw the year of its creation, 1958, and about which I have long had mixed feelings. Although I loved much of the acting and singing, even as a child I felt that Logan’s heavy reliance on colored filters—although wonderfully theatrical—was distracting. And I have always had difficulty with Ray Walston’s comically grouchy characterization of Billis.

       This time, moreover, I felt even more ill at ease with the American characters, who, in the film version seem less “confused” than utterly tense, unable to enjoy even those emotional states of which they sing and dance. And it is this tension, it seems to me, which helps to make this film musical such a discomforting and emotionally unfulfilling experience.

        By beginning the film with the on-the-beach Seabees’ and sailors’ “complaint,” “There’s nothing like a dame,” Logan immediately sets up a series of problematics: the handsome and sweaty sexual males of the island are segregated from the island’s women, from both the nurses, who they can glance at only in passing, and the native women, who the French have sent off to other islands for their protection. These men are not just expressing their yearnings, accordingly, but voicing their absolute frustration. They are lusty males without any hope of releasing their pent-up sexuality.

       Only Luther communicates with Nellie Forbush and the other women. But then, he is a special case. Luther does their laundry, sews grass dresses, and does various other “womanly” things that permit him entry into their company. In short Walston is asked to play the film’s only “gay” man while simultaneously having to pretend to be just another of the guys—a slightly more eccentric version of the desirous sailors—which helps to explain the actor’s somewhat dislikeable snarls and growls. Without openly speaking of this character’s sexuality, the screenplay later asks him to have no interest in Bali Ha’i’s women (he seeks out the male-centered Boars’-tooth ceremony), and finally, requires that he dance in Forbush’s Thanksgiving performance in drag! Is it any wonder that he attempts to escape the island with the handsome and obviously “saxy” Kerr (playing Lieutenant Cable), both by renting a boat and hitching a ride aboard the latter’s plane?    

     Nelly Forbush, played with almost clueless romanticism by the ever-buoyant Mitzi Gaynor, quickly allows herself to fall in love with the island’s handsome Frenchman (Rossano Brazzi), without even pausing to ask why, as he has told her, he has killed another man. Yet she falls into an absolute panic when it is revealed the beautiful children she has admired (later Los Angeles gallerist and my friend Candace Lee and Warren Hsieh) are de Becque’s own, fathered by a native woman.

      As absolutely enchanted as he is by Bloody Mary’s young daughter, Liat (France Nuyen), Cable cannot bring himself to marry the girl, reminding himself in song of his Philadelphia girl back home. But, at least, he clearly recognizes his hypocrisy, admitting the tensions within himself quite clearly in the work’s most morally responsible song, “Carefully Taught.” Kerr, however, doesn’t even get to sing that important admission, since it’s only lip-synched; and Emile de Beque’s great ode to love, “Some Enchanted Evening,” is sung by Metropolitan singer Giorgio Tozzi, which may explain some of Brazzi’s inexplicable grimaces. Even original Broadway performer Juanita Hall’s wonderful Bloody Mary is sung by another. Only Gaynor and Walston get to belt out their own predicaments.

     In short, not only have the American figures of this work been “carefully taught” their racial and social isolation by their parents and society, but the characters in this highly artificed film are “carefully taut,” prudishly tense in their separation from the more open islanders. In a film where no American seems at home in his or her skin—the writers going so far as to punish Cable’s sexual and racial transgressions with his death—it is perhaps appropriate that nearly every time anyone breaks into song, the sky unnaturally turns into garish yellows, purples, blues and reds.* In their up-tight sexualities these figures understandably are slightly queasy, ill-at-ease in this brave new world.

      While the Broadway cast eventually came to comprehend the absurdity of their perverted love interests, symbolized by the “hundred and one pounds of fun, Honey Bun”—a ridiculous vision of unfulfilled sexuality, the film’s actors know only that they are “moving on” and away from this frightening world at film’s end. Nellie alone stays on, perhaps now more as a mother than a lover.

 

*Logan, himself, so he later explained in his autobiographical writings, was horrified by the final results of what were to have been only minor filters to color certain scenes. When he finally got a glimpse of the finished scenes, he argued for reshoots, but the film, having already gone over budget, went into the can without the retakes.

 

 

Los Angeles, February 13, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2013).

 

Federico Fellini | Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

circling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, and Pier Palo Pasolini (screenplay), Federico Fellini (director) Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) / 1957

 

Almost all of Federico Fellini’s films are episodic, and many—as critics have noted—are structured circularly. But none is more circular in form than his Nights of Cabiria. Its central character, Cabiria Ceccarelli (Giulietta Masina)—who, one might argue is not just at the movie’s center but is the film itself, its raison d’etre—travels through vast spaces of post-war Rome without going anywhere. Her life, filled with dreams and aspirations, remains in stasis, and, accordingly, one might almost describe Fellini’s early masterwork as a comic study in duration.

      Part of the problem with the delightful Cabiria, as Roger Ebert pointed out in his 1998 review of the film, is that this character moves against the rhythms of life itself. “On his sets [Fellini] played music during almost every scene, and you can sense in most Fellini movies a certain sway in the way the characters walk: Even the background extras seem to hearing the same rhythm. Cabiria hears it, but often walks in counterpoint, as if to her own melody.”

      Like Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton walking against the storm, the ridiculously dressed, pixyish Cabiria uses this and the character’s other eccentricities to great comic effect, swaying, shrugging, even physically wrestling with others around her to maintain her personal defenses again their cynicism. While her fellow prostitutes dress to reveal their buxomly shapes, Cabiria, in stripes and a matted faux-fur top-coat, emphasizes her skinny impishness, looking, at times, like a young boy in drag instead of a grown and ageing woman. Wherever she goes, an argument is sure to follow, even if nothing is said as when she becomes determined to move from her usual stomping grounds of the Archeological Passage to the posh Via Veneto, where the tall and well-dressed women of the night look down disapprovingly upon her. Any man choosing to go home with Cabiria might almost be seen to be making a personal joke.

      Indeed, in the very first scene of the film, Cabiria’s current boyfriend-pimp steals her purse and tosses her into the river. Unable to swim, the character almost drowns, saved only at the last moment by children and a local worker. Later, she is picked up by a well-known movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari), after a fight between him and his girlfriend. Just to punish his girlfriend, Lazzari takes Cabiria to a swank nightclub, where she immediately becomes entangled in a bead curtain.

     Later, at his lovely estate, before she can even take a sip of champagne or bite of duck, he orders her to hide in the bathroom when his angry girlfriend returns. As the couple make up their spat, Cabiria spends the night in the bathroom with the dog, sneaking out of the mansion early in the next morning, only to go crashing into the glass doors. In short, this off-kilter figure has difficulty with both entering and exiting; movement either forward or backward is difficult for a figure who moves in circles. At least she has received the actor’s signature to prove her “luck” to her friends.

     After revealing her belief in joy and love under the spell of a cabaret hypnotist, another man, Oscar (François Périer) courts her, claiming that he desires the same things in life. Finally, it appears, that Cabiria has found the love she has been seeking; but he too, taking her to a cliff in the woods, robs her and would toss her over the cliff were she not to beg him to let her live.   

     Although she bought and, later, sells a ramshackle shack in an industrial field at the edge of the city—a house of which she is very proud—she seems never, at least as we observe her, to actually have even a one-night-stand, let alone a romantic success.

    Cabiria’s belief also extends to all things religious, despite her avocation. But a trip, with other fellow prostitutes, to what purports to be an appearance of the Virgin Mary (a similar situation is played out in La dolce vita) ends with a claustrophobic rush of bodies, terrifying the plucky sinner. A far more spiritual encounter is Cabria’s late-night observation of a saintly good Samaritan, who, with his own money, brings food to the desperate cave-dwellers outside Rome. It is there, also, where Cabiria sees what might someday soon be herself, as she encounters a former prostitute, now a haggard and wizened being, living in the dark of these caverns.

      But even these more spiritual revelations do not truly alter Cabiria’s thinking. Like a dancer moving against the beat, she remains locked in a pattern of refusing to believe the very realities Fellini presents her with. If there was ever evidence that Fellini was not a neorealist at heart, it is in this film; Cabiria, portrayed by his own wife, is the fantasist that the director would soon become, particularly in the film presumably about Masina, Juliet of the Spirits.

     Although Nights of Cabiria ends, oddly enough, with a procession of young and beautiful boys moving forward through the forest, and catching up the forlorn waif in their march, we know that that movement forward will not last long. Surely Cabiria will at some point turn back, retrace her steps, and end up very near to the place where she has begun.

     In her constant circling, finally, Cabiria is a kind of female Pierrot or Pierrette who in her circles imitates the rounded hat, skull cap, or dunce hat and the circular and crimped collar worn traditionally by the figure; and in her circling Cabiria also parallels the movements of the moon and the tides with whom both Pierrot and Pierrette are always connected.

      By the late 19th and 20th centuries, in part because of Pierrot’s and Pierrette’s endless inabilities to ever achieve the love of their Columbines or Harlequins, the characters, male and female, also come to be seen as outsider dreamers who are unable to attain normative love.

       Hence in cinematic works as various as Victor Saville’s The Good Companions (1933), Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise (1945), and Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1979), as the Pierrots are tricked, mocked, and threatened by their would-be normative lovers, they are represented in the heteronormative context not only as fools, dreamers, and dunces, but are generally associated with the queer, homosexual worlds which, given their being seen as societal outsiders, associated them with the godless worlds of the angels banned from heaven, those individuals devoted to the worship the moon, witchcraft, vampirism, the occult, and cabalistic visions, as well as to worshipers of idols of sacrifice such as Moloch (homosexuals and lesbians, obviously, had themselves, in their same-sex activities, sacrificed the possibility of bearing children), and a people later committed to illusions of reality, specifically the magick lantern and film itself.

      Moloch is particularly important in this context because of Giovanni Pastrone's grand 2 ½ hour silent epic film 1914 film Cabiria, the shared named of the young girl at the center of his film who survived the volcanic eruption of Mount Aetna and later came close to being sacrificed to Moloch in Carthage before finally becoming united with her Roman savior Fulvius Axilla. The film was based, in part, on Gustave Flaubert's 1862 novel Salammbô which was a great favorite of Anger’s.* Fellini, it is presumed, named his central character Cabiria in honor of the 1914 movie character.

 

*Kenneth Anger is particularly interesting in this context because as a gay artist he embraced in his second cycle of filmmaking precisely these outsider spiritual activities, influenced as he was by English occult writer and philosopher Aleister Crowley. Some of these elements are quite apparent in Rabbit’s Moon, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), and Lucifer Rising (1972-80), all of which I discuss elsewhere in the My Queer Cinema volumes.

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2013).  

Bob Mizer | My Brother, the Sister / 1970

permission

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter and director) My Brother, the Sister / 1970

 

The year after Why the Wooden Indian Wouldn’t, Mizer recognized there was no turning back. And in his color short, My Sister, My Brother Mizer clearly recognized that the posing strap was a thing of the past to be replaced by the on-screen male-on-male sex, which he had helped to effectuate, was here to stay.

     Almost as if to prove himself up to the task Mizer let loose a grand array of gay sexual tropes. The short begins with Jim Lee entering dressed vaguely in drag, wearing a white blouse with an outline of a bra and breasts and chartreuse pants, being advised that according to the fraternity initiation rules he has to remain on the park bench open to public view for a full half-hour, perhaps even encountering people whom he may know in his drag get-up. Accordingly, Mizer has begun his film, as he did his 1963 work Military School Initiation as part of the trope of sexual control over the new would-be members of it freshmen pledges, while at the same time hinting of cross-dressing themes.

      Almost before the fraternity senior has left, a man arrives wanting to pick-up the female before his eyes, an offer which Jim immediately and emphatically rejects. Soon after a woman appears from the same off-stage “glen” of the park to ask if she might hook him up with other men, willing to serve, evidently, as a kind of female pimp who Jim also sends packing, commenting on how he had never before realized how weird were the folk in his town.

      Finally, a handsome sailor (John Lee) appears, sits down next to him, and—no matter how much Jim attempts to indicate that he doesn’t have what the sailor’s seeking and he’s not at all interested in what the sailor might offer—refuses to leave, insisting that he give him a try, Mizer in the process introducing yet another homosexual favorite, a man in tight white bell-bottomed pants on shore leave.

     When eventually the half-hour has expired, Jim gets up, and since the sailor insists on staying, walks off.

      The sailor, however, follows him home and enters his apartment, looking it over and approving, begging him, even though he apparently recognizes that Jim (still inexplicably in drag) is really a guy, to give sex with him a try. 

       Unable to rid himself of the insistent predator, Jim gives in and finds the whole sexual event, including the fuck the sailor finally accepts as payment for his permission for the sailor to stay on, to be quite pleasurable, the sailor enjoying the new sexual sensation so much that he decides to stay for the two further days he has left of his leave.

       When the credits are shown and the two Lees hold up signs stating their names, a voice asks if they’re related, but the apparent brothers refuse to deny or confirm their relationship, suggesting that Mizer has also tossed in a bit of sexual incest into his sexual stewpot.

        It appears that the boys are simply simulating their anal sex, but they do verbally agree to cum simultaneously, and one even sports, for a few on-screen moments, a full erection. Yet, as I began this piece, the Lees’ acting is so awful, the plot so ludicrous, and sex so unstimulating that we look back with almost sexual longing for films like 42nd Street Hood and Tijuana Bandit.*

 

*I find it absolutely fascinating that after all those years of Bob Mizer’s having basically been able to escape censorship by the US and local governments and seeing in a new era of cinematic male sexual representation, I was censored on Facebook, banned from its pages for a full month, because their visual recognition machine interpreted by picture of two men, wearing posing straps, wrestling on the streets of New York from 42nd Street Hood as representing men engaged in nude sexual copulation. It appears we’ve gone backwards in the notion of what the media is permitted to say or visually present to the public. Oddly enough, when I attempted to post one of Mizer’s film on the internet Facebook, the machine saw the posing straps as nudity and punished me by a month in Facebook hell, which meant I could no longer communicate with my friends.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2021).

 

 

 

Bob Mizer | Revolt of the Android / 1969

to thine own kind be true

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter and director) Revolt of the Android / 1969

 

Bob Mizer’s 1969 short Revolt of the Android is one of of his shorts that betrays a good sense of humor combined with a slight narrative that establishes the film as fully sexually male-oriented, and not just a film pretending to be for sexually disinterested admirers of the male form.

       In this work, model Larry Contrell determines that he needs a male helper, ordering up the newest catalogue model, which comes shipped covered in plastic and with two bottles of liquid controls: “Go” and “Stop.”

       Unpacking the handsome Bob Johnson, Contrell carefully administers some of the “Go” liquid and immediately finds the new housekeeper perfect for the job as he lays down on his stomach and asks the android to massage his back, which the robot immediately proceeds to do.

       Meanwhile, reading through the local news he spots an ad for a meet up with a female, which when the servant hears goes against all that he has been pre-programmed to accept. He quickly goes “crazy,” wrestling his owner to the floor, picking him up and properly spanking him before his “controller,” now sitting him down upon the bed with a very sore ass, watches his robot abscond with the offending newspaper and handing him a copy of Male Physique to read instead.

       Unlike the many male butlers of the 1930s who grew nervous and even peevish over their master’s encounters with the opposite sex, this Android stopped such leanings toward heterosexual behavior immediately before it got out of hand.

        This work, strangely, is less about the beauty of its models—although they do make a lovely pair—or their chaste homoerotic interactions, but serves, in a variation of Shakespeare, almost as an open statement to its male viewers, “boy, to thine own kind be true,” strongly suggesting for the first time what the “kind” sexually consisted of homosexual bonding.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2021).

Bob Mizer | Military School Initiation / 1963

military discipline

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter and director) Military School Initiation / 1963

 

As an AMG documentary film observes, “if some long-forgotten fraternity jock with latent tendencies hadn’t dreamed up the idea of humiliating fraternity initiations, erotic cinema would have had to invent them.” Starring AMG studio regulars Ernie Matthews, Bob Jackson, Monte Hansen, and Chuck Steury, Military School Initiation (1963) entices us into the world of the military school boys which cinema has long promised us.

    The two senior fraternity members lounging around the house in—what else, given this is a Bob Mizer movie—their posing straps, encountering two new pledges and immediately demanding they strip to their own posing straps (didn’t everyone wear such under skimpy penis coverings in those days?). 

      The seniors pull out their boots and demand the pledges shine them to a black gleam. Of course, the finished shoes do not at all meet the demands of the seniors, who pulling out the ping-pong paddles spank the newbies.

 

     In the very next instance, the pledges eyes are covered with towels tied round their heads while the two seniors spray whip cream over their younger friends’ mouth and noses, resulting in a mass wrestling mass which soon becomes a pile of heaving flesh—the perfect outcome for their at-home viewers. A color promo suggests that before the final cuts there was also some towel slapping.

       Now they’re all friends and equals.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (2021).

Bob Mizer | Slave Market / 1960

damaged goods

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (director) Slave Market / 1960

 

Slave Market of 1960 (also known as “Boy Slaves for Sale”) stars one of Mizer’s most beautiful models, Ray Fowle, who plays a Bagdad slave up for sale, his first appearance in Mizer’s photographs and films.

   A lascivious old man bids for him, as also does a handsome prince (Don McConnell). Like the previous Aztec Sacrifice the work was filmed in an epic-manner in color. But this time around the plot is slightly more complex and the acting, at moments, rather more sophisticated, particularly when the prince attempts to outbid the old man, and eventually loses to him, having emptied his money bag in the attempt to buy the young boy for sale.

    The old man starts to lead off his prize, but before he leaves, the young slave bends down to the prince telling him not to worry, that we will take care of the old man by tricking him.

     Hardly to they get out of the slave market but the new purchase begins to show signs of what appears to be epilepsy, shaking, and nodding his head to one side. The old man turns back to

observe him in anger, trying to lead him away. But suddenly the slave falls to the ground, white froth foaming out of his mouth.

     The purchaser takes out his recent agreement, turns the boy around, and immediately returns him to the slave driver, demanding he get his money back in return for the failed “product,” evidently the seller gladly willing to accept the return of his “merchandise.” Turning to the prince, the scoundrel asks if he might still be willing to pay the amount he originally bid for the boy. Pretending to be somewhat skeptical and observing the slave still showing signs of epilepsy, he pauses before finally agreeing to buy to slave from the elder.

    As the boy moves off with the prince, he still shows some signs of ill health, but the moment they are out of sight, the two hug, the slave assuring his beautiful prince that all is now well. The two hold hands and walk off into the sunset of a thousand and one nights.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (July 2021)

Bob Mizer | Aztec Sacrifice / 1959

aztec bondage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (director) Aztec Sacrifice / 1959

 

Bob Mizer’s mini-epic Aztec Sacrifice released in 1959 mocks the 1950s and 1960s religious spectacles such as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben Hur of the same year, and Spartacus (1960), paving the way for such later underground camp versions of DeMille and other such directors’ works in Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964).

     In this costumed and color-film movie, Everett Lee Jackson is an archeological student who goes to bed one night after reading his pictorial text book to have a terrifying nightmare where he finds himself suddenly chained, Hercules style, between two pillars by Aztec chieftains who ritualistically provide him with a presumably sedative drink before laying him down and strapping him into place—in a brilliantly absurd moment—with Mylar tape before placing a “poisonous viper” on his chest, its tongue flicking out onto his face. He is surely about die, but suddenly awakens in his own bed, his roommate returning home to find him sprawled out on the bed with their pet snake Jimmy having escaped.

     Despite some seconds of pretend horror, it’s all done with a good sense of humor, particularly since we see Jackson smiling, almost with pleasure, as Physique magazine regulars Jimmy Wilson and George Savage lay him out for the sacrifice. The campy costumes of feathers, beads, and baubles, extravagantly point out the groins of the Aztec chieftains who are understandably attracted to their victim’s pectorals and buttocks.

    I would, of course, liked to have known more about the relationship between the archeological student and his snake-loving friend.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).