Douglas Messerli | I'm Funny That Way: Two Fighting Flyer Films of 1929 [Introduction]

i’m funny that way: two fighting flyer films of 1929

by Douglas Messerli

 

Circling somewhere in a long string of films about early wartime fliers waiting to land before film audiences between William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927), The Flying Fleet (January 1929), the later Test Pilot (1938), is Frank Capra’s film Flight (September 1929) which shares much in common with the others, including the fact that the leads train and serve in or for the military together during which they become close buddies and proceed to fall in love with the same woman, resulting in a feeling of betrayal between the two males and a final reconciliation of the two airmen, one of whom saves or attempts to save the other at the last moment through his piloting skills. Most importantly, each of these films, although engaged in the narrative with heterosexual love is actually centered upon the male camaraderie between the two leads, a relationship which can be read as a coded homosexual love or, at the very least, a significantly important bromance which far overshadows the heterosexual marriage with which each of these films ends.

     What is also very interesting is the interrelationships between the last three named of these movies. The Flying Fleet, starring Roman Novarro as Tommy Winslow and Ralph Graves as Steve Randall was based on a story by the famed U.S. Navy Aviator Frank Wead, who also wrote the script to the Test Pilot starring Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable. Capra’s Flight, which film commentator Hal C. F. Astell has correctly noted is not only an obvious comparison with the earlier one of that year but “isn’t far off being exactly the same film.”

      That second film, Flight is credited as being based on a story by Ralph Graves, the same actor of The Flying Fleet, and who stars in this film as “Lefty” Phelps, the pilot who wins the girl over his friend and close companion Gunnery Sergeant “Panama” Williams, a role performed by Jack Holt, who is often cited as the Clark Gable of the silent films. Wead also wrote the script for Capra’s film 1931 film Dirigible, yet another story of airmen who loved the same woman, starring once again Ralph Graves, this time with Jack Holt.

      Perhaps I should also mention that both Novarro and Graves, who shared the bill on The Flying Fleet, were quite openly gay to the Hollywood community. Murdered by two brothers who called from an agency Novarro regularly used to obtain male prostitutes, Novarro’s homosexuality is well known today.  During his career he had longer affairs, evidently, with composer Harry Partch (working as an usher at the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the time), journalist Herbert Howe, who became his publicist, and the wealthy San Francisco businessman, Noël Sullivan.

      Obviously Graves is lesser known, his sexuality seldom discussed. But he had long been a friend of Howard Hughes’ father, who had put Graves on the payroll of “Big Howard’s” Toolco company when he was between acting jobs. Later he and the younger Howard Hughes became good friends, and one of Hughes’ first film efforts was to be Grave’s directorial debut Swell Hogan of 1926, a disaster when Hughes finally screened it. Unsure of how to fix it, Hughes hired Dorothy Arzner to work on it, but she clearly thought it impossible to redeem. When Howard contacted his uncle, novelist and film director Rupert Hughes, according to biographer Darwin Porter (Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angels), he responded "It's nothing. No plot. No build up. No character development. The acting stinks. Destroy the film. If anybody sees it, you and that homo Graves will be the laughing stock of Hollywood.” In an interview with Anthony Slide for Silent Players, Graves later admitted to having had affairs with W. Somerset Maugham and Noël Coward, as well as Mack Sennett (no Mabel Normand around when he stayed in Sennett’s house) and Howard Hughes* while working on Swell Hogan, the film for which Hughes had workers destroy both the celluloid and the sets.

 

*Porter quotes Graves about Hughes: “His reputation is that he bedded a lot of the most beautiful gals in Hollywood. It’s also well known to a few hundred people in the industry that he also bedded a lot beautiful guys, too, including me. From the very beginning I knew Howard as a homo. I was a great friend of the boy’s father since I too as a Houstonian. Papa Hughes was definitely no fairy—I can swear by that. But he knew his son was a cocksucker.” But Porter’s book, beware, is self-described as a fiction.

      Whether everything Graves says can be believed is not for me to answer. He also claimed that when working with D. W. Griffith, the director would call him in to discuss a script, but spend most of the time kissing him.

      The Graves / Hughes movie, incidentally, was to tell the story of a homeless man who wanted to adopt a baby, almost crying out, it seems to me, that the gay writer would like to have children, homelessness in this case being used as a metaphor for living a life without a wife.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

John W. Harkrider and Millard Webb | Glorifying the American Girl / 1929

straight to broadway

by Douglas Messerli

 

Millard Webb (screenplay, based on a story by J. P. McEvoy), John W. Harkrider and Millard Webb (directors) Glorifying the American Girl / 1929

 

A friend of mine recently asked whether I wasn’t now very tired of seeing films representing the difficulties of sexually “coming out.” Certainly, I have seen several hundreds of variations of the LGBTQ popular genre, although I still find the subject interesting and the variation in the individuals’ confusion and suffering seemingly inexhaustible. I answered, “yes, the genre was beginning to wear thin, but throughout my life time I have seen far more films in the genre of a small town or even “big town” girls with dreams of becoming successful in New York’s Broadway theater. There were so many hundreds—among the apotheosis of this genre are works such as A Star Is Born, Gypsy, and Funny Girl—that I’ve seen over the years that I can hardly bear to watch yet another, particularly those filmed in the early days of talkies from 1927 through the 1930s.

      Yet yesterday, I sat before the screen witnessing what I think might be one of the very worst of the genre, Glorifying the American Girl, with a plot so predictable that it didn’t even need to be written. And when there were weak links in the action, the writers didn’t even bother to fill them in, knowing that their audiences could easily do so from having seen the same story played out so many times on the screen.

      In this version of the tale, whose only variation may be that the “hometown” girl lives and works in New York City, Gloria Hughes (Mary Eaton) serving as the sheet music counter singer alongside the piano player would-be lover Buddy Moore (Edward Crandall), is determined to be a Ziegfeld Follies star, while Buddy hopes to compose music for stage productions. Like most such dreamers, Gloria is possessed of a dreadful soon-to-be stage mother, who at this point simply spends any money her daughter makes selling sheet music, but soon takes over the role as a true monster who seeks to keep her daughter hoofing only to allow herself to live the life she deliriously “slaved” for. Gloria seems forever convinced of her mother’s endless tears and monstrations instead of getting wise to the fact that she’s eating up the girl’s share of the 50% she makes as one of the dancing duo, Miller and Mooney.

     I only wish that Gloria had met up with her sleazy partner, Miller, before I had to slog through the bad numbers and endless volcano of supposedly satirically clichéd speeches pouring from her employer’s mouth. But I guess they needed the picnic and its terrible stage acts so that the writers could more fully reveal that poor Buddy, desperately in love with Gloria, was fast becoming the stooge which most career-oriented beauties make of their moon-calf lovers; it’s clear that he should find happiness instead with the plainer looking but happily untalented and loyal friend, Barbara (Gloria Shea). But part of the genre’s pleasure derives from his slow awakening to the fact that as beautiful and talented as Glorified American Girl might be, she’s a dead end when it comes to love, just as it makes clear that as long as a boyfriend like Buddy remains googly-eyed over the blonde bamboo, it’s better for women like Barbara to stay clear of them. Barbara only discovers what’s been obvious since scene one by getting hit by a car and being sent by ambulance over to Bellevue.

      Of course, Danny is equally “no good,” taking his 50% from her career while offering up none of his has-been talent. Oh but, who cares? Gloria gets a job, becomes the Ziegfeld Follies stage star for doing a kitschy ballet skit that she’s always wanted to make famous. It’s clear if you want to make on the Broadway stage you have to abandon your heterosexual wishes at the stage door.

      How the writer and directors ever convinced Florenz Ziegfeld to produce this film, let alone tack it onto several skits and numbers from the actual Ziegfeld show, “Glorifying the American Girl,” is someone inexplicable. I guess Ziegfeld was of the mind that any publicity is better than none. And certainly he did everything he could to make the last few scenes as interesting as possible, beginning with a roster of radio broadcast cameo walk-ons that even director Robert Altman might have envied. Noah Beery, Irving Berlin, Charles B. Dillingham, Texas Guinan, Otto Kahn, Ring Lardner, Mayor Jimmy Walker and his wife, and dozens of others including Ziegfeld and Billie Burke themselves trot into the Ziegfeld theater just before the curtain rises.

     Unfortunately, the skits Ziegfeld chose to be filmed only reveals why his Follies and other such high-toned burlesque-vaudeville shows would not survive the Depression. Rudy Vallée and his Connecticut Yankees’ performance of his “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” is so weak-voiced and boringly interpreted that you realize why he needed a megaphone; Helen Morgan’s rendition of “What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man” only telegraphs the difficulties she would soon have with alcoholism; and Eddie Cantor’s seemingly endless vaudeville shtick about two Jewish suit salesmen makes it clear why the very next year he would escape into the movies.

    Gloria’s en pointe butterfly ballet sequence looks more like a skit starring Gypsy’s Tessie Tura than anything you might see in the Bolshoi. But you do get a strong sense throughout of the sexualization of the American Girl in scenes in which the chorines are covered only in beads and feathers surrounded by plenty of half-nude chorus boys.

      This film somehow turned up on my encyclopedic LGBTQ list, and while watching it I had become certain that like a few dozen others on that list that had absolutely no such content, works that some busy gay queen or dyke had simply listed because of wishful thinking. But suddenly in the midst of the technicolor last few scenes pasted to the black-and-white bleakness of this silly stardom story, a glorious Ziegfeld tableaux vivant of a just-captured mermaid surrounded by burly bare-chested sailors that, with its foretelling of the photos of French photographers Pierre et Gilles and a snapshot of Bette Midler as Dolores Del Rio, made it worth the trip. The three boys in this picture are just a few of several who punctuate a space that represents, along with Adrian Brunel’s film Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffoonery (1925), one of the first clear cinematic instances of camp humor. Here, it is the men who are clearly sexualized, presented as gay boys to droll over as the mermaid simply lays they in wait to be eviscerated.

      Check out this film just for this scene and the later glimpse of the half-naked Johnny Weissmuller beside the half-naked Ziegfeld queen at the end, but you might want to scroll ahead.

Los Angeles, July 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Dave Wilson | Pinklisting / 1985 [TV-SNL sketch]

one of your own kind

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jim Downey, Al Franken, Tom Davis, and Don Novello and others (screenwriters), Dave Wilson (director), Pinklisting / 1985 [6.27 minutes] [TV-SNL sketch]

 

I suppose we have to give credit to Saturday Night Live for taking on such a taboo subject in 1985. The episode, comparing the current hysteria about AIDS and the gay spread of the disease with McCarthyism, mocks those who in 1985 still kept their distance from gay men for fear of infestation, thus forcing many gay men back into the closet.

     Actually, some of the incidents portrayed in the sketch were based on real events. As Matthew Rodriguez, writing in the online magazine The Body noted, “The sketch aired the fall after Rock Hudson died, after the tabloids ran several stories claiming his Dynasty co-star Linda Evans got AIDS from kissing the star.” There was still the notion among many in society that AIDS might be spread even by breathing in the same air, even though by this year of this work, most of the medical establishment had long corrected their original fears and confusions.

    In this version of that hysteria, a famous actress Melinda Zoomont (played by Madonna) is distressed since she thought they had cut the sex scene. The director, Art (Randy Quaid) explains that since in this soap opera she’s going to have male star Clint’s baby and he kidnaps her in later episodes, they had to reintroduce the scene where they loll naked in a hot tub. Yet the actress is furious since, proclaiming in her best Bette Davis imitation, “…I told you, I don’t do love scenes with actors I don’t know,” meaning she won’t even associate with who are not verifiably proven to be heterosexual and, so she was misinformed, therefore safe from acquiring the HIV and AIDS.

     At that very moment, Clint pulls up in his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. With a flat-top blonde hairdo, and walking as close to John Wayne as he is able, looking more like a robot than a man cowboy who just wet his pants, Terry Sweeney—the only openly LGBT actor on SNL until Kate McKinnon and John Milhiser, both of whom joined the cast in 2013, and Bowen Yang, who joined the cast in 2018—quickly convinces Melinda of his heterosexuality by responding to the director’s introduction by saying, “You don’t have to introduce me to television’s sexiest star.”

     However, during his makeup session with Joan Cusack, he reads is own favorite tabloid. He quickly scans the sports page announcing that the Raiders “clutched,” before he turns the paper around to read the headline: JUDY GARLAND BIO: LISA UNWANTED, upon which he immediately breaks down in a supposedly gay campy like outburst, putting his hands to head and gasping, “Oh my god, when are they going to leave that poor woman alone?” When he regains his composure again, it’s all sports that he pretends to talk about.

     The director now explains the scene: they share a glass of wine, gaze into each other’s eyes, you kiss passionately, you take off your clothes and you get into the hot tub. He demands that the sound director turns on the sound for the hot tub. “That’s a hundred and eight degrees in there, so you two should be quite comfy.

      Art suddenly calls in the censor, since the director a question about the kissing scene.

     Jon Lovitz, in his first SNL appearance, does various versions of tongue movement to represent kissing that is most definitely off limits.

       The actors begin their scene, but suddenly a pulley falls loose and a rock comes crashing into the small child’s pool next to them, all setting Lionel and his character Clint into a screeching hysteria fit, which immediately leads Melinda to declare: “Wait a moment. You’re gay!”

        Clint answers, “Yes, I’m gay.” Standing, he continues, “And now you all know. Art, you can fire me if you like, but I can’t go on living a lie.”

        The director responds: “Clint, I admire your guts, and I think you should know I’m gay too.”

        Suddenly, somewhat like the famous scene in the film Spartacus, where all his soldiers claim to be the leader, so does the entire crew (which includes later better-known figures such as Robert Downey, Jr. and Anthony Michael Hall) and the makeup artist also admit they’re gay.

         Clint summarizes: “Living out this little charade, you know, was not a matter of choice, but a matter of survival. [Looking hard at Melinda] But then I supposed you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

         Melinda stands, claiming she does understand them, admitting that she’s an “intravenous drug dealer.”

         Art wonders if they can now shoot the scene, but Clint storms off the set, insisting that there’s no way that he will work with an “intravenous drug dealer.”*

         Critic Rodriguez found the sketch to be disarmingly edgy and progressive.” While IndieWrite found it to be “something even more rare: the mainstream media addressing AIDS in 1985 in a borderline sensitive manner.”

          But frankly, except for a couple of moments, I did not find it amusing, and found Madonna’s acting to be something near to atrocious. Furthermore, all the gay stereotypes are here: the effeminate high voiced hysteria, the closeted queen, and the final self-righteous coming-out. Yes, the show should be lauded for taking on the subject; but they could have done so much better if they only had known a little more about the queer world and those who inhabit it. Rock Hudson didn’t have to mime a straight man; that’s what as a gay man he looked like, a gentle speaking baritone with a chiseled hunk’s body that drew in nearly every woman who came near him, from the seasoned (even if she claimed to be totally naïve) Elaine Stritch to my own mother. Even Howard, when I told him early in our relationship that Hudson was gay, refused to believe it.

        Although this sketch, moreover, is focused on those who would shun and isolate primarily gay men, it says nothing about all those gays and others who were actually suffering from HIV or full AIDS, and spews none its ire at those many parents and friends who had left their sons and daughters to die alone, without love. Let alone does it talk about the real political ramifications of a US President and his government appointees who refused to fund sufficient money for AIDS research, many who were only too happy to ignore and punish the gay community which most suffered the devastation of the disease.

     By 1985 the scourge and its effect on the gay the community was well known, yet this sketch makes no reference to it. Although someone like Jonathan Swift might have put irony to good use to create a comic statement; however, by 1985 irony as a literary tool unrecognizable my many people in the US, and the comic talents of Downey, Franken, and others were not up to doing much else than poking fun at those who misunderstood that the disease was spread not by sharing a hot tube or kissing, but in making love, in sex itself—a subject still off the radar in US TV offerings. In a sense, we have never recovered from the religious right’s views of the 1950s with which this reminds us in its first frames.

     Finally, I’d like to ask, are we supposed to feel that there is some equivalency between wanting to keep a distance from gay men and desiring to have nothing to do with an intravenous drug dealer? Is Clint’s refusal to work with Melinda Zoomont connected, in some manner, with her refusal to have anything to do with gay men? I see no corollary, and find the joke almost offensive, particularly given the not-so-distant events I mention in the footnote below.

 

*Audiences of 1985 would also be aware of the 1981 killings of the so-called Wonderland gang, who dealt in cocaine and heroin, and were shot to death in their Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles home for their robberies of other drug dealers.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).

 

Shimon Kabili | The Way Out / 2017

perhaps the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shimon Kabili (screenwriter and director) The Way Out / 2017 [25 minutes]

 

This US film, based on true events, tells a story about a Mexican vacation, filmed in Israel with a mostly Israeli cast.

       Ryan Moor (Aki Avni) is a well-to-do real estate developer who is vacationing with his family, his wife Natalie (Sharon Ben Tovim), his daughter, and son in a Mexican resort. Evidently he is involved in deals in this community as well, since all the hotel employees seem to know him and he’s given a grand suite with a stunning view of the ocean, the hostess immediately providing his children with special tickets to a beach ride.

      He and his family appear to be nearly perfect, except for a very important matter that he has evidently long been hiding. Ryan is deeply in love with an Argentinian national, a male name Ariel (Nir Zelichowski) who is living illegally in Mexico. And in that regard, we immediately recognize this film as sharing issues that were raised, without the wife’s point of view, in Todd Haynes’ 2002 feature film Far from Heaven.

      This beautifully filmed movie, with cinematography by Shark De Mayo and an excellent musical score by Ophir Leibovitch, begins with Ryan’s arrest by Mexican police on the beach where he has retreated, after sex, to talk with Ariel. Even there, however, he can hardly keep his hands off his lover and the police find them as they are about to again engage in sex, illegal, so we are later told, on the beach in this resort community.

     Resisting arrest, Ryan is beaten and taken in for interrogation, he constantly insisting that he wasn’t doing anything, until finally meeting up with the police head, Juan (Makram Khoury) who tells him that the fine his criminal act is $1,000. A call to Ariel results eventually in the payment after long hours on a bed without mattress or pillow and a nearby hole in the floor for a latrine in a padlocked cage.

     Moving in and out of time, the film shows him with his wife revealing that their sexual relationship has changed, he rejecting her sexual advances. And yet we glimpse his moments of love and happiness with is children.

     But the most moving scene is the one in which, in the middle of the night and after sneaking out of his bed where Natalie lays sleeping, Ryan and Ariel meet up on a derelict side street. It is clear that his love for Ariel is far deeper than any love making he might be able to revive in his heterosexual relationship.

      How long his homosexual activity has been going on or whether or not it has involved only Ariel is never revealed. But for any of us who have observed closeted heterosexuals in their attempts to find sexual fulfillment it is a sadly familiar story, as the head-over-heels in love Ryan must block out most of his life and his moral commitment to it for a few moments of pleasure.

       This story might have ended in a kind of cyclic pattern—after being freed with the payment, the husband returning to pretend his joyful embracement of the family—were it not that writer / director Shimon Kabili takes it in an odd direction.

       When the payment is made the police chief seems to be driving Ryan back to is hotel—although we are not certain and are somewhat fearful when Ryan asks, “Where are we going?”—all the while the older man, Juan, asking him questions about his marriage and family, which Ryan readily answers. But when he asks about his “boyfriend,” Ryan once more bulks, refusing to admit to such a relationship: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Juan pulls the car over to the shoulder and stops the engine, as we become truly fearful of the situation.

      The police chief begins by describing his Playa community as being religious and traditional with regard to marriage and family. He too had a son Miguel, he tells his prisoner, who people saw go into “a dice club,” where tourists go. He admits that he couldn’t accept it, being a great sin in his family and in response, he expelled his son from his home and refused to talk with him after, despite his wife’s constant attempts to convince him to change his mind along with his son’s attempts to resume their relationship. “I didn’t want to hear.”

      He takes out a photo of his son from his billfold and shows it to Ryan. After a long pause, he continues: “He killed himself. …I wanted him to live my way. Now he doesn’t live at all. Not my way or any way.”

       This is a very touching scene which we recognize as the only moral message possible in this film. But we have some confusion, obviously, about where his confession is going? Obviously he is heartbroken over his rejection of his son, his inability to accept him for who he was. But what is he suggesting for the man trapped in his car? Like Ryan, we want to ask, “Where are we going?”

        As Juan removes the prisoner’s handcuffs, before driving him on, he finishes up with a piece of advice: “I hope you understand what you are doing.”

        And now we can begin comprehend his meaning. Ryan himself, in this case, is both Juan and his son, a man torn in two, the one refusing to permit the other to live his life as he must. Death is imminent unless he makes a choice to find “the way out” of the bind in has put himself in.

       This excellent work doesn’t provide us with the answer to what this troubled man decides. All we see is his return to the early twilight hotel rooms, watching briefly wander the rooms in his torn shirt and his bloodied lip, after an absence surely noticed by his wife. He checks in on his children, closing the door tight before moving on into his bedroom, sitting down upon the bed and shaking his wife awake with an assured voice speaking her name “Natalie.”

       Let me just suggest, it does not sound like he is about to cry out in a complex lie of how what has happened to him is the cause of a terrible mistake, but rather that he has something to share with her. Just perhaps the truth.

Los Angeles, August 31, 2022 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (August 2022).

Dan Fry | Dancing Around / 2017

forget what you’ve heard

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dan Fry (screenwriter and director) Dancing Around / 2017 [15 minutes]

 

In Australian filmmaker Dan Fry’s 2017 short film, Dancing Around, he explores a family breakup due to a mid-life gay relationship through the daughter, Maddy’s (Taylor Morgan) eyes.

      Maddy’s mother Ned (Nereda Taylor) is a lawyer who daily drives to work from the family’s Queensland country home with her co-worker Johan (Johan Venter), while her husband, Dan (played by the director) appears to be a stay-at-home father. Certainly, it appears that he has the closest relationship to Maddy, encouraging her dancing, insisting she help out with kitchen duties, and indicating other attentions that evidences the fact that it has become mostly his responsibility to raise Maddy.

     But there are subtle signs, early on in this film, that things are not as perfect in this family as they first may seem. Maddy seems to be spending in an inordinate amount of time dancing; indeed Ned and Dan have even built her a small separate studio for her to get away from all other human contact, which she apparently takes every opportunity to do. Later, we learn that there have been regular arguments between the two adults, several of which she has overheard.

        Although she seems to like Ned’s law partner Johan, a visit from him on this particular occasion does not elicit joy. Maddy complains that all her mother and he talk about is law. But we suspect there are also other reasons. And when he arrives, we soon begin to wonder—when after dinner, Dan excuses himself from his wife’s company in order to take a walk, inquiring beforehand whether or not Maddy is in her room, and we observe Johan soon after exiting from what appears to be his room during his stay—what else is behind Maddy’s displeasure in Johan’s evidently commonplace visit.

      Fortunately, Fry postpones the scene, narratively returning to a scene somewhat earlier, evidently after dinner with the adult trio, when Maddy is asked to dance. But even before she is requested to perform by her father, we see a slight argument erupt as Ned seems to wonder whether her performance is worth watching, while Dan appears to scold her for not ever being there to see her work. Johan quickly resolves the devolving argument by asking to see her dance, her father reminding Maddy to “Forget what you might have heard, this is your time to shine.” The child dances a free-form series of movements that is quite remarkable.

     The director narratively moves the film yet a little further back, during a scene while they are all at dinner, Maddy stabbing at her fruit which she clearly is not interested in eating. She drops a piece of fruit on the floor and bends down to pick up, observing under the table that her father and Johan are holding hands. We see her break down in tears soon after.

   

     We now return to the scene that was interrupted earlier, where the two men meet and kiss a ways off from the house, but alas not far enough away from Maddy’s young eyes, as she stands on the balcony of the home, we later discover, photographing them. Clearly, Maddy is a kind of later version of Henry James' Maisie, of that novelist's What Maisie Knew.

     By the time the men return from their tryst, Maddy has shown the pictures to her mother. And when they return it is with the intention of finally revealing the truth to Ned about their relationship. She, however, bluntly faces off with her recent discovery, which obviously doesn’t end well.

      Dan is seen packing up, the two males obviously heading off, but Dan trying to make certain that Ned will remind Maddy, who apparently now refuses to talk with him, that he will be back with her in a couple of days. The bitter Ned reports that Maddy was not truly is daughter, a statement overheard evidently by Maddy. Johan insists that Dan go up to talk to Maddy as the film comes to a close; Maddy in her room alone, two pet hamsters upon her shoulders, takes down the photos of her father and mother to study them carefully as if she seeking in them some forgotten reality. The work ends with clips of film taken from when Maddy was a baby being carried, hugged, and kissed by her father, no mother in sight.

       The tragedy in this painful tale of late coming out—a common occurrence alas in societies, such as Fry argues Queensland is, where men and women are still encouraged to hide their sexual identities—is the pain it brings to Maddy who has already pulled apart from the human world as she puts all of her confused feelings into dance. Maddy may lose her greatest source of love, it appears, if her father is refused visiting privileges or if he is refused his parental care for her. The mother clearly has been far too busy to properly demonstrate her love for her daughter. And yet through her final statement we realize she is making a case for Dan to have no rights concerning his beloved daughter.

       In this sense the film represents a brutal reality that occurs in homophobic worlds in which individuals are forced to escape, like Maddy has into dance, into cocoons spun with lies and dishonesty.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).