Burt Gillett | King Neptune / 1932

blow the men down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Norm Ferguson, Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, David Hand, Dick Lundy, Ben Sharpsteen, Art Babbitt, Jack King, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ed Love, Fred Spencer, Paul Fennell, Chuck Counch, Joe D’Igalo, Harry Reeves, Charles Hutchinson, Dick Williams, and Charles Byrne (animation), Burt Gillett (director) King Neptune / 1932

 

This 1932 Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon, features Neptune (voiced by Allan Watson) at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by his various subjects including octopi, crabs, seahorses, and, from within a clamshell, a bevy of naked mermaids.

    The mermaids gather on a rock, while meanwhile a ship full of pirates carouse the sea singing their pirate song. In the midst of the burly, drunken pirates song a highly campy pirate, dressed in purple, peaks through a porthole to momentarily interrupt the chorus with his own effeminate version of “Yo-ho blow the man down,” in response to which someone throws a jug of rum in his face.

     The pirates spot the mermaids and rush to the rock where they sit sunning themselves. Most of the beauties quickly dive into the sea, but one red-haired lovely is lassoed by the head pirate and tossed into his treasure box. She too is different from the others, prized for her ginger hair.

     Neptune is locked in chains, but his entire kingdom comes to the mermaid’s rescue, including spouting whales, a contingent of mounted sea horses, and a razorback shark whose body serves as a launching and landing pad for flying fish. Octopi—via the animation of David Hand, who later became supervising director of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi—turn themselves into helicopters.

     Breaking the chains, Neptune rises to the surface, blowing up a storm, stirring up whirlpools with his trident, and finally, sinking the pirate ship by leaping upon it and plunging it to the bottom of the sea.

     The pirates have apparently drowned, but the orange-headed mermaid pops out of the chest festooned with jewelry hidden in the treasure chest, while the others equally rope themselves in long strands of pearls, performing another lovely water ballet to Neptune’s pleasure.

     Because of the perceived nudity regarding the mermaids and the suggestion of heavy drinking, this lovely film was not selected for the 2019 Platinum Edition DVD of Disney’s treasures.

     Interestingly, the brief role played by the queer pirate is precisely the way gay men and women were often introduced during the same period in the numerous “panze” films, where they appeared in a context of isolation, separated from the rest of the action and having no real involvement with the other characters, there only to represent an outsider in the midst of an often closed society.

    It’s never revealed what happened to the queer pirate, despite the fact that we doubt he was not involved in the rape of the mermaid; but perhaps just by presenting an alternative, the life of pirating was pictured as not entirely evil. Some pirates just liked to be around those of their same gender.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

    

Nigel Finch | The Lost Language of Cranes / 1991, 1992 general British TV release

family secrets

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sean Mathias (screenplay, based on the novel by David Leavitt), Nigel Finch (director) The Lost Language of Cranes / 1991, 1992 general British TV release

 

Rose Benjamin (Eileen Atkins) is an editor, working throughout this film on what appears to be a romance novel. Her son Philip (Angus Macfadyen) also works as an editor, although we do not see him engaged in his vocation but rather observe him mostly cuddled up in bed with his lover Elliot (Corey Parker) a mercurial American who appears torn between his love for and an inclination to break up with Philip. Rose’s husband and Philip’s father Owen (Brian Cox) is a successful academic, teaching at a university. Accordingly, the Benjamin family, although not financially well off—indeed during the period when we enter their lives Rose and Owen are fearful of not being able to find an affordable new apartment, the owner having demanded the flat in they have been living for many years be vacated—they nonetheless seem to be a fairly comfortable and well-adjusted urban trio.

       In US terms—the country wherein David Leavitt’s novel on which this film is based occurred—the Benjamins might be described as having achieved the American dream. To the outsider their home surely is a comfy expression of what appears to be their satisfaction with their lives.

       Yet, as we soon discover, the British Benjamins are a family unable to communicate their deep differences and pains, not just to the world, but more tragically, to themselves. Without actually knowing it, they each speak a slightly different but utterly incomprehensible language to one another. Philip lives with a female roommate, Jerene (Cathy Tyson) who is working on a PhD thesis that focuses on private languages, describing to Philip a pair of young twins who created a private language among themselves and another young boy, who left alone in his crib for most of his life, developed a language from his observation of the large working cranes outside his window. Hence this film’s title, The Language of Cranes, a secret way of expressing not unlike the way Rose, Owen, Philip, and perhaps even Elliot each speak languages that to the others appear to defy communication while openly living lives secreted from one another.

       To give him credit, Philip is the first to try to break the unspoken taboo, declaring to Elliot that he is planning soon to visit his parents and tell them he is gay. It is not that he is closeted; all of his friends know that he is a homosexual; all, that is except Rose and Owen. He is also determined to fully express to Elliot his love and commitment to a permanent relationship.

     The fact that Elliot—who has grown up as the adopted son of a noted queer author, Derek Moulthrop (John Schlesinger) and his partner Geoffrey (René Auberjonois)—still warns Philip about admitting his sexuality to his parents and soon after runs off to Paris, writing that he has found Philip’s love too demanding, should have given Philip some warning of just how difficult it is to describes one’s own identity to others. Yet, fortunately one might argue, Philip pulls open the living room drapes which we see Rose closing in a deep moment of isolation and confusion.

        Hoping to become as honest with his family as he has been to everyone else, the son tells them of his sexuality and reveals how painful it has been over the years to reveal it to the people he most loves. One might think that in 1991, the year this film was released—presumably contemporaneous with the incidents in the film itself—that to such enlightened professionals that Philip, after a moment or two of dismay about having not been told before or simply not having been able to read the signs of his sexual preference, would be greeted with open arms. Yet Rose particularly is angered by the news. Like many a mother, she begs him for some time before she can come terms with what he has told her. More telling is her response to his explanation that “everybody knows it, except you.” 

        “We all have our secrets,” she declares. “I’m not sure they ought to be revealed.”

     “It’s better,” Philip insists, echoing what anybody in his position or what any open-minded individual might argue.

      “Better for whom,” she snaps.

      Even at a later point in the drama, Rose seems still almost bitter about the revelation. And given her first response, we now see her in a different light, as a woman who herself has been holding deep secrets inside, not only about her own affair which we realize was a temporary fling with another married man, the couple’s friend, but out of her own resentment for her husband’s inattention and her doubts about his fidelity. These reactions give a dimension to Rose that Atkins quite brilliantly embodies in her character’s private struggle with inexplicable ghosts and her own slow attempt at translation of the secret language used by her husband.

      Owen at first seems more accepting of his son, but strangely remains silent as a tear drops from his eye and; soon after Philip leaves, he bursts into a seemingly endless crying jab, requiring that Rose not only deal with her own emotional responses, but to comfort her inconsolable husband.

       What we already know by this point in the story is that Owen is not crying for Philip as much as he is crying over his own lost life, his life-long resistance to admitting about himself what his son has just been brave enough to express. 

 

      On regular Sunday outings Owen attends a local porno movie center (apparently at the time there were no such places in Great Britain but in order to remain true to the story, they nonetheless created one) seeking out quick sexual liaisons with other male theater-goers or occasionally joining another man for hotel sex. At another point, Owen gets up the courage to actually visit a male piano bar, picking up a man his age, and joining him for sex.

       Suddenly, it appears, no one in this previously “ordinary” middle-class family is happy; and we realize none of them live in a manner that the majority hetero-normative society would deign to describe as “normal.”

       Encountering a good-looking new faculty member, Winston (Nigel Whitmey) Owen invites him to their home for dinner, ostensibly—so he tells his son on dinner meeting where he also pumps Philip on how to recognize whether someone is gay or not—as a possible companion for his son. But at the family dinner itself it quickly becomes clear to Rose that real reason why Winston has been invited to enjoy her lasagna is because Owen is attracted to him. Throughout the scene Rose remains stolidly quiet as director Nigel Finch’s camera focuses in on a suddenly loquacious Owen describing the joys of Greece and Italy to his would-be lover.

        His apparent attempt to seduce the younger man is, indeed, as Rose later tells him, embarrassing, particularly since the attractive American is quite obviously straight, as Philip confirms when he reports to his new boyfriend that all the young professor could talk about as he drove him home was his girlfriend.

        In the quiet aftermath of Owen’s performance, his wife confronts him about his sexual interest in men, to which, at last, her husband admits he has attempted to sublimate throughout most of their marriage. The New York Times television critic John J. O'Connor nicely summarizes their intense encounter:

 

“While Owen and Philip grapple with the meaning of it all, clear-eyed Rose survives with tenacious dignity. ‘How many times have I looked the other way,’ she asks whimpering Owen, ‘drawing ridiculous conclusions.’ Still another superb performance from Miss Atkins (A Room of One's Own) makes Rose a far more defined character than she is in the novel. She commands our attention and sympathy. ‘Think of me for once,’ she tells her husband. ‘My life's like the punch line of some stupid joke.’"

 

       For Rose, Owen’s admission is suddenly a kind Rosetta Stone that lines up a lifetime series of inexplicable actions, allowing suddenly for a translation from a unknown language she only now can read.

      Through Philip’s honest “coming out,” the Benjamins’ lives have been changed forever, but at least they have the consolation that in the remaining years they might find fuller meaning while living out their true identities.

       This powerful 1991 film was produced by the feisty Ruth Caleb on BBC, in another instance of the bravery of that network compared with the three US network giants. The original featured frontal nudity in the gay scenes and gay sexual activities in the porno movie as screened that year in the London Film Festival, and later in February 1992 on British television. For the US airing in June of the year for the PBS Great Performances series, the frontal nudity was cut from the work as well as much of Owen’s visit to the porno cinema. But even then the PBS airing caused a great deal of controversy, with some sponsors, such as Texaco some claim (which they deny), withdrawing future funding of the series.

      The uncensored film is available on Region 1 DVD in the US, and on Region 2 DVD in The Netherlands. Despite its being a BBC production, it has not been released on DVD in the United Kingdom even though it has been scheduled for release several times before being postponed indefinitely.

      As I have written elsewhere in these pages, Howard and I met one another and became a gay couple openly living together in 1970. The idea that almost 30 years after Warhol’s raunchy gay videos, that 20 years since such significant films as Visconti’s The Damned, Fellini’s Satyricon, and even, in the US, Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band that audiences still could not tolerate the open presentation of gay life seems almost incomprehensible, as meaningless to many of us as the language of homophobic hysteria.

      One must recall, however, in 1992 even seemingly sophisticated audiences were still reeling from the news of AIDS—absurdly described as the “gay” disease—and that very year a second wave of films about AIDS were making their way to theaters. My editorial assistant, Pablo Capra, who came of age in those same years, describes them as representing the most virulent anti-gay attitudes imaginable—although I most certainly might point to other periods such as the early 1960s, an even more powerfully homophobic era, in my view, than the notorious re-bating 50s.

      I am well aware that there still many TV viewers today who would, like Rose, prefer not to have such “secrets” revealed. Sorry folks, the very book you have in your hands testifies to the fact that there are simply no more secrets to be told. Anyone today who doesn’t know about the lives of LGBTQ people is intentionally placing their hands over their eyes, ears, and nose while reaching out to cover my mouth like one of the many-armed angry Indian gods.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).

Yasujirō Ozu | 風の中の牝鶏 (Kaze no naka no mendori) (A Hen in the Wind) / 1948, USA 2013

sacrifice and blame

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yasujirō Ozu and Ryosuke Saito (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 風の中の牝鶏 (Kaze no naka no mendori) (A Hen in the Wind) / 1948, USA 2013

 

Yasujirō Ozu’s A Hen in the Wind is hardly his most appealing work. Not only is the film—about a war-time wife, Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) who, in order to pay for her son’s medical bills, becomes a one-time prostitute—melodramatically conceived, but its patriarchal attitudes are nearly unbearable.

       We all know that when Ozu was repatriated from the war, he turned to subjects primarily dealing with family life. But generally, the tensions between parents and children are quite fairly represented. Here the tensions are quite one-sided, as the returning husband, Shuichi (Shūji Sano) becomes furious when his wife confesses her behavior, eventually violently throwing her down the stairs.

       She survives, and he ultimately forgives her, but in his determination that they should never speak about it again, he is still blaming her for her own sacrifices. Even though he has discovered that she visited the brothel only once—and we know what he doesn’t, that her customer could not even get an erection—she is still blamed for the event.

     Moreover, Ozu does not even permit his character to defend herself. At no time does Tokiko report just how difficult it was to raise a young son alone, or express the fact that she often went hungry to feed Shoichi (Hohi Aoki), that she had attempted and failed to sell her last kimono that she often carried the sick child home on her back, or that without immediate money she would be unable to put him in the hospital to be cured. Rather, the director has her endure her husband’s charges in quietude, almost as if she deserves them. And given the family dynamics, it is clear that she believes he is justified.

    Critic Joan Mellen felt that this violent behavior showed that Ozu “brilliantly and honestly confronted the post-war moment,” showing how Japan—like the heroine—had become prostituted to the sleazy values of the Occupation. We know instinctively that Ozu is attempting to represent sympathy for Tokiko. Yet for me it seems the director blames those who stayed behind with few alternatives, instead of the young warriors who brutally went off to war. If these represent his conservative family values, I certainly wouldn’t want to share his family life. But then Ozu never married or had children.

      The work kept reminding me of how Nora, in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, was attacked for having made sacrifices to save her husband’s Torvald’s life.

      But Ozu gives poor Tokiko, who unwillingly sacrificed her own body to save her son’s life, no choice of even leaving; she is more trapped in their poverty-stricken homelife of the mid-20th century than even was in the previous century’s norms. But then, it is also apparent that Shuichi would never be able to care for their son, and that Tokiko’s only choice, if she were to leave, would be to continue a life of prostitution, becoming more of a Mizoguchi figure than an Ozu one.

     Speaking of A Hen in the Wind, Ozu himself described it as “a bad failure.”

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).

Atom Egoyan | The Adjuster / 1991

adjusting to life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Atom Egoyan (screenwriter and director) The Adjuster / 1991

 

On paper the plot of Canadian director Atom Egoyan’s 4th feature film, The Adjuster (1991) sounds like the most perversely surreal movie ever made, an complete artifice that requires, more than simply its audiences’ suspension of belief, but a complete immersion into a sexual planet that includes everything from the worst of what is imaginable in porn films and the most outlandish of voyeuristic and exhibitionist fantasies, to romantic straight and gay liaisons performed by one seemingly nice guy insurance adjuster. To actually attempt to describe the narrative is a little bit like trying to outline a mad mix of cinematic and literary works that one might encounter in the library of Dr. Alfred Charles Kinsey—which is perhaps why no film critic I read has done it very successfully, often confusing and misinterpreting what eventually is revealed as being pretty straight forward, even if totally unbelievable, after Egoyan’s rather clear presentation.

      Let me give it a try. Hera Render (Arsinée Khanjian) works for the Canadian Censor Board, daily reviewing all porn films which they rate with an extensive list of categories from A through H. It might help if I—following the details of the film provided by a new censor just entering his  post (Don McKellar)—repeat the categories, if only to help my readers understand the vast array of attention their coding system requires:

 

A.    Graphic or prolonged scene of violence, torture, crime, cruelty,

horror, or human degradation.

B.     The depiction of physical abuse or humiliation of human beings

for purposes of sexual gratification or as pleasing to the victim.

C.     A person who is or is intended to represent a person under the

age of 16 and appears

1.      nude or partially nude in a sexually suggestive content or text

2.      in a scene of sexually explicit activity.

D.    Explicit and gratuitous depiction of urination, defecation, or

vomiting.

           H.  A scene where an animal is abused in the making of the film.

 

    We’re never told why E and F do not exist, or if they do what they represent. And, to be fair, I do not know if this list has anything at all to do with the real Canadian Censor Board. The offices, filled with overflowing bins of pornographic magazines and fliers which a staff of numerous others to attend to them, seems like something out of a sexual science fiction film in the manner of Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968).

      Hera is clearly a very competent and committed worker, except for the fact that she inexplicably films the porno works she watches. When the genial and personable Head Censor (David Hemblen) is alerted to her possible infraction, she reveals that she does it not for her own enjoyment but to share her workday duties with her sister Seta (Rose Sarkisyan), who lives with her and her husband and watches the films all over again each evening, often with Hera’s young son Simon in the same room with her. She and Hera are close and have shared their every experience with one another throughout their lives.

      One day on the subway Hera encounters a drunken derelict, an overweight disheveled being who at one point falls to the subway floor. While she passively watches another woman goes over to the drunk and sits next to him, slowly lifting up her skirt and guiding his hand to her crotch as he publicly masturbates her, she obviously fully enjoying the act.

      These two, we soon discover are a wealthy married couple, Bubba (Maury Charykin) and Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) who, other than throwing lavish dinner parties, spend most of their lives planning outlandish sexual events that fulfill Bubba’s voyeuristic desires, while Mimi is able to exhibit her lusty pleasures in the most public of ways possible.

     For their next adventure, Bubba hires an entire football team along with their stadium so that Mimi can live out her cheerleader fantasies by having sex with each and every member from tight end down the line to guard, center, and quarterback.

      But even earlier in the film we have seen Bubba scouting out a place for a new “shoot,” the strange suburban development in which only four large homes were built among many empty acres, only one of them having been sold and inhabited before the developers ran out of money.

      In that isolated house lives Hera, Seta, and Simon with this strange trio’s father, Noah Render (Elias Koteas), a good-looking and apparently mildly tempered insurance adjustor.

      From the evidence in the very first scene, we sense that Noah and Hera’s relationship is not a terribly close one, particularly since in the dark Hera seems to be moaning and shaking from some nightmare vision as Noah quietly rises to dress, having been called out to a house fire which he must investigate. He telephones her on his way to the fire just to check up, but she seems unappreciative for him having awakened her.

       What we soon discover is that Noah’s job seems to consist primarily of him showing up to burning households to meet the owners whose whole lives have just gone up in flames. He asks them for photographs and complete descriptions of their every destroyed possession, but goes far beyond what the company might require by gently consoling them, often using the company mantra “You may not feel it, but you're in a state of shock.” To help them find their way back into the “real” world, Noah not only attempts to jog their memories in order to replace what they have lost, but offers most of his clients his own body, making love to beings who are temporarily without anything else in their lives.

        At the local motel where he puts up most of his suffering customers he is known as a hero, not only by the motel’s operators and service workers whom he has helped to keep in business and employed, but by his grateful insurance holders to whom he has provided new hope both mentally and physically. A bit like the beautiful family visitor of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), this more everyday angel offers the customers, apparently both female and male, young and old, far more than they might have imagined when signing up for their policies.

     If we see Noah in bed with one of his newest female clients, we also witness those who are still waiting for the company payment seeking out his reassurances and caresses—at one point an older man holding Noah’s hand and kissing it like a mafia Godfather, and by the end of the film his most recent client, a photogenic Hispanic man named Matthew (Raoul Trujillo), laid out naked on the motel bed, having just had sex with the always ready-to-please adjuster. Through the film Egoyan represents him with a bow and arrow, a man playing cupid to his own self.

      The clever movie-goer probably has already perceived that all of these figures, each in their own way, are different kinds of adjusters. Through her coding and the cuts in her ratings result, Hera is adjusting what those addicted to pornographic sex can see and enjoy. Through their enactment of fantasies and later film-making Bubba and Mimi transform the sexual imagination into something closer to “real” life enactments; while Noah not only adjusts for the financial loss of the grievers’ previous possessions but helps them socially and sexually to readjust to life itself. 

      Yet it is their very differences in the way they affect people’s existence that explains the final ending of this “theorem/theory” film, a work which the director himself described as being about "about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way."

      Hera, her sister, and her son live in a kind of passive world where images represent real actions for good or bad. Pornography is pernicious not just because it represents “violence, torture, crime, cruelty, horror, and human degradation” along with abuse of adults, children, and animals, but because it replaces real human action with representations of them. If nothing else, the real actions at least involve living beings and their bodies which is why even the representation of these acts are so atrocious. But for Hera the body does not even exist. We recognize that her and Noah’s relationship is empty, replaced as it has become by her observation of the most vicious visions of what human relationships consist.

      

     Mimi and Bubba bring those pornography fantasies to life, nudging them, if nothing else, a bit closer to reality. The last great “performance” which they plan involves the lonely Render house itself, which they have rented out to the couple so they “play house” with a gathering of pre-teen boys celebrating a birthday party at which the scantily-clad Mimi apparently intends to introduce them to the pleasures of female sex. But this realization of mass child abuse is finally, at least if Bubba has his way, to be their final act.

       Having rent out their house for what he believes is a regular film shoot, Noah makes the mistake of putting up his own family in the motel which serves as his workplace. Slowly it dawns on Hera and Seta both what precisely is going on when Noah visits his clients. And as Noah sits beside the bed where he has just fucked Matthew, we notice in the background his wife, sister-in-law, and son, with packed bags, getting into a taxi—obviously to take them all away from the far-too-real sexual activities in which Noah is involved.

       When he discovers them missing, the adjustor speeds back to their previous home, only to discover Bubba pouring gas over the contents of the entire bottom floor of the house. We don’t know if Mimi is upstairs, whether the boys have left the premises, or even if perhaps Hera, Seta and Simon have returned to their rooms above. With match box in hand, Bubba, calmly warns the sudden intruder that it is time to make a decision: “Now you’ve come in just at the moment that the character in the film, the person who was supposed to live here, decides that he’s going to stop playing house. So....are you in...or are you out?”

        Noah, already in tears, slowly backs out, obviously preferring real life with everything that it entails, the touch of human flesh and the friendly assurances of human discourse to all the other alternatives with which he’s been faced.

        Now outside his own burning house and destroyed past, he is in the same position finally of all those others to who he has offered solace. His life too has been “adjusted.” He has chosen real human intercourse, as ephemeral as it might be, over any representation of it.

        Appearing as it did early in the 1990s, Egoyan’s The Adjuster remained one of the most powerful statements about sexuality in general throughout that decade and is still among his very best cinematic works.

        

Los Angeles, January 21, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).