Friz Freleng | The Unmentionables / 1963 [animated cartoon]

the trouble with carrots

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Dunn (story), Gerry Chiniquy, Virgil Ross, Bob Matz, Art Leonardi, and Lee Halpern (animators), Friz Freleng (director) The Unmentionables / 1963

 

In the 1920s Elegant Ness (aka Bugs Bunny) has just been appointed by the US government to gather up the members of the mob. In no time Ness has found them—or rather they have found him, taking him to their hideout and pouring cement into a basin in which they’ve place his legs in order to create “concrete shoes.” He’s tossed into Lake Michigan never to be seen again—or, at least, that was their intention. But clever Bugs uses a pipe as a snorkel and escapes.

    Meanwhile, just as in the film Some Like It Hot, mob members Jack Legs Rhinestone, Baby Face Half-Nelson, Pizza Puss Lasagna, Pistol Nose Pringles, and Teeth Malloy gather to celebrate Rocky’s birthday.

 

 

     Out of the cake springs a flapper, the ubiquitously resourceful Bugs, who dances up a storm before being perceived by the enthusiastic mob king with the memorable phrase: “That Dame’s not a dame.” Rocky picks up his gun and shoots wildly, accidentally killing everyone other member of the mob standing in line to take their turn with the flapper.

     As Rocky’s right-hand man Mugsy puts it: “Gee Rocky, you made a boo-boo.”

     Ness reenters to arrest Rocky for murder, as the mob king points his gun at the FBI agent, Bugs/Ness pulling his every-ready carrot, only to be mocked by Rocky until the carrot-tip drops open and Bugs lets the loose with the bullets. As Ness adds, however, “That’s the trouble with carrots; they’re only good once.”

      A mad chase follows, ending in the ACME Cereal Factory where Bugs, after some preliminary gun play in the dark, manipulates the factories machines to send Rocky and Mugsy into the mixer and packaging them ultimately into cereal boxes.

      The narrator, in the out-of-breath emphatic style of Walter Winchell in The Untouchables, announces that “On October 28th agent Ness slapped the handcuffs on Rocky and Mugsy and brought them to justice. They were sentenced to 40 years of hard labor, which was a little hard on agent Ness who was never able to find the key to his handcuffs.”

 

    That’s all folks.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Ethan Coen | Honey Don't! / 2025

who she is and where she’s at

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke (screenplay), Ethan Coen (director) Honey Don't! / 2025

 

Although most critics figured out rather quickly that the newest Ethan Coen film Honey Don’t is playing with the detective noir genre, and that the detective in this case not only purposely stands against type—instead of the cynical, fast-talking white hetero this film’s detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a tough, curvaceous, well-dressed lesbian—this detective striding her way in heels through her multiple investigations without being able to make even the easiest of connections. Besides, we already know that at least the first death, that of Mia Novotny (Kara Petersen)—a client of Honey’s who has missed her appointment by presumably crashing her car off a cliff—is connected with the local Bakersfield religious cult the Four-Way Temple since in the very first scene we watch another woman, this one also dressed in high heels as well as a tight-fitting dress of zebra skin, scramble down the hill and wrestle the ring off the dead woman’s finger.

     Although the critics basically praised the film’s actors, particularly Qualley and Chris Evans— the sleazy leader of the Four-Way Temple, the Reverend Drew Devlin—most of them were irritated by the film’s structure or the lack of it, The Hollywood Reporter describing the movie as a “series of gags with nowhere to go,” IndieWire arguing the work is “a mishmash of disparate parts,” and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody complaining that the film has no backstory. The New York Times reviewer Beatrice Loayza not only insisted that the events of the film “feel deliberately random,” but in the same sentence added a second major attack by the critics in general, that the jokes “feel lazy.” 

     But when I thought about these complaints in relation to the so-called classics of noir detective tales, I had to ask when did any such film structurally make sense or provide the viewer with a full backstory? When did any detective truly come up with a remarkably witty come-back? The goal is such works is to set the detective on the trail of a series of seemingly disconnected events that allows him, along the way, to fall in love with one or more of his clients while requiring the writer and director to desperately struggle to bring some coherence to the darkly scattered events of the tale. Most noir detectives—unlike the breed of puzzle-solvers such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple (the latter of whom was partnered in the Margaret Rutherford versions to her real life husband, Stringer Davis, but might as well have been queer the way the eccentric Rutherford performs her), Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, Columbo and numerous other rationalists—stumble their way through the movies such as the The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Chinatown, without often knowing even what it is they are looking for and seldom finding any logic in the end, as well as losing the gal in which they fell in love along the way. Sam Spade never finds the “real” falcon or even discovers if there was ever a real such statuette; and I dare anyone to explain to me the full plots and consequences of the other two films? Mightn’t we describe both as a series of seemingly “random events” or a “mishmash of disparate parts?” Humphrey Bogart purposely makes his every line appear as if he it is simply too difficult given the realities of his world to make a clever deduction, and Jake Gittes has learned from experience to doubt every word anyone, including himself, might ever speak. These men have been hurt too many times.

   In fact, Honey O’Donahue is quite certain about her world and her own role in it; it’s the rest of her decayed and rotten Bakersfield world that is a confused mess.

     As she sasses back to homicide detective Marty Metakawitch’s (Charlie Day) awkward flirtations, perhaps for the 50th time he’s tried to get her on a date: “I like girls.” Yet the dim-witted dunce is doomed to the same behavior the next time the two encounter one another.

    Even before she’s crossed the doorstep of Mia’s mother’s house to ask some questions about her daughter, her current husband or boyfriend insists she doesn’t know anything, although Honey not only quickly discovers through a look around the place that she was a member of the Four-Way Temple cult but reveals a leather sex halter wrapped up inside her white church-going robe, cluing her and the film’s viewers that Revered Devlin requires his female devotees to not only “act” but passively engage with his sexual aggressions. He spends most of the film in bed with one or two of his female congregants explaining to them, as he fucks, how to further find ways to excite him.

  Honey knows his kind too well, and counters his drooling sexual snarl of an attempt to arrange a meetup with a whip-snap of wit. When Devlin queries her, “Do you drink?” she answers, “Heavily, it’s a point of pride.” “Should you and I discuss this over a drink?” “Tuesdays I dry out.” Leaning over his desk, he whispers, “Today’s Wednesday,” she responding quite emphatically, “Today is Tuesday.” Later, he describes her as “fascinating,” she besting him with a quick reply, “And you haven’t even seen the riddle tattooed on ass.”

    When Honey’s older sister Heidi demands that the oldest of her six children, Corinne (Talia Ryder), about to go out on a date, be home by midnight, the daughter, already on her boyfriend’s motorcycle answers, “I won’t be home tonight,” visiting her aunt the next day afraid to go home covered, as she is, with the black and blue marks of where that date has brutally hit her.

     Honey not only later takes things in hand by beating up the young male punk who has hurt her niece, but when she’s finished with him and done deconstructing his rifle, she slaps a sticker proclaiming “I have a vagina and I vote” over his vehicle’s MAGA decal.

     Even a lowly female police worker MG Falcone’s (Aubrey Plaza) subservient actions of handing over the address of Mia’s mother, doesn’t escape Honey’s ever-active gaydar; she arranges for the woman to meet her at a bar wherein they publicly engage in a deep dangle of one another’s crotch before returning home to fuck.

     When an unhappy gay man comes to her in the hopes that she will trail his husband to see if he’s cheating on him, Honey explains that 1.) he already knows he’s cheating if it’s come this far; 2.) the best thing he can do is talk it out with his lover; or 3.) divorce the brute.

      In short, even if she becomes a bit distracted in finding Mia’s killer, Honey knows who she is and what her world is all about.

     It is that world that goes about mysteriously meeting up in bar where the gay man’s boyfriend awaits to meet up with a man for a drug deal, and who when approached by a boy, Hector, delivering up the drugs from the Four-Way Temple demanding he first pay his back bill, becomes infuriated that his drug-deal may go sour. When he bends down to fellate Hector in exchange the drugs, the boy freaks, knocks the man out, and runs him over in his car.

   It is that world in the form of the religious cult that sends out the church thug Shuggie (Josh Pafchek) to quiet Hector, mistakenly shooting the boy’s agèd grandmother, before finally encountering the boy, who he also shoots, but not before the surviving Hector kills him. Hector goes on to attempt to murder Rev. Devlin in his bed, but is shot and killed by that holy ambassador of God.

    It is that insane patriarchy in the form of Honey’s abusive father (Kale Browne) who, in returning to beg Honey and her sister Heidi’s forgiveness scares off Corinne, who runs off in fear into the hands of the cult.

    And it is the local police woman Falcone, also a member of the cult, who through the abuse of her military father, her school peers, and the church, has become psychotic, having murdered several women previously including Mia (whose body she stuffed into the car before sending it over the cliff), has kidnapped Honey’s niece Corinne, and finally, confronted by the detective, is really to add Honey to her list of missing and dead women.

     Honey survives, returning to the streets and a summary by Homicide detective Marty, of all that has occurred, as well as another flirtations jibe, ending with Honey’s reminder of her sexual lust.

    Honey is back on the streets just in time to reencounter the French woman Chère (Leera Abova), who represents the money behind all the Four-Way Temple’s actions, and now on her scooter, after having sex with Devlin and finishing up with a round of bullets in his gut, is about to catch a plane out of town.

     Once more Honey’s gaydar kicks in, as she asks what time is the stranger’s flight. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even if it’s only another chance event in a world of random murders and mayhem.

      Honey Don’t is the second film of Coen’s and his wife Tricia Cooke’s planned trilogy of grade-B lesbian films, the first being the 2004 movie Drive-Away Dolls. Although I don’t plan to extend this series of queer cinema discussions beyond 2025, I will obviously have to find a way to sneak in the third of this clever comedic series.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Todd Verow and Charles Lum | Blow Job 2017 / 2017

blow job, the remake

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Lum (screenplay), Todd Verow and Charles Lum (directors) Blow Job 2017 / 2017 [5 minutes]

 

Filmmkers Charle Lum and Tood Verow pretend to recreate Andy Warhol’s iconic short movie, Blow Job 2017, with three or four “extras,” if you want to call them that; they’re actually three or four one-liner jokes that erase all the ironic intentions of the original 1964 version.

    Here also a black-leathered jacketed young man is backed-up against brick wall receiving fellatio. The original recipient, DeVeren Bookwalter, however, was much cuter than the long-haired and wasted looking Luc Goodhart, and Warhol’s version, running for 9 minutes, gives you a little more to chew on than the Verow/Lum shortened version of 5 minutes.

    In the 2017 rendition, however, you do get the sound of the mint-new jacket actually crackling with actor Goodhart’s ecstatic moments of enjoyment. And in this version you also can observe him catching the entire experience on his cellphone and after the event vaping—what might be described as the “real” blow job.

    For an extra buck, moreover, you can also see the split-screen or the cinemascope updates, both of which turn this previously rather innocent film—innocent since you never see anything beyond the cute boy thrashing around his face and shoulders in evident pleasure—into a true porno film. The added versions, in fact, show us that this was clearly a real act of fellatio as we observe Goodhart’s curved cock with David J. White’s tongue and lips licking and engulfing it, as well as the moment of ejaculation with white cum.

     In this “expanded” version, in fact, the film loses all its original meaning, transforming itself instead into a porn-worthy blow job, along with the inclusion of the cellphone and vape pen

evidently proving that in the 21st century we have lost our sense of irony and camp in our presentation of the literal pornographic act.

     As Luis Ranz comments on Letterboxd: “This remake sucks.”

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

 

Cary Kehayan | In Search of Avery Willard / 2012

cerberus: avery willard as gay filmmaker

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cary Kehayan (director) In Search of Avery Willard / 2012

 

I begin not with the films but a basic primer about the filmmaker / photographer / gay event producer Avery Willard of which so little is still known.

      Strangely enough, I probably even met him at one time or another since I regularly visited the Christopher Street Bookstore, actually not much of bookstore, but an underground gay room for which you paid the man behind the counter for entry into several rooms where other gay men were waiting for the right person to come along to have sex. I often found that “right” person and, in fact, had the very best blow job of my life in that dark, damp space sometime in 1969, a period in which Willard worked there.

      For Willard the Christopher Street Bookstore was a kind of cover for his real careers, which few knew about except for those invited to his special showings and performances. From the 1940s on Willard photographed major movie and theater stars, including photographs which his friends found in a closet of hundreds of notables such as Butterfly McQueen, Billy Holliday, Anthony Quinn, and Barbra Streisand; while otherwise organizing drag shows at Club 84; and gradually through his own name and Ava-Graph Films label and beginning in the 1970s under the pseudonym of Bruce King, making films that straddled porn and experimental art films. Yet as one of the historians speaking in this film perceptively points out, while others of day—such as Bob Mizer, Kenneth Anger, and even Andy Warhol were still presenting gay life as a metaphor, for Willard it was literal. The gay body in its sexual manifestation was at the center of his films.

      Focusing on leather boys and other tough costumed types, Willard’s films were most definitely for those who enjoy the male body and liked to watch their figures get an erection and masturbate right through ejaculation or show off their asses and fuck. That he often did this with gay boys as superimpositions against city lights, masturbating boys starring at mirrors or engaging in staged theatrical events, and finally turning their essence into multiple images or abstractions permitted his work to still be seen as semi-art rather than pure pornography.

      It appears, however, that the montages, mirrored-images, color interventions, and outright cinematic abstract images were not added to get past the censors, but were an essential part of what fascinated Willard about filmmaking. He was after all, a first-rate photographer, and his porn films incorporated that history and his adoration of theatrical drag queen accessories.  

      That he was never arrested for the latter, however, was not the result of his artistic interventions, but because of the fact he never widely screened his films and most of them still today, languishing in the New York Public Library special collections, are awaiting transfer to DVD. Many of the films shown in Kehayan’s documentary are not readily available for viewing.

      As those who knew him personally, among them fellow filmmaker James Bidgood, the former drag queen Adrian (Henry Arango), and Agosto Machado, interviewed in Kehayan’s film all assert, Willard didn’t really care whether or not others saw works such Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils (1965), starring Adrian as Salome in drag or his leather suited studs in Gay Boys (1940), Reflections (1966), Dream Boy (1966), Leather Narcissus (1967), and Clouds (1971), all made before he turned to actual porn productions under the Bruce King moniker.

        All of his friends agree that although Willard went about his business with a surety that no one else quite possessed in those days, he was not particularly friendly or even well-liked. Almost everyone “dished him,” and many wanted nothing to do with him. Moreover, it appears he has few obvious sexual contacts accept perhaps with his models. He clearly did not seek out deeper relationships, but like his films moved quickly on time and again to the next one, the next model, the next way he which he might satisfy his ever-changing desires. It is appropriate surely that he served as a kind of Cerberus to the underworld of quick sexual desire. He seemed friendly, once paid, as he greeted even a 21-year-old boy such as me to what others might describe as a hell of lust.

      As one historian of three presented in this film, John Cox, Jeffrey Escoffier and  Joe E. Jeffrey puts it, Willard’s work is a messy amalgam of seemingly oppositional images, the male dressed and performing as females and the male pretending to be one of the macho straight men of the world of motorbikes, firemen, cops, and hustlers—both pretenders not unlike the characters of Warhol’s world behaving a bit like Warhol’s camp model dancer Paul Swann, men so devoted to their fantasies that their performance of the lives becomes an expression of camp.

      Bigood laments the fact that Willard did not at all attempt to permit entry in his art by the heterosexual world—except perhaps for the commonly straight audiences of Club 82, who as Adrian laughs, often sent their wives home and enjoyed an evening out of late night sex. But that was clearly his intention, to serve a coterie of admirers interested in precisely what he was interested in, but who sadly never quite showed up for his events—at least until years later, long after Stonewall when the LGBTQ community began looking back at the men and women who had helped to pave the way for their existence. If he was bitter, as one commentor believes he was, Willard had reason to be, a great photographer forgotten and a dynamic pioneer of the gay world ignored.

      As I suggest, most of Willard’s works are still not readily available. Clips of all the movies listed above do appear in this documentary, but they hardly do justice to the actual works themselves. I have found copies of two of the films, which I discuss below. 

 

Los Angeles, October 18, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022)

John Huston | Reflections in a Golden Eye / 1967

smoldering desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chapman Mortimer and Gladys Hill (screenplay, based on the novel by Carson McCullers), John Huston (director) Reflections in a Golden Eye / 1967

 

I recall seeing John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye when it originally premiered in US movie theaters in 1967 when I was 20. I certainly comprehended, at that age, what the film was all about. Three years later I met Howard—after a long year in New York City in which I was actively involved (nearly every night) in the gay scene—sharing in what is now a 50-year relationship. But I don’t think it dawned on me, at that time, just how audacious this film was, directed as it was by the heavy-drinking macho Huston with its sexually gay closeted “hero” performed by every woman’s heartthrob, Marlon Brando, sharing the love of a wife, Elizabeth Taylor—acting as if she were auditioning for the film in which she won awards for just the year previously, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—with another more outwardly heterosexual neighbor, acted by Brian Keith.

     Throw into this simmering pot a feu (“pot on the fire”) the highly neurotic character played by Julie Harris—despondent over the death of her son she has cut off her nipples with a scissors— attended by a gay Filipino houseboy named Anacleto (Zorro David), who dances at the drop of his mistresses’ stitches and paints while sitting at her feet long into the night—and you know you are in a world that could exist only in the imagination of writer Carson McCullers, who prefaces her story with such a matter of fact statement, ““There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed,” that when the murder finally is committed we are not truly shocked.

      What is disconcerting is the intensity with which each of these characters suffer the various torches lit from within. Perhaps the list complex is the spoiled southern belle, Leonora, whose daddy was evidently once the camp commander, and who hence has lived a life wherein she often proves that she is stronger than any man on the base. As a child she played polo equal to some of the male seniors, and throughout the film she rides her beloved horse Firebird almost as if she were dancing out the captivity briefly imposed upon the firebird of Stravinsky’s ballet. As I mentioned above, through Anacleto, music and dance is equally central in the home of Major Morris Langdon (Keith), Leonora’s current lover.

       He wife Alison Langdon, who knows of her husband’s affair and is secretly plotting a divorce, is so psychologically frail that she doesn’t even attempt to truly conceive of how she might survive without her Langdon, let alone imagine that he might use the situation to gently lock her away in an upscale institution for the slightly mentally disturbed. Soon after Alison dies, apparently of a heart disease, but in McCullers’ highly symbolic world we also know it is another problem of the heart, her husband’s disinterest in and his ultimate betrayal of her.

       Even the seemingly level-headed Langdon appears to be a bit off-kilter when, after his wife’s death, Anacleto disappears. Time and again he tells Major Penderton (Brando) that he just wishes for the Filipino’s return—while continuing to argue that if the former houseboy could only serve in the military, he would be “straightened” out. Clearly there is a great deal of denial and misconception of how sexuality defines one even from the most reasonable of McCullers’ characters.

   Penderton tires of his friend’s laments for the loss of Anacleto. Indeed, we might almost be tempted, given the other characters’ deeply burning fires of the heart, that Langdon is obsessed with the houseboy in a manner similar to his wife’s dependence upon her companion.

    Asked by Langdon whether or not he agrees with his assessment that an individual like the houseboy might not become a different man with army training, for the first time Penderton almost comes out of the closet, nearly admitting to his own sexuality in his answer to his colleague: “no,”  hinting that identity arises from birth not from nurturing.

      In his negative answer, moreover, we quickly perceive that Penderton is suffering far more than the others. He is painfully forced to play the spartan-like stoic while slowly coming to terms with his latent homosexuality which manifests itself in his lust for an enlisted man, L. G. Williams, who regularly takes a black mare out for a ride in a nearby meadow, where he strips off his clothes to enjoy a true “bareback” experience.

      Increasingly, over the few days of this film, Penderton, while outwardly performing rote activities of camp commander, begins to lose even the embedded consciousness that his role demands, as he, quite literally, cruises the young Williams, subconsciously hoping even that he might be spotted in the act and that his sexual desire reciprocated. When the private drops a Baby Ruth candy bar wrapper, Penderton picks it up as if it were a secret message, putting it away in his special treasure box which includes pictures of naked male statues, a silver teaspoon he has stolen from another officer whom he and others believe is effeminate because he reads Proust and listens to music. At one point, inexplicably imagining that the young L. G. will soon be paying him a sexual visit, he preens in the mirror, carefully brushing his hair. Early on we have seen him exercising his body in order to keep trim and fit.

     What he doesn’t know is that the young and very innocent Williams (Robert Forster), who according to his bunk mates is still a virgin, has become transfixed by Penderton’s wife, gradually turning into a complicated voyeur who, while Leonora sleeps, slips into the Penderton home and into her bedroom where he watches over her, rubs his face against her blouses, and sniffs out her perfumes. These scenes of extreme voyeurism, in fact, are the most truly sexual that this highly restrained film offers the viewer.

      Huston, in the original filming, restored in the newest version I saw the other day, muted all the colors of Penderton’s world, turning them into a kind of dingy brown that snaps the colors of the female characters’ costumes (particularly those of Leonora) into a focus that is almost garish. Is it any wonder that Penderton detests all his wife’s highly colorful bric-a-brac.

      It is hard to say which of the two men, Penderton or Williams is the more innocent, since they both can never act on their secret passions.

      Yet, Williams, we recognize is a truly gentle soul who nurses Firebird back to health and attempts basically to keep to himself, despite the taunts of his fellow enlisted soldiers.

      On the other hand, in order to punish his wife’s emasculation of him and, perhaps, just to catch another glimpse of Private Williams, Penderton regularly borrows Firebird, painfully spurring the horse on and on and, after he is thrown, brutally thrashing the horse, an act that Leonora repeats on her husband’s own face during one of her bi-annual camp get-togethers. We recognize that violence has become a way with both husband and wife in order to play out their dissatisfactions.

      When she was still living at home, Alison twice saw Williams entering the next-door house, but each time she has attempted to tell others they have simply accused her of imagining things.   

     So too, actually observing one of Williams’ late-night entries, Penderton imagines that his metaphorical white-knight is suddenly arriving to allay his sexual longings. The Major attempts to comb his hair into place, turns on and then off the light, leaving his bedroom door slightly ajar.

      When the Private does not arrive at his doorway, Penderton enters the hall and walks up the stairs to his wife’s room, in which Williams drops to the floor stroking Leonora’s clothing.

     The inevitable and final action of outrage, as the author has previously suggested, is almost insignificant. It will be written up, surely, as a response to an act of breaking and entering. In her husband’s seeming attempt to protect his wife, Leonora may even begin to admire him for a while.

Yet the true desires of these characters will never to known or salved.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).