Gregory La Cava | Bed of Roses / 1933 || William A. Seiter | Professional Sweetheart / 1933

the catfish eaters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wanda Tuchock, Gregory La Cava, and Eugene Thackrey (screenplay), Gregory La Cava (director) Bed of Roses / 1933

Maurine Watkins (screenplay), William A. Seiter (director) Professional Sweetheart / 1933

 

Near the very end of Gregory La Cava’s 1933 comedy Bed of Roses Franklin Pangborn suddenly shows up in his usual overstressed squirrel-like role, this time selling women’s panties as a department store floorwalker where the central character Lorry Evans (Constance Bennett) also works. There is no true reason why we even need to identify him as being gay, except that, as usual, his character gives off a prissy, too proper, and overly harried sense of being, selling what we are certain would never cross the hands of a normative cinematic he-man except perhaps for pulling if off from a female body. In the few seconds devoted to his busy dialogue, moreover, he even gets the opportunity to show his appreciation for the piece of clothing that he holds up to display, while also taking a second to assure an inquiring customer, the Mae West-like hip- swinging Mrs. Minnie Brown Oglethorpe (Pert Kelton) that her friend is still working at the store a few yards from where he stands. The scene has no reason to be Pangborn’s except that he has played similar roles so very many times and so well that we even recognize him as the type, much like Pangborn was in real life, a man who lived with his mother and an occasional boyfriend, and accordingly is totally comfortable in an atmosphere of pushing, squealing, chattering, eager women. He made the act of coping with shopping women an art in the way that Humphrey Bogart made lighting up his own and a blonde beauty’s cigarette.

     Vito Russo quotes a RKO studio release of the same year for another of his roles, this for Professional Sweetheart:

 

     “Call Franklin Pangborn a sissy offstage and he’ll plant five hard knuckles on your proboscis. But call him a sissy on the stage or screen and he’ll pat you on the back and call you “pall”....for Pangborn is famous for his portrayals of “sissified” characters....those chaps generally known as Adelbert, who go in for the arched eyebrows and a mincing walk...and in RKO’s Professional Sweetheart, he plays a typical role...that of a male dressmaker who flutters about...adding to the general hilarity of the uproarious satire.”

 Pangborn may have winced if you described him as a pansy, but I doubt very much if he might have slugged you. He knew that he had a power over women that few other of the males in his films might even have imagined.

      Strangely, one of Evan’s central male beaus in this tough comedy, New Orleans publisher Stephen Paige (John Halliday)—best remembered today as Katherine Hepburn’s father Seth Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940)—who Evans encounters on the boat that might have taken her from prison to New Orleans, might be best described as a “woman hater.” When she finally arrives in New Orleans, she looks him up pretending to be a West Virginia news reporter, in truth seeking an eligible bachelor to prey upon, knowing that such a smooth-speaking, straight-thinking, respectable man is the easiest to push into a comprising situation which, with any luck, will keep her in room, board, and fashionable rags for a long time to come.

      He admits immediately, when told a woman reporter was waiting to meet him, he expected a “fat frumpy sort of thing,” and quickly sizes up her “interview” as being less interested in his career than in his personal being. Being the kind of man who openly supports the legal restrictions of prohibition, he sports of fully stocked bar which, with a little of her natural-born chicanery permits the double-crossing man-hater to get him drunk, and before he can even wake up from what knocked him out, convince him that he owes her and his entire society an explanation for a night-long affair that never happened.

       Paige perceives her money-grubbing tactics immediately for what they are and calmly swallows his pride along with the stomach pill with which his butler provides him. “How much do you want?” he calmly inquires, to which quite expectedly Evans, taking up her various well-learned rhetorical poses, answers: “I just want you?”

       “Well you can’t have me. I’m a respectable citizen. At least I was a respectable citizen until you tricked me into doing something I didn’t want to do.” As she threatens suicide and terrifying racket to announce to the world just how wronged she has been, he quietly tells his butler to “Tell Henry to get the car ready. We’re going out to look at apartments.”

       In a sense, he punishes her perfectly, locking her away in a bed of roses from which she is permitted little escape to mix with her friends or the other man, from whom she’s also swiped a significant amount of cash, the handsome cotton barge captain, Dan (the favorite hero of the decade’s comic romances, Joel McCrea.)

       While Paige traps her in a closed relationship based on his complete knowledge of just who she is and his needs for filling his stomach and satisfying his occasional sexual desires, Dan has unintentionally captured the heart that she and her friend Minnie never knew she even had.  Ensconced in an elegant apartment overlooking what appears to be the French Quarter, Evans becomes so stir- crazy that she truly imagines herself joining up to serve her life on a barge in the arms of the lean stargazer eating nightly meals of catfish.

       Strangely, Paige is even amused by her “ridiculous” love and is willing to let her go if only she tells Dan everything about herself, a request she simply cannot fulfill for fear of losing the one man whose kisses finally reveal to her what love is all about.

       Trapped between two extremes, Evans goes to work in the department store from whence the selfish Paige, eager to amuse himself through her, as he has in the past, tries to woo her back. It doesn’t work, of course, and inevitably Dan finds her, and asks her all over again whether she’s willing to roll down the river with him—with such silly plot that fear it will never cease until we hear the heroine say yes.

       The original critics and audiences evidently could not quite forgive Bennett’s Evans for her double-dealings, but adored Pert Kelton’s courser man-handling character Minnie who definitely wore the pants in her marriage to the Boll-weevil terminator, Ogelthorpe.

 

Los Angeles, October 11, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

Kon Ichikawa | 炎上 (Enjō) (Conflagration) / 1958

the believer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kon Ichikawa, Keiji Hasebe, and Natto Wada (screenwriters, based on the novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima), Kon Ichikawa (director) 炎上 (Enjō) (Conflagration) / 1958

 

Young Goichi (Raizo Ichikawa), whose father has run an out-of-the-way Buddhist center, witnessed his mother and uncle having sex shortly before his own father died, perhaps of complications for his wife’s affairs.

      Having been convinced of his father’s continued statement that “the Golden Pavilion of the Shukaku Temple is the most beautiful thing in the world,” the young innocent Buddhist acolyte determines to study there under Dosen Tayama (Ganjirō Nakamura).

       Although he is a true believer, there also seems to be something slightly backward about the likeable Goichi, who is not only unbelievably naïve but also a stutterer, a condition perhaps brought on by his rather abusive family life.

       The seemingly affable Dosen even offers to send him to further schooling, and, later hires Goichi’s mother who suddenly appears in her son’s life again, to work in the kitchen. In debt now to the kindness of the Dosen, she demands that her son study hard and, ultimately, replace the Dosen after he finishes his studies. But things do not go well, particularly when Goichi discovers that the Buddhist leadership, although giving an outward pretense of abstinence and piety are, in fact, running the Pavilion as a tourist stop and making a great deal of personal profit in the process. The Dosen even has a geisha mistress in town.

       Ichikawa reveals his hero’s inner feelings through a careful mix of flashbacks and plot extensions, revealing Goichi’s rather fragile ego developing as a being who has sought spiritual beliefs as a way to escape from the daily realities of post-World War II Japanese life. He, it is clear, has mistakenly perceived the shrine as a kind of Shangri-La, a world lying entirely apart from the everyday world. In short, the sad incidents of Goichi’s home life get purposely confused in Ichikawa’s telling with the young boy’s illusions of a kind of paradise. And before long, it has a profound impact not only upon his studies but, particularly when he meets a young woman, with his sexual fears.

      We might almost describe Giochi as a religious purist or, even, an over-zealous believer—despite the fact that we still sympathize with his spiritual crisis. What Ichikawa does not focus on is that the boy, with his love and devotion to his father and his utter hatred of his mother, may also be a closeted gay man who is simply unable to come to terms with his sexuality. Whatever the case, it is clear that for most, Goichi is not an entirely appealing figure. As The New York Times reviewer, Howard Thompson wrote upon the film’s original US premiere: “For all Raizo Ichikawa's righteous indignation as the painfully stuttering protagonist, he remains an extremely neurotic and naive whiner, and a dead duck from the outset.”

      As often the case in Mishima’s work, whose novel provided the source to this film, such inner turmoil, especially at the crossroads of sex, familial duty, and spiritual beliefs, results in great violence. In Goichi’s case, it erupts by him trying to burn down the “golden temple,” being arrested, and he committing suicide before he was to have been imprisoned.

     Like so many of Ichikawa’s films, Enjō profoundly explores how Japan’s World War II imperialist pretensions effected the generations that followed.

     This film was apparently Ichikawa’s own favorite of his oeuvre.

 

Los Angeles, September 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

 

Darwin Valencia Martínez | Sin Retorno (No Return) / 2015

kisses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Darwin Valencia Martínez (screenwriter and director) Sin Retorno (No Return) / 2015 [15 minutes]

 

Like many a buddy movie where the relationship between two men turns into something else, in this film Mateo (Fabio Concha) and Diego (David Noboa) have been life-time friends, and their caring for one another has both helped them to get through many a crisis.

     At what appears to be an utterly unpleasant prom, Mateo admits that his girlfriend Andrea (Coralia Yelenia), who has just passed out drunk, has finally grown tired of him, the two as good friends do in such situations, commiserating with one another through a long brotherly hug, Mateo arguing that he simply wants to leave the place, his only friend being Diego. But this time it quickly turns into something else as Diego suddenly kisses him. Mateo immediately backs off, Diego regretting the kiss since it may have broken the close friendship they have had for so many long years.

     Still, together they drive Andrea home, leaving her on her on her doorway pounding for her mother to let her in.

   The tension between the two continues, Mateo finally insisting that he cannot deal with it that evening.

     Diego spends a long sleepless night, trying, unsuccessfully to phone his friend to apologize, and is now even more fearful that the relationship between the two of them has been severed. Yet, surprisingly Mateo does show up the next morning, and the two take a lovely bicycle trip into the countryside, returning to share video games and watching movies. But again, the specter of the kissing rises up as Diego tries to explain his longtime feelings.

     This time Mateo’s anger leads to violence, both of them battling physically with one another, until finally, Mateo kisses him fully on the lips, mocking him for his desires. But Diego does not back down time, demanding that Mateo face his own feelings as the two finally fall into a deep kissing session. But when it begins to turn into a sexual episode, Mateo again rises and runs off, bicycling away as Diego cries for him to return. Yet, strangely, Mateo has still insisted that perhaps they still can be friends, but nothing more. As he rides off, accordingly, we do not quite know whether there can “no return” to their friendship or that nothing can return to what it was in the past, that perhaps he will return to their new possibilities.

     This Ecuadorian film is quite deftly realized, and leaves the viewer with the desire, that may or may not be actualized, for these two boys to find and discover their true love. But in such a culture, it takes a brave man for someone like Mateo to realize his own being and reality. It is apparent he is desperately in love with Diego, but whether or not he can come to admit that is left up to speculation.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Elena Weinberg | The Weight of the World / 2013

no sympathy in sight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Duncan Coe (screenplay), Elena Weinberg (director) The Weight of the World / 2013 [8 minutes]

 

In this very short coming out film from 2013, Taylor (Jon Lee Richardson) has just come out to his father, the most important scene in the film which the writer and director have removed from evidence, draining their film from any true dramatic significance.

    Instead, our your “hero,” if you can describe him as such, rushes off to tell his best female friend Jesse (Brenna Sturdivant) what has transpired. Beginning with a metaphor, asking her if she has seen the flocks of parrots who have been tossed out of their homes, “Pets that have escaped or are now living in the east side. Bright green wings, pale gay forehead. Dark scalloped feather around the breast. Fragile, feral. Tossed out.”

    She reminds him with her comment: “Or escaped.”

    Evidently his father said nothing, just what he might have expected, and he will now be forced to live for the rest of his life, he fears, in total resentment of the man whom he still loves, or, even worse, resist becoming the full gay man he now identifies as. He is terrified of either future, that his whole life will now be “buried in his past.”

   Actually, if when I told my father and mother that I was gay and that Howard and I were in a relationship, they had said nothing, I might have seen it as a good sign, but getting up mid-dinner and driving from Washington, DC back to Iowa did not at all bode well. But even then I quickly got over it, knowing that when it comes to such revelations of sexuality, you have to free yourself from parental approval. It hurt and still does today, but I was not devastated and had no intentions of either hating them for their blindness nor resisting my own sexual inclinations. Perhaps Taylor is still simply too young, and since he apparently has still not found someone to love, maybe he just might have waited until he had left the house, gone off to school, and found someone to help support him in such a difficult act.

    Obviously, this sulky boy does not even find the open love which Jesse offers him to be enough, and he gets back into his beautiful SUV (evidently a gift of the father he supposes hates him) and drives away to god knows where, brooding, the title of the film falling upon his shoulders.

    Unfortunately, since we know nothing about the father and very little about the son, it is hard to sympathize with this character, and, in a sense, the vagueness of his future plans symbolizes our feelings toward him.  

    The film relies entirely upon our knowing the genre, and remembering how painful it was for others to imagine what this young man is suffering. But, in the end, we don’t even quite know what is in his mind, how his father has really felt about his admission. If the film’s intention is to simply mock such an extreme reaction—after all it is described as a comedy—this short cinema itself declares itself from the beginning that it is a failure, mocking the plight of its central figure.

       If we are meant to share in the young man’s worries, writer Duncan Coe and director Elena Weinberg might have first introduced their characters. As it is, I feel only for his friend Jesse, whose love is apparently not enough to begin to salve this foolish boy’s pouting.

      And who is the Erik she calls at the end of the film, perhaps a male who has long been waiting for this event before he makes his move?  That might be a nice ending if the movie weren't so lazy to even explain it to us.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026). 

 

 

Emma Westenberg | Lucky Strike / 2019 [music video]

heart in hand

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emma Westenberg (director) Lucky Strike / 2019 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

Sitting on a California beach, Troye Sivan, clearly having a crush on the beach bartender (Brandon Good), begs his would-be lover to “Tell me all the ways to love you.”

Oh, I want to know just how to love you

The jewel of California

Oh I want to skip stones on your skin boy

And drown me in your water

 

And my boy like a queen,

Unlike one you’ve ever seen

He knows how to love me better

A hit of dopamine, higher than I’ve ever been

He knows how to love me better

 

Cause you’re safe like spring time

Short days, long nights, boy

Tell me all the ways to love you

 

Cause you taste like lucky strikes,

You drag, I light, boy

Tell me all the ways to love you

    Clearly this man has the young man’s heart in his hands, as Sivan begs for a way to be able to fully express his love.

    Soon the rather disparate beach crowd around him have joined in on his dance of pleasure, slightly reminiscent of Salome in Oscar Wilde’s famous play and later opera—only here, despite the fact that the bartender holds the singer’s heart in his hands, there is no perversity. This is male on male love, pure and simple, with the blonde Australian beauty, in the end, left on the beach alone.

 

  Is it sad or joyful? In this case, it’s hard to tell, particularly if his wondrous day with the bartender is simply one of his imagination. There is a strong sense of longing here that is missing from some of his more joyous videos.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

Alexis Diop | Adieu Émile (Farewell Emile) / 2024

a return to the present and the future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alexis Diop (screenwriter and director) Adieu Émile (Farewell Emile) / 2024 [26 minutes]

 

This short film by French director Aleix Diop begins as a kind of mystery. Why has the beautiful young Tim (Benjamin Sulpice) suddenly lost he equally lovely lover, Émile (Arthur Beaudoire), who even Tim’s open-minded mother also seems to adore?

     Throughout this film, through endless imagines that Tim has filmed on his cellphone camera, we get glimpses of their wonderful times together, they joyful young lives, and their engagement with one another.

   In the background, however, we also note that Tim’s father has suddenly died of cancer, and throughout, his mother calls him, pleading that he return home just to claim whatever is left of his father’s possessions. Tim simply ignores her, having also lost his lover, and desperate again to make contact.

 

   The only connection that he has is his mostly cellphone friend Céline (Camille Léon-Fucien). In fact, most of this film uses cellphone images and messages to express it’s plot. As one Letterboxd commentator notes: “Finally accurate phone use in a film.” But frankly I find it rather boring, truly unrevealing, and utterly distracting, not the way I like to “read” my narrative, although I am sure most younger people prefer that experience. The speed through scroll of images may give us a sense of their experiences and love, there is nothing but surface issues presented here. Why has Émile left so suddenly, and why is Tim so desperately seeking Émile? We can imagine the latter, but can’t explain the first part of the question.   

     Through internet connections, he tracks down Émile, suspecting that he has returned to his former lover, a rather sleazy individual, Zahir, living on Île de France. And Céline finally provides against her better judgment, the full address his lover’s current address.

     Needing desperately to talk to Émile, Tim takes a taxi to Rue Myrha. But en route his mother calls pleading with him, one last time, to visit her and help her sort out his father’s possessions, suggesting that he has not all been there for her in her grief, and, mostly important, revealing that for the past year he has retreated from the world in his own inability to deal with his beloved father’s death.

     Obviously, this also explains, in part, his lover’s departure. Tim has not been the same loving companion with whom Émile once lived. The devastation of his father’s death has clearly taken a toll on Tim’s ability to love and think. As the taxi arrives to Rue Myrha, we see him, now with tears rolling down his eyes from his mother’s comments, remaining in the taxi and not carrying out his intended last encounter with his former lover. Among the various images we are given a view of the Garde de Nord train station, perhaps an indication that Tim might finally return back home to lay to rest his tortured past and return to being an individual capable to a new relationship. It is as if perhaps Tim has realized that he cannot return to the past.

     The film, however, stuck in the phone images of a past, does not give us clue whether Tim might be ever able to return to the present and future.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2026).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whammy Alcazaren | Bold Eagle / 2022

 no one there

by Douglas Messerli

 

Whammy Alcazaren (screenwriter and director) Bold Eagle / 2022 [16 minutes]

 

Bold (who uses the internet name luckymaybe1923) is highly depressed, trapped in his own apartment, fearing or disinterested in going out or answering the continued knocks and cries at the door. Instead, he dreams of Hawaii, where he imagines he might be happy, and spends his days in his Navotas City apartment crammed with family memories, posters of all kinds, stamp albums, and an ever-patient cat, while spending his time mostly while on hallucinogenic drugs and seeking love from strange men on the internet as they masturbate and fuck their way to “happiness.”

 

  At moments, Bold Eagle is truly beautiful and imaginative—although its tripped-out images are somewhat predictable and I could certainly do without the smiley emblems and the pussy heads—filled with pornographic sexual acts of all sorts, on film and in photographs.  

    

     Yet this is also one of the most depressing films I have ever seen, with, it appears, no way out for Bold who can only vary his world by dressing up in different costumes and playing out the behavior of various animals and other figures. He cannot find his way back, evidently into life, and despite all the cheer-up songs sung in English by Hawaiian choir boys, he still finds it difficult to get out of bed or even rise from his usual position on the floor.

     He wishes he were the cat. According to the Internet, he seems to have won a free trip to Hawaii. Perhaps he should answer the knocks at the door, the calls for him to come out. But Bold, is not an Eagle and cannot leave his protective nest.

     This Philippines short movie by Whammy Alcazaren is definitely not for everyone.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).