Isles of Löwensohn: THE WILD BOYS, LET THE CORPSES TAN

Funny that after decades of seeing her only hither or yon, I find Elina Löwensohn (NADJA herself!) in two new auteur-driven super weird movies (both en français), which I happened to watch, back-to-back, on two consecutive nights. In each film she plays a semi-insane ruler of a gorgeous but remote location wherein she presides like some kind of perverted Ms. Roarke over a Fantasy Island gone horribly wrong, and R-rated. Owning her masculine side with a cigar chomping swagger. In THE WILD BOYS and LET THEIR CORPSES TAN alike, this Romanian-American actress (just one year older than me and she's handling it way better) sure can swing a wild dick, if you'll pardon my French. N'cest pas? Both films just arrived in the US via streaming; both are shot in blazing Super-16mm celluloid. Both are so surreal they make Buñuel seem like di Sica. Coïncidence? Non, mon ami, Absolument oui

Wait, has she ever been in a movie that's not surrealist? The last time I saw her was The Forbidden Room (and before that, Nadja), and she looked, frankly, like a different person in each those. She was gamin-esque. Gone is that gamin! La gamin est parti... She has surrendered even late-inning Delpy/Huppert-style mature Parisian hotness in favor of a stogie and a laugh throaty enough to choke the communism out of Lionel Stander. Wagging her sun-browned body around like a Bowery-born scrapper, bounding over piles of enemy corpses with Patton-esque gusto, breasts bared with the 'who cares?' haughtiness that marks European women as the superior to all other genders and continents. Rocking punk rock bangs and a stare that could freeze the blood of a drowsy, sun-basking tiger, Löwensohn poses and shifts around on the rocks and beaches with the short guy beatnik cool of Dick Miller and the existential ambivalence of Warner Herzog. 

Yet those breasts are young and full-still, as if eternal. Shall you not try to swing the same?

8 THE WILD BOYS

(Les garçons sauvages)

Dir Bertrand Mandico

***1/2

Gender-bending a Clockwork Orange / Captains Courageous bad boy rehab adventure into erotic surrealist shapes not unlike like Batailles' Story of the Eye and Angela Carter's Passion of a New Eve,  comes Mandico's Les garçons sauvages. Five over-privileged boys are pressed aboard a rough trade reform school rehab fishing boat after Trevor (a malicious spiritual force envisioned by the boys as dog with a jeweled mask) incites them to violence against their indulgent lit teacher during a masked drunken Macbeth performance. A kind of 'scared straight at sea' adventure, the ship is helmed by a very salty sadistic captain with a map tattooed on his penis--one of many we'll see, though they all seem rough, uncircumcised and woven from burlap--results. Collared and tied to the ship and regularly choked to within an inch of their lives at the salty captain's whim, (most of) the boys gradually become submissive, the rough living snapping them out of their entitled sadistic prep school funk...

But that's just the beginning of this bizarro odyssey! The destination of the ship is a mysterious island with sexually active vegetation (which the boys are encouraged to take relentless advantage of). Oysters, oozing tree sap, pollen, the salty sea, and other island fragrances infise a strange hormonal magic in the air, enough to slowly turn these rough trade specimens into girls (their penises drop off and are swept away in the uncaring surf, suddenly no more relevant than land crabs). Meanwhile trees and rocks become giant asses and mocking breasts. "Luckily," a mysterious lady (formerly male) doctor (Löwensohn) arrives to take them under her wing; together they will eventually start sexually devouring and killing randy sailors, committing high seas mutiny, and surrendering to the intoxicating touch and taste of the local plant life. For the in-cahoots captain and the doctor, it's a living. 

Announcing Mandico as a vital new presence in the international film scene (there should be dozens more like him), Les garçons sauvages is really off in a field by itself, chasing horny phallic dragonflies, drinking manna-jaculate from phallic tubers, screwing between leafy legs, sleeping deep in the shrubbery, Uranus' severed testicles foaming into Venus, then back to foam again. There are signs of other unclassifiable movies, everything from Naked Lunch to Matango to Valhalla Rising in its hallucinatory amok Robinson Crusoe wanderings... but there's only Batailles and Carter's fiction and maybe moments in the films fellow French provocatuers Claire Denis, Catherine Breillat, and Gaspar Noe, but they never quite go this far into the Cocteau mirror. 

 The great twist though is that these boys are all played by girls, to start with, and the freedom accorded these already free French actresses allows them to swagger and strut in ways that do a heart good to see. Female sexual aggression isn't, apparently, the same existential threat in France as it is here in the US. It's merely recognized as performance, one the girls-as-boys are all keen to embody, strutting and making lewd gestures and wave their cocks around like they just strapped them on, their fair feminine features actually make them perfect as teenage boys. While their burlap members fall off, they behold their new breasts like they just earned their team colors. It's quite revealing when deconstructing the postures and posing of performative manly mannishness ala Beau Travail  (with which it would make a wild double feature), all swivel-hipped sailors and grabby crotch-forward surrender --the way letting your unconscious anima/animus stretch out in drag brings all sorts of in-the-moment awareness and mojo. It's twice as sexy as it should be, really, no  matter what your persuasion.

What does it all mean? Why don't you read some Batailles, Huysmanns and Angela Carter and learn something about just how precarious your own sexuality is. Words on a page can reorganize the molecular structure of your private parts! Read the wrong book and get aroused in places you didn't even know were there, and maybe weren't before you read it. Suddenly buried infant memories sweep up onto the rocks as gender's social constructs are surrendered to the lapping oyster-rich waves.

--

LET THE CORPSES TAN

(Laissez bronzer les cadavres)

Dirs. Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani

**1/2

My expectations ran mighty high for this. Too high, perhaps. being such a gigantic fan of Belgian writer/director/producer team Helene Cattet's and Bruno Forzani's 2009 debut, Amer, and their sophomore effort, The Strange Color of Her Body's Tears. It's been a case of too much early promise to keep up with. This, their third feature is still suffused with their signature style (gorgeous 35mm photography, tastefully-recycled Ennio Morricone music, lots of feverish close-ups of eyes, hands, knives, guns, mouths, wild clothing, dissociative nonlinear editing, stylized violence) but there's no room in a traditional crime thriller (adopted from a potboiler French novel) for the kind of psychosexual or post-structuralist departures that made their earlier more giallo/Argento-inspired work so delectably artsy. They make some feints towards that level of giddy experimentation, like early Dario Argento and Maya Deren fighting with Stan Brakhage and Luis Bunuel in a phone both kind of style, but the result is that neither element quite gels. Maybe the bottom line is, there are just too many sunbeated old French male actor faces that look too much alike; with all the Leone eye close-ups and mouths and arms and all that they seem quite interchangeable.

The terrain though is lovely. Blazingly shot almost all outdoors--church ruins, filled with winding passages and cold rock interiors, an artist enclave high on a hill overlooking the crashing Mediterranean surf: clear deep blue sky, blazing sun --you can feel how hot the stones are where the sun hits them; you can feel how cold it is in the shade. It's run by a crazy middle-aged artist (Elina Löwensohn, still smoking those stogies) and her has-been writer lover played by the indefatigable Marc Barbé (they were last paired together as killer and final girl/lady in Sombre) and at the moment mostly inhabited by shady character. Stephane Ferrara is a guy named Rhino, but he's not the big bald bruiser you'd think was named Rhino --that guy's in the cold storage cave, humping the roast lamb hanging there (that lamb gets pretty gross and shot up by the end of the film--in slo motion). At least I think that's true. Who can keep all these craggy old man faces straight?

Anyway, it's a perfect location. Who wouldn't want to shoot a movie there, or hide out after a crime, even without air conditioning, phone or electricity? Even the the has-been writer's young black wife comes there, uninvited, with her kid (stolen from her ex-husband who has sole custody), a cute young maid. Complications! The father might get the law on the place now, so the crooks will have to kill everyone. And then two motorcycle cops show up. Oy, it's going to be a long afternoon. 

The cast dwindles out like ticker tape as visions of everything from Point Blank to Django Kill... If you Live, Shoot cohere amidst the coronas, vaginal solar flares, Brocken spectres, fata Morgana, and sun dogs cohere amidst the lacatatin tied-up breasts and flying bullets. A cliche'd close-ups of ants crawling on an arial photo of the ruins may pass with only mild groans. Ask not when deconstructed homage becomes cliche! We just know.

Alas, sometimes Forzani and Cattet have such devotion to their startling compositions and deep colors that the big picture falls away. They cram in surreal details like afterthoughts that take away rather than add: when one man is shot the gold he's carrying is hit and explodes as if liquid, splashing all over him (art... from Django Kill!) but aside from a very cool skull-headed hobby horse, and a painting Elina makes in the beginning by shooting paint pellets at a canvas and burning holes in it with her cigar, there's not much art on the scene to make the splashing gold have relevant context. It all has to be made up on the spot by the filmmakers who showed keen awareness of Jungian archetypes and surrealism in Amer, but here when they resort weirdly sexual or death driven tableaux (below) it doesn't signify much beyond its own ephemerality.  Should have been watching Bernardo Bertolucci and Ingmar Bergman the same time you be watching them giallos and westerns but maybe school is out, so they watch what they want rather than what the teacher assigns... and as Merlin says in Excalibur, it is mens' nature to forget.

I think.

But hey -shock value abounds and there's nothing wrong with that (aside from its desensitizing long-term effects). In what are either fantasies or flashbacks, a young silhouetted anima figure (presumably Löwensohn's character in her younger artist muse days), stands over a group of men and pees on them as the Morricone guitar stings bray. In another she's tied to a cross; cruel tight ropes over her breasts cause them to lactate in great rivers down her body (evoking similar imagery with the lit teacher in the early portion of The Wild Boys! What's up with Lowenson and rope-forced lactatio?). Later still she jams her heel into the mouth of one of the men  intercut with the use of a gun in a similar orifice, ala the 'dying primal scene reverie' images in Argento's Tenebrae. 

And yet, the synergy that made Amer so magnificently Antonioni-meets-Argento-esque (dialoguing with Lucretia Martel's paranoia and Claire Denis' butch sexuality as well as Argento's psychosexual post-modernism) is missing. Aside from the snarky obviousness of "gold"-en showering, or the commerce/art compromise when gold coins become liquid gold paint, the twin voices--the feminine avant garde experimental non-narrative lovingly ying/yanged with the masculine/Apollonian linea narrative--so indicative of the Cattet/Forzani union in the past--don't connect like one would hope. We end up admiring the lovely location, the photography, the range of styles, the great use of classic Italian film music, but eventually we lose any idea of which craggy middle-aged heavy is shooting which, or if we're supposed to care who gets the gold or not.

The reason those new wave crime movies (which Corpses clearly pay homage to) worked back in the day was their pro-crime attack on cultural norms of the time. Censorship and big budgets made mainstream fare so tedious and conventional that unusual angles, splurges of sex and giddy violence, the bad getting off free from their crimes, was fresh and new. The usual plots were subverted, even rendered meaningless; the crime was the style. Outlaw culture was born, leading directly from Breathless to Bonnie to Badlands. I'll definitely see Corpses again and hope my feelings change but as of now, I'm just left confused by the plot and disappointed by the mismatched Franco-esque asides.

Another weird connection: seeing this film the same year as the release of Other Side of the Wind, for Welles' artsy film-within-the-film is the Cattet-Forzani film I was hoping for. Welles keeps all the surrealism connecting properly, the colors and imagery are trippy relevant because they connect. You know what it all means even if what it means isn't clear. The part of you that 'gets' weird art knows what it means and if that part doesn't tell you, it's because it's saving it for your dreams. He keeps it simple, allowing the style and symbolism to directly link. He taps into the myth. He was doing psychedelic modernism back in the goddamned 40s so he doesn't need to underline Big Messages (his message is always the same anyway: having a massive ego and the confidence to flim-flam people eventually backfires. It's that message every time with Welles. But hey, along the way he points to the eternal truths as they pass by in parade, like an excited kid at the reptile house who knows all their Latin names.

,

In the same way Amer worked. It had form and unity of modern and post-modern in a tale of one girl's evolving relationship to her parents and animus. Three-vignettes of sexual awakening in a girl's life are told in three distinct retro styles, allowing for true new wave energy, giving us the modernist frisson of slip-sliding signifiers we find in the best of Antonioni. We didn't need a narrative in Amer because we saw the common thread through it all, as if all the movies made in Europe about woman's sexuality suddenly rearranged themselves into a completed puzzle. Amer didn't have to make sense, it was sense. Forzani and Cattet's sophomore effort, Strange Color of Her Body's Tear, on the other hand, was more like an exercise in bravura style, but with enough enticingly lovely actors and such a gorgeous art nouveau hotel setting it didn't matter if the story got monotonous and incoherent. With Corpses though, what do we have? Bronzed Mediterranean fifty-somethings lounging amidst the cloudless blazing blue sky and groovy ruins? Up close shots of eyes, guns and gross mouths stuffed with food and bad teeth? One is tempted to recall Hitchcock's line about how some directors make slices of life, while he mades slices of cake. Alas, Cattet and Forlani have tried to make a slice of a slice of a slice of a slice and we're left with nothing but an empty fork.

Anyway, it's worth the trip, just for the view.

And the balls.

----

Vanishing Caloric Density: QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958)

Before her there was only Peggy Hopkins Joyce. After her came all of cable TV. And now our first lady may be a secret Soviet 'handler' for a mole Raymond Shaw-style presidential sleeper agent blah blah, but who cares? She looks marvelous, darling. That bitch can wear a dress. Has a first lady ever been this glam?

In such an age as this, can we really afford to forget about Zsa Zsa Gabor?

Barely two years dead, seldom seen outside a scarce handful of cult movies (and a few forgettable 'good ones' like We're Not Married) it's easy to forget that her unique brand of 'empty' celebrity was once unique in pop culture. Well, we forget her at our own risk: she's the preface chapter to all of trash TV today. But she herself was not trashy. Along with her sisters and mother, she was Hungarian and a socialite and she got rich divorcing rich old men husbands and got famous for being famous without having anything to be famous about, which has been such a constant for so long now it's not even a novelty.

And yet, there's no one remotely like her today because she had that high-toned class that usually was seen in society pages rather than heard on game shows. She came from a time when TV was campier but less shrill, with relatively little of our current reality show 'loudest voice wins' 'diamonds-that-shine-like-rhinestone' ugliness. Instead, the blurriness of analog color TV signal and the Vaseline on the lens catching her every diamond sparkle, Zsa Zsa drifted along the talk show airwaves like a fabulous pillow feather caught in a cold Nordic draft. Witty enough to be engaging, beautiful enough to be beguiling, but nothing else, we jokingly imagined her as the harbinger of the TV future, the equivalent of what the food industry calls vanishing caloric density, her melt-in-your-mouth hungry ghost illusion left us with nothing, not even the illusion of fullness - only the vague epiphany that fullness itself was an illusion. She knew to play herself dead-on straight, like she didn't get the joke; she was able to be that paragon of social high-toned class that Joan Rivers, in her acres of furs, was a sly riff on. But Zsa Zsa knew she was playing a 'type' as stereoed-in as Charles Nelson Riley or Rip Taylor, yet it worked because she pretended she didn't know it. We were left to fathom what percentage of her schtick was pretense, and it's that which made her interesting. We could keep it up as long as she could.

The epitome of composed class and elegance: gowns and lashes for the ladies and gays, impressive cleavage for the straight boys, she was the sort of lady you bring to Vegas on your arm and know she won't embarrass you by getting hammered and pestering you to go upstairs, and if she has any 'needs', she'll make sure they're met, in austere Eastern European style (via some dashing parking attendant from Brazil who conveniently speaks no English). Her vanity and insecurity over her leggy competition might drive you to a nervous breakdown (as it did to the director of the film we're discussing today) but you don't have to worry about her mental health: you could bounce a truck off her old world European composure and worry only about the truck.

Television today has set the bar for glamor is so low it's down in the sub-basement. "Reality" stars sip Napoleon brandy mixed with Mountain Dew and end up splashing it on each other to signify a fight that will keep us watching past the next add for butt augmentation --but that's inevitable. That's science. It has to do with intelligence, education and the bourgeois pretentiousness of intellectuals, writers who never notice how their 'talking down' to audiences makes less educated audiences desperate to feel smarter than someone, anyone. While it's annoying being surrounded by idiots, maybe it's worse being an idiot surrounded by smart people. Reality TV is the chance for even idiots to feel superior. Happy now, smart person, knowing the success of Honey Boo-Boo and the election of Trump is partly y'all's fault? 

Problem is, those shows about dumb yokels are made by smart people, and the contempt they feel for their subjects is hard to hide, and contagious, and addictive. Brainy Harvard snob writers eventually start to show their contempt too broadly, like the smirky New York intellectual Walter Matthau in 1957's A Face in the Crowd (left), writing the corn pone slop in Lonesome Rhodes' show like he's doing anyone a favor when in reality his cynicism is what's dragging the world down around his ears. Watching that movie you start to think yeah, Lonesome Rhodes is a monster, but I don't want to punch him in the face as bad as I want to punch you, Matthau. This type of character, so common in the late 50s-early 60s, that thinks a pipe, white skin, glasses, a suit, college education gives them dominion over women, children, the 'working class,' and dogs. They don't respect the savvy craftiness of street smart 'hicks' or the intuitive 'soft touch' of women (though they presume their lascivious attention is always welcome). Their father can help get them any job they want and they presume they deserve them. These privileged 'wits' end up enforcing a straight white male intelligence on their non-white, non-straight, non-male and non-college educated subjects, who naturally suffer in strait-jackets of passive aggressive 'dumbing down' dialogue, the sort that used to be so common it was a kind of invisible normal that might make you slowly go insane but you were never sure why. 

It's cuzz city slicker douchebags with them pipes keeping us thinking each other is super dumb by writing our thoughts for us on TV, is why! Fight the real enemy. This asshole:

Slap the pipe out!
(from top: Matthau, A Face in the Crowd; Anthony Eisley, Wasp Woman

Another example: Anthony Eisley of 1959's The Wasp Woman who continually treats his boss--the CEO of his company--Janet Starlin, like a child who needs constant supervision lest she sell the empire for a magic bean. With his unlit pipe and bougie bow-tie it's only natural we pray a certain wasp stings him rotten.

Think I'm just free-associating? Our current shitty national situation, Zsa Zsa Gabor, empty fame, snobby Harvard writers --what do they have in common? QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE (1958).

This is CinemaScope

As a fan of bad 50s horror and sci-fi movies (especially Mesa of the Lost Women and Plan Nine) as well as the wry work of Ben Hecht (who wrote the story, not that it's very original) and Charles Beaumont (who adapted it), I am supposed to automatically love this Queen, this presumptive sci-fi shaggy dog classic, this veritable remake of the story filmed first in 1953 (as the far 'superior', Cat Women of the Moon) then also in the same year (1958!) but in black-and-white, as Missile to the Moon. 

 (from top) the heavenly beatnik jazz dancer troupe of CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON; the celestial moon goddesses of MISSILE TO THE MOON; the tired front line of broads from QUEEN 

I love Cat and like Missile but loathe Queen. Meanwhile those films never show up on TCM when its time to fill some campy sci-fi slot in their schedule. Probably because it's in color and has Zsa Zsa Gabor. But I'd rather watch the surly sniping of Kip (Victor Jory) over Helen (Marie Windsor) being with dopey Laird (Sonny Tufts) instead of him, and the way they all play it totally straight, Jory's prima donna macho so 'itself' it becomes poetry, like watching Shakespeare act out his 14 year-old kid's metal album. The winky 'hey gang!A rocket is a phallic symbol nyuk nyuk' of Queen is the real enemy to bad movie lovers. I want to slap the pipe out of its smug Walter Mathau Face in the Crowd-mouth.  I like both its writers and love the film from which Queen 'borrowed' its wardrobe (the uniforms and a sparkly minidress from MGM's sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet) and it's got babes and a giant spider (there's also a giant spider in Missile and in Cat Women and even Mesa) but most of the time it's just Cinemascope-length assemblages of under-directed actors standing around on opposite ends of a crumbling high school theater stage, ever ready for either a attendance roll call or old-school rumble that never happens. The film plays like a box of cake mix, unopened, with an egg broken over it, left it a cold oven by a director who's too busy hiding in his trailer to avoid one of Zsa Zsa's on-set rages to light the pilot. Instead he lets the soundstage fill with gas, like Monty Clift under a Place in the Sun canoe. Maybe Hecht and MacArthur are just too intellectually snotty to take this seriously, lest their Algonquin friends accuse them of reading Weird Tales instead Ezra Pound. So they embed a satyric wink so overwrought not even a near-sighted bourgeois patron of the arts could miss it.

The plot you know even if you don't: a shipload of smirking virile Earthmen head to a planet of all women where they help the good leader (Zsa Zsa) overthrow the bad one (Laurie Mitchell [who played a similar role in Missile to the Moon]) whose mask is even uglier than her ugly face. Va-Voom! Lots of girls in terrible MGM costume drama hand-me-downs getting freaky, guys makin' moves, and the captain tackling the biggest lay of his life.

sharp eyed fans may recognize Davis in Alta's 'decent' frock from F. Planet

Sounds like I'd love this film if it let me. But it loves its own smirky self too much to let anyone else share. Some of the girls are great (like Lisa Davis (right; below left) who rocks great lipstick and smoldering Gillian Anderson eyes) and the writing seems a decent framework for a more straight-faced mature approach (which would allow the magic of camp to cohere better). The problem is in the misogynistic direction and frat boy acting by the men, that pipe puffing smug-snarkiness where (SWM) actors and director think themselves too smart for their material so they think adding some bawdy audience winking will help put it over, which shows how wrong they are. Such smirky douche bag superiority has poisoned the film to never be a true cult favorite except in the smirkiest, douchiest, winkiest, most patriarchally self-important of ways. (The title + the star = a tourist version of camp, and not one to make a lifetime fan of it).

What makes the 'good' bad versions of this same plot (Cat Women of the Moon in particular) work so well as enduring 'camp' classics on the other hand, is the intent to do something straight and good but without the know-how or budget or the talent to make it, but with a genuine love of strong women. When these films are good we get the genuine eccentricity of lower rung Hollywood really trying to make nothing into something and of genuinely liking women. Unknowns and outsider artists mix with actors shunned or forgotten by the Hollywood elite and up and comers ready to try. They all take this last or first chance grab and nobly fight to stay in character as the set collapses around them. These oddballs and has-beens and non-starters are--to we classic horror / sci-fi fans--our family. They're the equivalent of the Bad News Bears, or the bar full of flea-bitten drunks in The Iceman Cometh, they're waiting us for us to come watch them again with Hicky eyes anew, to buy them drinks so they can live through the alcohol that is our eyes. They get that it's all over in well under 90 minutes, win or lose but so is the effect of an average double highball. Only the drunks survive, because thirst never dies. And neither does DVD. 

Maybe this is why (white male) barflies and has-beens tend to have more respect for women and minorities, since the men in these Z-grade films are as disenfranchised and thus less afraid they'll lose anything by portraying women as the badass goddesses they are. I know for myself, alcoholism humbled me down to the roots, made me forever grateful and in awe of the women who rescued me. And that's why we drunks, drag queens, punks, and other outsiders that make up the bad film-lover community aren't going to be drawn to such puerile contempt for either women or the sci-fi and horror genres. And thus no character in Plan Nine leers at Vampira and says some inane shit like "my coffin or yours, baby." No one in that cantina says to Tarantella in Mesa of Lost Women, "I bet you got a real sticky web." If there were such quips these films would be as ignobly remembered as this Queen. It's the celebration, the worship, of female strength, that makes them endure with stoic grace in the face of incompetence. It's there in John Waters, it's there in Russ Meyer, it's there in Roger Corman. It's not there in Queen of Outer Space. 

The 'space women need men' subgenre always has a giant spider - Analyze its symbolic meaning, write down your answer, then look at the oeuvre of artist Louise Bourgeois to see if you're right!

Only a few elements in Queen from Outer Space take the outsider/sublime approach vs. the Matthau-in-Face in the Crowd attitude, and one of them---believe it or not--is Zsa Zsa Gabor.



No matter what happens, she plays it dead straight. She should have been the evil queen- as the title and billing suggests, with her beauty being the mask and the ugly scarred face appearing after the face cracks off because she's too busy making out with the captain to moisturize. Instead, as the chief scientist and leader of the resistance, she brings that same feathery class to bear she'd bring to any 'real' social event only here it looks like the event happened five years ago and no janitor has stirred therein to sweep up. And the event was an afternoon ladies-only coffee clatch fashion show with a vague Robin Hood theme.

If it's not going to offer anything else, the casting of Zsa Zsa was brilliant touch just for marquee value alone, making Queen of Outer Space live in high camp infamy, a touchstone name easily recognized by programmers who know nothing of the genre. But it's not worth the camp adulation, for it is the kind of self-hating sci-fi that feels the need to leer and roll its eyes every five minutes.  They don't get that it's not 'fun' to presume a planet of all women is going to roll over the minute some douchebag puts on a moth-eaten blue powder and struts in like the kingdom can now relax - a man is here to take charge. It's offensive, man. You can't put women in masks deformed enough to scare Picasso out of the brothel (left) and expect them to thank you for it. You can't think some young captain bucko can topple an empire just by toying with the affections of a mask-wearing broad on Venus and have it not be so misogynist I could just scream! You can't!

Grandma, what uneven eyeholes you got

Real camp would go the opposite way - it heaps a dozen dead male spacemen at the feet of its evil goddess. Great camp celebrates strong, badass broads. It loves them. It even gives them a magical beatnik free jazz dance to quietly haunting Elmer Bernstein flute music. For Queen the contempt is so thick they don't even have the decency to put some ornamental Vishnu statuary around the place, nor to attach the painted boards that make up the evil queen's mean-spirited rocket launch control platform, the kind of thing that would earn a frown from any high school drama coach. But to not even bother to make the eyeholes symmetrical on the glittery masks the queen and her coterie wear? Unforgivable even in elementary school.

Well, either way - if we don't like it- we have two others just like it for solace, each worse than the other and far better in their worseness as a result. Today, maybe the times have changed - we've been to the moon. We know there's no babes there. Or if there are, they're fast asleep (or as Rutledge says, their "condition: not dead, not alive"). Alien women are here, instead, on Earth, and their masks are human, but just barely. Sometimes I pass one on the street - they have deep light blue dazzling eyes and blonde hair, impossibly elfin. And I send them a telepathic message of the sort one passes to celebrities spotted in a crowd ("I know who you are, but I won't blow your cover by saying hello") The alien babes I spot don't answer me, but that's show business. Maybe I'm not smart enough to be worth 'sending' to. My genes aren't worth harvesting, so no cool sexy abductions or long snogs. I am not mad or jealous and I'm not out to topple any kingdom, certainly not a matriarchy, even if it's run by a puppet doofus via his hot Russian handler. I'll write whatever I have to in order to earn my sanity, to feel observant enough about the shit I watch that I somehow contribute to the collective evolution of dude-kind. Pass me my pipe and let's get the show started, and then cancelled! And take me with you when you go back to space, long as I can bring a DVD player, can count on constant normal gravity, and Cat Women of the Moon! 

It's because I know you won't bring me that I don't want to go. Hail Alpha! 

Greetings from the Bilderberg Jamboree

See also:
CAT WOMEN OF THE MOON (1953)
MESA OF LOST WOMEN (1953)
FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956)
PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)
--
Acidemic #8 The Brecht / Godard / Wood issue

Cuspidor of Greatness: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)

The red man was the big man

and then came the great big white man 

a white man? / that's the right man.

The whites got the reds and the reds got the blues, 

and the red white and blue was born. 

The above is a snatch of song sung by Wheeler and Woolsey, with dancing Native American maids all in rows, and while sardonic as fuckall it's rather callous, as if casting a bloody stain on America's conscience is the same as patriotism, and no one really seems to care, because now Native Americans have oil wells and gambling and educated spokespersons. But where exactly do Wheeler and Woolsey fit in? In DIPLOMANIACS (1933),  Woolsey can best be imagined by picturing a lipless George Burns aiming for Groucho Marx's arrogance and way with a cigar; Wheeler is like Nathan Lane pureed together with Frank McHugh, and slid under Charlie Chaplin hair oil. Always, always there's the sense that these guys are really stage show vaudevillians more than film stars.

Some great comics like W.C. Fields, Mae West (pre-code) and the Marx Brothers (at least pre-DAY AT THE RACES) have stood the test of time. They are eternal. Others, popular in the early dirty turn-of-sound 30s---Eddie Cantor, Jolson, Wheeler and Woolsey--have not been so lucky. They have faded into niches were only freaks like me do scrounge. But thanks to the Warner Bro. Archives, a horde of their surreal pre-codes are finally available on DVD, and man you can learn a lot about the era's social stigmas and stigmatisms and all the things the code would wipe away. I've already written about one such eye-opener, WONDER BAR (1934). Why? How do I know? I follow my bliss, and online reviews: my hunger for pre-code surrealism is, however, always accompanied by my liberal PC brainwash afterburn.

Open the closet door!

DIPLOMANIACS (1933) came out the same year as, and is very similar to, the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP, and was co-written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote W.C. Fields' MILLION DOLLAR LEGS the year before, and that it can be compared to them is an honor, for Wheeler and Woolsey have not aged as well as Fields or the Marxes. Unless you like both the Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy you might find yourself put off by the freaky squareness of these boys, even if only in some uncanny way you can't explain. Me, I don't care for the grotesque infantile tantrums of Laurel and Hardy. Something about them creeps me out. And there's something similarly sticky about Wheeler and Woolsey, some uncanny quality that makes their resemblance to other comedians of the day most disturbing.

And man do they love to play dress up. Wheeler and Woolsey share the same sense of infantile queerness as Laurel and Hardy --is that why they creep me out? They lack the amok heterosexuality of the Marxes, or the singleminded pursuit of oblivion that elevates Fields. Woolsey does get drunk in one scene but he's really more interested in..... ugh.... soup. By the second time he asks for more soup in the first class dining room I'm feeling the polar opposite of watching Fields grab all the table service bottles on his way off the roof of INTERNATIONAL HOUSE (1933). Booze = funny. Soup= yuck! Why? Because food, like life, is gross. Drunkenness, divine. And as someone with near fifteen years sobriety, I should know!

That said, if DIPLOMANIACS landed on the college revival circuit the way the Marx Bros. and Fields films did back in the late 60s-80s, it too might have garnered a hipster cult. The pair do, after all, go for the weird with unhesitating brio, as in the still above where they're sent aloft by being tossed up in a Native American blanket (from here on in I'm switching to 'Indian' for reasons that will be made clear) en route to the Lausanne peace conference or when they battle a tribble-like crawling scalp. Fans of Broadway shows like THE PRODUCERS, or revivals like ANYTHING GOES (which I saw in London in 04) will probably feel themselves on very familiar ground here. Some of the numbers have a lived-in, well-rehearsed feel, especially the big shipboard number where Wheeler tries to shake a lovestruck vamp named Dolores (Marjorie White).  A definite scene stealer, she arrives in villain Louis Calhern's stateroom wrapped in plastic after the following bizarre and racist exchange between him and Hugh Herbert as Calhern's Fu Manchu sidekick, trying to pass Yiddish off as Chinese:

Calhern: I need a vamp
Herbert: What kind?
Calhern: ...a female vamp!
Herbert: What color?
(...)
Calhern: A white one.
Herbert: White ones get dirty much too quickly
Calhern: Well, for this job she'll have to get dirty.

It's funny thanks to Calhern's robust delivery of the phrase "have to get dirty." But of course they make a mistake in presuming the boys are straight rather than ensconced in an infantile, closeted misogyny, which renders any vamp's come-ones powerless to sway them. They have the closeted queer's malice towards straight sex, presuming brusque burlesques of hetero courtship will satisfy doubters as to their manliness. The boys sleep in the same bed, and Woosley is clearly the top, you can tell by his big erect cigar and Wheeler's BIRDCAGE-y nightgown (below). And then rather than getting their morning drink on like real men they're more concerned with mani-pedis. "If we can get away with wearing these pants we can get away with anything," notes Woolsey, and when someone overhears him whispering that something's a secret, he asks "What's a secret?" and he replies "A secret is something you tell everybody, confidentially," you know he means the celluloid closet! (1)

Working in the film's favor is the feeling that the filmmakers just saw the amazing LOVE ME TONIGHT (1932) and presume the audience has too. The song sung during the boys' first Parisian morning clearly apes the famous opening montage of Parisian noises that ends with Chevalier saying "Pariee / you are too loud / for me," and shutting his window. Here the lyrics include, "from the taxi honks/ it might be the Bronx but no / this is Paris." (also Wheeler sings a bar of "Isn't it Romantic" while rushing through a montage of lyrics). Another favorite moment occurs after the bulk of first class passengers leave the dining room, and the captain of the Geneva-bound ocean liner gravely addresses the remaining gentlemen at his table: "As we are men of the world, let us consume alcohol." I knew that if I was seeing this with my fellow Fieldsian Max while splitting a 1.75 of Ten High, we'd have looked at each other in stunned delight, but he's married now with a kid, I'm long sober, and these guys are lightweights. Where's my Sean Regan?

That all works maybe, though, in the context of the film, which I saw by myself at three AM high only on herbal tea and cigarettes, after finishing my big previous post on isolationist themes in the films of John Monk Saunders. For if nothing else this film, like MILLION DOLLAR LEGS is really about America's post-WWI contempt for Europe, and the buffoonery of defeated nations still bristling against the post-WWI border alterations and expecting us to give a shit.

What is being satirized in short, is the world political scene immediately prior to the Nazi's re-mobilization, a build-up contingent on that very same weary unwillingness of the allies to step in again. So these films provide an illuminating time capsule look at something that no longer exists, a sense of out-of-touch posturing in Europe that American comics saw as a great chance for satirization, and Hitler saw as a perfect chance to defy restrictions. When a bomb goes off at the Geneva conference in DIPLOMANIACS it just turns into an excuse for a crazy blackface musical number, one of the reasons maybe this doesn't get screened very often, and an insight into the idea of 'deathlessness' in comedy, ala Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges, wherein explosions and accidents that would kill or cripple or kill a normal man just leave one with blackface and maybe an exploded cigar. Wishful thinking like that kept us neutral!

The second vamp is named Fifi and her kisses make men literally smoke under their collars and fall to earth a burned-out mess. We're supposed to believe that one kiss from the lipless Woolsey's makes her smoke and fall to the ground, too. More believable is the concept that a mincing French attendant is considered too oafish when the boys get their hair and nails done in Paris, and overall there hangs some horror movie oddness to the caricatures, reminding us that an element of the grotesque was alaways assumed in pre-code comics. For an example just dig the monstrousness of below poster, the eyes of all of them bugged maniacally or shadowed with lewd conspiracy. DUCK SOUP also satirized war, but it bombed; by then, apparently, the ominous tom-tom of a second world war wasn't comical.

Then there are the other odd reminders of the pre-WWII sense of anything goes, As Dreamland Cafe (from where I lifted these images) points out:

"One of the unnerving aspects of the film for a modern viewer is that there are several swastikas in the Indian costumes. Apparently swastikas were actually common in Southwest Indian design work until WWII. The Nazis had come to power in Germany by 1933, but it doesn’t appear that the film-makers were associating swastikas with them, even if the threat to world peace was on everybody’s mind."

World peace was on everyone's mind, and it's important to note that swastikas weren't just Native American (and Buddhist) symbols, but universal good luck charms (in 1931 Joan Blondell sells swastika key chains in BLONDE CRAZY).

The strange thing about the celluloid closet is that by hiding in plain sight and 'passing' their racist, misogynist mincing off as American straight, gay Hollywood broadened the scope of what 'straight' was. Now such business--prancing, mincing, jumping into one another's arms, avoiding women like the plague but presuming they could get one to fall for them no problem if they cared to-- seems pretty queer - when we see that behavior in contemporary film and TV (ala Sal in MAD MEN) we spot it right off and it causes a shudder of realization about the parameters of 'masculinity'. These characters/actors might be unconscious even of their own closetedness; it happens, and probably happened an awful lot back then. But there's a side effect of the recent decades of positive social change: men still afraid of seeming gay can't do half the things they used to do, like mince and sleep in a negligee in the same bed as their best buddy. They also can't be racist, sexist, or crude without catching instant PC flak. Everything is, in short, reversed. Depending on what state you're in, of course.

It's not that I'm PC myself, just trained like a bird dog to sniff and point. Thus Wheeler and Woolsey linger on the lip of the cuspidor of greatness, alongside Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor, defeated in the end from draining down into the pot of cine-hipster rediscovery by their own propensity for blackface and closeted mincing.

Well, thanks probably to Mankiewicz, at least their politics are hilariously bleak, the script sharp, lyrics clever,  the men very old, the women warm, the champagne cold, but over all lingers the presumption that hetero masculinity will continue to encompass this kind of infantile feyness in the century to come instead of delineating certain attitudes and actions as either gay or straight, and either choice preferable to the double blind sneer of the unconscious closet. And so it has come to pass that what was once a good luck charm is now a symbol of racism so vile it's permanently stained the fabric of our conscience, and our PC evolution has rightly rendered blackface and 'red man' tomfoolery accessible only via Warner's DV-R archive by those brave few willing to shell out for the strange and dubious privilege. But there is justice in popularization: The Marx Brothers (2), Mae West, and Fields deservedly endure in the mass produced DVDs and if that's in part from avoiding racism, closeted queerness, fascism, and misogynist objectification through most of if not all their films, well, I'll drink to that any day... So Oooga Booga to you too, you upstart! And if there is such a thing as a tartuffle, then you are just that thing!

NOTES:
1. I should say at this point that I find an out gay person is a thing of joy and beauty, but a closeted 'lover' unaware of the vile misogyny underwriting his straight burlesque is most dispiriting (see also: MONTE CARLO)
2. Since posting I've been thinking about the moments of blackface in Marx Brothers films but they are brief and serve the story: in DAY AT THE RACES they cork up to hide from the cops, but it's after a big dance number that basically expands the "All God's chillun got guns" section of SOUP's "Going to War" number, where are all the black people come to the rescue of the brothers, and sing and dance wondrously and are at least legitimately black. Racist or not it gives work to a vast stock of blazingly talented and legitimately black singers and dancers and one senses throughout a kinship between the black cast and the Jewish Marxes --a well documented simpatico extending even to Al Jolson. And one need only watch the sassy black maids sashaying after Mae West as she struts around her apartment in I'M NO ANGEL, and hear her rich bluesy voice to know that in other circumstances West could be their maid, and not feel at all chagrined by the reversal. W.C. Fields splits a bottle of whiskey with an Indian, appears in blackface only to hide from a constable (in a scene edited from TV prints), and means Native Americans when he talks about carving through this wall of human flesh, carrying his canoe behind him. None of it seems 'unconsciously' racist --it is indirect, and more to paint Fields as a scalawag and mountebank full of nosegay, than as a tool for enhancing one's sense of Aryan superiority. Amen. 

ADDENDUM. Don't let this rant stop you from seeing DIPLOMANIACS! Woolsey might be a lipless freak but Manckiewicz wouldn't let you down. I'll even sell you mine! xo

Nuts Taking Pictures of Pictures taking Nuts: MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)

Stick out your dong and say 'AGHH!'

"Myra Breckinridge was born with a scalpel and don't you ever forget it, motherfuckers--as the kids all say." Yes,, Raquel Welch--as post-op woman Myra-- narrates in the third person (she's at least two all by herself) in the un-membered-rabble mess/tear/racy-piece MYRA BRECKINRIDGE. It's not sharp, but that scalpel in old John Carradine's mitt (above) will, you feel, definitely cut off something, and it's not (just) Bunny's member. No, "ma'am." As the kids all say, if you can't get up to change the channel, at least change your underwear, before your silver Long John Horatio Hornblows anymore Captain Blood against the mast.

Let me grab a bucket of Jungle Red Benjamin Moore and brush/stroke the scene: Time: the end of the 60s / place: Hollywood.  We watch with mouths agape as the last vestige of hetero-studliness associated with the counterculture's orgy mentality fishtails off the woman's lib curb into a 'Joe Buck on the Deuce'-style gay orbit. 

MYRA B. is--as the kids all say--one truly awful film, but that doesn't mean you should miss it. 

As a truly anti-Hollywood Hollywood production and a rare example of a mainstream film that's truly misandric (something Valerie Solanis might dream up after too much pruno). "My purpose in coming to Hollywood," Myra announces early on, "is to destroy the American male in all its forms." (hear hear!) As long as the film focuses on this 'destroy men on every level' mission, keeps splicing in an array old film clips (to create the feeling these long gone actors are alive and watching events unfold), and supplies Welch spouting with anti-male / pro-Hollywood doctrine to spout, it's pretty badass. But once it veers in any other direction, a kind of suicidal self-sabotage comes a-crippling. For some unbeknownst reason, the producers saw fit to let Michael Sarne--a Brit actor, singer, and flashy gent with no discernible filmmaking know-how (or grasp of Hollywood history (he's a bloody Brit for Christ's sake)--have the directorial reins.

 If nothing else, the film really needed a Yank directing; only an American, born and bred, could have really understood Hollywood and its twisted sexuality in the way needed. While the script is cutting on many levels (thanks no doubt to Vidal's way with dialogue), Sarne's camera is almost too polite; he forgets to leer down Raquel Welch's dress and he cuts away right when a tirade is getting interesting.

Sarne, once again trying to cut short a sexy tryst

But first, historical Hollywood context: in 1970, Fox--MYRA's parent company--had also released BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. What a pair! Both used film critics either as actors or writers and then passed the project to directors unused to working with big budgets (Sarne and Russ Meyer). Apparently anyone--as long as they were coming from outside the system--could get a major studio movie made in the late 60s-early 70s. Studios were dying right and left and the old guard was clueless in the face of the psychedelic / feminist / black power / anti-Vietnam revolution generation. They saw EASY RIDER and thought, a blind chimp can make a better movie than this! So they did the only logical thing: went out and signed the first blind chimp they saw. It was a sad, grasping desperate strategy, born from their old guard derision for what was 'selling tickets.' If they hadn't done drugs themselves--and they were too old and square not to believe the anti-drug hype--they just threw some breasts, loud music, and strobe lights on the screen and hoped for the best. Damned hippies wouldn't even notice--the shrinking bigwigs assured each other. Those kids were too high from smoking acid and snorting reefer to follow a plot anyway, just give them the rock music, a light show, painted ladies dancing in cages, and then pack your golden parachute and bombs away. As Bob Hope, Peter Sellers, and David Niven rode out their contracts bedding young girls in flowery miniskirts, Top-40 bands of the day wailed on the soundtracks. Only AIP seemed to be making money, thanks to a shrewd mix of low budgets and expectations. 

The big studios didn't know how not waste money, so they tried everything else but, and it was all wrong. Even the farthest gone of the freaks could sense--like a shark---the flailing micro-vibrations of a wounded seal-like square's desperation to seem with it, but they weren't biting. In fact, they swam the other way as fast as possible. Narcs were everywhere, man, you had to watch out for cops with fake sideburns, and worse, horny balding idiots who'd heard about all that free love being given away on the Haight --big burly old dudes in Beatle's wigs looking to 'connect' - these older unhip faux-hipsters made a hippie watchful and a whole lot of paranoid.

But the studios had to try something. As early as 1966, a glut of over-priced, star-studded, psychedelic imagery-and-song-filled counterculture-satirizing (and aping) bids for mainstream success crawled desperately along the nation's marquees. The story they told was almost always the same: some average, middle-aged white collar square, trapped in his plastic-fantastic existence (Bob Hope, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, William Holden) suddenly wakes up, shacks up with a young free spirit hippie chick (Goldie Hawn, Joey Heatherton, Julie Christie, Kay Lenz) and finds either himself or a reason his ex-wife wasn't so bad after all  (in the darker versions, he kills said free spirit, due to his latent prudery). CANDY (dir. Christian Marquand); CASINO ROYALE (dir. Ken Hughes); BLUEBEARD (dir. Edward Dmytryk); SKIDOO (dir. Otto Preminger); I LOVE YOU ALICE B. TOLKAS; WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? and THERE'S A GIRL IN MY SOUP (all w/ Peter Sellers); HOW TO COMMIT MARRIAGE (w/ Bob Hope), PETULIA (dir. Richard Lester), BREEZY (Eastwood) to name just a few.

We're not a big fan of 'eaters' here at Acidemic

Some of these bloated midlife crises went perhaps too far into the freedoms wrought by the psychedelic era, and grew careless with them as if the Yin/Yang were just the latest in a long series of symbols for sex, ever-changing to keep fooling the censors and southern state rubes. The idea that LSD had created a kind of post-modern melt-down far different than their own square little jalopy-and-sock hop naughtiness was lost on an older generation for whom the notion of 'freedom' began and ended with the free sex with luscious young hippie girls they'd read about in the Times Sunday supplement. According to all the tabloids, those little chippees were just giving it away, strutting around with their painted midriffs. How was a man supposed to go home to his dour middle-aged wife and not groan in torment? He'd think about the ease with which he'd score if only he wasn't married. They were right there, for the taking, flashing him sexy looks (he thought). 

Thus these old dudes of the dying studio system masked their one-track minds in what we call 'terminal quirkiness.' They'd hire a handful of already has-been flower power bands for the album tie-in / soundtrack; get some B-roll of the girls of the Haight on a groovy summer afternoon; fish a long black hair/beaded headband combo out of the western "Indians" wig box down at wardrobe, throw it on your middle-aged contract player, throw a bubbly 'free spirit' in a fringe mini-dress into his arms, shove the whole thing on the big screen without even looking at final cut and hope for the best.

But the youth didn't want old comedians leering over their cleavage. Thrusting themselves into the modern world and making it up as they went, the youth were goal-free; it wasn't about the orgasm, man, it was about being in the moment. Hollywood reared back on its haunches like a spooked lion at that idea, lashing out at the very things the youth thought important, baring its fangs and ready to burn down the studio and laugh maniacally like Lionel Atwill or Joan Crawford rather than surrender the reins to some young turk who wouldn't appreciate a dirty-double Billy Wilder entendre.

Hollywood had labored too long perfecting a system of self-satire to understand its whole sense of self-satire itself was now under satiric attack. It couldn't understand there was no way out but to play the ogre as best it could. Trying to be anti-establishment (ala the Guy Debord concept of recuperation), the establishment ended up only anti-youth. I get it now that I (a member of Generation X) am too old to go to any party that would actually interest me, yet still too attend the ones that don't, just to get out of the house. The mix of prurience, jealousy, and legitimate concern I feel when hearing about 'bracelet parties,' for example, no doubt links me to these old Hollywood producers. The fact that we can never really never know for sure if those bracelet parties are real or not without going to one is enough to make us crazy with a constantly shifting amalgam of jealousy and concern. Is Bob Dole allowed to lust after Britney? Or is he part of the problem whether he does or not? 

Which brings us to MYRA, the mostly talked-about adaptation of Gore Vidal's seminal, fluid novel. Raquel Welch came aboard early, mainly--as she puts it in the DVD commentary--because she was supposed to (and wanted to) play both (the male) Myron and his post-op female counterpart Myra --kind of how Ed Wood played both Glen and Glenda. She rightly considered it an acting challenge. And if the filmmakers had stuck with that idea it might have been a great film (or at least less bad). Sarne insisted on casting Rex Reed instead. Urgh. One of the worst casting choices in the history of movies, Reed's air of defensive snootiness sabotages what little chance the film had. (No offense Rex, you doe-eyed minx).

What made MYRA a hopeful buzz generator was the sex change angle coupled to the image of Raquel Welch as an American flag-waving dominatrix. She had been made an international star before her breakout film ONE MILLION YEARS BC (1967) had even been released, just from the poster! No shit, Sherlock - look at this image at left - them gams. No boy or man of any age can remain unmoved. But she had another thing going for her too: an in-person air of take-no-prisoners imperiousness, the kind of thing that might make her come off as stringent (but seems more akin to self-defense considering all the pawing he's surely had to endure) that made her perfect for Myra.

But alas. Sarne left all that ore un-mined.

The fatal flaw of the film is right there in the opening bit: John Carradine plays a mumbling doctor performing the gender reassignment in what is presumably a psychedelic dream sequence "You realize once we cut if off it won't grow back," he says, trying to talk Myron out of it. "How about circumcision? It's cheaper."

Now, that's in itself hilarious and Carradine rocks, but if you start a story already in a dream sequence, and never really come out of it, then there's nothing ventured, no risk, no reason to care what happens through the whole rest of the film, unless it contrasts at some point with a recognizable reality. Carradine's warning that "it won't grow back" has no weight since we didn't even know Myron had one to begin with, AND either way it does apparently grow back. As soon as Farrah Fawcett hints she'd sleep with Myra if she were only a 'he', Myra backs out of the whole damn movie and becomes Myron again. The idea Farrah would want to shock up with Rex Reed is just too awful for any straight male to hear, worse even than Drew Barrymore marrying Tom Greene (ps: or Scarlet Johansson marrying Colin Jost)

Intended be very clever, this variation of the book to reach a happy (relax straight dudes, it was all a dream and no one lost their nuts) only reflects male-dominated mainstream cinema's still-unresolved castration anxiety, an anxiety which clouds its vision to the point of myopia (even films that tout their castration angles, like HARD CANDY and TEETH have sew-it-back or 'just kidding' cop-outs). But I can assure you every person who ever sees this film would prefer all the castrations stay where they are, for seeing Farrah and Raquel in bed together is super hot, while Farrah and Reed together is super not. Sarne, in his idiocy, got it backwards, leading to the most irksome homophobic cop-out in film history.... at least until Blake Edwards' SWITCH (if you've seen that film, you know the scene I mean, it will make you hate Blake Edwards forever--all the strides he made for gay liberation with the mainstream crossover of VICTOR/VICTORIA gone down the drain).

Huston rides a horsey

So, my caveats emptied, I'm going to go out on an already severed limb and defend MYRA anyway, because, even with the cop-outs, it's one of the few truly misandric films ever to come out of Hollywood.

Misandry: the hatred of men; an understandable feeling for anyone who loves movie stars and hates the cigar-chomping little midlife crisis sleazionaires--the pimps of the ephemeral--who mold their leading ladies from virgin clay into sexually-assailed golems of gorgeosity-made-flesh, i.e. PRODUCERS. In the context of MYRA, misandry is the desire to (as Myra puts it): "facilitate the destruction of the last vestige or trace of the traditional man... to realign the sexes in order to decrease the population, thus increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage."

Baby, you read my mind.

The problem is, while some of the film's dialogue does attain this dizzying height of cinematic savvy, it also betrays a very short attention span. In parts it seems like Sarne checked his watch, realized the film had played long enough that it could stop and still be considered a feature, and so made a 'wrap it up' gesture and immediately departed for rehab, leaving MRYA caught between the zipper of gender studies exhibit-A and a "hard" place limbo. Feints at validating the lifestyles of queers, commies, nymphos, hippies, and the semi-condoning of punking out of dumb "I'm straight!"-pleading studs (ala SCORE!) all adds up to zilch if it all ends up merely being the prelude for the same old vindication of boy-meets-girl establishment wonkiness--the old 'we had a lot of fun here tonight boys and girls but remember, gender normative straitjackets are there for your protection!' switch and shuffle.

Maybe what MYRA's makers subconsciously seem to fear isn't so much rejection of its subversive message but the idea of a Hollywood without censorship to rail against. A film like MYRA can't break walls if there are no walls left, and MYRA is terribly afraid it has nothing else to offer besides wall-breaking. So it knocks a few glory holes in the drywall, and then rushes to quick patch them up before dad comes home. Or another metaphor: the little boy dancing on the top of the dam, screaming that its about to burst, and kicking at it with his little churchy shoe, and then whipping out his dick when no one pays attention and, when no one pays attention even then, pretending to cut it off. And when that doesn't work, stepping down off the wall and going back into the church. Rex Reed's well-known hatred of the film is telling it that sense. In his little three minute film reviews on TV, Reed's snootiness was rawther droll, but this is a real movie, and no snootiness stays droll longer than, maybe, five? He can badmouth the film all he wants, and understandably, for it's there to forever remind him that he's just not right for the movies. Some people are just instantly unlikeable on the big screen. It's not their fault we want to punch that smug smirk off their faces the moment we see them. It's why screen tests are a thing. Only in the late-60s/early-70s could a first-time director get away with not having his casting choices challenged by the studio's self-sabotage police. 

Sadly, for all that, Rex might have been right. As with so many movies with 'queer' characters in that less-enlightened albeit more heterosexually-liberated era, the 'ick' factor is camped to the point of gauchery in MYRA, and so all that's left of substance is Myra's knowing but bizarre love of 40s musicals (she's horrified that the dumb acting student hunk she aims to deflower has never heard of the Andrews sisters). In her scenes as an acting teacher, Welch is superbly authoritarian and uber-confident, making them the real highlight of the film. "They really did roll out that barrel... And no one ever really rolled it back." When she socks John Huston during class, she explains that she's using the fighting style of Patricia Collinges in THE LITTLE FOXES. TARZAN AND THE AMAZONS (1945, below) is, she adds, a "masterpiece," and "The real Christ can't compare with either actor in King of Kings." She also notes the only one now to compare oneself with as far as a male role model is James Bond "who inevitably ends up with a blow-torch aimed at his crotch." All this is very, very welcome and taken, no doubt, straight from Vidal's lips to hers, all goosed up by movie footage: giggling Richard Widmark from KISS OF DEATH and Marlene in Navy drag from SEVEN SINNERS come rolling in like a welcome reprieve and apt commentary, as if the history of gender-bent Hollywood was looking down from a thousand screens as an omnipresent Greek chorus.

Tarzan, w/ Amazons

Bacchantes

Continuing the 'more-is-less but pile it up anyway' philosophy and upping the camp level past all decency are scenes involving the geriatric bacchant Mae West. Her sultry comic timing still makes even lame double entendres ("Ah, the pizza man! When do you deliver?") and ultra-subtle come-ons ("I don't care about your credits, as long as your oversexed") come off clever, especially when interspersed with gay-themed musical numbers ("Hard to Handle!") and vagina dentata Busby banana circles (from THE GANG'S ALL HERE). As a bonus diva, however, West's presence never really pays off. She provides the haughty Myra with an equal and they share some properly jovial and queenly laments about the states of their men. But then, able to find no real anchor to hold her in place, Mae drifts like Snow White, eventually fading into the horizon. 

Still, if you think she's an embarrassment, being so old and still stuck on vibrate, well fuck you! She's an intrinsic part of the film's value as a phallic rhinestone time tunnel ramming up Hollywood's golden age! She slides the middle finger of freedom right through the tight sphincter of angry Catholic censors, for whom West's whole schtick was once the direst threat facing America.

And then there's the main reason to see the film: the awesome sequence in which Myra takes a stud's anal virginity. Here, at long last, Welch's dominatrix acting style finds its ultimate expression of howling vengeance. Wearing, finally, a stars and stripes bikini and (unseen) strap-on. We may not agree with her method, but you have to admire her brazen insanity. Before she invades Rusty's virgin shore, she tells him "your manhood's already been taken by Clark Gable and Errol Flynn; I'm merely supplying the finishing touches." Those lines are intercut with footage of a bucking bronco ("who's never been rode before" a cowboy actor warns) desperately trying to escape his stall, and Clark Gable leering down from a poster, as if god approving of the whole she/bang.

If nothing else, this scene can provide Hollywood devotees with whole new ways of reading their favorite MGM stars' enigmatic grins.

But the picture's meta-Eisensteinian old star leering doesn't end there, Welch's orgasm is crosscut with (I wrote them all down): a stock footage damn breaking; Jayne Mansfield; 30s dancers waving umbrellas and jump ropes in the studio rain; Welch on a flower swing ala Marlene as a girl in SCARLET EMPRESS; a roller coaster; a mushroom cloud; rich 30s socialites laughing from their swanky balcony; Laurel and Hardy covering their eyes; a ballet dancer in a split bowing forward; Welch riding a broom and wearing a witchy hat; tinted silent footage from MACISTE IN HELL (the same footage used in Dwayne Esper's MANIAC (1931), Spencer Williams Jr.'s BLOOD OF JESUS (1941) and my own 2007 film that climaxes with a Kali-esque goddess anally assaulting a helpless hetero-bro --QUEEN OF DICKS). Throughout, Welch whoops it up with great abandon. The only other actor to match her for America-encapsulated yee-hawing is Slim Pickens ridin' the H-bomb in STRANGELOVE. 

A fella really could have a good weekend in Vegas will all this stuff. 

The cumulative effect (even if the Shirley Temple milking the cow footage was excised on her request. though we do see her sloppily eating creme puffs which is--in some ways--even worse), is a rupturing of the historical fabric of film history -- like this strap-on represents the the return of everything 40s Hollywood repressed and coded into abstraction. All the repressed queer energy, fermenting in its lavender manhole covered sub-basement fermentation well, finally blowing like a gusher right up through the cracks in the Hollywood Walkway, soiling every set of shoes in sight.

It's a great moment but its not long after that we're burdened with sulky Rex Reed again and his eyeliner-ed Richard Benjamin mystique, sneering his way nostrilly through party scenes where actors barely notice him, either because he doesn't really exist (not sure if Sarne knows either), or because he's so busy masking his self-consciousness with an air of haughty disdain that he plum forgets to notice anything around him, including that he's making people very uncomfortable. You know, that guy who spends the evening looking at your bookshelf and not talking and you're not sure why you don't like him but you wish he would leave?

And it gets worse! Once Myra has Farrah on the third base line, Farrah cops out of the lesbian tryst: "Oh, if only you were a man!" So Myra decides to switch back to Myron. Turns out it was all a dream. Aww. He's still a man after all--Farrah Fawcett is just his nurse, and Raquel is on the cover of some gossip magazine and did he have a car accident like in the book or is he just recovering from a vasectomy?  Urgh! FUCK YOU SARNE, YOU COP-OUT BASTARD.

I'm sure our flaky, second-guessing director Sarne would say he meant this cop-out as a challenge to preconceived notions of sexual hierarchy, i.e. that masturbation fantasy is somehow just as relevant as actual fornication within the fantasy of a film. In the book, apparently, Myra's sex change is never completed and after she gets in a car accident, she winds up in the hospital, and that may have been the original reason for ending the film there, but any hep person knows that when you try to make it real you have to show some balls and stick to your gun. Last minute all a dream cop-outs are a DRAG! 

There were times in MYRA where the level of madness made it hum like electricity, like the best part of Russ Meyer's (similarly problematic) only with intellectual gender-bent discourse instead of robust cleavage.

Someday, maybe, we shall have both... and we will see lesbians that wind up neither shot (VAMPYRES, BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS, BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE, WATCHMEN), nor last-minute hetero-converted (KISSING JESSICA STEIN, SWITCH, this), but living happily ever after. These films will not come from the majors but from Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Let us rejoice... quietly... We don't want the squares coming over. Again. 

To avoid the hetero cop-out end, stop watching when you see this image
and imagine they live happy ever after,