Having confessed my ignorance, I shall merely direct you to this good description of the film here:
http://vinnierattolle.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/some-of-my-best-friends-are.html
and this one here: http://trashaddict.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/some-of-my-best-friends-are.html
Some more of the history of the film, posters and various publicity materials are here:
http://www.queermusicheritage.us/jun2003a.html
1971 trailer
Because the film features Candy Darling a few of the clips have been uploaded:
Unembeddable:
http://youtu.be/f5CZJGY3kQo
starts: 1.00
ends: 5.40
Directed by Bruce Beresford
Written by Barry Humphries and Bruce Beresford
Another film adaptation of a modern day Candide. In this case it’s the transfer to film of the Private Eye comic strip written by Barry Humphries and drawn by Nicholas Garland. The strip had two satirical targets: the drunken, boorish yet simultaneously priggish Australia left behind encapsulated in the character of Australian tourist Barry McKenzie and the venal, shabby, trendy, exploitative Britain he was visiting. Aside from actual satire, the strip was Humphries’s opportunity to introduce as many slang terms for sex, drinking, and vomiting. Because of this, and because it was perceived to denigrate Australians in the eyes of the world, the strip was banned by Australian censors and the notorious Australian customs board. As it had been running since the mid-1960s there’s an argument that the strip preempts many of the achievements of the American underground comix, but since it's unknown in America it falls beneath critics’ radar.
Most of the film is a fairly direct dramatisation of events, dialogue and characters in the strip. At one point Barry visits a former girlfriend only to discover that since moving to England she has become a butch lesbian with a similarly older butch girlfriend. Lesbians fall outside my remit, but in the film you’ll notice she’s a perfectly normal seeming young lady though the girlfriend is still an escapee from Radcliffe Hall. Barry and his ex then then go to visit a pub for further conversation. In the film version, more is made of it as being gay pub, and so it is that everyone in this pub is a drag queen.
The second half of the scene in the toilet with the policeman is a direct dramatisation of the corresponding strip in “Private Eye” from November 1966, possibly one of the earliest instances of jokes about police entrapment of homosexuals in lavatories. However, his inevitable farcical transvestite turn makes more sense in the contexts of all these drag queens.
Finishes at 0.35
Candy 1968
Directed by Christian Marquand
Screenplay by Buck Henry
Film adaptation of Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s satirical pornographic 1958 novel. The book was a sexual variant of Candide, in which Candy, a naïve beautiful girl makes her way through the world unwittingly arousing and almost inadvertently having sex with all the people she encounters. The book became notorious and one further aspect of Southern’s reputation for transgressing taboos.
The film features an enormous number of comics and stars making cameos in this films including Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, John Huston, Ringo Starr, Walter Matthau as doctors, politicians, generals, gurus. It’s not a good film, but it’s spottily entertaining with some weird performances and jokes to make up for longeurs, and the ten minute credit sequence in which all the characters reappear in a sort of allegorical tableau to a rock soundtrack is loads of fun like similar endings in “Buckeroo Banzai” or “The Life Aquatic”.
At one point in the book, Candy is arrested by the police, whose car then goes careering into a drag bar. So in this dramatization you get more screaming female impersonators on screen than have possibly ever been collected until “Paris is Burning” (1990). This is mostly just hysterical men in dresses running around shrieking and shrieking and shrieking amidst the rubble. Apparently a number of these are real drag performers not just actors for the days, but I’m afraid time has mostly forgotten them.
Eventually one of the stunned cops is able to declare that this is "a nest of commie, fag draft-dodgers!” and is about to start beating up the drag queens. However, the drag queens overwhelm the one cop - a little foreshadowing of what happened at The Stonewall Inn the next year.
There’s then the moment where the other cop confusedly finds himself kissing a man in a drag, and when he realises what he’s doing, knocks down his kisser, telling him “to fight like a man”. And of course, whenever a homosexual is threatened with violence, the natural response is a sadomasochistic “Yes! Yes! Give me some more!” So assorted perversity in this little scene of about 30 seconds. Actually, it's a little more significant than that. For the longest time "Sunday Bloody Sunday" (1971) used to get trotted out in lists as the first gay kiss in mainstream cinema, but this mostly forgotten film preempts that by three years.
1968 also saw Frank Sinatra in “The Detective”, which was a lot, lot more seriously intended than this film. “The Detective” was a film rather overly in love with its pretensions to the gritty realities of police work. Its crime plot was about an investigation of a murder with sexual mutilation elements which ends up diving into the New York homosexual underworld including how the trucks on the docks were used as a scene for sex. So one to watch in a double-bill with Al Pacino’s “Cruising”.
Did straight bars of the 1960s really feature giant paintings of naked ladies? How would I know. But an appreciation of naked ladies is one of the tickets to heterosexuality.
Did gay bars of the 1960s have giant paintings of naked men? Almost certainly not, since gay bars existed by flying under the radar and not being too blatant. But hey, this is just a comic reversal.
The patrons in their tight trousers (compare to trousers of the two straight men), their effeminate stance, and their bouffant hair.
Roughly contemporaneous with this cartoon is “The Gilded Lily” and its clientele in S. Clay Wilson’s “Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters Stomp the Fags” (1967)
A cartoon that at the time can be assumed to speak for itself. The readers will know what these men are. A whole bunch of homosexuals get kicked out of a suddenly closed gay bar – cocktail sign in the window. So what do homosexual men look like as a tribe in the mid-60s? Tight trousers (“fag pants” as they were known then), colourful tops, matelot-style stripes, ascots, and sunglasses worn even indoors. Oh, and a handbag
The next gay bar in a humorous piece should be the one in the “Bar Scene” sketch by The Committee (1964), an American improv satire group, but I don’t have that album, though you can read a little more about it here:
http://ukjarry.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/44-american-satirical-cabaret-1963.html
So the next chronologically is this:
No actual homosexuals in sight but; “I’m trying to get the place known as a homosexual hang-out”?
The idea of gay men as scene-makers is a cliché. Even by the early 1960s there was the assumption that hairdressers and interior decorators are gay, and who knows how many artists and writers are “that way”. But 1964 saw the publication of Susan Sontag’s essay on “Camp”. Even if you weren’t a reader of “The Partisan Review” where it originally appeared or high-brow collections of essays, Sontag’s point was disseminated in reviews of the book and then became the buzzword in numerous newspaper and magazine columns. The new artistic mode was “camp”, but worse, Sontag also pointed out that homosexuals were its arbitrators and vanguard. Homosexuals were recognised as being in a position of explicit culture power. It is amazing how many book, theatre and art reviews in late 1964 and early 1965 push back against this, finding the flimsiest opportunity to criticise the idea of “camp” and to knock homosexuals (immature, developmentally retarded are the nicest arguments) in the process. So I think this may be what prompts this cartoon.
So here are some contemporary denizens who huddle together in the modern metropolis. Like knows like because they have overly styled, lengthy hair, expressive eyes with long lashes or eyebrows for men. Sensitive features and postures. An earring on the bartender. At least one patron looks as though he’s eying up another across the bar.
The gag in the cartoon is a reverse with the unexpected interposition of heterosexuality.
The psychiatrist is also a 1960s touch, particularly since it seems almost every, or at least every other, gay man of the time was seeing a shrink to try and deal with his sexuality.
To put this bar in some sort of context: “The New York Times” ran a lengthy feature , “Life on W. 42d St. A Study in Decay.” by Milton Bracker on 14 March, 1960. A large part of this “decay” is devoted to the homosexual presence on Times Square and 42nd Street. The reporter details encountering such homosexuals as “a Negro who wore fluffed up hair and heavy black make-up on his brows and lashes” and a "a white youth with thick blond hair and handsome features who wore makeup on his eyebrows" who "spoke effeminately and shifted his hips and legs as he spoke." Disgraceful. Worse may be a heterosexual “youth in a black jacket and tapered trousers” who listened to “‘nothing but rock’n’roll’” and considered “homosexuals … ‘nice people.’” He should know better. Amidst all the sex cinemas there’s also the Jewel Box Review – with "25 Boys and 1 girl – Astounding Deception!!!" it was a drag show. Drag will play a big part in the forthcoming depictions of gay bars in the 60s and 70s.
The play would probably have faded in the nether realm where most theatrical productions reside with just a few more sniggers given the sexual aspects and a little more outrage than usual given its pro-Irish independence theme. However it really hit the headlines due to the activities of censorious religiously motivated prude and all-around screw-face Mary Whitehouse. Never knowingly without sand in her vag, though Whitehouse knew nothing about politics (the subtleties of rape as a metaphor passed over her head with a sonic boom), she knew filth when she heard about it. If the depiction of sodomitical intercourse between men on stage wasn’t filth then nothing was. The self-appointed guardian of the nation’s morals didn’t go see the play, but did send one of her minions to attend a showing. He reported he had seen one of the actors insert his penis into another actor's rear. Despite Whitehouse’s urgings the Director of Public Prosecutions said no legal action would be taken, so Whitehouse initiated her own private prosecution against the director for having "procured an act of gross indecency” contrary to the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 – the same law used against cottaging.
Not the Nine O’Clock News, 1981
(First half is a parody of the somewhat raunchy dance troupe “Hot Gossip”, a few of whose members were fairly obviously gay. Here you can you see Rowan Atkinson, Griff Rhys-Jones and Mel Smith as “The Nancy Boys” swishing about to Blondie’s “Atomic” as some rather bored dancers more than just a little cheesed off with their lithe female colleagues tarting it about – whereas real gay dancers would probably try to outshine the females and hog the spotlight. This is closer to the cliche of male ballet dancers bored and envious of the attention given to then women).
Starts at 1.18
The play makes the perfect occasion for an “I’ll be buggered if I go out there” joke.
The trial went around with terrible consequences for the accused if found guilty. The prosecution though had only one witness, the minion who had reported to Whitehouse. His evidence was that he had seen a penis penetrate. Upon questioning it was revealed that he had purchased a cheap seat at the rear of the audience making him unreliable, so that he had not seen what had really happened on stage - the actor had in fact simply made a fist with his thumb sticking out and mimed penetration.
The presiding judge said the case could still continue on the Act's grounds of obscenity as the tendency to deprave or corrupt, but then Whitehouse’s lawyer refused to proceed and the case collapsed in an unprecedented manner. Both sides claimed victory, although since she was the party who initiated a £40,000 law case on the basis of an obscured thumb, you can’t help but feel Whitehouse looks the more foolish.
“Punch” 28 Oct 81
"What’s On:"
Gay Catholic Graduates Against Brideshead:
Was Waugh unfair to minorities? Did Flyte have a grant? What are the erogenous zones on stuffed bears?
Rally Thursday, Vatican debating chamber
Amost three years later, “Brideshead Revisited”’s gayness still enough of a common currency to provoke this little tossed off one-line squib:
“Punch” 13 June 1984
“Brideshead Guide to Homosexuality in County Houses Open to the Public”
Starts at 33.55
This is a black comedy, a forerunner of those 1970s Vincent Price theatricalised serial murder films.
A serial killer, Christopher Gill (played by Rod Steiger), strangles older women to death then draws a lipstick kiss on their foreheads. Gill is a theatre director who kills because of his mother fixation. To compound this he regularly phones the detective investigating the murders to taunt and mislead him and laud his own genius.
The main reason to watch this film is Steiger’s performance which is outré to say the least. Gill commits his murders by getting the old ladies to invite him into their homes, by putting on a series of disguises: priest, plumber, cop, hairdresser. So there are his oddball performances in these disguises. He then puts on other accents when on the phone to the detective. And then there’s his performance when Gill is just being himself. Steiger’s character/characters never quite manage to form a total. The character never settles into a groove and so is either all over the shop like a mad woman’s piss or deliberately unsettling. The tone never quite finds itself.
Half of this film follows Steiger. The other half follows the investigating detective, his developing relationship with one of the witnesses played by Lee Remmick, and his life with his ultra-stereotypically jewish mother. Oh, and there’s even a dwarf making a confession thrown in at one point.
Yes, it’s an odd film. But not flamboyant in such a way that one could describe it as a traditional camp classic. It’s shot in a slightly grubby manner more appropriate to a film about The Boston Strangler, say, with no showy cameos unless you count Steiger’s various impersonations. The only camp is in the scene where Gill pretends to be a gay hairdresser offering a free wig to his prospective murder victim.
The character has little bitchy moment as his victim argues with him about the wig, and then latter when he realise he won’t be able to murder her, to make his escape he gets a real strop on. As he storms out his prospective murder victim’s the sister calls him “You homo!” To which he waspily replies :”That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person” and slams the door behind him.
Steiger had played at least one tortured closet homosexual role before, but this is not in the same dramatic hemisphere. This is just blowing up clichés on the big screen outrageously. Who’s in on the joke maybe another matter. Though to most of the audience at the time it would have been a novelty to see them on the big screen, as this sort of thing hadn’t made its way on to the TV.
