Cinq à sept vs. the Censors: LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON, CHLOE, LOLITA, BABY DOLL, ON THE TOWN, RED DESERT, THE BIG SLEEP

Censorship has been a constant bane of our great country, but the need to outwit dogmatic Christian 'morality' has inspired great writers and directors to new heights of sneaky double entendre. One of my favorite tricks of theirs is a common enough thing in Paris but unknown to the Christian right: the afternoon tryst. The censors of the 50s-60s never could grasp the idea of love in afternoons; sex to them was limited to one position (missionary), one place (bedroom), one time frame (night after everyone had gone to sleep). Having boys and girls even in the same room at night was presumed to leave someone pregnant by morning, but in the middle of the day these girls were safe as Fort Knox.

If anything this proves censors are both unimaginative and vile. The more tightly they try to control sex the more paranoid they get, hence the tighter the grip, and the more limited in thinking. Thus their sexual repression leads to the notion that most men change into date-raping monsters as soon as bedtime looms and the censor/camera isn't there to chaperone/spy.  They know something is going on in that fade out from night to morning --that's a long time- but not knowing what drives them insane. All men become the raging id of repressed desire, all women easily willingly overpowered. This low opinion of human behavior serves to justify the chaperone-like censor's sense of self worth, that their job mattered, they were the bulwark against the tide of baser instincts.

That doesn't mean sex wasn't all over censored films, just that there had to be a 'code' for every thing: if someone unmarried of the opposite sex did sleep over in a post-code film, for example it goes like this: If there's a fade to black after a kiss between two lovers at night, the editor can never fade out to the next day or morning. The scene must always end with him going home alone, or being interrupted by the terrified maid announcing some sinister distraction, OR the director could cut away to something, like a clock tower (in CASABLANCA) and come back to the scene with the lovers still fully dressed, but now smoking -and then you might presume (if you were over 18) that they were both just very fast dressers. But you had to show her leaving (or him) before actually she goes to sleep, nonetheless. If she or he does stay over, the butler might be shocked to see a girl lounging in his master's bed in the morning, but then find his employer not in bed beside her but in a knot of sheets on the living room couch. Whew!

In the days of the small town idyll of the soap opera 50s there was plenty of post-war modern sex colliding with pre-war small town moral hypocrisy, and movies and novels lolled in the horrific toll taken when a young free spirited girl and boy tried to stifle their romantic impulses to please the shrewish old gossips next door. A kid hangs themselves to be free of all the slander in PEYTON PLACE (1957), and in A SUMMER PLACE (1959), Sandra Dee comes home from spending the night on the beach with her boyfriend to find her mother (Constance Ford) waiting with a doctor to examine her hymen. What the fuck is this, you think, Sharia law?  No, just a reminder, perhaps, that the censorship boards are terrorist-affiliated, very very misogynist and backwards, prizing virginity, which is something only a very sexually insecure, small-dick punk would want, with no idea of what's involved in getting a girl to loosen up. There, I said it.

That's what that moron Sam Neill in Jane Campion's THE PIANO (1993) also doesn't understand. He'd be much happier if he just rolled with the sensual blowback from his new wife's affair with Harvey Keitel. But Neill is so sweaty and repressed and easily led along by colonialism's backwards ideas of propriety that he thinks it's much saner to mutilate her hand instead. In short, he is a natural-born censor.

Censors even insisted husbands and wives had to sleep in separate beds, which makes no sense if you're trying to endorse marriage as desirable. No doubt sex was present, but censors suspected even husbands of turning into rapists once the lights were out, though of course the night table between the beds was considered be enough to repel them. Laymen will also bring up the rule of lovers having one foot on the floor on each side of the bed but I've never seen that. Still it's pretty damning evidence of the sexophobic Catholic censor board.

Thus it's natural that one of the most interesting ways the filmmakers sought to baffle the censors is through elapsed time (the way lovers in the 20s would fool the dozing chaperone by moving the clock back).

It took most of the later 30s (from when the code was implemented in the back half of 1934 through to the late 60s) for screenwriters to bamboozle the censors while providing what the code was all about -- enough doubt over what happened in the fade out to let innocents think nothing happened and laid adults to know something did. Two examples most film fans should be familiar with are CASABLANCA (1942) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1941). The former cuts from an embrace to an airport watchtower and back to the lovers, still dressed, smoking and looking out the window. Since it's only later that night, and the lovers are still formally dressed, they can smoke and look contented.

In FALCON, there's a fade-out with Bogart leaning down to kiss Mary Astor that moves away from them (we never see them kiss, just Bogart bending down past the window towards where she's sitting) and out the window, where a figure in a trench coat watches up at the window like a ghost wondering if a womb might be going up for rent. We move from this to the next morning but the censors couldn't stop it because a) we never see them even kissing before the fade out, and b) the assosication with danger (the gunsel) and sex is subtextually implied anyway, and c) they are very far from the bed at the fade out, and not even shown in any representational manner.

But the easiest way to baffle and flummox the censors was love in the afternoon, which is a common French practice, as I never get tired of mentioning, and which decadent continental-minded directors and screenwriters use to their advantage, making fun of the censors' lack of earthly carnal experience as they do so. Here are some worthy examples:

BABY DOLL (1956)

Elia Kazan's masterpiece takes the “did they or didn’t they” aspect of production code censorship and makes it the focus of the story, something they could never forgive him for. Here the censor / prurient viewer stand-in for whom all things must be clear and literal (hick cotton gin owner Karl Malden) goes insane trying to figure out whether the hazy dissolve in the nursery where Vacaro takes a nap in baby doll’s bed late in the afternoon signifies they had sex. 

And this was the way Hollywood dealt with the issue of “did they or didn’t they" --the narrative split. If you expect a yes or no answer and really try to find one, you will go insane. In the tree of sex, the cardinals can rest easy in one corner, and the horny bald-spotted Maldens can go nuts in the other... it must be so, or society cannot function. BABY DOLL calls attention to this split however, and ridicules those who would prefer one side over the other... if you feel the need to insist "they did it," you are a pervert, and if you insist they did not, you are a prude. As such, BABY DOLL poses an affront to the pious and phony moralizing of so-called "decent" citizens, which may account for the huge Catholic protest the film created.

After Vacaro and Baby Doll wake up from their nap, neither Archie Lee nor we in the audience know if they did or didn't have sex. Rather than confront them directly, Archie Lee hems and haws around the issue, and Baby Doll and Vacaro play up their flirtations... but is solely for Archie's benefit? At least partly, yes. What makes this scene so “dirty” is not the seductive play between Vacaro and Baby Doll, but its performative aspect. They exaggerate their seductive fire for each other in order to enflame the jealousy of Malden. Their kisses are passionate in direct relation to Malden’s proximity; the harder Malden tries to get a clear yes or no, the steamier their interaction gets.

The lesson to be learned is how to let go of control: Vacaro wins Baby Doll via a constant ebb and flow of masculine aggression and playful retreat, an ebb and flow that pushes her boundaries and then moves back a bit to let her catch her breath. He chases her but when she stops running, he stops chasing. When she chases him, he runs. Thus play is introduced into the mating ritual, letting Baby Doll assume a more pro-active role, without any forward move on her part leading immediately to a man slobbering all over her. Once he has her where he wants her (trapped on an attic beam) instead of demanding sex, Vacaro forces her to sign the statement against her husband for burning down his gin. Why this film outrages the Catholics may lie more in this area than in the idea of a man obsessed with an "underdeveloped" woman (Baker doesn't seem the least bit under-developed, merely inexperienced). There's an implicit notion in code-sanctioned romance that the sex must be dealt with quickly -- one dissolve between a kiss / fade-out and a cigarettes-in-full-dress afterwards. BABY DOLL lives in the twilight realm of that fade-out, stretching that black bar until it forces Malden into a corner.

LOLITA (1962)

A whisper, a fade, no mention of anything ever. But what did happen in that hotel room the next morning? We're still wondering... in removing anything remotely even double entendre, the film makes Debbie Reynolds movies look raunchy by comparison, yet the whole film fairly sizzles over because of our fascination, or censorial-prurient desire to look deeply into the did they/didn't they crevasse... (more here)

LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (1957)

It's kind of weird to think that Billy Wilder's LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON came out a year after BABY DOLL. It's classy enough for the 30s but naughty enough for the early 60s. (Wilder was an unrepentant fucker-with of censors). Audrey Hepburn visits millionaire Yank wooer Cooper at his killing floor hotel suite (which he keeps stocked with a band of serenading gypsy troubadours) only in the afternoons, while her detective father Maurice Chevalier is at work (Chevalier gets a lot of cases trailing errant wives to Cooper's apartment), then splits in time to deal with her dull musician geek boyfriend, cello homework, etc.). She acts all worldly and experienced, almost a burlesque of the women she reads about in her father's lengthy file on Cooper, and slowly uses his own playboy image to slowly infuriate him with jealousy ("if it's any comfort to you, Mr. Flanagan, you are the first American in my life"), gradually shifting the power seat from his worldly wiles to her playful manufactured put-on. Her elaborate imagination with conjuring alpine guides, Spanish bullfighters, and Dutch alcoholics recalls the Lady Eve train scene. Meanwhile the censor gets easily sidestepped through ingenious pans away from the lovemaking to the swoon-worthy gypsy musicians, each song keyed to a stage in the seduction. The censor can't say shit about an orchestra, but when we pan back it's clear something has happened. As long as they're still on the couch, and more or less dressed (even if the clothes are mussed and they can't find a shoe or two), and it's not yet night, all is well, as far as 1957 is concerned.

I really resonate with this film for a few reasons, and one of them perhaps hinges on my whole enamored feeling towards the French cinq a sept (5-7), a tradition whereby one visited one's mistress between work and going home for 7:30 dinner. I still long for mine, now some seven years gone. Notes Chevalier in Wilder's film, "In Paris people make love . . . well, perhaps not better . . . but certainly more often. They do it any place, any time," but the film didn't do well, and as Film Projector notes, a lot of that was maybe the age difference:

Hollywood has a long tradition of teaming older men with younger women (and also that there is psychobiological evidence to explain such mutual attraction: men tend to equate youth in women with fertility, while women tend to equate age in men with the stability and material resources necessary to maintain a family), and such a romantic pairing as Gary Cooper and Audrey Hepburn—although certainly not fashionable in today's more age-conscious world—doesn't seem entirely implausible. (more)

Damn straight, age-consciousness --one is a dreamer wooer quite getting along in years, the other Hepburn in prime gamin beauty and jubilance, innocent but visibly intrigued. May-December relationships are as stigmatized today as gay relationships used to be. But it goes deeper than how an older man is in a much better position to benefit a younger woman, sharing wisdom and gallantry galore, while all a younger man can really share is surly petulance and vitality. I also think that goes both ways, and older women should take younger men lovers as often as they please. Why not? It's good all around, and might even save this fucked up country from its current quagmire of gender and age relations. And it's very French, n'cest pas?

But rest assured, these relationships exist, behind closed doors, denied in public, deep in the closet, and safe from the censors by making love mainly in the afternoons (by evening, the old man is usually too tired anyway, at least pre-Viagra).

ON THE TOWN (1949)

The war was over but girls were still being nice to guys in the service, and a certain sexual leeway was perhaps implied, especially between the working girls of New York (or San Francisco as with Dorothy Malone and that cute cabbie in THE BIG SLEEP - 1946). Once she gets rid of her roommate, taxi driver Betty Garrett all but devours Sinatra during the afternoon while Gene Kelly chases Miss Turnstiles and fellow sailor Jules Munshin hooks up with sassy sketch artist Ann Miller. We don't see much of that hook-up but it sure is great watching Garrett devour Sinatra: "I like your face," she tells him. "It's empty, know what I mean?" At least she keeps her goals reasonable -- going for Frank. "I knew you'd come back. They all come back." And since they all meet later, 8 PM I think, up in the Empire States Building, the unchaperoned nooner between Frank and Brunhilde (as Garrett is named) goes off without a hitch. The censor dozes right on through it. It was the war after all, or had been. Girls could hook up with sailors before marriage as long as they didn't stay the night and made it to their wartime riveting job on time the next morning. (see also High Society Matrons of Frank).

THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

"...On the other hand -- we never know what happens in between being 'closed for the evening' and going out - he doesn't kiss her goodbye or anything - yet perhaps less gallant or experienced viewers will instantly assume it was a full on tryst, a 5-7 shag (vs. snog). Well, the censor is a great one for compelling lovers to not kiss and tell; the time between the glasses coming off and the paper cup toast and the "so long pal" exit are strictly their own business. At any rate, it would be pretty hard to believe even in the 60s-70s that something so cavalier as a sexual hook-up between strangers could go on during regular working hours and not leave any repercussions. You could say it's all just a male fantasy--all those young., available women in all those working wartime women (taxi driver, etc.) leading old Doghouse Rileys like Marlowe to gambol wild and free amongst them while the boys labored overseas. Further wartime references are scattered through the dialogue ("How are you fixed for red points?" Marlowe asks Bernie, meaning to corpses and culprits he has along with their guns, red points being weekly ration booklet meat allowances.)" - full review

 CHLOE IN THE AFTERNOON (1972)

Eric Rohmer is a quiet genius when dealing with sexual tension of first kisses and hook-ups, and that genius is on big display in this tale of a Parisian man who runs into an old friend-of-an-old-girlfriend and starts hanging out with her in his lunch hour, gradually leading closer and closer to cinq a sept territory while his pregnant wife waits at home. Sure it might be a mid-life crisis and sure I can't give away the ending, but it's a great example of that love in the afternoon...

In closing, sex in the afternoon is such a great loophole to the conventional mores of the life-choking censors that it's naturally Parisian in origin. Paris, where people have sex rather than obsessing about it (to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich). What a delight censors can be confounded so easily!  Here sex is displayed all over the place as the ultimate status symbol: the stakes are high, and every one is holding out for a perfection they'd only run away from (or would run away from them) if they ever actually found it. We put all this pressure on the third date sleepover to deliver a wonderful mythic poetry that we can spend the next week analyzing and/or bragging about in long phone conversations with our friends; is it any wonder we're so single and so eager to settle? Ladies and gentlemen, let our great country discover the cinq a sept, and stop expecting sex to deliver all the answers... only film can do that.

RED DESERT (1964)

It's Antonioni's big art joke --the modernist response -- writ fast to the frisson disconnect of censorship - Vitti, her husband, her maybe lover, and a few assorted wives, secretaries, managers and swinging bosses all rendezvous for lunch at a brokedown shack by the docks. A conversation about the aphrodisiac properties of fertilized bird eggs leads to one of Vitti's few outbursts of ease-in-the-skin, "I want to make love," and this big bedroom space in the shack, painted red, is gradually full of bodies all being drawn to each other, dancing and slowly acting on their lusty interlocked blase cool. Have they gathered for an orgy? Or is just one almost happening? Is it a matter of Italian censorship that Antonioni can't be specific or is this the modern art genius? Yes, of course it's both, as in all these 5-7 movies. If we demand to know what did happen in the fade-out then we are like Karl Malden in Baby Doll, and we will lose our mind! Ah... Modernité!

Anyway we have the dissolve to darkness and when we fade in it's clear some great energy has been expended, or they ran out of wine or there's just one of those momentary lulls that occur sometimes among people having a really good time and almost having an orgy, but then backing off and feeling their good mood turn on them, pissed they chickened out. We're not meant to know, and by accepting never knowing we realize that's the point and that's why Vitti is crazy because even she doesn't know yet there is no knowing. She's the 'awake' character beginning to realize that all these other people know stuff she doesn't, that they have lives between frames, scenes, before and after, which she lacks. But is there really anything to lack? Again, that's the genius - no questions - we must embrace ambiguity as a pre-requisite to waking from the dream of consensual linear time. The result of our collective slumber to our true reality is what is poisoning the world. We miss the beauty of the trees so lose them. We 'don't know what it's got til it's gone,' but even when it's gone we don't know - unless we first get enough perspective, enough distance from our beds. So wake up, sleeper! The nap is over, the mistress is sated and watching the clock. The censor will be getting home soon; time to feign dignity and dishwater dull decency, until tomorrow, same time, same brief candle. The best part of it all is, you can wait.

Angels of Death: 10 Favorites

I love chicks that are truly crazy, not the faux bad-assedness of poseurs like Winona Ryder in Heathers (who express remorse for their murders as if mom and censor are waiting just off camera) but those who are truly liberated, in a way that terrifies even the bourgeois tenured profs who presume themselves beyond knee-jerk anti-feminist patriarchal reactions. It's payback time for the Inquisition with these devilish damsels on the screen.

People come to horror movies to see their deepest, unresolved, pre-empathic infantile anger expressed and cathartically exorcised. Bela Lugosi embodied this rage for my generation, the egomaniacal genius who scorned society and its unconscious banality appeared to us through the fuzzy UHF signal like an alien ruler. We rooted for him even unto the closing credit flames. In his honor I praise the chthonic bitchez in these films, for they stomp all over 'safe' characterizations and trust the audience not to start killing everyone the moment the film's over. They use their claws.

I only wish I could mention the great female killers from certain gialli, but that would be giving away the plots and I would never....

Yoko Mimimada

HOUSE

1977

I need to see this film about a dozen more times before I'll be able to write about it, but whatever... it's paisley psychedelic strangeness with incessant, nerve-grating piano melody stopping and starting until it becomes torture. Minimada plays demonic doppelganger auntie to a gaggle of schoolgirls who are all devoured by her deadly... house. She's old and in a wheelchair but as the girls are consumed she becomes younger and more empowered until in a final showdown she's a picture perfect soap commercial model. This film may be too out there even for an 'enhanced' audience, but is the kind of thing you can freak out people of all ages with.

If you need to come down afterwards, try AUDITION!

Sue Lyon

MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD 

1973

Three things I'm crazy for: nurses, Sue Lyon, and mercy killing; all three are wrapped up in this piece where Lyon is a homicidal nurse who kills patients so they don't have to spend their lives crippled, old, or boring. Meanwhile a bunch of douchebags with tacky helmets, whips, and dune buggys pull some of the old surprise party ultra-violence on random families who are usually watching Clockwork Orange-related programming. You get the impression this Spanish director Eloy de la Iglesia really loves his Kubrick (Sue was, of course, Stanley's LOLITA). She's aged well and if doing cheap Italian horror movies to pay the bills was a common thing for American actresses of the era, she's younger than most all of them, and still hot, especially in white, and red.

The incredible Kimberly Lindbergs champions the film over at TCM's Movie Morlocks thus:

...by making Sue Lyon his muse, Eloy de la Iglesia hijacks Kubrick’s LOLITA and leaves the audience questioning their voyeuristic relationship with the cinema and its effect on our own sexual impulses. Eloy de la Iglesia‘s Lolita isn’t a fictional ideal of feminine beauty or a hapless victim of the male ego and Sue Lyon seems to get a kick out of exploiting her character. By the end of MURDER IN A BLUE WORLD it becomes apparent that Stanley Kubrick’s films have been thoroughly deconstructed and put back together in such an unusual way that Sue Lyon is able to completely redefine her celebrated ’60s role.

Priscilla Lawson

FLASH GORDON

1936

People remember the monsters and Flash's wrestling tights from the brilliant original 1936 serial but not everyone remembers that at the core of all the derring-do was a hot love quadrangle: Ming's kinky daughter, Princess Aura, lusts uninhibitedly after the earth man, who stays true to Dale (Jean Rogers), the long-suffering earth woman who is desired by Ming (and Prince Baron longs for Aura). Dale is often thrown into very revealing gowns and pawed by hawk men and the a crab-clawed dragon monster while Aura arches her wicked eyebrows and pulls strings behind her father's throne like the Fah Lo Suee of Mongo. It was Princess Aura I had the hots for as a kid and Lawson is pretty solid and awfully kinky. I guess it was okay as far as the code was concerned to lust uninhibitedly in a 1930s serial if you never get your man.  If you can see the whole serial, see it. If you can't, see the edited together feature SPACE SOLDIERS. Either way, keep your eye on Priscilla at all times.

Allison Hayes

ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU 

1958

The best parts of this film are not even the hilarious underwater fights (slow motion with a bubble machine and blurry filter to hide the fact they're all shot on dry land under normal gravitational circumstance) but the scenes with Allison Hayes as the bitchy trophy wife of the rich fat cat big game gold hunt gambler Carl Denham x Capt. Kidd whatever come to these voodoo islands to dive for gold. In case you forgot, Hayes is the 50 FOOT WOMAN and a honey for the ages, always looking like she just slithered off the cover of a 1930s pulp magazine. And she turns into a zombie, in this film, and the idiot non-zombie people just won't even... well, let me turn you over to Day of the Woman's Britney-Jade Colangelo, who notes that Hayes, sports quite possibly the GREATEST bra that man has ever known. The hottest moment is when Hayes talks her fatcat boyfriend into insisting the handsome skipper (Gregg Palmer) kiss her! Right in front of him! Fatcat even has to insist!! G'head on Miss Allison! When she gets all zombiefied the film reaches it's big golden stretch (the lighting is almost Lewton-eque as she moves through the dark with her knife, above) but there's never a dull momnt along the way; see it back to back with Ed Wood's NIGHT OF THE GHOULS for yet another army of middle-aged-elderly extras marching through tight spaces as zombie avengers, but no one can compare with Hayes. 

Beatrice Dalle

TROUBLE EVERY DAY
2001

"TROUBLE fulfills the promise of CAT PEOPLE, which told of a race of humans who would turn into black leopards after making love and could turn human again only after taking a life. However in Paul Schrader's 1982 version these killings were kind of tepid, with the panther striking while the victim is lolling around in a post-coitus haze. None of that waiting around for Denis! The way Dalle continues to obliviously whisper and coo in her now dead lovers' ears for example, links to her a real cat, toying with her prey long after its dead. Such scenes are few and far between (a similar one was apparently edited from later cuts of LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT), they make producers uncomfortable because they threaten the safety of their model of the cinemagoer as one already dead and presumed therefore impervious to attack, as if the image and the eye are tectonic plates and the idea of cinema is to promise contact yet prevent any actual buckling. Dalle's sexuality buckles it and triggers a simulacratic melt-down; the covetous eye is torn out in a fit of enjoyment that transcends all textual boundaries. "(cont. reading here)

 Mariclare Costello

LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH

1971

It's tough being a paranoid schizophrenic when everyone really is out to get you. This is what Jessica learns when she and her husband and some meathead move to an island off New England to get away from the big Apple's 70s crime. They find a squatter named Emily (Costello) living in their big manse, and are about to kick her out, but she's kind of cute and Meathead takes a shine to her. Jessica is just pumped that she didn't hallucinate Emily -- she really is there! And she plays the lute. And her picture is in an old frame in the attic dated in the 1800s. Uh oh... There's a really terrifying scene where Emily makes a pass at Jessica, and then kind of --- well, it's freaky, quiet, fucked up beyond rational thought, and awesome.

All the Ladies on the Isle

THE WICKER MAN 

2007

"Many critics label LaBute a misogynist but his remake of WICKER MAN allows him to portray plenty of very powerful, frightening, intelligent women going up against a coarse, unconscious, ineffectual male cop and that's the opposite of what a misogynist would do. A truly liberated, sexually aggressive, snarling female is one of the most terrifying creatures ever conceived of by - and I hesitate to say God because God is suddenly not even a "He" when they're around, and everything gets dark and scary and one's balls shrink and release hormones of queasy dread that hit us like an extra dose of gravity. And without the people of Summers' Isle kowtowing to his manly whims, Nic Cage's "A Child is Missing, damn you!" righteousness is revealed as the macho bullying it's always has been.  Cage here is like the sister's boorish boyfriend in REPULSION or the sleazy neighbor in CARNIVAL OF SOULS, only here he's outnumbered and roaring like an old pervert crushed to death under the headlights of a Russ Meyer supervixen. (Where the Wild Wicker Lieutenants Are, 1/7/10)

 Ruth Gordon

ROSEMARY'S BABY

1968

What Polanski dredges out of Ruth Gordon’s clown-cake make-upped old lady smile is an evil against which there is no rational defense if you've been socially conditioned --as a woman in the 20th century--to be nice and decent to friendly elderly neighbors. Since Minnie Castavet is old and perky and adorable there is no defense against her prying, manipulating, and ensnaring because according to the social doctrine old ladies must be obeyed while women Rosemary's age are treated like children too incompetent to know what's best for their own wombs.

Marki Bey

SUGAR HILL

1974

"It's great to be rooting for a murderous voodoo priestess and not have to worry she's going to develop a conscience or let love weaken her resolve for deadly reprisal-making via a series of comic book-style death traps involving zombie massages ("Treat me easy, easy,"), a severed chicken foot that hops around on a string (a peak AIP moment), voodoo dolls ("When the doll is enflamed you will pick up the knife and use it on yourself!"), leg cramps, and hungry pigs ("Hope they like white trash!"). When the 'good' guys are the zombies, the bad guys don't have a chance in hell... and I'm in psychotronic heaven. (9/9/10)

 Lesley Tapin

LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL

1973

Sweet Lila Lee (Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith) escapes her creepy preacher foster parent and catches a midnight bus to Spookville in this low budget and all the more eerie for it thriller. If you ever used to catch those bizarre, faded color, cheap puppet and bad dubbing-infused German and Swedish 'kid's film' K. Gordon Murray imported on TV or in the local matinees in the 60s-70s then the threadbare theatricality of LEMORA will be like remembering a childhood nightmare. There's some vague lesbian resonance between the evil Lemora and Rainbeux as Lemora introduces her to a lot of weird perverse blood-drinking style shit, and I cannot reveal the awesome ending!

 For another great women in horror top ten, check out this from last February's Women in Horror Month.

Lyon in Winters: LOLITA and Immortal Porpoises

Where I come from, home for the holidays means dying lawns, cloudy suburban skies, foil-covered crock pots brought unwillingly from the car to the front door; chattering hellos from perfumed relatives; ceilings slick with condensation from ever-baking turkeys and boiling rutabagas; football and the voice of Sam Elliott extolling guts, glory, Ram, from the living room; a barrage of women nattering from the kitchen. It's a time to go to school reunions and movies just to get out of the house. Hometowns leave their mark, like a lash of sameness, slash of lameness you'll never paint over... but is it that bad? What if you come from a family rife with divorce, guilt, skeletons, incest? Pedophile freaks subverting the family dynamic? Lolita cousins coming onto you while aunts and uncles look at you harshly but you're too drunk to resist? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

I had a fine podcast discussion with Jamey DuVall at Movie Geeks United for The Kubrick Series' -- and so I've been thinking of LOLITA all day. Let me share it with you as we close the holiday down:

Laws dealing with minors and corruption are tricky things. A kid (under 18) who rapes his cousin can get off with just a flick on the wrist, but a guy who sends one of his prostitutes home for Xmas on a train can go to jail, just for buying her a ticket that takes her across state lines. This all goes back to 1910 and a law meant to catch white slavers that was amended as the Mann Act in 1948 largely due to the newspaper headline case of Frank LaSalle, a an old pervert dragging a naive shoplifting minor named Florence Sally Horner, off on a two-year cross-country spree. The constant travel making it hard to discern the unkosher relationship kept in place by blackmail (he saw her steal a notebook from a five and dime and played copper). This was a vile case, a shot heard by journalists around the world, and the headlines have never been the same, for better and for worse. They made laws designed specifically to catch evil men like Frank (and Humbert). Good for them. I'm not kicking about it. I'm super skeeved by this topic. On the other hand, my own super skeeve response fascinates me. I know I'm not alone in it, I know its origin in the Freudian Totem and Taboo root cellar of the unconscious, but what is it, really?

Kubrick's film LOLITA, as well as Nabokov's original book, seems to take the Horner outrage and subsequent law as a challenge to depict the corruption of a minor in a non-hysterical manner, with trans state-line travel galore. I've seen the film and read the book numerous times, but never thought of that strange but valuable (if abusable) law... suddenly, this past viewing, it was all I thought about.

My dad has a terribly long and ornate joke dealing with this law, involving transporting immortal porpoises over staid lions, or something --which I heard him tell other adults at drunken dinners all through my childhood--and I never understood why it was even funny or what the hell they were talking abou. The point is, it's a law designed specifically to counteract the moves of people like Humbert, himself an evil user of pretend morality. Humbert's flabbergasted relationship with Quilty is an ultra-cool mirror of the guilt-wracked hypocrite censors challenging lysergic intellectual Kubrick to both adhere to and defy the "How could they ever make a movie of Lolita?" marketing catchphrase.

Over the passing decades this film's been many things to me, but this last viewing it seemed to be about art vs. censorship and the way the promoters of 'childhood wonderment' and the Peter Pan 'if you can dream' aesthetic--the Norman Rockwell fishing boy logo of Dreamworks and the mouth agape wonderment of E.T.-- are the both the exploiters of children and culprits who bring us the hyper-awareness of the dangers of pedophilia. The two are entwined, a double exposure of exposing, like a cobra with the head of a tail-eating mongoose. The more you pine for and prize a 'perfect family' the more pressure-cooker force you put on those latent incestuous, pedophile dark desires. Pedophilia is the ultimate evil, after all, the one crime even the other prisoners in jail will kill you for (in jail); it goes deeper than Oedipus, down into the murky swamp behind the Bates Motel, and it is embedded in the fabric of our modern trend towards the deification of children and their 'innocence.' Is it any accident that the two main architects of this hypocritical saintly children-izing in the early 1980s were Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg?

The difference in the pre-ET 70s was that no one wanted the Norman Rockwell 50s 'childhood wonderment' thing anymore, so there was less to repress, and what you don't repress you don't have to 'act' out in sexual transgression. The pedophiles and flashers were still around in the 70s--the rate of crime in this area has not risen--but parents' intense fear for their children's safety wasn't as ubiquitous. The Don Draper cultural rubric didn't include constant monitoring of playdates. The kids were left to roam the house, yard, or neighborhood while parents smoked, drank, swapped, played bridge, and carried on. We kids knew not to get into cars with strangers or take their candy, and above all we knew when to stay out of our parents' way and when was the right time to creep downstairs and steal from the cabdt dishes. We knew when the bridge games would devolve to the point that our presence would be greeted with welcome instead of stern reprimand; we knew the tartness of our parents' whiskey sours and Tom Collins' kisses; we learned to mix drinks with the powdered packets of whiskey sour mix and play bartender. Adulthood was a virile open-shirted marvel in the 70s... there was no clear line to cross. Sometimes, it just reached out and grabbed you. You felt safe around it, yet knew that it was, itself, unsafe. You know, like life?

The sad thing now for an old rager like me watching LOLITA is to see the inexorable passage from mom to daughter to daughter-mom in Sue Lyon, as it so preternaturally predicts the arc of America's cultural mores, from repressive 50s-early 60s, (Shelly Winters) to liberated late 1960s-70s (Sue Lyon) to repressive 80s (Lyon-in-Winters). Elaborating the transformation is Sellers as the liberal trickster elite and James Mason as the outflanked conservative imposter. Just as the most vocally anti-gay politician is inevitably found drunk in a gay nightclub, so does Humbert Humbert hide, like a scoundrel at his last refuge, behind the outrage of conservative wagon-circling.

The message was clear and simple to a generation for whom Freud was like Oprah: the more concerned you are over your child's well being the more suspect you are. I was more or less Lolita's age when I first saw LOLITA, and my perspective and identification with it has changed a bit now that I'm Humbert's age, or rather Quilty's. It's the Quilty character who dominates now, more, for me. The vantage point from which art--through its transparency and deliberate digging for dirty truth--looks down upon dull, corporeal expression of desire. To paint a nymphet, like Degas with his ballerinas; to film a nymphet like Rollin with his vampire women; to write of one, like Nabokov, is to effectively sublimate the desire to corrupt them in the real. The artist has 'already' tasted such forbidden fruit in this sense and found he much prefers using the desire and rapture as a inspiration, a springboard into art. rather than actual tawdry seduction --a dead end. Artists understand that sexual gratification means an end to the dance, a sudden return to shame and self-consciousness, a hasty, guilty retreat through the parking lot. Instead of making art, you made a 'situation', a guilt trip, a baby, or a messy crime scene.  Compared to the divine rapture of creation, which is eternal, it's just a negative chalk mark on your karmic blackboard. In other words, there's those who are inspired by the muses to create and those who just want to mount the muses in their trophy room. The last ones are the evil who may or may not know what they do oh lord.

Lolita in this instance if of course the muse, dragged down too soon into the tedious abyss of mortality (i.e. getting knocked up, moving to Alaska, where maybe she'll grow up to be Sarah Palin!), and Humbert the bourgeois authority that proclaims things art or pornography according to his own licentiousness (he makes things -- Lolita herself -- forbidden to the masses [not letting her in the play] so he may enjoy en toto under the pretense of protecting her morals) and Sellers is the artist, the Bugs Bunny who actually controls the stuff of 'real' art, for he knows what's really going on... and that is the primordial jazz of constant persona dissolution.

The moral to all this? Family ain't perfect, but you can trust its imperfection a lot better than you can trust the TV that tells you a true family is like the one they show. TV gets its messages from the Humbert elite and they don't have your best interests at heart, and never did. In the 1980s, before SSRIs were popular, some of us had to successfully kill ourselves just to convince our parents we needed therapy. In the 1990s it's reversed, but the same principle of fear and gray flannel blending applies. Therapy was once taboo, as in 'people would talk' - they'd think you were bad parents if your kid had to go to a therapist. Now that once 'moral' attitude that therapy is taboo is itself taboo. We've got to get the Lyons back out of the Winters and lift the immortal porpoises across staid lions if we're ever to wise up to the fact that our desire is inherently unfulfillable. Only then we can wise up to the double-edged sword of desire, and just hang it on the wall rather than wield it-- for we only ever cut our soul to ribbons. The only exorcism of desire that truly fulfills and heals that soul is art. Humbert can shoot up the Quilty art museum all he wants (in the beginning), but he's already lost the war... he's already given the surest sign he's a dirty old man: he's a prude.

A Voluptuous Crucifixion: My Long Day's Journey into NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)

There's movies about drunks made by sober folks for sober folks (i.e. Days of Wine and Roses) and then there's movies about drunks made by drunks for drunks, such as NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. It's directed by John "drunk in Mexico" Huston, written by Tennessee "alcoholic beachboy junky" Williams, and stars Richard "King Drunkus" Burton. Whether snoring through high-steppin' crap like EXORCIST 2: THE HERETIC or THE MEDUSA TOUCH, chewing scenery indiscriminately between woozy waves of hungover nausea in DR. FAUSTUS and BOOM! or--in very rare moments of clarity--brilliantly acting, Burton was always one drink ahead of his slur, a surfer sliding and grinning wild-eyed and mirthlessly down the tube as lightweights collapse in his wake. If he didn't always land gracefully, we could blame the floor or the script, not the man, usually.

But he had his weaknesses. He had appetites. And he fed his appetites. And when a great writer knew him and too knew appetites, of the sorts condemned by moral matrons blind to their own butch yearnings, then a mighty force was in the works. Only a great shaper of drunken, mighty forces like these could harness such a booming noise into a manly tune, only a towering friend to the drunken titan, like John Huston could craft from this crazy madness something truly mythic and even transcendent in scope. The result of this great meeting of three minds, NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, has been called indulgent male narcissist male gazing by bitch-ass punks and people who never knew the awful terror of depression, loneliness and fear that coalesce when a day of youthful waggery, public adoration, groupies, endless free drinks, and velvet ropes parting before you like an admiring red-faced sea suddenly gives way to hostile, indifferent nights, alone - shivering, unemployed, fired, bested devastation - paying full price for even a plain diet coke as you clutch your sweat-stained AA pamphlets like the last rope out of the jaws of the long swim crashing surf Medusa. 

I don't like to regale you with tales of my own grandiose drunkenness (hah!) when writing about my favorite drunkard films, except in ways that illuminate the impossibility of being objective about a film when it hits close to home. So let me tell you a story that mirrors Rev. Shannon's own, a story that takes me back twenty years - to good old summer 1990.

I'd graduated college in Syracuse in '89, where I'd been played bass in a very popular (on the college scene) acid rock cover band, I quit them on good terms thinking my stardom would illuminate wherever I next alighted. I moved to Seattle with my hot girlfriend; I did the Noel in a Hendrix Experience cover band until the Hendrix guy got arrested and I wouldn't co-sign his bond and put up my car as collateral, whatever. No one came to see us anyway, except our progressively less-impressed girlfriends. Being just 22, bloated and wild-eyed with progressing alcoholism, and naive as all hell, I was genuinely surprised how hard it was translating my Syracuse local rock god glory to a town that, as anyone who's tried to move there knows, is very insular, and depressing. I became a hopeless drunk with few friends (all from California). I hung out at the Blue Moon tavern a lot, trying to score weed while various people tried to pick up my hot girlfriend and I let them (actually, as anyone in that situation knows, there's not much you can really do about it without coming off swinish) on the off chance they had weed. At home I read Hate and Eightball comics and listened to records of old blues and/or old radio shows while guzzling whiskey highballs and eating peanut butter on crackers; I watched endless WC Fields and Jack Hill movies (fell in love with Spider Baby for the first time), and drank more and more while the endless rains fell on our U-district one bedroom apartment's flat-top roof. A great way to sink into a cold depression, and loving every sick minute of it, at least in hindsight.

My too-hot girlfriend became disenchanted. She had too many good offers from affluent non-screwed up hippie bros. We broke up while shrooming at the aquarium, the sadness of a tank of black fish polluted her viaducts with melancholy. I left her there in our apartment and hit the road for home, shrooming all the way across the country via route 90. I hit Syracuse along the way, right in time for the hardcore psychedelic revels that mark the end of the semester every spring (or did), especially on Earth Day, at which used to be held an annual block party on the huge strip of lawn between the roads on fraternity row. Crashing with myriad yet-to-graduate friends and bandmates, I was out of the band but still invited onstage to jam and do funnels. I may have been nothing but a cut-rate Noel Redding imitator in Seattle, but in Syracuse I was still a lizard king-ish icon. Free at last, girls literally standing in line to welcome me back after the show as I sat there on my bass amp throne, each forcing each other out of the way, clamoring for my ear; my head full of cocky entitlement and psilocybin (a great combination), it was the happiest two weeks of my life. Unfortunately, looking back, I overdid it. I became a notorious slut, figuring out the best plan to deal with two housemates on Victoria Pl. both hitting on me was to sleep with them on successive nights, thus earning both their lifelong ire. They weren't even my only lovers during that two week stretch. I also got so high and drunk I actually accelerated out of my depression for the first time since 1987.

But May ended, the last of the straggling students left, and finally, the last person I knew still dawdling had left for home. I had nowhere else to crash, so--. still glowing from two weeks of validation, sex, drugs, rock and roll--I finally drove home--fanfare trumpets in my Lou Reed and Stones-soaked ears--to New Jersey and the Kuersten family tract. I was three grand in debt and a week late. I walked in expecting to just say hey and make a drink. 

My mom was there, furious, waiting. 

She started right in lecturing and a man had been waiting there, in the kitchen, to give me a urine test for life insurance. She hadn't even told me. This being the time of "Just say no," when you could go to jail for decades just having a joint in your car, I knew what would happen if I complied. So I went from living the "lush life" as king of the world to making hurried, vague excuses why I couldn't give a urine sample to my mom. Enduring her scathing silences and near-tears looks, the beige walls and the hostile yet disinterested depressive silence of that empty-but-for-disappointed-parent's house hit me like a tidal wave. I had no friends in town, nowhere to go, no one even to call.

That night I lay in my crappy little twin bed in my old room, as miserable as I'd ever been. I finally missed my hot Seattle girlfriend; it ached. I missed the girls I'd rebounded with in Syracuse - though by then they were all mad at me as they'd found out about each other. I was reaping the shit I'd been sowing for six years, all at once. My pillow wet with tears, I was too young (23) to understand the anguish of validation withdrawal, going from a life of constant drunk, stoned, tripping, collective love, to one of silently hostile maternal indifference and crushing solitude. I felt the full weight or all the great shit I'd thrown away in the name of what I called at the time "the sacrifice of love for love's sake," of walking away from the band and the girl while the memories were still sublime - not riding it into the ground. That sense of sacrifice made it all so sweet at the time. But now.... there was only  pain.

Men weren't allowed to cry back then. We were supposed to man up, tie our ties and take temp agency typing tests every day until we died or got a real job. Man, that Seattle girl was so hot, bro. Shit. Now that I wasn't rebounding right and left, I really missed her. The things I disliked about her faded into trifles while her beauty glowed every more painfully from the 3,000 mile vantage point  and I was yet too young to understand why that was. Now I'd be unable to smoke pot for at least a week (when the urine taker returned), needing to wash my system out with daily jugs of water and refraining from all "dry goods" in a state of uneasy paranoia. There was no recourse, no outlet for my longing.

I was so sad that night, I couldn't sleep. I'd never been too sad to sleep before. I never had a pillow soaked with literal hot tears before. Never. It was hell and it went on forever, hour after hour as I lay there until I could finally hear the snores of both my parents in the next room.... like an 'all clear' alarm.

I crept downstairs to see if I could perhaps find solace in TV and the parental liquor cabinet.

My ginger touch in removing dad's booze ever-so-quietly from the shelf was still in effect. I could negotiate the creaky stairs in pitch blackness without making so much as a creak. I could make myself a large "heroic" tumbler of rum with a dash of pineapple juice without rattling a single ice cube. Thus armed, I began the torturous cycle through cable channels that was two AM TV in the pre-internet early 1990s, and all so quietly no creature would stir around me.

Suddenly out of the fog of paid programming whom should appear? Richard Burton, in color on TNT (Ted Turner was colorizing everything it could get its hands on), fending off Sue Lyon's irresistible advances down in Mexico and basically giving voice to all my miserable woe right there on the spot and the rum hit me like a warm hug right as I saw Burton's magnificent drunk face and recognized the girl as the same hottie from "Lolita."

I was going to be all right... the warm flush of rum hit me as I realized the whole movie was about what I was going through, the kind of night that's tough to get through, but saved by frank and honest discussions of, for some reason, Hannah Jelke's bizarre sexual experience in a gondola. Deborah Kerr's performance is, I realized only later now that I'm older (and many years sober, thanks to AA and the grace of etc.), the other major source of power in this movie, as her own descriptions of getting through long nights ("any light looks good after being so long in a dark tunnel that you thought was never ending") rattling any emotionally vulnerable soul to tears of catharsis.

In short, Night of the Iguana "makes it easier to get through nights that are hard for us to get through," Miss Hannah Jelkes says of her poppy seed tea. Watching it that night, after my hours of tear-stained despair, I realized a part of me was enjoying being at the end of my rope "on a green carpet hilltop instead of Golgotha, the Place of the Skulls," i..e. my parent's tract home in Bridgewater, NJ, bathed in the forgiving glow of rum and orange juice. "Isn't that a comfortable, almost voluptuous crucifixion, Mr. Shannon?"

I rushed to tape it, missed about the first 45 minutes, realized it was playing again the following night so I could tape the whole thing. Thank you, God! Thank you, rum! There was still some left! And Richard Burton, his thick black eyeliner-lined eyes wild with hungover desperation so palpable I knew I was not alone in ways I wouldn't know until AA ten years later. Thank you, John Huston! Thank you, you old savior and lonesome Tennessee Williams! They all 'got it'  And of course, thank you, Sue Lyon and all the other irresistible, cool, unique or awful women that Burton deals with in the film: thank you, tangle of closeted lesbian cock-blockers, nymphs, sexually active widows and middle-aged virgin quick-sketch artists with your tins of opium poppy seed tea.

I'd avoided the film prior to this moment because of childhood resentments against the misleading use of "Iguana" in the title. What monster-loving child expecting giant iguana attacks wants to see an "alcoholic priest dealing with various women in Mexico" (as per Lennie). Other people don't like this film for other reasons than its lack of rampaging giant iguanas. They see Reverend Lawrence T. Shannon as too passive, letting himself by fought over, pursued and pushed this way and that by various ladies, including Lolita's butch guardian, Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall). To these critics he's little more than a rag doll, flopping in one pair of jaws after another, barely able to choose or fight back, unwilling to sober up and escape. They said he was pathetic with self-pity, trying to swim out to his death the minute he doesn't get his own way. They were right, but can I suggest that if you hate him because of that, well, maybe you wish some girls would fight over you while you laid back in a similar rag doll fashion?

Take it from me, and Burton, Huston and Williams - you're better off wishing for it than getting it, because as Liz Phair would sing a few years later, if you do get it "and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." And worse, as hollow a pleasure as it is, you get addicted to it pretty fast, and then, the minute it stops, the agony of not having it kicks in, like opiate withdrawal (which if you don't like this movie, it's clear you never experienced). You see the results of this 'admiration withdrawal' all the time in Hollywood, the aging starlets turning themselves into duck-like gargoyles to vainly try and get their 'fix' back. In short, it's the male version of Charlene's 1982 hit "I've Never Been to Me" - no faint praise.

But before you find the solace of 12-Step Groups (or death) you--in desperation--grab at any straw with all the desperation of a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. When a ride shows up you nearly always say yes, wherever it's going. And that's never good because they want you for reasons not your own. The only way out of one dysfunctional lover's claws is when some other chick bothers to scoop you up and steal you away for another. Whatever the new temptation is, you take it. The alternative is an ever-tightening noose of co-dependence as your last temptation slowly ages into a death trap, or what AA calls "taking a hostage" or worse, dying alone - over and over, through every minute of every night. Eventually all the girls you messed around with behind each other's back are going to get together and compare notes. Girls might get branded slutty in high school but they're always absolved (it's the men's fault), but men get branded later by secret female cabals and it's forever. They never look at you the same way again.

You know the score, dear reader, everyone has had their May 1990, that shining moment when more than one person is fighting to take you home to their place and you just soak it all up and let them fight it out, and then, in the end, you can only go home with one of them. You can't decide which to pick, and anyway, the party is in full swing, so you stay, drink more, and then around dawn, you realize you are alone, your options are expired; the person you've been talking to for the last hour is long since asleep. You laugh at your own absurdity but even that doesn't help allay the sense of isolation and anguish. You wake up the next evening and it's already dark and its sadder than if nothing ever happened because something did... and you blew it. And hearing dear Hannah sat "Drink was never your problem, Mr. Shannon" is quite a comfort, as is the withered old poet lost in a grapple with his verse which will only ever be heard by whomever happens to be around when it's finished, but he doesn't care. As long as it's good. Now in the age of the internet we can all imagine all our work read and treasured by anonymous strangers, as opposed to existing only in a few Kinko copies, read only at open mikes by yourself, literary journal editorial offices by rejection slip-mailing interns, or no one, and all chance for notice dying as soon as your parents moved and threw all your old boxes away. Where could you find the strength to be a writer in that hellish environment of complete isolation and Father Mackenzie writing his sermons that no one will hear / with no betrayal of despair?

You could be one day as lucky as the old gentlemen - it doesn't matter who hears it, as long as it's finished, and as long as it's good. Since in the end we're just looking for a reason to keep writing, some assurance we're not speaking only to ourselves (not even noticed enough to be forgotten), or that it doesn't matter even if we are, there's a goal now. Get so good that when someone does read your work in the future, it cracks their mind apart. Like yours is right now! Bro! 

"endurance is something blue devils respect"

There are critics who also dismiss Iguana as being talky and grandiose, but you have to understand the mindset: if you're a talky, grandiose drunk grappling with the realization that you've already had your glory days, that you're like Sebastian Venable if he was smart enough to take a cab out of that godforsaken beachside bar in Cabeza de Lobo and so survivied, aging to become the oldest 'working' poet, still galavanting around with a female 'procurer'; and if you keep photos of ex-girlfriends in secret drawers, to pore over longingly in between your serial monogamous string of relationships, and if you reread your illegible notebooks of slurred poetry and tear-stained letters from the only girls you ever loved, all while vainly drinking your way out of a pre-internet suburbia NJ hell, then Night of the Iguana is your movie.

Few things are more boring than a sane artist. And of course, academia and the bourgeois are flooded with them. Not to rationalize, but in my opinion if you're an 'artist' and not down there in the sludgy flooded basement of your inner mansion, digging for monsters and jellyfish and risking being dragged under by monsters from the Id, then where are ya? In the living room having tea? A spot o' tea, guvna? Then you're not an artist - you're a 'craftsman' and/or a tenure track hack.

Just try to lead one of these sane artists down the stairs and see how they fight to get back up, screaming in litigious terror.

Then there are the ones with completely clean basements, they have nothing left to dig for and so their writing moves from "fiction" or "non-fiction" into "spirituality" or "Self-help."

All of which is preface to saying Night of the Iguana comes from a messy basement, a star, director and writer all with messy basements that they are deep down in the muck of, pulling up all sorts of deep archetypal mythic relics, as ancient as Cronus' broken rusty chains. It's there in the shy, ashamed way Shannon can't even drink in front of the ladies, he has to take a bottle of the cart and sheepishly slink off to his room like Popeye ashamed to let Olive see how shaky he is with the spinach can opener. I've also endured the hissing vibes in the eyes of women my own age as I walk down the street with hot babes half theirs... I've been victim of rumors, and shakes, and blue devils. I've been saved, as well, by beautiful angels who fed me when my hands shook to much to lift a fork. Hannah Jelkes calls these moments examples of "broken barriers between people." It's when you're so vulnerable and sensitive you see the beauty and kindness of those women who stick around and comfort you as truly angelic --glowing and absolving. You have no wall to hide behind and they are drawn to that nakedness of soul like a holy flame. "What is important," notes Hannah, "is that one is never alone." Yeah, booze, man, and Central, NJ, and being a barely published young writer in the age before internet, with intense social anxiety.  She gets it.

"Did someone call for a recitation?"

Yet, in getting it, she can undo it. Her love for a humble man turns him cocky, and then needy when she's not into him anymore (due to his cockiness) - thus hard-won self-knowledge seems to be swallowed up by women, who leave the man having to start all over again shedding his post-cocky neediness. Similarly, recognition and fame makes mundane formalist status quo keepers out of once visionary artists. Like a woman's love for a humble man, the public's love for writers and artists turns them cocky, then needy when their cockiness (as seen in the infamous 'sophomore effort' curse) shifts to neediness  Rather than prizing process all else, famous artists fall prey to to the addictive (naturally this process applies to all addictions) craving of attention. While self-aggrandizing is a necessary thing for some artists to overcome blocks, eventually old Ego chokes all the pipes and the bullshit starts to rise, coprophiliac sycophants may gather like hyenas in some mad night club nature show; the first line you cross is free but the costs rise until suddenly the limelight isn't over your head anymore, it's below your feet and all you're left with is a stamp on the back of your hand, now slowly washing away in the early morning rain like Roy Batty's tears. When you wake, mom wants a urine sample, and there's Bim maybe, letting your mom know a bed has opened up in the Bellevue alcoholic's ward.

A summary of Iguana's own plot is a great example of the has-beenophobic male as well: right at the beginning Lawrence T. Shannon is derided by his pinch-faced congregation,  for "praying" with one of his more attractive young (female) parishioners. We never see this girl but when we next find Shannon, he's acting as a Mexican tour guide, showing old church ladies around, trying to stay awake or semi-sober as best he can in the heat. Complicating matters is Charlotte (Sue Lyon) a wanton nymph under the care of Ms. Fellowes, a lady so misandric she could go toe-to-toe with Mercedes McCambridge in Johnny Guitar.

"oh, courage..."

Charlotte is madly in love with Shannon, promising him a job at her father's church and completely deluded and swept away in a girlish infatuation tide generated by boredom on the one hand, and the girlish sense of safety created by his being a 'born and bred' clergyman on the other. For his part, Shannon's conscience is so strict about messing around with an underage girl that he has no choice but to drink said conscience clean into oblivion. The line is sanity, honey, and he crosses it. Fellowes catches them one too many times in a clinch and threatens to have him fired from Blake's Tours. Shannon strands the tour bus near his old drinking grounds, tries to keep Fellowes' call to Corpus Christi, TX, from happening, way off in a suite of bungalows up in the hills above the beach, run by yet another female (played lustily by Ava Gardner) with an eye for defrocked Welsh priests. Brother, the heat is on! Literally as the hill is super steep and the sun hot enough to fry the minds and shaky lower intestines of some of the older ladies in the congregation.

Shit, man... and to see it all in color the first time was really nice. The TNT folks did a fine job. You could practically smell the coco de oro in the air (especially with what I was drinking at the time, 50/50 rum and orange juice). I managed to tape the entirety of a second showing and to see it a dozen times or more before finally seeing the b&w original. And now it just doesn't feel like the same movie. Still, now I'm sober so the tales of Hannah's few sexual experiences --one in the Nantucket movie theater, the hand job or whatever it was ("he was arrested, for molesting a minor / I told the police it was a Garbo picture.") and Shannon's mix of hostility during his panic attack and flashes of compassion and wisdom --has all lost a little of the magic I felt deep in my rapturous veins watching it on that colorized TNT print back in 1990.

And it's easy to see why Williams wanted his go-to muse, Anna Magnani to play Maxine (like she did on Broadway). He wrote the role expressly for her, and--as she showed in her other William's-written vehicles The Rose Tattoo (1955) and The Fugitive Kind (1960)--Magnini's slightly-dowdy sexually super-needy persona might be manna for gay boys (Brando in Kind) and grinning idiots (ala Lancaster in Tattoo), but is terrifying for any straight men who's grown up and moved out of his parent's house. Magnani' brash 'to the rafters' powerhouse dowdiness is terrifying, while Gardner's beauty is apparent no matter how down she dresses. It's fine by me, of course, that Gardner is in Magnani's role. I feel suffocated by even a few minutes of her in The Rose Tattoo and that a gorgeous man like Brando would choose her over Joanne Woodward at her sexiest in Kind is, frankly, as unconscionable as the idea that shacking up with Gardner would in anyway be a consolation prize instead of sexless Deborah Kerr (while it it was Magnani, it would make sense. No offense to that actress meant, of course. But Gardner is a raspy doll that any man would love to shack up with on a hilltop overlooking the sea, the cradle of life (and death, for brave poets to sail off into), no matter how much make-up she lost and weight she added and hair she mussed. On the other hand, shacking up with Magnani is daunting. She's legit larger than life and it's only with her in mind the part makes sense. She's the kind of woman a man needs to drink into focus, otherwise she's a blur of resonant movement. That's sometimes the best feature about forces of wild nature like her (i.e. my favorite adage (that I made up for my folklore final), "there's no such thing as ugly women, only sober men"). And Nadine's has a fully stocked bar (if Shannon doesn't drink up all the profits), so why he wouldn't be leaning that way from the get-go is the one false note. 

Since Gardner plays her though, it's hard to imagine why he seems to think twice about it. She's a lifeline tossed to Shannon the way this movie was a lifeline tossed to me in my hour of woe. I took it, as did he. Drunks may be a lot of things, but they're no fools, and they're in no position to refuse hospitality, be it Nadine's rum cocoas or Ted Turner's colorized cradle of life. Save us once, in our hour of woe, and we're loyal to you forever. Even now my relationship to this film is strong, unbreakable I quote it so often in this blog I don't even notice it anymore. Amen.