Shhhh! At long last, lost Lewtons: ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY, THE FALCON AND THE COEDS

Shhhh! Let us speak of Val Lewton, but quietly. A man whose oeuvre of poetic B-movie horrors we knew of, even in the 80s of Central Jersey suburbia (where we taped them off local TV creature double features, like a fisherman dipping his claw into the soft stream), Lewton made subtle and shadowy noir-horrors that are still ephemeral, mere wisps of smoke through the threader. Yet how come even my Journey-crankin' gearhead brother also liked Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie after I taped them back-to-back when they came on WORs Creature Double Feature and we watched them nearly every night one long ago summer, the fan on next to the window drowning out the crickets,  and the harp and frond shadows whistling all around the dark verandas? We dug the growls in eerie WMCA basement pools, and the rustle of the cane fields. They didn't shout and telegraph their emotions --they talked in low, conspiratorial voices and operated on a level of subtlety that drew us in (we had to lean into them), leaving us transported, and... then... suddenly realizing, as does the lovelorn birthday girl in Leopard Man, that it's gotten dark and we're locked in with some strange deadly force we can never see clearly. Where most horror was like a crazy derelict shouting at us over shrill orchestration, Lewton's movies lured us close with seductive calming whispers.

Maybe that was part of their appeal --the low, quiet talking was part of the wartime experience. Loose lips sink ships! The guy on the park bench reading the paper might be a Nazi spy! We could watch these films all night and never wake the parents (and they were good for hangovers, too).

It being the war, the thinking at the big studios was that if one must make horror films, make some of them hilarious, so that America might laugh at its Euro-thrashing boogeyman fears. Boris Karloff was on Broadway with Arsenic and Old Lace, and 1942's underrated Boogeyman will Get You was at Columbia; Lugosi was chasing the Dead End Kids around moldy Monogram passageways. And at RKO--on the B-lot with Lewton and Tourneur--a new way to exorcise the horror of war was manifesting, a style the both looked forward to film noir and backwards to classic literature and ancient myth, and with a minimalist leave-it-to-your-imagination approach to monsters.

The latter was something that we young Famous Monsters of Filmland devotees were initially turned off by, but then later-- when confronted with too many bad monster suits--we finally realized how seeing is never the same as believing; a really dark black shadow is itself scarier than any illuminated monster hiding within it.

That shadowy minimalism, in combination with the quiet whispering and the mostly-indoors filming, and the supernatural--unconscious--power-of-suggestion-genuine supernatural transformation aspects, makes Lewtons seem very personal. Everyone in the world could be wearing I walked with a Zombie T-shirts and we'd still think we were the only one who resonated with its weird dream poetry. It was just some small precious thing that spoke only to us in a 'psssst' sort of conspiratorial whisper, like some girl you meet at four AM outside on a stoop and have an hour-long conversation with in low voice to not wake the neighbor while you share a cigarette (and then you realize she was never even there - just a dream, your anima projected onto the smoke). I'm always amazed when I hear other people say they love these films, for I presume they're my discovery alone, and so perhaps do they.

That's why we fans--especially those who love both film noir and art films as well as horror pics, feel protective of them. I don't like all Lewton's later movies as well as the first four; I think it was a mistake to separate him and Tourneur after the third film, a mistake to start casting children (as in Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher) and setting things in period costumes, and a mistake to lose narrative steam by getting hung up on polemics on 'authority in tight spaces evoking madness '(Ghost Ship, Isle of the Dead). All the tri-corner hats and clattering hooves and smiling coachmen (Bedlam, Body Snatcher), make me feel like I'm being dragged through Colonial Williamsburg as a bored, thirsty kid with aching feet (an experience which left me with a lifetime aversion to period pieces and the smell of horses).

The later Lewton would have no doubt done an actual Jane Eyre instead of I Walked with a Zombie, for example. If only the executives in their infinite wisdom didn't give him such easy literary titles as Body Snatcher and Bedlam! Better they got weirder and more prosaic like The Thorned Glove of the Time Traveler or I was a Voodoo Vampire. 

All of which is a tortuously long preface to the discovery of two 'sort of' Lewton films made by RKO's other B-units but using many of the same people, same actors, crew, writers, sets, props, ghostly mythopoetic flavors and signifiers from the first four films (all from 1942-1943) in the Lewton RKO series. When I've run the Lewton circuit and I got to have more, and am eyeing the Bedlam, Body Snatcher last gasp with grim countenance, maybe I'll turn to these instead. 

So here are two I have found and folded into my Lewton box, if you get my meaning. None of this will mean much to people not in love with the breezy interiority of I Walked with a Zombie. But then again, who wouldn't be, if they surrendered to it?

THE FALCON AND THE CO-EDS 

(1943) Dir William Clemens

***

From its crashing waves close-ups and swirling romantic piano music score, right down to the title font, the resemblance of Falcon and the Co-Eds to the opening of I Walked with a Zombie is uncanny; I only noticed it though as I recently saw them both--quite by accident-- back-to-back (1).
In addition to cast, font and mood, the figure of a gloomy fragile-doomed poet hangs over both this film and Lewton's fourth, The Seventh Victim. All three of them are from 1943, and two were written by Ardel Wray, a mysterious poetic figure who seems clearly to have modeled these fragile doomed poets on himself, possibly exorcising some inner doomed poet, forever at odds with the RKO B-movie system, looking for one muse to lift him from suicidal despair.

In both instances, a poet is hanging around and wafting in his (spacious) bungalow, clearly nursing a fabulous dreamy crush on some girl who's really a shimmering reflection of his own dream anima. A teacher at the all-girls school, the dead poet/English professor has fans who are sure it wasn't an accident or suicide and that the dean just wants to avoid scandal. Hence a saucy student heads down to the city to steal the Falcon's car so he'll need to go up there to get it. Once he's up there, reading the dead poet's manuscript as a crushing girl is swallowed in billowing curtains from an ocean view window, we think instantly of Seventh Victim's Jason (Erford Gage) and his original draft of poetry that Dr. Judd accepts from him on their way to the Satanic mass, or thereabouts. Reconstructing the personality from mute evidence, the Falcon declares this dead poet "a man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it, who spent most of his time alone,.... who took refuge in his new imagination (...) how easily a man like that could be dominated by others." and "He lived such a narrow empty life that it finally suffocated him." Damn dude, been reading my seventh fLstep? Nimbly prowling around the grounds, Tom romances or confounds the endless string of suspects, manages to maintain the student body's collective crush without either dampening or indulging it, and employs three singing moppets to shadow suspects, the very cool 'Ug Sisters.'

Haunting Co-Eds with otherworldly presence is a dreamy psychic student named Margueritte (the alluring Rita Corday), with a dead composer father--supposedly similar in temperament to the dead poet (but more famous)--who keeps having premonitions of death ---voices whisper to her in the wind to kill herself. We hear what she hears in the sound mix, and it's pretty creepy as the whispers blend with the wind until we almost feel like we're going crazy. And for a supposedly grounded mystery, the film keeps a tactful and open-minded opinion on the supernatural, mirroring that of Lewton's films, wherein the real and the vividly imagined merge into a poetic realism (i.e. Irina is a cat and/or a frigid hysteric in Cat People; Jessica is a zombie and/or a casualty of tropical fever in I Walked with a Zombie - the supernatural as a dweller on the threshold of existence).

Tom Conway seems to have been quite busy amidst the RKO B-lots, for in 1943 alone he was in three Falcons and two Val Lewton pictures (Seventh Victim and I Walked with a Zombie). Like Lewton, Conway was born in Russia (St. Petersburg) to a wealthy family that fled the Bolsheviks, bringing with them with barely any of their vast fortune). Looking at Cat People now I realize that it is not really my favorite Lewton film anymore - it lost some esteem when I lost my own virginity (and stayed human). But whether the curse is real or not, I'm a huge fan of Conway's lascivious Dr. Judd. I'll grant you he doesn't really buy into her story and he should, because he's already losing his chance to get her on the rebound, but then it's too late; one certainly can't hold it against him if he turns up the following year after supposedly being torn up, to go around pimping Jean Parker and pissing off more poets in The Seventh Victim. 

Here are some more similarities -

WOMEN

The women angle too is interesting, as Lewton films are stocked with so many strong females. With women doing so many of the jobs usually taken by men during the years 1941-45, it's imperative to remember that, while women suffer at the hands of soldiers and blah blah, its a great time for feminist advances in the workplace and an even better time for attractive men still at the home front, that is if they want to experience a world where the women compete for the men, for a change. That's part of the noir fantasia we so love in The Big Sleep for example, all the hot available lady cab drivers, librarians, book store managers, etc. We think 'oh how novel!" now, but these films reflect a very real facet of life at home during the height of the war, and not only are there many women, but war widows, and in the morality of the time, a widow was basically allowed to sleep with anyone she wanted. She had given her maidenhood to the cause, and now the rest of her sex life was her own.

The girls' school, seen in both Co-Eds and 7th Victim is a prime example of this Edenic safe space in the time of war (ala the woman's dorm in A Matter of Life and Death). This is a kind paradise a man overseas can imagine without feeling either sexual desire or paternal affection but something in between and yet neither, beyond any one final thing, reflecting the feminine eternal flame that cores the death drive like an apple.

THE AMBERSON STEPS

Astute viewers will also notice the school's main stairwell (built for Welles' Ambersons and used regularly by the B-unit) used for the interior of the all-girls' schools in both Co-Eds and Seventh Victim - leaving us to wonder - is it the same school?

Alas, Jean Brooks

I am not a fan of Brooks, and though she wears a few nicely trimmed dresses here and is a decent actress am shocked by her callous behavior towards the "students" (many of whom seem no older than her) and that we're supposed to not think she's the dragon lady. Kind of the missing link between Joan Bennett and Shelly Winters, she has gravitas and a no BS sense of acting and purpose that creates a kind of hangover contagion rather than the allure we'd hope for. Not sure if it's me but I can't abide her character being mean to Marguerite or letting a panther loose, or turning down a poison drink for weeks only to pick a noose instead. Nothing makes sense when it comes to our Ms. Brooks. 

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY

(1945) **

Deconstructing the horror / war mindset is tricky. We can understand the psychology behind the horror ban as a classic example of Hollywood misdiagnosing the contradictions that abound in viewer psychology. The feeling was that audiences didn't 'need' more horror (the war provided plenty). Lewton's B-unit and Universal's THE WOLF MAN and SON OF FRANKENSTEIN proved audiences needed the old horrors more than ever, but they also needed to be able to laugh at their fears. Thus, horror comedy became a huge parallel program, stretching from Bob Hope in CAT AND THE CANARY (1939) and GHOST BREAKERS (1940) through to BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU (1942 and the stunning success of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE on Broadway, which kept Karloff out of films for almost a year.

RKO finally loaded itself into the horror-comedy canon for ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY in 1945, a clunky if well-crafted little blend of scares, laughs and island intrigue. The comedy comes from a pair of shifty talent agents who try to appease gangster Sheldon Leonard's yen for nightclub entertainment by procuring a real 'live' zombie for his voodoo-themed lounge. What makes it, like Co-Eds, a long lost Lewton is that the boys go to San Sebastian, the same island setting as 1943's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, and there they meet several actor/characters from that film, including the tall scrawny bug-eyed zombie, Darby Jones (above- the skeletal tall black man who plays the scariest of the zombies in Lewton's film, Carrafour) and the strolling calypso singer, Sir Galahad.

Though not part of the Lewton crew (he'd only appeared in a small role in the same year's Body Snatcher), Bela Lugosi has a florid, full-tilt villain role as the zombie maker who ensnares our bumbling pair of Abbot-and-Costello-esque comics (2), tying them up and then letting them run amok through his trap doors and passages, chased by himself and Jones.


As with Lewton's Zombie, a real chilling highlight is a song from Galahad, this one played as the boys disembark on the San Sebastian dock. First Galahad sings happily about how San Sebastian is a tropical paradise but when the boys walk past him and he's behind them, and all the other passengers have gone from the dock, the song gradually darkens in melody and lyric, to become a tale of menace, paranoia and woe.

Sir Galahad's songs are always direct addresses to the people he's singing about, which is what makes him uncanny - as in his slow ghostly walk across the empty veranda towards Frances Dee after brother David has passed out in I Walked with a Zombie. But of course the boys are imbeciles, and don't think Galahad's eerie tourist trap warning could apply to them.

Though played for comedy, these little termite moments gives Broadway the Lewton vibe. Also, it's entirely (RKO) studio-bound, with atmospheric lighting especially in the night/dungeon scenes The front of the NYC club could be the same set as in Leopard Man, the NYC exteriors the same as in Seventh Victim.e

As for the boys, they're fairly forgettable. The stooge screams like a hysterical baby the moment anything goes wrong, even while sneaking up on a voodoo ceremony, making the panic of Mantan Moreland in KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) seem like square-jawed heroism. I'm also not a huge fan of Darby Jones' doofus ping-pong ball eyes this go-round. It's not a good look. His eyes were plenty buggy in Lewton's film, so what's the rumpus? Luckily we wouldn't see ping pong ball eyes in style again for zombies until 1972's SUGAR HILL where they rawk. At any rate, Bela makes up the difference. He seems to be having a grand time here, stretching his muscles in real sets after loping around Monogram's waterlogged cutaways for so long, Best of all, there's no Jean Brooks!

So enjoy what ye can while ye can, for the war can't last forever and once Johnny comes marching home, all that dizzy poetry will have to be stopped. Played by Alan Ladd or Robert Mitchum, our returning vets will be brooking no umbrage from fey 4F poets who've had the pick of the dame pool for too damn long.

Until then... Shhhh!

NOTES:
1. I thought I was the first to make the Ardel Wray connection, only to find Time Out London's Film Guide had beaten me to it, them crafty Brits.
2. Strangely, aside from Hold that Ghost in 1941, Abbot and Costello stayed away from horror until well after the war (... meet Frankenstein came out 1948), preferring westerns, period pieces, and sports spoofs.
Special shout out to the indispensible DVDBeaver from whom I copped some of the above Co-Eds stills

CinemArchetypes 18 - The Aesthete

Well here's the last stop on my currently habit-imprisoned train, this is where I aims to be, claims to be.... this is the place that we aim for, we artists of pen and brush and neurochemical excess. Don't mistake our sexual aloofness for inhibition but rather a cumulative loathing based on excessive debauched memories, ghosts and horrific hangovers. Our souls are glutted with the ecstasies and agonies of the flesh, so now we'd rather just contemplate the wreckage for awhile. The aesthete's disregard for solace and emotional baring allows him to scuttle gender's narrowing limitations and so, instead, the aesthete's raison d'etre, the last standing ideal he can find in his shit-kicked can of carded houses, is the collapse of the ground between each pigeon hole; boredom and small-mindedness are his only enemies, and he knows to beat them he must join them, love them, forgive them, as he can seldom totally escape them. His goal is to be so far out that even the maniac charging him with a knife is not a foe; even death's wicket absinthe demon vestments are nothing to fear.

In cinema he is sometimes the 'gay best friend' or some expository dialogue-mouthpiece scholar visited in his book-stack warren by the detective hero for a clue from the past, but he is never a cliche. Kick the generalities curbside and don't let the groupthink studio heads swap out his generous heart and adventurous spirit with mere rote quirks! They will drain his beauty like wine snobs so uptight about their hundred dollar glass of vintage port they end up spilling it all cuz their hand shakes. Slowly, fearfully, the pressure from the money men leads to second-guessing, draining the aesthete of life until he's merely a prop. Don't say it couldn't happen!

John LaZar - Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Up until Tuesday night I had been cursing the Kubrickian darkness in Wellesian brogue rather lighting a candle just because the wax smelt churchy. But friends, I've been shown the light. Obama won and so finally we have proof that if all us freaks and oddballs stick together we can actually drive this bitch -- and as Mae West said in Klondike Annie, when you make fun of the good book the joke's on you, not because dogmatic preachers shout it but because making fun of anything destroys your spirit. First you joke good-naturedly about it, then its less of a joke, then its a threat, then suddenly it's the only reason you're not happy; your own judgments are attacking you and eventually it's your god-given right to kill the judge within. Like in Mingus' "The Shoes of the Fisherman's Daughter are some Jive Ass Slippers," one cool little musical motif gathers some friends and slowly a whole mob shows up to dig the sound and then it gets crowded and heated and the music gets repetitive and circles tighter and tighter and towards some violent orgasm of mob violence against you, the listener, and  bam, you're gone, just air and the whole crazy dance starts over. This is something in myself I had forgotten until the hurricane, the Obama victory, and seeing Zachary Quinto play a hip '64 shrink coercing a lesbian mental patient into barbaric Clockwork Orange-style aversion treatments on American Horror Story. 

Sometimes the trappings of an aesthete are just for show. It's easy to cover one's tracks in all sorts of shady business by cultivating an air of mystery and eccentricity, but such a creature is easily found out for he has not faced the true aesthete test of either perfect aloneness or perfect acceptance. He must face the demon staring back up at him from the toilet at which he is kneeling in rueful dry heave hell, and survive. He must drink his demon under the table, then drink the table under his higher power, or else rear back in moderation like a golden stallion. The aesthete has a morbid acuteness of the senses and the vile laughter of ruffians on the street in passing is like gunshots to his ear. So he must either shut himself away behind his romantic wall with only mad sister Madeline for company, or accept, love and forgive the ruffians one and all, like Scrooge does, and has to do every year, because slowly over the course of the fiscal countdowns he doth forget his Xmas spirits. The Swimmer didn't ever figure that out, and he ended up locked out of his own empty castle in the rain, like a poor ass Kafka. In short the aesthete must either open his heart so completely that it turns inside out or endure the pain of it slowly crumbling into a brown dwarf star.

1. VINCENT PRICE

"Sometimes I feel like I'm playing the subconscious of the entire human race" Price once said, "and I love it." Is there a more perfect choice for Roderick Usher, for Poe in general, than Price? As Little Italy and De Niro were to Scorsese, so Poe and Price to Roger Corman. But Price is velvet voiced, with a rare balance of open-hearted gentleness with mephistopholean grandeur that we lovers of cinema gobble up like sin itself. We're not really scared of his characters, but we're sometimes horrified by the depths of madness they sink to, which Price embodies with a glint of mania that shows us the fun, the joy in madness that all monsters should feel, at least twice, and in doing so he helps us transmute our own despair at death's inevitability and life's incessant slog, the constant closing of the door on paradise as one recedes into the cold marble wasteland, into something like a hot cocoa and slippers by the fire.

2. Rupert Everett - My Best Friend's Wedding (1996)

Damn, I need to wash my eyeballs after trying to find an image for this one. The available stuff on other sites are burdened with fluffy fonts for memes meant to be passed relentlessly to and fro in those relationships that form between two people when one is madly in love but able to exhibit some restraint because just being around their love is enough, and the other glad to have an adoring friend at their beck and call, who 'gets' them. Most of us are lucky enough to have been in both these roles. Maybe we even switched them with the same person. It works but it takes real devotion to the aesthetic of it all for it not to self-destruct just the same. One false kiss and it's all for naught.

That's what makes Everett's character so transcendent. He is delighted with the normal folks he meets, even the bride and groom's clueless family, and not in a cynical snide way. His heart is joyous enough he doesn't need to even express it, except to feign heterosexuality as needed while still exhibiting his peerless flair (including leading the extended wedding family in a rendition of "Say a Little Prayer for You"). And he flies back to the wedding just to rescue her, with no intention of sleeping with her... ever. Unheard of in most films today... alas.

"George's maturity, considerateness, tact are intimately connected to the gayness that sets him apart from the social norms, permitting him a wide distance from the practices and conventions in which those around him are entangled. He is able to talk to Jules in a way that would be impossible for a heterosexual man, offering her always an intimacy that is all the closer for being nonsexual.... (his) public speech to her... constitutes a veritable proposal, the commitment to a relationship that will be permanent but nonexclusive, , built upon a much sounder formation than sexual love or romantic attraction. -- Robin Wood (Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan - appendix p. 306)

3. Robert Downey Jr. - Sherlock Holmes / Game of Shadows

The master of 'macho fey,' Downey's Holmes is full of warm, insouciant charm while still being a true badass and just a little bit of a shit. Highbrow types dismiss any blockbuster as without merit and vice versa, but just ignore them and dig the steampunk detail, the interesting 'pre-figured' fight scene inner monologues, the colorful but imminently deadpan nonchalance, the fast-flowing Wildean witticism, even the acrid tang of Gunga Din-ish misogyny. Guy Ritchie gets it right and Downey Jr. finds a character that he can bring the full brunt of genius eccentricity to. His Holmes is how I wish someone would play Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest. Ah, a man might dream...

4. Judy Davis as George Sand - Impromptu (1991)

The 80s was a bad time for aesthetes, but like all things must they ended. Then, 90s: Nirvana, metrosexualism, and this great gender-bent love story: I fell in love with Hugh Grant's gentle brilliance as Chopin courted by Davis' wild, dressed-like-a-man rogue Sand. The chemistry is like top shelf champagne. A robust story of artists, love, gender and the wives of disinterested nobleman who support the arts mainly to forge illicit love affairs with wild bohemians while their mutton-chopped men are off shooting grouse, it made huge impression on me when I first caught this on cable when I was a drunken poet back from Seattle, heartbroken and unemployed and ready to find validation for my cockeyed theories about how truly cool artists are beyond gender duality. I had a total man crush on Judy Davis, as apparently did a lot of people as she was in a vast array of cool artsy films in the early 90s, but she was never quite as sublimely macho fey and endearing as here - the film that opened her doors to Naked Lunch, The Sheltering Sky, Husbands and Wives, Barton Fink and --alas--The New Age.

5. George Sanders 

"Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck."

Thanks George, for swimming (for however long you deigned to) in our cesspool. With that warm dark cultured tone in your voice, at once comforting and threatening, you made us secure as well as nervous; you made the room seem fraught with possible greatness, your characters were the type to become exhilarated, roused from their wit and gin-soaked ennui at the thought of a fight or a scandal. As a kid I was bored and uncomfortable by Rebecca until your Jack Favell shows up. You're just a conspiratorial voice at first, chummy with the chilly Ms. Danvers; the next minute bounding through a window to greet the stressed new Mrs. De Winter.  We learn you were not just Rebecca's cousin but her lover, and while none of her supposedly scandalous deeds could be mentioned since it was the age of the nervous censor, plenty was implied through the code's symbolic registry and every timbre in your delicate yet manly voice. Did you catch her in a lesbian tryst with Danni and blackmail your way into an incestuous threesome? Were you the one who debauched Rebecca initially? Against her will, at first, at some ancestral summer place when the adults were all out on sail? We never know, but that's what makes an aesthete an aesthete: he shows you just the tip of his depravity, and that may be more or less all there is of it. We just don't ever know.

Under the mantle of the code, homosexuality was the sign of a depraved mind so gayness went part and parcel with a litany of evils. A gay person by definition was abnormal; she or he had orgies, killed hired girls during laudanum blackouts, and smoked pot with jazzbos up in Harlem --in for a penny in for a pound.

So while on the one side Rebecca offers the rare perverse sickness of Olivier, a gay man in a lavender but presumed loving and tolerant marriage with Vivien Leigh, displaying great moral outraged sickness on learning the truth about Rebecca's bilious private life; on the other hand there's Favell's rougish waggery, like a breath of fresh air, like Hopsy running back to the comparable honesty of Jean Harrington at the end of Lady Eve.

6. Clifton Webb as Waldo Lydecker - Laura 1954

(Contains SPOILER) As a guy who loved good drinking movies but had yet to write one word about film outside a college class, I felt iffy watching Laura for the first time, the sickly jasmine air of the theme song and the girly name implied a certain 50s fashion show dullness, but meeting Waldo Lydecker early on, in the bath but typing away and narrating, was like being rescued from what you fear is going to be a very dull party by a one man cadre of Algonquin wits. That Waldo turns out to be the killer is just the icing on the cake since he's the first one you like and the only one you identify with. The others are little more than ciphers until Laura finally shows up out of the rain, and the flashbacks, into her own murder mystery, and the drinks come out in full. Greatest of all is the way his homosexuality or status as 'out of the running' for her hand in marriage or sex isn't really mentioned or deemed important, and he even out-aesthetes Vincent Price, here having a wild time as an upscale freeloading gigolo suspect. That's what gets him: Laura going for a two-fisted heterosexual neanderthal like Dana Andrews isn't threatening - it's a whole different thing; but Waldo can't brook another aesthete sniping in his stall - the effete intellectual in her life must be Waldo or no one!

"In true aesthete form Waldo loves a beautiful, intelligent young creature but in a way that's beyond the grotesque fumbling of the earthbound mortals in unconscious thrall to their boiling reproductive gene pools. His, my dear Dana Andrews, is a life of the mind! Of the spirit! Of art and beauty and truth and poetry, but when we aesthetes see our muses stoop to breed or date an inferior subject, or worse throw us over for another effete aesthete, well we lose our continental minds worse than if we were just an ordinary jealous suitor! It's happened to me personally not once, not twice, but thrice! Ladies, you know your names! Call me! ."

7. John Dall as Brandon and James Stewart as Rupert  - Rope.

"Hitchcock’s Rope was scripted by gay playwright Arthur Laurents from a 1929 play by Patrick Hamilton. In his memoir Original Story By (2000) Laurents discusses how the screenplay was to go. “The three main characters in Rope are homosexual. Brandon and Phillip are lovers who carry the Nietzschean philosophy learned from their former prep school teacher, Rupert, to its outer limit: a murder committed to prove superiority. Rupert is a good friend and probably an ex-lover of Brandon’s; his is the most interesting role.” In fact, Rupert seems based on Wilde, and it’s clear he has played (if inadvertently) Des Esseintes and Lord Henry Wotton to these two impressionable youths. Made three years after Lewin’s film, Rope is essentially Hitchcock’s Dorian Gray. The screenplay calls Rupert “distinguished in appearance, manner and thought”, and stresses his dandyish aspect: “He is completely self-possessed and elegantly detached. His manners are beautiful, his speech is eloquent and his tongue can be sharp.” Of course, as a Wildean figure, he also has a sinister aspect: “[Y]ou cannot really be sure whether he means the extreme ideas he propounds or whether he is joking. Just as you cannot be sure whether Rupert is essentially good or essentially evil.”

Laurents probably had in mind Wilde at the height of his fame and immediately prior to his downfall. In 1894 Wilde wrote for an Oxford undergraduate magazine an egregious piece which he called “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”. Here are two of its maxims: “Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others”; “Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance” - Ken Mogg (Senses of Cinema)

8. Dean Stockwell as Ben - Blue Velvet (1996)

There's a spectrum of aestheteness and at the gutter end lurks Ben, a nightmare fever dream monster of an aesthete, the sort who could believably entomb his sister in the family crypt just because the demon fairy in his absinthe bottle whispered he should. I don't think David Lynch intends him or his buddy Frank and their other cronies to be 'real' in a concrete Lumberton sense... They are prototypes for the non-corporeal dancing dwarf-style beings to come. Ben is how nervous 50s children would imagine a gay hipster beatnik and Lynch and Stockwell let that idea of an "entered" "sandman" "crooning" "In Dreams" run free of quotes! You need to see this movie again, and again, wiederholungswang style, until there's that 'pop' and you get the whole Oedipal jazz fairy tale in a heated flash, and suddenly you're free.

9. George Sanders' brother - Tom Conway as Dr. Judd in 

Cat People (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943)

In Tom Conway, Val Lewton found his quiet spokesperson, his ego ideal, suave, literate, educated, a little too polished to ever convey his full measure of world-weary sadness. As such he appeared in three films, two as Dr. Judd. In Cat People, Judd proves his aesthetehood by deciding to seduce Irina himself, understanding that a well-meaning putz like Bill with his endless patience is not what she needs to come out of her dark anxiety. She needs dark stranger who's in love with death enough that he won't be too bummed out if she really does turn into a panther and kill him. Until then, he dismisses her fears as a kind of ancestral unconscious conservatism, but he acts on the mythic level in seducing her, because a) Bill's already left Irina by that point so he's not necessarily cuckolding and b) maybe it's unethical but it's okay as it's unethical done altruistically - i.e. his is an unselfish selfishness. A 'good' doctor would never be able to cure Irina, because he couldn't step into the dark sexual surrogate role with the shadowy elan of an ideal Shavian / Jungian. Inversing the usual dynamic of the good moral person who harbors dark sexual secrets, beneath Judd's caddish whims and dark sophistication lurks a beautiful altruism. 

He was back for The Seventh Victim, which--since he was already dead at the end of his last film--reveals New York City is purgatory, a bardo of deserted late night subways, overcrowded missing persons' offices, strange make-up companies, and Satanic cults coaxing each other deeper into the abyss. Dr. Judd may be still a bit of a cad, but his apparent womanizing secretiveness once again harbors a real heart, and his rendition of the Lord's prayer at the climax is enough to make even a jaundiced old pagan like me throw in an extra five dollars when the plate's passed at his next AA meeting.

10. John Astin-  Gomez Addams - The Addams Family

If you want to understand the divide in America you have only to watch an episode of The Addams Family vs. an episode of the Munsters, one abided the tedious status quo of 50s-middle class family dynamics, warping Universal classic horror signifiers to a banal framework approved by the moral right; the other depicted rich decadent surrealist eccentrics that mocked the moral light, showing how the oddball freaks could be far more tolerant and good than the 'normal' people who lashed out at anything outside the norm. And at the head of it all stood the vaguely entrepreneurial aesthete Gomez Addams.

Gomez's love of wife Morticia is the prana for the whole show. She loves him too but she's too legit crazy to provide the show with its Wildean compass the way Gomez does. If you were a normal shlub longing to be considered different while never stepping anywhere near the edges of society's freshly-mowed block, The Muensters was your show; if you were a total freak who couldn't sandpaper down your edges anymore than a leopard could change its spots, who didn't care about being accepted either by the normals or the crazies, but liked them both anyway, who felt that the intolerant moral conservative neighborhood voting committees out to get you were really just kooky lovable monsters like yourself, turning the other cheek all the time and setting it on fire with love and matches, then you found a home in that kooky mansion, with Gomez making sure you always felt welcome, regardless of what bit of occult statuary was growling at you.

11. Jean-Paul Belmondo - Breathless (1959)

He plays at being a thug, but if you pay close attention to his words, Belmondo's character in this premiere Godard feature is a hopeless aesthete, one who has severed all ties with the law-abiding world, shooting a cop and going on the run as matter of course, but unlike the murder committed by the two encoded Compulsion-style thrill killers in Rope (who hoped to prove their "beyond good and evil" superiority), Belmondo just drives outside the frame of the film and into your lap like a William Castle skeleton, pointing out the beautiful architecture of the theater before chasing after the gorgeous (and androgynous) petit-bourgeois NY Tribune-hawker, Jean Seberg down the aisle like some obnoxious yet eloquent Harpo Marx. My favorite line is near the beginning when he's driving along in his stolen car through the country and he says to the camera, "If you do not like the country, and you do not like the city, and you do not like the sea... then get stuffed" ---that was the old Fox Lorber subtitle, which I like better than the Criterion "then go fuck yourself," but either will do. Belmondo acts the vagrant moocher, the ruffian, but his fatherly need to point out the joyous beauty around him reveals he's really an aesthete, with Paris his playground boudoir.

12. John Waters

He voiced the first openly gay character on the Simpsons, and when he dropped by just to do novelty dances with Homer and fawn over Marge's corncob drapes it just seemed natural and delightful, and even those of us without the stomach for Pink Flamingos knew there was no escaping our love for Uncle John Waters. I forget where I read that his favorite films were Boom! and Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, but I know it was in high school, and it took me 10 more years to have any chance of seeing them (early 80s) and so he set me up with a life mission.

While certainly shocking and subversive, Waters' films always have a vitality and openness that leaves you elated rather than dispirited. The charm of this openly gay aesthete finds its delirious yet always coherent flowering with Hairspray, which blasted free the Peyton Place-level repression of Baltimore with the bomb of sock hop music, in the process inviting fat chicks, drag queens, beatniks, black folks and creepy senators into the prime time light - just dance and all is forgiven, honey, and that goes both ways.  He's the all-inclusive candidate who finally dissolves the pinched face intolerance of the moral snipe red state thin white hypocrite establishment to a wicked witch black puddle, but then, like John Lennon at the end of Yellow Submarine, invites the sad blue meanie to the party. When we are all-inclusive we cannot fail. God bless us all! xoxox