If you live in New York and you pay attention to the movies (or if you don’t live here but you read about film across the blogosphere, say), then it’s probably safe to assume you are aware of Film Forum’s Breadlines & Champagne series, running now through March 5th. All the films are shown in 35mm, plenty are not available on DVD and every day there’s a new 2-for-1 double bill of 1930s Depression-era cinema. This Saturday, the ever-dreaded (around here, at least) and always-plastic Valentine’s Day offers a delicious dream pairing sure to propel its audience back outside with all the right Hallmark-approved sentiment appropriate to gaudy reds and garish pinks and overpriced (and often terrible) chocolate: Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) followed by Mitchel Leisen’s Easy Living (1937). Indeed, Film Forum’s program has a David Thomson endorsement that says, “If you paired [Easy Living] with My Man Godfrey, you’d have a beautiful portrait of money in New York—and a happy audience.”
One of my earliest movie related memories – from the time I was six or seven – was of parading around the house, hips swishing and purring in my finest Mae West mimicry, “Why don’t ya come up and see me sometime?” I barely remember actually watching the B&W My Little Chickadee on the tube, so mesmerized was I by the platinum blonde goddess, a creature clad in ultra-femme garb but projecting an aggressively male body language and distinctly unfeminine voice – like no one I had ever seen on the screen. Years later I would realize it was my first encounter with a woman like me.
Miss West is my patron sinner/saint for many reasons, but mostly because today’s catchphrases like “genderqueer” and “boygirl” didn’t exist in her time – and she didn’t need them. She did what came naturally to her way down deep inside, no buzzwords required for self-knowledge. I intimately understand why she eschewed monogamy in favor of a fetish for bad boys, rough trade and Hercules musclemen – the ultimate physical embodiment of our 100% male insides, our souls made flesh-and-blood tangible. I know what it’s like to choose lovers you want both to be with and to be, to covertly use sex to sweep aside all awareness of the female form, to lose oneself in a tidal wave of testosterone. Miss West is my fellow undercover agent in the mainstream world, a gay man “passing” as a femme little chickadee, serving as my transgender guiding light.
For weeks I’d been raving to anyone and everyone that the recent re-release of Chaplin’s controversial 1947 Monsieur Verdoux, in which the Tramp sheds moustache and cane to become a gold digging serial killer of wealthy widows, is one of the finest films of the year. So I wasn’t surprised when an actress/comedienne friend of mine on the west coast emailed to say she’d just rented and laugh-out-loud adored it. What did give me pause was her follow-up, “That scene where he woos the rich woman in the parlor at the beginning, and also the one where he’s in the flower shop ordering roses…is it wrong for me to have the hots for a clown? Chaplin is so fuckin’ sexy!”
My answer: not only is it not wrong, but Chaplin wouldn’t have been believable mesmerizing his prey in Monsieur Verdoux if he hadn’t finally allowed his natural sexual charisma to shine through. For his entire career up until then Chaplin had been masking his virility beneath a shabby overcoat like a drag queen packing away her package. Monsieur Verdoux is perhaps the closest character to the real, really-young-women loving, multiple wed Hollywood legend than any other role he ever undertook. Verdoux’s seducing and serial killing of old coots seems like a screen-friendly substitute for Chaplin’s real-life seduction and serial impregnation of teenage girls.
Benten Film’s latest release, the award-winning The Free Will(otherwise known as “that 3-hour German rape movie”), is available today. I’ll be posting a longish piece on the film when I get back to New York next week, but in the meantime, check out comments from Cinematical, The ScreenGrab, and Hammer to Nail.
Fleshbot notes that the editor of Showgirls/director of last year’s Dane Cook/Jessica Alba bomb Good Luck Chuck is also a published photographer of art porn. The Approval Matrix may need to be redrawn to reflect such achievements in middlebrow sleaze.
Speaking of dubious filmmakers: is Madonna turning into Mae West? Michael Musto is all for it, as long as we all agree to “pass a law that in 30 years she must start covering shit up.”
New Magnet release Shrooms leads Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus to ask an immortal question: “If, in a film, a character has to have his penis bitten off within the first 35 minutes, wouldn’t it be more interesting to let him live until the story’s end?”
Oh, the drama! Whilst a gossip blog of questionable repute allegedly has airtight evidence that maverick filmmaker Madonna has hired Paul MacCartney’s divorce attorney to sever her ties to Guy Ritchie, at the same time rumors are spreading that the soon-to-be 50 pop star is reteaming with director Alex Keshishian to make a follow-up to his 1991 tour doc Truth or Dare (known overseas as In Bed With Madonna).
I don’t know whether or not the two stories are related, and it’s probably best if we assume that both just aren’t true, but for the sake of argument: please, please, let Madonna make a (probably doomed, but noble!) attempt to recapture her floridly, gloriously shallow Truth or Dare era glory days by once again leaving a movie-making husband and forcing a no-name filmmaker to shape her everyday life into mall-grade Fellini!
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Benten Film’s latest release, the award-winning 
