one more for the road
by
Douglas Messerli
The
Iceberg Video Guy (writer and host) The 55+ Year Old Lost Film NOW
FOUND / 2020
The Internet Movie Data Base of Films and Movie Professionals describes—still as of the date I am writing this piece—A. J. Rose Jr.’s 1965 19.24-minute short as a “movie about a man’s manhood is endangered [sic]. He must rob enough banks as to where he has enough money to get a genital reconstruction surgery.” The IMDb entry describes it as being 45 minutes in length.
No one apparently ever bothered to check
whether this rather incoherent description was actually correct since for over
55 years the film has apparently been lost. It was first mentioned in the AFI American
Film Institute Catalog of Feature Films 1961-1970 under the title Penis.
Obviously that title roused the interest of several individuals who sought it
out—without success.
Someone else, trying to track down the film
by the IMDb entry found that the description actually matched another movie
titled Percy from 1971, directed by Ralph Thomas. That entry reads: “Edwin
Antony (Hywel Bennett) is emasculated in an accident which kills a young
philanderer. Doctors successfully replace his member with that of the dead man,
but refuse to tell him the full story of the organ's origin. So Edwin begins a
search which takes him to the philanderer's wife—and also to his many, many
girlfriends...”
Having mentioned the disappearance of the
film on his “Iceberg Video” blog, the site’s host heard from an individual
named Maurice Jones who reported that he had sought out the distributor of the
film, Film-Maker’s Cooperative, to see if they still held the distribution
rights for the lost work. They responded that it was still in their files and
might be rented for $100, but since no one had ever asked for the film,
they weren’t sure whether the copy still existed.
Jones evidently took a chance and sent off
the payment. The movie titled Penis by Rose that arrived in the mail was not at all a porno flick nor an adult “sex
film” but was a silent, black-and-white experimental work of cinema that is
quite fascinating.
The “Iceberg Video” host—known simply as
the “Iceberg Guy” (although his letter box code is Zelcher20 and the videos he
posts are under the rubric of Zelcher Productions—went on to show several
scenes from the rediscovered Penis and to interpret the work’s meaning.
Interestingly, this savvy kid did perceive
some of the film’s art house influences, including Maya Deren’s Meshes of
the Afternoon (1943) and Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien
Andalou (1929). Through the evidence
provided in the opening scene of a long heterosexual kiss and the following
scenes of a tortured young man visiting a decaying cathedral in which he
recalls a mass in which he evidently attended the priest as an altar boy; a
later scene in a museum; another in a laundromat in which each of the washing
machines is named after a woman; a skit in which a naked man makes love and “fucks”
an army poster (“I Want You.” U.S. Army”); and the final scene in which the
woman the man was first kissing delivers him up a gift—the young commentator
was able to determine that the film concerned the man’s struggle with his homosexuality.
The “Iceberg Guy,” however, interpreted
the film as having a rather tragic ending. Since what the woman delivers the
man at the end of the film is a penis, which he accepts and stuffs back into
his pants, this critic interpreted it as a final acceptance, despite his
desires, of normalcy. Since gay males were often seen not fully being men, he
argues, by accepting the gift of the penis, he has restored himself to manhood defined
by the standard heterosexual definition of what it means to be a male in our
society.
Our young analyst also provides a second
possible meaning. Since in the laundromat the machines have been given female names,
perhaps the man is wondering why they can be named but not he. Accordingly, he
may be seeking to become transsexual which means the gift and its acceptance
suggests an equally sad ending since he has apparently given up his attempt to
redefine himself as a woman.
I applaud these interpretive efforts, as
wrong-headed as I think they are. In my reading this lovely small cinema masterwork
is actually a quite comic vision of the standard “coming out” tale, bearing, I
argue, the kind of relationship with that genre as George Coe and Anthony Lover’s
satiric film De Düva: The Dove (1968) does to the films of Ingmar
Bergman.
To
prove my point, let me just recount the scenes of the entire film (now
available on-line on The Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/penis_1965).
The film begins with the long heterosexual
kiss between the film’s hero and what later becomes evident is his girlfriend. The word Penis placed upon an image of erotic Indian art, a male
with an erect penis and a woman with bared breasts appears, announces the title. But the very next
moment the screen displays the closed door of a safe, with, soon after, a hand reaching
from outside the frame to deposit a dime, as if it were the kind of locker in
which one keeps possessions in a bus station or gym. The hand is waved back and
forth almost as if signifying that some magic trick were involved.
The door opens to reveal the heads of
marching C.O.R.E. protestors demanding “Freedom Now.” Although C.O.R.E. (the
Congress of Racial Equality) is perhaps best remembered for their protests
against racial segregation, they also fought, according to their stated
principles, for gender equality, freedom of religious belief, social equality,
and for open expression of sexual orientation.
The very next scene shows a priest, other
adult officiates, and altar boys all deeply genuflecting at the altar. In fact,
the gesture is repeated in several following scenes and young altar boys, after
the service, genuflect to the cross, lain on of the floor, several times
repeated as in a loop tape. Even this first time at the main altar the gesture
is repeated in quick succession seven times.
There is a quick frame of a young boy,
obviously in pain, with a bandage winding from his head to his jaw. Apparently,
he has suffered an accident, a childhood case of mumps, or perhaps a tooth
extraction. Perhaps his wisdom teeth have been removed, allowing him to move
ahead without the “wise” clerical beliefs of the church.
If nothing else this connects the
individual with the general scene of the several altar boys in the previous
frames.
In the next scene the cathedral is
completely in decay, plaster falling from the walls, pews overturned, dust
settling upon the entire shell of the former place of worship. Obviously the
role that religion once played in this community has been abandoned. And the
man, who looks like the figure from the first scene of the kiss, who enters
from out of the frame to walk up an outside aisle, is visiting the church in
memory of it, likely representing his role as one of the altar boys since in
the very next instant we return to the priest holding up an embellished cross before
several kneeling altar boys, who rise and continue in procession. With the
alteration of the image of lone man in the destroyed church and further scenes
of the priest and altar boys we are quite obviously made to make the connection
between the two.
Intentionally, almost comically given the
looping of some fragments, the director makes no attempt to be subtle about the
relationship of this man’s past to his present. The church which was a large
part of his childhood has now fallen into disarray, not only physically we
perceive, but psychologically. Its significance is not only diminished but
possibly, since we now know how many hundreds of such altar boys were sexually
abused, part of the reason the now lone congregant has lost his faith.
This an obvious reference to Buñuel and
Dalí’s young man in Un Chien Andalou who we witness chained to engraved tablets
of the Ten Commandments, while he pulls behind him two grand pianos each with a
dead donkey upon them followed up with two religious seminarians—the burdens of
his religious and cultural past. The animals are different from Rose’s film
only in their braying stubbornness as opposed to his beast’s growls warning of
potential bites. In Penis the man is obviously in a used motor parts
lot, the sign in full reading “All types of trucks, cabs and bodies,” with the
camera focusing particularly on the worlds “types” and “bodies,” referencing both
gender and sex.
This scene, particularly when the cart
becomes stuck in a rut out of which he struggles to pull it before proceeding
on his perilous path also references Ingmar Bergman’s hearse in the dream
sequence early in The Wild Strawberries, and there is a feeling in this
scene of the deserted city of Bergman’s work.
Our silent hero is now in a museum staring
up at a sculpture whose tormented face the camera lingers on. The “Iceberg Video
Guy” admitted he could not recognize the work of art and sought help in
identifying it. I believe our gentleman friend is enjoying a day off in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art studying Auguste Rodin’s Adam cast in 1910.
Our young man is clearly an admirer of the male body.
In the very next seen the man, sitting
crunched up on a small bench, seems almost as tormented as Adam. But in this
case it’s a comical torment, as we waits in a laundromat for his clothes to
finish their cycle. As the video critic observed the washing machines each have
a handwritten name upon them, in order of appearance, Mary, Arleen, Debbie,
Cindy, Jill, Lindy, Rose, Nancy—the camera resting on that name for some time
as the man blows cigarette smoke toward the name that also means in certain
heterosexual circles a queer or faggot, a Nancy-boy—and finally, Betty. Rather
than hinting at his gender preference, I suggest that the director is here
moving our hero into the gay camp world of the time, when gay men identified
their friends with female names, a fact made even more apparent when we glimpse
that all of these feminine sobriquets are also designated Speed Queens, the
manufacturer of the washers—most certainly hyped-up fairies.
Next stop for our roaming romeo is a
butcher warehouse were our confused hero walks in and out of the huge carcasses
of hanging meat, loosening his tie as he slowly begins to stroke and caress the
fatty surfaces of the slabs. He grows so excited in the act that he finally strips
off his shirt to embrace them more fully in seemingly steamy lust.
These actions were completely beyond the comprehension
of our self-identified cis-male straight commentator, laughing as he joked “Each
to their own.”
But any gay boy would have known that it
was not the beef they serve up in restaurants he was seeking but what the
metaphor signifies: gay bars are often described as meat racks, long bars lined
with young men just waiting for someone to take them home and enjoy their beefy
pleasures. We can now presume that our handsome hero has taken off his glasses
and wandered into the joys of gay bar sex.
Apparently he can’t get enough the male
glance as the next few seconds of the movie reveal him back at the Met studying
the numerous fleshy indentations of bronze that Rodin molded to represent Adam’s
rippling muscles. By this time if you’re not giggling, at least just a little,
I suggest you click your player off.
We watch our man walk along a wall with a
large clock implanted into the cement of the edifice, apparently permanently
stopped at 12:00, since the building seems to be a derelict remnant of another
time. This too might remind a Bergman aficionado of Professor Isak Borg’s dream
in Wild Strawberries where an ocular clock has lost its hands.
Now please give a hand, if you’ve got
yours, for a little gay political vaudeville theater. A clown pops up on the
screen, and out struts a cute, thin, completely naked boy carrying the iconic
sign of Uncle Sam’s longing: “I want you [for the] U.S. Army”—this at a time
during the Vietnam War when much of the US male population didn’t want anything
to do with their eager uncle. Unlike today, when gays, lesbians, and transsexuals
are delighted to finally be able to join the Armed Services, in 1965, when the
US force had reached the size of 184,314 men joined in brutal combat by 514,000
South Vietnamese soldiers there were very few males left excited to be drafted.
And gay men felt themselves lucky, if they could convince
In this charming number our nude dude slowly
lowers the Uncle Sam sign down to give it a quick fuck before literary coming
out with penis in full view on one side of the poster. He turns to Sam to give
him a blow job while giving a nice view of his thin ass, before dancing like a go-go boy around the invitation to join up.
With a magic hat the hot boy makes himself
and the poster disappear, only to re-enter, still nude, with a clock, this one
with its hands still intact. The time is 2.35, and he slowly moves the right hand up to read a quarter to 3, hinting, one suspects, of the famous Frank
Sinatra ballad, the perfect song to sing male friend off to war with:
There's
no one in the place except you and me
So
set 'em' up Joe
I
got a little story I think you should know
We're
drinking my friend, to the end
Of a
brief episode
Make
it one for my baby
And
one more for the road
I
know the routine
so
drop another nickel in the machine
I'm
feeling so bad
Won't
you make the music easy and sad
I
could tell you a lot,
but
you've got to be true to your code
So
make it one for my baby
And
one more for the road
But
then he might also be lauding at the great rock-and-roll hit of 1961, Gary U.S,
Bonds’ number “Quarter to Three,” where instead of sadly drinking the night away,
they dance “As happy as they can be.”
Evidently, his time has run out, as he
sets the clock down and hunkers beside it in a most despondent position.
Apparently the sex is not successful. No
penis in sight. And the very next scene our patient gal is herself in a museum,
fondly checking out a female nude sculpture, while he stands on a bridge
smoking a cigarette as he looks out over what appears to be a wasteland, his
tie blowing in the wind a bit like a male figure out of a Robert Longo
painting.
Suddenly she appears at the other end of
the bridge, bearing something as she walks in his direction. She hands the
object to him, turns away, and begins walking back in the direction from which
she has come.
We realize a moment later that the bridge
on which they stand is a drawbridge and that the figures are soon after located
on either side of where the bridge is rising up into the air. Obviously, they
are now in separate spaces, in opposing worlds. We now see the gift she has
given him: a rather well-shaped and long penis which he briefly strokes before putting
it into this pants, zipping it up.
She
has returned his manhood and he is now free to use it as he wants.
We
have no idea who A. J. Rose was, but I’d guess it was a pseudonym. This film is
far too clever and witty to be the work of a neophyte to filmmaking. But
finally, as our friendly “Iceberg Video Guy” declares, we’ve found the Penis
and can now do something about it. My words above represent a raw attempt.
Sorry I don’t have any pictures from the film to accompany my efforts. To my
readers I can only suggest that you take a look for yourselves.
Los Angeles, February 17, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February
2021).
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