Walking the Walk

The queen is not amused, but we are: Olivia Colman in The Favourite.

Olivia Colman waddles through the halls of power as Queen Anne in The Favourite like a demented wind-up toy. Suffering from gout and plagued with insecurities, Anne is a feast for any actress (Claire Bloom and Margaret Tyzack have done well by the role in the past). Colman tackles her with a full-on fervor that knocks you out. In her hands, the queen is more than just an assemblage of tics and eccentricities. She's a complex human being, the warped product of a barely mentioned past who probably shouldn't have been put in charge a grocery list much less a country. That's the film's central conceit, however. None of the characters, most of them the beneficiaries of inherited wealth and position, are capable of wielding power effectively. Yet they squabble over it constantly. Even the middle-class Abigail Hill (Emma Stone) — who plots to replace her cousin, Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), in the queen's favor — doesn't know how to handle the power she strives for. It's not that she's a woman; it's that she's human. And the political system depicted seems the opposite of a meritocracy. If anything, it reflects the warped leadership in Washington today — the boobocracy wherein inherited wealth and the right lies suddenly qualify one for the highest offices in the land.

Colman's performance is better than the script she's been given. Screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara make rather a hash of history. Their script ignores recent scholarship that suggests Anne was quite the capable ruler whose reign was highlighted by major developments politically and culturally. Instead, it presents the childish, emotionally unstable Anne of Lady Churchill's memoirs, hardly the most objective account of events, with contemporary sexual rumors spread by her enemies thrown in to sweeten the pot. Their writing is very witty, with some scenes that resemble Harold Pinter's best sketches. The opening, for example, in which Colman tries to get Weisz to help her tend her pet rabbits (one for each miscarriage and lost child), provides a capsule image of the perversions of power that will fill the picture. Just don't mistake anything you're seeing for what really happened. Its their and director Yorgos Lanthimos' vision of the corruptive influence of power — All About Eve (1950) with crowns and cunnilingus.

That strong emphasis on the personal means the political issues get somewhat muddied. Of course, nobody wants to sit still for almost two hours of political theory (unless maybe Errol Morris is directing it), but it would be nice to have a clearer image of who's on which side. From the film, you can't tell that Anne's Lord Treasurer, Sidney Godolphin (James Smith), belongs to the same political party as his chief parliamentary opponent, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult). Nor is there a clear sense of what Godolphin and Lady Churchill's loss of power means to the nation. The imagined personal chaos is placed so firmly center stage that it ends up doing the history an injustice.

While the action is unspooling, however, there's little chance to worry about it. Colman's performance dominates the film, but it's not the whole show. Stone and Weisz more than carry their weight as the dueling cousins. Weisz has the quieter role in many ways, but you can see the need for power in the set of her jaw and her steely eyes. Stone starts out seeming softer. The character's more of a victim at first, abused by a man who lusts after her during her coach ride to the palace and then thrown into work as a scullery maid. With her big, doe eyes, she seems the perfect little martyr. But the actress can pull up a harder side as well. She has a great deal of wit, which works well for her in this film (in the much soppier La La Land in 2016, I kept waiting for her to laugh out loud at some of the script's more ridiculous moments). As the plot progresses, Abigail finds ways to ingratiate herself with the queen. What starts as seeming altruism, preparing herbal remedies for Anne's persistent and painful gout, turns into manipulation as she first seduces the queen and then takes every opportunity to undermine her cousin. Stone limns all of this beautifully. She never gets ahead of herself, so she carries the audience from sympathizing with her to hating her for her manipulations.

Gender politics are a key issue in the film. One of Lanthimos' key choices is to have the women use natural hair and make-up while the men carry over the greatest excesses of the Restoration. They wear large wigs and Hoult, in particular is heavily, made up in the period's "male kewpie doll" look. It's to his credit that he doesn't let the costumes swallow him up (any more than the makeup and special effects did in his X-Men movies). The men who have a more natural look are those outside the power politics. There's a brief shot of Lord Churchill (Mark Gatiss) without a wig after he's been removed from his post, and Lord Masham (Joe Alwyn) is more natural throughout. His character is more of a pawn. He's the stepping-stone for Abigail and Harley's ascent to power, and Alwyn plays his perplexed innocence quite well (you'd hardly recognize him as the same actor who played Lucas Hedges' rapist in this year's Boy Erased). The courtship and wedding night scenes are particularly sharp because he thinks he's won a sexual prize only to find he's just a tool in her hands.

Lanthimos has given the film a rich look. These political shenanigans are carried out in the lap of luxury. But he keeps under-cutting it in an almost Brechtian way. There's a very funny court dance staged by the German choreographer Constanza Macras that mixes elements of contemporary rock and hip-hop performance with period dance. I'm not completely sure of its purpose, but it's a hoot (and very well performed by Weisz and Hoult). Lanthimos also uses wide-angle and fish-eye lenses to create a disorienting effect. At times, that's almost too showy for its own good. It's Brechtian all right. It pulls you out of the story, but I'm not sure if it makes you think about anything expect the director's showing off.

Ultimately, the film doesn't need tricks like that to make its point. Everything it needs to say is there in Colman's performance. Her work has been one of the delights of British television since she made her debut in 1999. Her performance as Simon Doonan's mother in Beautiful People is one of the most fully dimensional comic portraits I've seen. After one episode, you knew Debbie and wanted her as your best friend. As Ellie Miller in Broadchurch, she just about knocks you out of your seat as she tries to navigate her professional and personal spheres. Her Queen Anne embodies everything the script has to say about the vagaries of power while adding a human dimension that grounds the writers' and director's concepts. She can transition from pathetic grotesque to heartbreakingly human in an instant. It's a dazzling accomplishment. Every time you think you've seen everything she has to offer in the role, she comes up with something new.

  Tina Carver tries to anatomize a walking tree monster

as Todd Andrews looks on inexpressively in From Hell It Came.

On the IMDb page for From Hell It Came (1957), the first listing under plot keywords is "bare chested male bondage." "Bare chested male" recurs further down the list, followed by "staked out" and "catfight," among other descriptors, the last being "killer tree," which is what the film is actually about. This suggests one common characteristic of the film's small cult of fans, desperation.

They're going to be pretty frustrated if they watch after the first few minutes. The South Seas horror flick opens with the dead tribal chief's son, Kemo (Gregg Palmer), indulging in a little bare chested male bondage. He's being punished for taking his sick father to see the U.S. scientists stationed on the island. Kemo accuses the medicine man (Robert Swan) and the new chief (Baynes Barron) of poisoning his father, but Kemo's wife (Suzanne Ridgeway) lies to support their accusations. Palmer is the most accomplished actor to speak in the scene, but his impassioned speeches, delivered while he's tied to the ground, are somewhat undermined by the presence of a chicken in the upper right hand corner of the frame insistently pecking at the ground. He's also got the best body in the film, though it's not shown to good advantage while he lies there. Only after his execution, when he's buried propped up in a standing coffin, do we get to appreciate the only decent pair of pecs in the picture. Many of the extras, all of them white actors made up to look Polynesian, are a great argument for moving to colder climates. Some of them seem desperately in need of support garments.

And that pretty much takes care of any prurient interest in the male form. The film's pretty frustrating to the traditional male gaze, too. Later in the picture Kemo's widow, who lied because the new chief has promised to make her his woman, discovers he's been sleeping with Naomi (Tani Marsh, the only actual Polynesian with a major role). They engage in a catfight that's almost as flaccid as some of the extras' physiques. There's minimal contact, and at one point, Ridgeway runs into a tree for no seeming purpose other than to leave her knife lodged there.

Of course, that's just the tease to draw in older viewers. The real point of the film is to thrill the kiddie matinee crowd with the horrific tale of a murdered man coming back as Tabonga, an ambulatory tree, to kill his enemies. The film doesn't really succeed at that either. The tree is more funny than scary. It sort of shambles across the landscape; the bedridden could probably outrun it. Its arms don't appear to be much good, though they can carry potential victims (how it gets hold of them is another question; the body suit designed by Paul Blaisdell has workable elbows, but the shoulders aren't much good for anything). At one point it backs the evil chief up against a tree and seemingly rubs him to death. That's it — no strangling or beating — just a lot of vertical frottage. Maybe the tree gave him splinters that got infected, very quickly.

The film is pretty much mired in '50s attitudes, awash in a sea of colonialism and sexism. Since the tree and its victims are all natives, they're not the real focus of the film. Rather, the picture spends an inordinate amount of time on the U.S. scientific team, consisting of one aggressively male scientist (Tod Andrews), the female scientist he loves (Tina Carver) and an older scientist (John McNamara) who likes his liquor and, given his resistance to the women in the cast is probably a coded gay character. Even though Carver is a dedicated scientist, Andrews thinks the fact they're in love means they have to move back to the states where she can keep house and raise his children. Of course, as a scientist she's no great shakes. When a strange looking tree with a pulse starts growing from Kemo's grave, she and McNamara decide to study it by digging it up, putting it in their lab and pumping it full of an experimental serum she's been working on that should keep its heart pumping (convenient, no?). Then, with no knowledge of how the serum will affect an organism they've never seen before, she says they can all go to sleep and see how it's doing in the morning. When they awaken to find the lab wrecked and the tree thing missing, she and Andrews logically (?) conclude that means the tree came to life and ran off. She insists she can handle a gun when they go hunting or it, but then she straggles from the group to get sand out of her shoe, runs into the tree alone, screams twice (and none too well; it's more a squawk than a scream) and faints.

This is hardly the kind of sophisticated Polynesian civilization reported on by anthropologists. The natives are stereotyped Hollywood "others," no different from depictions of Native Americans or Africans in other films. Rather it's the goal of the U.S. scientists and military to bring civilization and science to them as a byproduct of their making sure the nearby nuclear testing hasn't done too much damage to the environment. This translates into hiring them as servants and using them as test subjects. 

  Linda Watkins prepares to act Tod Andrews off every screen in the lower 48.

Needless to say, the acting is not of the highest level. Carver has a pleasingly low voice, even if she doesn't know how to scream. Andrews can't seem to figure out what to do with his hands if he isn't smoking. And it's taking all my restraint not to make puns about the actors playing the natives being more wooden than Tabonga. The one exception is Linda Watkins, who plays Mrs. Kilgore, a British widow running the local trading post where her main product is comic relief. For some reason, the credits claim the film is introducing her, even though she had made half a dozen pictures in the '30s. Watkins started her career on stage as a member of the Theatre Guild's repertory company. Her performance seems scaled for a large theatre rather than the camera, but she throws herself into the flirtatious, loquacious character with a kind of carefree abandon that's infectious. In later years, she was a frequent TV guest star; as a cynical music critic in the Thriller episode "The Terror in Teakwood," she delivers the same kind of over-the-top performance, albeit in a more serious role. She's so much fun, you can't help wishing that instead of shooting at Tabonga they'd just had her talk it to death.

Two Faces, One Story, Sort Of

The two versions of A Woman's Face

 One of the joys of the late, great FilmStruck was the way it served as a vehicle for exploring themes, directors, stars and even film stories in different settings. Where else could you find the first three versions of A Star Is Born alongside George Cukor's dress rehearsal for the story, What Price Hollywood? (1932), all while the latest remake is playing in theatres? Or Leo McCarey's original Love Affair (1939) followed by the Glenn Gordon Caron remake from 1994, assuming you could stomach the latter after experience the forgotten joys of the former.

I was in the middle of rehearsals and a production run when FilmStruck's impending demise was announced and didn't really have much chance to gorge on the wealth of material from the TCM Library and the Criterion Collection during its final months. One of my last treats, however, was watching the two versions of A Woman's Face within a week of each other. The comparison was surprising. Conventional wisdom holds that the Hollywoodization of international hits results in the coarsening of the source material. Certainly Hollywood made a hash of such classics as Breathless (1960), Les  Diaboliques (1955) and The Blue Angel (1930). In the case of A Woman's Face, however, I would suggest that there are distinct ways in which MGM's 1941 remake is superior to the 1938 Swedish original, though both films have their strengths and their flaws.

There's nothing disgraceful about the Swedish original once you get past the sticking point in both films, the notion that making a scarred woman beautiful will completely change her character for the better. Each tells the story of Anna, a female blackmailer who, as a child, was caught in a fire caused by her alcoholic father. A chance encounter with a plastic surgeon (she's trying to sell the man's wife some incriminating letters) leads to her going through a series of surgeries that remove the scar. Then her cohorts send the now beautiful woman to serve as governess to a child who stands between one of her confederates and a large inheritance. She's supposed to help with the child's murder but her new face changes her psychology, moving her away from the path of evil.

In the Swedish version, director Gustaf Molander shoots the story pretty much straight on. His surface realism almost works as a diversionary tactic, giving the film's fallacious assumptions about character some kind of credibility. His work seems to reflect  the New Objectivity, a German artistic movement most clearly embodied on screen in the films of G.W. Pabst. It makes sense that a Swedish director in the 1930s would be aping a German film style. Sweden led the rest of Europe in film production in the years before World War I. After a period of recovery, Germany took over, first with Expressionism in the late silent era and then with the New Objectivity. Like Pabst, Molander uses realistic details of décor to reflect the characters' inner lives. The rooms Anna moves through at the film's start are dingy and sparsely furnished, reflecting her lack of connection to anybody around her. As a criminal, her relationships are entirely based on utility. When she moves into her governess position, however, the rooms are more cluttered and homey. She's working in an idyllic mountaintop chateau, a house filled with elements of the natural world that reflect her move into more emotionally committed relationships as she grows fond of her elderly employer and his grandson and falls for her boss's male secretary.

In all of this, Molander is greatly aided by the presence of the young Ingrid Bergman. At just 23, she was fast becoming one of the leading actresses in the Swedish film industry and was only a year away from her move to Hollywood, which would make her a major international star. As the transformed Anna, Bergman is warm and emotionally open. It's a gradual development. On the train ride to the mountain town, she's more withdrawn. This is right after she's gone through the successful surgeries, and she's not used to dealing with the attention her new face brings her. When the man sharing her compartment, her new employer's secretary, tries to flirt with her, she doesn't know what to do. After meeting her charge, the young Lars-Erik, things start to change. The first night at the chateau, she tucks in the child, and he tells her he loves her. Bergman's reaction is a wonder. Molander puts the focus on her as years of bitterness forged by rejection melt away. You can see her transforming into St. Ingrid, the Hollywood image built by performances in films like Casablanca (1943) and The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), so it's hardly a surprise when she decides to try to save the child.

Her earlier scenes as the bitter, scarred Anna, aren't as effective. The scar is a great piece of make-up, designed under the guidance of Bergman's husband, Dr. Petter Lindström. It pulls down her lower eyelid and pulls her lip into a perpetual sneer. But the young Bergman overplays her hand, snarling out her every line in a way that makes Anna seem a petulant child more than a confirmed criminal. Her performance of those early scenes stacks the deck in favor of reform, which tends to undermine the film's realism. She's so miserable she has to change. A realistic, albeit specious case study turns into a morality play.

Even with that, Bergman is pretty much the whole show. There's nobody in the film who equals her naturalness in the later scenes or the intensity of her emotional commitment. The attempts to match her romantically with the secretary fall flat, and the actor, Gunnar Sjöberg, comes off decidedly weak in comparison. Their romance doesn't feel destined to do anything but fill time. There's no suspense over whether he'll stand by her when the truth about her past comes out, because you really don't see them as any kind of a couple to begin with.

By contrast, the 1941 MGM version is all about romantic suspense. To make the plot more enticing to U.S. film fans, the screenwriters — Donald Ogden Stewart, Elliot Paul and a host of uncredited others, because…Hollywood — give Anna not one but two love interests. The role is now played by Joan Crawford, and multiple suitors would seem to be her due. These men represent the different paths available to Anna, which actually makes the conflict stronger. Rather than the barely tolerated accomplice in the Swedish version, the potential heir becomes a suave, high-society blackmailer (Conrad Veidt) who hooks up with Anna's gang and becomes her lover. At first, he's content simply to share the spoils by giving them access to more affluent victims, but when he sees Crawford transformed, he comes up with the idea of placing her in his uncle's household as governess to the heir apparent.

Since Hollywood and American film audiences would seem to have little truck with male secretaries, the plastic surgeon (Melvyn Douglas) is made a more viable romantic candidate. That, of course, requires getting the dissolution of his marriage past the Production Code. Where Bergman had blackmailed a basically decent woman who has strayed once (the doctor's wife even comes to visit her in the hospital), Crawford's prey is a serial adulteress who seems to have never taken her marital vows seriously. Osa Massen, who plays the role, is also the weakest link in the film's acting ensemble. The leads and character players around her endow their roles with professional expertise and commitment, while she appears to be at a loss for how to read the next syllable. When Crawford smacks the snot out of her in their big confrontation, it seems as much an aesthetic judgment as frustration with the character's whining. How dare Crawford be forced to play against such an inferior scene partner!

This is one of Crawford's better performances (she would often tell interviewers she felt this film made it possible for her to win the Oscar three years later for Mildred Pierce). In early scenes, she contextualizes the character's venom. She has no trouble pushing people around, but she also has a soft side. Her colleagues are a group of petty villains (expertly played by Guy Meek, Reginald Owen and the wonderful Connie Gilchrist) who make fun of her behind her back and at one point trick her into looking into a mirror. Crawford takes just a moment after seeing her scar to register her pain at that treatment before smashing the mirror and turning on them. When Veidt starts working his charms on her, she makes her melting into the affair totally believable. She needs some acknowledgment of her worth as something more than just an expert criminal. She also has moments of surprising restraint. Explaining how she got her scar to Veidt, she rattles off the facts coldly, as if distancing herself from the childhood trauma. It's much stronger than if she had pulled out all the emotional stops. She supplies the facts; the audience supplies the feelings.

Her weakest moments come when the story shifts into melodrama. Veidt shows up for his uncle's birthday and begins to doubt Crawford's commitment to killing the child. Instead of letting her evade the issue, the script has her lying to his face, and that's something that's always been outside Crawford's range. She must have missed the day in acting class when you learn that the point of a lie is to convince the person to whom you're lying. Instead, she plays the subtext. It's an emotionally constipated moment that wouldn't convince anybody, much less an experienced criminal like Veidt.

Fortunately, that scene is over quickly, and we're back into the elaborate fantasy director George Cukor has made of the film. Some historians have tried to diminish his talents by suggesting his most visual films were really the result of his working with consultants like Cecil Beaton on My Fair Lady (1964) and George Hoyningen-Huene, who served as color consultant on all of his films from Bhowani Junction (1956) through The Chapman Report (1962). Certainly he has an ace cinematographer on A Woman's Face, Robert H. Planck, who had worked with Crawford on the visually stunning Strange Cargo (1940). But there's an intelligence to his work overall, even on a film that keeps skirting the edges of claptrap like this, that's all Cukor.

Most of the film is told in flashback, during an inquest into a character's death. Cukor and Planck move into the past with an elegant tracking shot at the roadhouse Crawford's gang runs, where they gather information on future victims. The camera moves with two women dancing, a touch of European decadence that quickly locates the film in a mythical world where the plot seems much more logical.

There's a surprising amount of suspense in this for a Cukor film, and he cuts the suspense scenes just right. It's really the closest he's come to working like Alfred Hitchcock. There's a scene of eavesdropping and near murder in a sunny, snow-filled landscape (shot entirely on the sound stage — more fantasy) that's particularly effective in that vein. He also does a great job revealing Anna's new face in the framing courtroom scenes.. We've heard of the surgery and we've seen Douglas removing her bandages, but we haven't yet seen her face. In court, she wears a wide-brimmed hat that covers the scar's former location, a holdover from earlier days. Halfway through the picture, the judge finally makes her remove her hat to reveal, what else — Joan Crawford. Cukor was wise enough to know that a film like this was basically about becoming Joan Crawford, and he gives her a big, loving close-up. Planck's camera captures the features that made her a star: the high cheekbones, the strong nose, the large, expressive eyes. It's the big payoff the audience has been anticipating for more than 45 minutes.

Then Cukor falters. The film goes back to flashbacks to show her first day out of the hospital. The hat is back, still covering her face as she walks through a park. Then she notices a child staring at her. She panics for a moment. Then the light catches her new face, the child smiles and Brosnislau Kaper's music moves in for the kill. It's a big, sentimental moment that just doesn't fit the rest of the film, which otherwise wallows in a sense of cynical, faux-European decadence. A year later, Crawford's legendary rival, Bette Davis, would have a much more successful reveal in Now Voyager (1942), and it's shocking to think that a plodding director like Irving Rapper could pull off the effect better than a near master like Cukor.

That's followed by a third reveal that wipes away some of the saccharine as Crawford goes to see Veidt. Again, she hides behind the hat while he greets her and goes off to fix her a drink. Then she removes the hat and plays the piano, so that when he comes back, he finally gets the full effect. Veidt does a bit of masterful reacting, combining surprise, delight and a hint of relief that he doesn't have to ignore her appearance any more. That's perfectly logical for the period, when most in the audience would be wondering how he could have made love to the woman she was earlier in the film.

Cukor was always haunted by his reputation as a woman's director, as if there were something wrong with his ability to get great performances out of actresses. In truth, he's a master at getting performances out of all his players, and one of the joys of A Woman's Face is the texture created by strong performances in the supporting roles. That's something the Swedish version, which seems oddly under-populated, lacks. The trial in the MGM film may look like nothing you've ever seen in any court on the planet, but the it's presided over by Henry Kolker, with defense attorney George Zucco (freed from his usual run of B-movie villains) and prosecutor Henry Daniell locking horns, and you know you're in good hands. Except for Massen, there isn't a performance in the film that isn't at least competent, and some are downright inspired.

If anybody comes close to threatening Crawford's status as queen bee, it's Marjorie Main, and that's less a case of scene-stealing than of surprising casting. Main made a career out of playing big-hearted, often slovenly down-home types, most famously as Ma Kettle in a string of low-budget comedies at Universal. Here, she's cast as the cold-hearted (or is she?) housekeeper at the home where Crawford works as governess. She's virtually unrecognizable at first, with her hair whitened and pulled back into a severe bun, and her eyes behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. It's a character woman's face, adaptable to any situation, and Main had the talent to bring this particular type to life. She doesn't get to honk out her lines, as she would in her more typical roles. But she snaps out criticisms of Crawford's more lenient approach to child-rearing perfectly. She even gets to hint at greater depths (which is necessary to the plot development). It's a surprisingly rich and nuanced performance from an actress who wasn't always challenged in that way (you can see a little of the same depth in her first appearance as Ma Kettle in 1948's The Egg and I, where the comedy has a more serious side). It's really a joy seeing what she could do in the role, but it doesn't take over the film. If anything, it's a reflection of the joy Crawford takes in her chance to play a strong dramatic role at a time when MGM had already relegated her to the second string. Like Crawford, she's a dedicated actress happy to get her hands on a role that lets her stretch and under the guidance of a director who loved bringing actors to their best.

 How to populate a movie: the faces of MGM's A Woman's Face

 Conrad Veidt, Crawford, Melvyn Douglas

 Reginald Owen, Connie Gilchrist, Donald Meek

 Crawford, Albert Bassermann, Marjorie Main

They Had Faces

Bette Davis works more than just her eyes in The Star (1952),

creating a powerfully human portrait of an actress unable to deal with growing older.

Near the end of Stuart Heisler's The Star (1952), a screenwriter (Paul Frees) looks across the room at a crowded Hollywood party and points out a woman he says has the perfect face. At that stage in the film, it's no surprise when the shot changes to reveal the object of his admiration is Bette Davis, playing washed-up film star Maggie Elliott. As in even her weakest films, her face is one of the picture's saving graces, often creating layers of meaning that go beyond anything the script could suggest. Dan Curtis' Burnt Offerings (1976) is a wretched mess of a picture except when she's on screen. Then it turns into a heartbreaking consideration of the ravages of age. In some of her early Warner Bros. films, when the studio tried to treat her as just another leading lady, her characters fairly pop off the screen with a supernatural energy that makes the films more about a powerhouse actress chomping at the bit than whatever sorry plot she was stuck with.

The Star is the best of her attempts to follow-up on the success of All About Eve (1950). As a woman fighting against the crushing reality that she's grown older in a Hollywood that only values youth and sex appeal, she's electric, even if the script keeps getting in her way. After she leaves an auction of personal effects that's only going to pay off her creditors, she has to deal with her freeloading sister and brother-in-law. The scene starts well enough, with her trying to explain her financial situation to them and point out that a lot of her lost fortune went to helping them. Davis plays this with sincerity and a touch of wit (the way she widens her eyes to feign innocence while dropping hard truths is one of the best weapons in her bag of tricks and gives lie to the claim that she couldn't play comedy; I mean, what the hell was All About Eve?). But then she has to blow up at them, and the whole situation starts to feel phony. Davis is too powerful, too much a force of nature, for us to believe anybody could take advantage of her as they have. And though she's an expert at delivering rants (in 1934's Of Human Bondage, her verbal attack on Leslie Howard is downright horrifying), she can't do it if the lines aren't there, and in this film, they're not.

Right after her sister and brother-in-law leave, however, she pulls off a surprising little bit of acting that jolts you back into the character's reality. She angrily sweeps her makeup table clear and then grabs her arm. It's a little thing, but it sums up her character's plight perfectly. She's too old for gestures like that. Through the course of the film, Maggie has to learn that she's also too old for the leading roles she used to play.

Later in the film, her agent manages to land her a screen test for a supporting role as the young leading lady's older sister, a downtrodden farm wife. Convinced she should be starring in the film, she plays the scene as if she were a young sexpot. When the agent takes her to the studio to find out how things went, she gets one of the studio's editors to screen the test for her. We don't see much of the test (we've already seen her filming it). Instead we see her face as she watches it and realizes what a fool she's been. Her response is riveting, and it paves the way for the film's denouement. Unfortunately, the scriptwriters then decide to give her lines. They're not needed, and given that we've already seen everything we need to see in her face, they seem ludicrous.

When Frees pitches his script to her at the party, which triggers her final crisis, the writers manage to stay out of her way for once. The film he pitches is basically the one we've just seen, about a star unable to adjust to aging. Unfortunately, the script then has him go for some kind of high moral. The woman's problem is that she's been so busy being a star that she's forgotten how to be — gasp! — a woman. It's not just that the idea is dated. After watching Davis power her way through the film for slightly over an hour, it's downright insulting. What's wrong with being a star if you can also deliver on her level? Her marriage may have fallen apart (because her actor-husband couldn't take her being more successful), but she has a daughter (Natalie Wood) who adores her and has even won the heart of a former co-star (Sterling Hayden) who bails her out when she's arrested for drunk driving. Even while still trying to rebuild her career, she would seem to be doing pretty well for herself by the film's patriarchal '50s standards.

That either-or proposition, that a woman can be either a star (read success) or a woman, was the one flaw in All About Eve. The scene in which Davis' Margo Channing evaluates her supposed failure as a woman is much better shot than anything in The Star, but I remember women hissing her big speech when I saw the film in a revival house in the '70s. Of course, All About Eve has a lot more going on than that one idea, and I don't think anybody watching it seriously believes that Margo is going to stay retired for long after she marries Bill. The Star, however, seems to be built around the proposition that to achieve success as a woman Maggie has to give up everything else, and Davis' powerhouse performance gives the lie to that idea.

Hayden and Wood are the only actors in the film who are really a match for Davis. It's not that the rest of the cast is bad. It's filled with reliable character actors like Warner Anderson as her sympathetic agent and Minor Watson as the studio head who agrees to give her a screen test, but they don't have a lot to work with. Hayden's character is more developed and parallels his off-screen life. He was doing work on Maggie's house when she spotted him and had him tested for a film in which they ended up co-starring. Since the war, he's given up acting to run a small shipping business (Hayden always preferred sailing to acting). Their scenes are like a meeting of old and new Hollywood — the studio-bred Davis taking on the young independent Hayden. She knows enough to share the focus with him. I wonder if Davis also realized that, as was the case with other aging stars like Joan Crawford, she needed a leading man with Hayden's craggy masculinity to make her love scenes believable duets rather than ludicrous solos.

She really connects with Wood, as well. The younger actress was 14 at the time. That's considered the awkward age for child actors, though we may all wish we had been that awkward at her age. She's gangly and effusive, but with her big eyes and her strong focus on Davis she seems a better mother-daughter match for her than Davis' own biological off-spring (the film made the two lifelong friends, while the less said of Davis' daughter at this point the better).

Good as Hayden and Wood are, however, they're very much supporting players, simply in terms of screen time. The film is all Davis, and she more than justifies the investment of 90 minutes. She always claimed this was one of the best scripts she was offered in the '50s. She did The Star after turning down Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) and lost the Oscar to Shirley Booth's whiny, masochistic performance. She would later regret that decision, but I think she made the right choice. Lola is too downtrodden a character for her. In fact, most of the prominent roles for women in her age range (think 1952's Sudden Fear or 1956's The Bad Seed) were such victimized creatures she wouldn't have worked in them. The only role she could have really sunk her teeth into was Serafina in The Rose Tattoo (1955), which, appropriately went to Anna Magnani, an actress often referred to as "the Italian Bette Davis."

Even beneath Charles Schramm's impressive scar makeup, Liza Minnelli has the eyes of a star in

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon.

Liza Minnelli's follow-up to her Oscar-nominated turn in The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) is far from her best film. It has all the flaws of Hollywood's attempts to get "with it" in the late '60s and early '70s. The editing and storytelling are choppy, the plot goes nowhere, and the sound recording is awful. At times the characters seem to be talking from inside a meat locker. There were directors who could make things like that work. Robert Altman turned the meandering narrative into an art form in films like M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and his masterpiece, Nashville (1975). But for Otto Preminger, who did some of this best work in tightly plotted films noirs like Laura (1944) and Fallen Angel (1945), it all seems just so much affectation. If it weren't for a few performances, the picture would hardly bear looking at.

After decades of seeing Minnelli turn in strong performances as everyone from Sally Bowles to Lucille Austero on Arrested Development (not to mention her unjustly neglected turn in Stepping Out), it's tempting to say any view of her performance in Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is colored by hindsight. Certainly the character, as written, is a little too self-consciously quirky (another trait of '70s screenwriting). Junie Moon is a carefree young woman who's been scarred when a date turned out to be deranged and poured battery acid on her face. In the hospital, she befriends Warren (Robert Moore), a gay man confined to a wheelchair following a hunting accident, and Arthur (Ken Howard), an epileptic incorrectly diagnosed as mentally challenged since childhood. They decide to set up housekeeping in a tumbledown shack near the Massachusetts shore.

As they face a series of crises brought about by insensitive neighbors and a landlady (Kay Thompson) who seems to have wandered in from some Italian horror film, the script frequently calls on Minnelli to go from zero to 60 in an instant. And the flashback to her disastrous date turns her into such a manic party girl you may wonder if they didn't undercrank the camera for those scenes. She's all over the place. But when Minnelli has to connect with another actor, she really looks at them. Those wonderful, Margaret Keane eyes of hers carry a lot of focus and intensity. It may be jarring when she has to jump to a big emotional effect, but once she's there, she's totally committed. Even when the character puts on airs, there's nothing phony about her. For the moment, at least, she believes in her affectations. And she shares her mother's gift for surprising bursts of wit that temporarily undermine the more sentimental moments. She holds off going for the obvious tug on the heartstrings, saving the big emotional punches for the film's end.

Minnelli provides an emotional center for a film that doesn't seem to have a consistent acting style. The script by Marjorie Kellogg (adapting her own novel) seems to draw its notion of gay men from some community theatre production of Noel Coward. Moore has a series of plummy lines to deliver, which he does as though playing to the back row of the balcony (he was primarily a theatre director, most noted for the original off-Broadway production of The Boys in the Band). In contrast, Howard is beautifully naturalistic as Alan, even during stylized flashbacks to his tortured childhood, when he was bullied and sent to a home for mentally challenged children (these are the best flashbacks in the film; the other figures look like two-dimensional, black-and-white ghosts, which is truly disorienting). His character is immensely appealing, as is James Coco as a lonely fishmonger who falls for Minnelli, even though he realizes she's drawn to Howard. And Anne Revere, who had worked for Preminger in Fallen Angels and Forever Amber (1947), has two lovely scenes as a hospital social worker. Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon was her first film in almost 20 years, after being blacklisted in the '50s, and she's lost none of her authoritative sincerity.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is also rather challenging from a political standpoint. 1970 doesn't seem that long ago for some of us old farts, but it's shocking to hear Moore called a "queer" and a "cripple," Howard's seizures referred to as "fits" and the terms "retarded" and "feeble-minded" thrown around in reference to his childhood.

There's also a reminder of how far the screen has come (or likes to think it has come) in dealing with sexuality. When Coco treats Minnelli's chosen family to a weekend at a seaside resort, Moore hooks up with a hotel employee (Fred Williamson) who appears to be turning tricks on the side. The two flirt so much you're waiting for something to happen. But during a night out, Williamson takes Moore to a black nightclub, where they pick up two African-American women. Williamson takes one off into the sand dunes, while the other seduces Moore on the beach. No wonder Williamson tears up the group's hotel bill. After leading Moore on like that, he's got to come across with something. For a gay audience, however, the whole plot line is another case of getting screwed by the film without getting kissed.

Yet there's still something strangely compelling about the picture. It's as if Minnelli were holding together the meandering plot and plethora of acting styles by force of sheer will. Because the picture was shot in the Northeast, it's filled with great, if underused theatre actors like Ben Piazza, Leonard Frey, Nancy Marchand, Clarice Taylor and Julie Bovasso. The whole thing is framed by shots of Pete Seeger walking through the woods as he sings his "Old Devil Time." The scenes represent Preminger's most relaxed work in the film. There's a faux symbolism to the piece; the lyrics saying "No storm nor fire can ever beat us down" seem to point up the resilience the characters strive for. But while Seeger's on screen, the film is just there. We get to sit and appreciate the beauty of the woods, the authenticity of his singing and his great weathered face. And somehow it doesn't matter that the picture doesn't really get anywhere, as long as it comes back to him.

Closets and Complexes

Harris Dickinson's stricken face at the end of Beach Rats

In the final shots of Eliza Hittman's sensitive independent film Beach Rats (2017), the rootless teen Frankie (Harris Dickinson) stares at the fireworks over Coney Island. Earlier in the film, he and his friends had looked on them with disdain. They found no great thrill in the display, even if he uses it as a conversation starter with Simone (Madeline Weinstein), a pretty girl he sees on the pier. But now, his life a mess, he watches them through pained eyes. Is the weekly display all he has left to look forward to? It's a gripping image, made more powerful by the way it echoes the ending of Francois Truffaut's first feature, The 400 Blows (1959), the famous freeze-frame on Jean-Pierre Leaud's face as his Antoine Doinel looks at the ocean for the first time and realizes it's not really the escape from his tortured life for which he had hoped. To say Truffaut's film is the screen's greatest portrait of youth at risk is hardly to denigrate Ms. Hittman's work, but rather to put it in perspective among the screen's more powerful portraits of the way young people can feel trapped in a world that seems to offer no real future.

Truffaut drew on details from his own childhood to paint Doinel as a victim of his parents' almost malicious neglect. Hittman's Frankie suffers from neglect, too, but it's more a matter of circumstance. Frankie's father is dying of cancer, and his well-meaning mother (Kate Hodge, in a deeply felt performance) is understandably preoccupied with caring for him and keeping the bills paid. Without guidance, he just hangs out with his friends, shooting hoops, getting high and trying to pick up girls. They support themselves with petty crime. While waiting to get on the bumper cars at Coney Island, one of them lifts a wallet from the person ahead of them. Frankie steals his father's painkillers to share with his friends and sell for a quick buck. At one point, he even pawns his mother's jewelry.

There's another difference between Frankie and Antoine. Frankie is gay. In the first scene, he cruises an on-line hook-up service looking for a man to talk to. Eventually he starts meeting the men from the site. Not that he's out to himself. In his view, he's just what's called an "MSM," a man who has sex with men. For the most part he dates older men for fear of hooking up with someone who might know his friends. When he meets one of his tricks in public, he almost panics. The man is one of the bartenders on a party boat Frankie's gone to with his friends and Simone, and when the guy tries to send the group free drinks, claiming the girlfriend is too pretty to have to pay, Frankie is furious. Later, when his friends catch him on his way to another date, Frankie tells them he only hooks up with gay men because they have drugs, lying that he gets high with them and then leaves them cold.

There's a price to pay for this dishonesty. In two of the three gay encounters shown in the film, the men simply treat Frankie as a receptacle. It's interesting that the only one who actually spends time with him and seems to care about his enjoying the encounter is the guy who tries to comp him for drinks later. And Frankie is finding the façade of heterosexuality harder to pull off. It's not just that his friends catch him. When he hooks up with Simone, he can only perform once, and only then by running to the bathroom to psych himself up in private. Hittman doesn't go for the obvious by having him pull out some gay porn to get in the mood, but you're pretty sure it's not Simone he's thinking about.

Hittman handles all of this with an objective sense of restraint. She's not there to judge the character; she just wants to show us what his life is like. When Frankie's father dies, she doesn't milk the scene for easy sentiment. She just shows the family gathered around his hospital bed in the living room. The slowing of the heart monitor is the only clue that this is the end for him. At times she may be a little too restrained. You may find yourself longing for a big, fiery confrontation out of '50s kitchen-sink realism. And there's no big climax at the end. After Frankie lets his friends beat up a trick, the first younger man he's tried to meet, he simply runs off to Coney Island to watch the fireworks. Yet that final image of him is haunting. It stayed with me long after some forced crisis might have.

Hittman's helped greatly by Dickenson's performance. He has a gift for getting inside his character and letting us see the world through his eyes (his performance as the telekinetic teen in this year's The Darkest Minds was one of the few saving graces of that mediocre effort to launch a sci-fi/fantasy franchise). Even when you can see Frankie making stupid choices, you know why he's doing it, and Dickenson draws you in enough to be on his side.

With its seaside setting and depiction of vagrant youth, Beach Rats calls up another association — with Federico Fellini's second feature, I Vitelloni. Like The 400 Blows, the Fellini film is semi-autobiographical, with the director represented by Moraldo (Franco Interlenghi), the group's philosopher who eventually runs off to Rome to build a new life. The two comparisons make the ending of Beach Rats even more painful. We know that Truffaut and Fellini eventually moved beyond their adolescent problems to become major filmmakers. But what does poor Frankie have? Doinel had the movies and his love of Balzac; Moraldo, his questioning. There's no indication in Beach Rats that Frankie has any special talent. He can charm girls for a while, and he can steal drugs (if it doesn't require too much planning). Under the credits, he takes pictures of himself from the neck down, the kinds of shots people post to sell their bodies while keeping their faces hidden. At that moment, Hittman turns the gaze on her male star and, as the male gaze in cinema most often does to women, reduces him to disjointed body parts. By the end, that seems to be all he has to offer, and he doesn't seem to have the intelligence or maturity to survive that for long.

 The two reasons to see King Cobra: Garrett Clayton and Christian Slater

If anyone had the brains and maturity to survive a life in the sex trade, it's the version of Brent Corrigan (the stage name for Sean Lockhart) played by Garrett Clayton in Justin Kelly's King Cobra (2016). As written by Kelly and D. Madison Savage and played by Clayton, Corrigan is almost the Eve Harrington of gay porn. In his initial interview for porn director Stephen (the film's name for Bryan Kocis, who actually discovered him), he comes off as a young naïf. But the camera is on, and before long he's taking his clothes off in a scenario that's far from unfamiliar to anybody who's seen more than a few solo films. After he agrees to work for Stephen, there's a brief shot of him in his room as he tries out different ways of wearing a baseball cap. That's where you see the wheels start clicking. It's a wonderful actor's moment, as Clayton takes us inside the character to show him rehearsing the image he'll use to sell videos over the next several years.

The humor from that scene carries into the way Kelly depicts Corrigan's early films for Cobra. He mainly focuses on the set-up scenes and seems to enjoy the cheesy dialogue and cheerful non-acting. As a result, the films made for Cobra come off as silly and queasy and little bit erotic all at the same time.

Clayton's portrait of the young macher is matched by Christian Slater's performance as Stephen. There's an openness to his work here I've never seen before; even in the recent TV series Mr. Robot, he seems more focused on projecting an attitude than getting inside his character's head. But he seems totally in synch with the porn producer he plays in King Cobra. Stephen is just as much of a schemer as Corrigan, but he's also a Pygmalion who's fallen hard for his Galatea. You can see the pain in his eyes when Corrigan starts fighting for his independence, even as you know that he's been ripping him off for years, underpaying him for videos that are pulling in six figures each. By the time he reaches his sorry end, dragged through the legal system when Corrigan reveals he was underage when he made his first videos and eventually murdered by a rival producer, you can't help but feel sorry for him.

The film is based on the real-life story of Corrigan's relationship with Kocis and their legal battles when Corrigan tried to break free of his control to forge his own career. It's there the film starts to fall apart. Kelly goes to great pains to depict Corrigan as Kocis' victim while also trying to keep the director sympathetic. When Kocis reveals he's copyrighted the Brent Corrigan name, Lockhart finds he can't work anywhere. Nobody wants him as anything other than Brent Corrigan. That's not true, however. In reality, Corrigan made three films as Fox Ryder before reaching a settlement to use the Corrigan name. In addition, the scenes of his abjection are a drain on the film, and though Clayton plays the wronged innocent well, it doesn't really work with the way he's been depicted as a schemer. It's as if Kelly wants us to laugh at the character's machinations and then suddenly feel sorry for him.

The film's biggest problem, however, is in presenting Kocis' killers, a pair of hustlers turned porn producers played by Keegan Allen and James Franco. Allen is perfectly fine as the young stud who's fallen for a life of privilege with his lover/pimp/producer, but Franco has a rare misfire as the more volatile half of the relationship. The character is a master of self-deception. He lives beyond his means and thinks the tacky porn films he makes with his lover are his ticket to the big time. Franco seems to be too smart for all that. When he has to get violent, he can't get a convincing rhythm going, and his scenes threatening and browbeating his partner fall flat.

There are also moments of almost self-conscious artiness. Stephen has a taste for classical music, which is established early on. For most of the film, the classics are confined to his scenes. When the police come to arrest Franco and Allen, however, the soundtrack switches to Schubert's "Ave Maria." Only it's not just the "Ave Maria." It's a mash-up with "Love Me Forever," a song setting lyrics by Tim Kvasnosky to the Schubert music, and the original Latin text. "Love me forever and pray for us sinners?" It's a strange muddle, but by then, so is the film.

The real star of The Gay Deceivers, Michael Greer (r.), and the man who should have been one of its stars, Christopher Riordan (below)

Imagine a romantic comedy set in an apartment complex for gay men. The piece is shot in the pop, crayon-box colors of the late 1960s. The leading man is the landlord, a flamboyant gay man in a happy, long-term relationship who acts as den mother to the tenants. He decorates their apartments, gives them romantic advice, provides a sympathetic ear and even cooks for them if they need help in the kitchen. The complex's resident hottie is always on the prowl, even as he's caught in a frustrating romance with an Army recruiter who has to keep the relationship a secret. When a pair of straight boys move in, pretending to be gay to avoid the draft, everybody sees through them but plays along just to twit the dimwitted dolts and even tease them into a few compromising situations. Most of us would lap something like that up.

Unfortunately, that's not The Gay Deceivers, a 1969 sex comedy that makes the mistake of focusing more on the straight boys than on their gay neighbors. Of course, that's the nature of the period. Homosexuality had only been allowed as a screen subject since 1961 (when William Wyler finally got the Production Code Administration to approve his rather overwrought adaptation of The Children's Hour), and was treated mainly as a subplot when it did turn up. Back then gay men and lesbians only appeared as either perverted villains or tragic psychological mistakes.  My images of gay representation in that era are dominated by the failed primetime soap Executive Suite, in which a woman confesses to her best friend that she's in love with her (at the time, one "confessed" to homosexuality, because it was still a crime in many states), then runs into the street only to be hit and killed by a garbage truck. The fact that the tortured lesbian was the incandescent Geraldine Brooks and the object of her affection Patricia Smith, a good character actress but hardly the type to whom one would write sonnets, just made it even more ridiculous. At least there are no garbage trucks in The Gay Deceivers.

What there is, however, is an illogical plot in which a rich, white law student (Kevin Coughlin) whose family could easily have bought him out of the draft gets his childhood buddy (Lawrence P. Casey), a lifeguard and gigolo (the straight kind, so it's OK) to pose as his lover so they'll be classified 4F. When they think the recruiting officer (Jack Starrett) is spying on them, they move into the gay complex while trying to keep Coughlin's family and girlfriend from learning about the ruse. It should be the set-up for a door-slamming farce, but their labored efforts to keep up the pose without sacrificing their love lives aren't exactly funny.

What is funny, however, is the complex and its residents. Michael Greer was already out and proud when he made his film debut as their landlord, Malcolm. Director Bruce Kessler, who apparently was committed to making a good movie, gave Greer his head, resulting in a more positive depiction of homosexuality than was originally in the script. Unfortunately, that only applies to Malcolm's scenes. When he's not on-screen, there are still some painful lines about gay people being child molesters, and Coughlin's and, particularly, Casey's stereotyped attempts to pass as gay. Yet there's also a powerful scene near the end, when Coughlin's father finds out about the ruse and tells him about the real-world consequences of his behavior, particularly should he become a lawyer. This all tends to give the film something of a split personality as it mocks homosexuality in some scenes, celebrates it in others and seriously acknowledges the consequences of anti-gay bigotry.

None of that seems to matter when Greer is on-screen, however. His relationship with his partner (Sebastian Brook) is the most mature, positive pairing in the film (certainly better than Coughlin's stock parents — stern father and ditzy mother — or his relationship with his judgmental girlfriend, a role that forces the talented Brooke Bundy to function as resident turd in the punchbowl). One scene Greer added, in which he fixes breakfast for the new tenants, is a comic delight. As the radio plays an arrangement of the "Habanera" from Carmen, he dances around the kitchen, at one point even putting a rose between his teeth. It's the kind of thing that would be insufferably over-the-top in the hands of a less-accomplished actor, but Greer's movement is so controlled and, at times, even graceful, he pulls it off. The script requires not one, but both of the straight boys to look in at different times and mug to the camera to register that they can't believe what he's doing. In the theatre, that's what we call "milking the cat." Frankly, the young men would be better advised to study his performance as a lesson in how to play farce.

They'd also be well-advised to study Christopher Riordan's work as Duane, the resident hottie. Riordan doesn't have a lot to do, which is a pity. He's an experienced dancer who knows how to make every movement count, and he's smart enough to know how people behave. When he first shows up, he delivers the "cruise of death" to the two guys with skill and precision. During the costume party scene, the camera keeps cutting to him for good reason. Not only does he look terrific (he's done up in hippie garb, and let's just say, his beads are very well supported), but he also drops his pithy observations on what's going on with all the skill of a young Eve Arden.

The Gay Deceivers did surprisingly well at the box office, which historian Richard Barrios credits to Greer's performance. He should have had a great career, but after playing Queenie in the overwrought film version of Fortune and Men's Eyes (1971), he was so typed in gay roles he found it hard to get film work (he wasn't the only one typed; Coughlin, who wasn't a bad actor, had trouble finding work after The Gay Deceivers). It's too bad the screen hadn't progressed enough to star Greer in a series of films as the landlord, with Riordan more prominently featured. Imagine how much fun that might have been.

Alexander Bracq shot through shadows in Seeing Heaven, an image as cloudy as the rest of the film

At the start of Ian Powell's Seeing Heaven (2010) we learn three things about the romantic young hustler Paul (Alexander Bracq): he's the most beautiful man porn director Baxter (Lee Chapman) has ever seen; he's trying to find his long-lost twin brother, also an escort; and whenever he has sex, he has visions of his brother, so he agrees to star in Baxter's newest film hoping all that sex will lead him to the man. Therein lie most of the film's problems.

Calling somebody "the most" anything in a visual medium, is generally not a good idea. There's a reason Alfred Hitchcock never showed the audience the first Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca (1940). Nothing could live up to her description. It's not that Bracq is unattractive. It's just hard to buy him as the most beautiful man anybody has ever seen. Hell, Chapman is lots hotter. Does the man never look in the mirror?

As for Paul's wanting to find his twin: Bracq, most of whose credits are for stunt work rather than acting, is such a weak actor it's hard to believe his wanting anything. Playing objectives seems to be somewhere outside his wheelhouse.

The idea of having visions during sex might work for a soft-core thriller. But Powell's script also has Paul experiencing visions while he sleeps, when he looks at art and when he watches other people have sex. So, why does he need to star in a porn film to find his brother. It would seem a nice trip to a museum would do the trick.

I guess that would mean cutting the videos of him shooting the porn film. They're not that hot, certainly not as much fun as the porn scenes in King Cobra. Here, it really is like finding gay Skinemax among your cable channels. Frequently after a torrid love scene, the two guys get out of bed wearing underwear, which isn't a physical impossibility, but I mean, why bother.

If the whole thing moved more quickly, the ludicrous plotting might work on at least a camp level. You could laugh at it and make wisecracks in between the lines. But this thing is so slow, you begin to think you could play Mourning Becomes Electra during the pauses.

It's also bristling with self-importance. It's not just the moody scenes of people staring at each other or even the morose Baxter chain-smoking through his own sexual encounters (and never at any other time). Baxter's dream is to make one more porn film so he can finance the serious script he's written, which would cast Paul as the most beautiful man in the world. At the film's end, after a bunch of strained revelations, including another producer's plot to drug Paul into doing bareback scenes, Baxter decides his more serious film is just another way of objectifying the young man, so he throws his script from the balcony of his apartment…one page at a time…in slow motion. It already seems hypocritical for the film to want us to feel guilty about watching the sex scenes.  Since they're really not all that hot, it ultimately seems like the height of self-deception.