What if ‘Hellraiser’ was Gay(er) and DTF?

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Short Takes: ‘Mascara’ (1987) ★★

Mascara was distributed by
Cannon Films, but it’s clear
director Patrick Conrad wanted it
to be part of the Artificial Eye/
Curzon catalog.

Mascara comes sooo close to being great Eurotrash. It ticks all the right boxes: Sexual secrets! Murder! Sleazy set-pieces! Michael Sarrazin in drag! Unfortunately, Belgian director Patrick Conrad decided to aim for the art house crowd, so prepare for your exploitation expectations to get doused by a cold glass of pretension and boredom.

Wealthy Gaby Hart (Charlotte Rampling) and police director Bert Sanders (Sarrazin) are an elite, opera loving couple, but fuck Gaby, this movie is about Bert. While watching a performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, Bert becomes transfixed—not by the lead diva’s performance but her costume (think Bob Mackie if he were designing for a more modest Cher). He immediately approaches costume designer Chris (Derek de Lint) about borrowing the gown for a friend to wear at her birthday party. Chris refuses, but he’s as transfixed by Gaby as Bert is by the gown, so he relents thinking that doing so will further ingratiate himself with her. Except, surprise, the friend Chris has in mind is not Gaby but Pepper (Eva Robins).

Other surprises follow, as well as a fair amount of sleaze and murder. Bert wants Pepper to wear the gown as she lip-syncs opera on stage at Mister Butterfly, a literal underground club featuring a variety of sexual nonconformists and kinky exhibitions, including an extra from Cats giving bloody blowjobs, an androgynous man eating oysters from a gimp’s mouth, and a man lowering his jock-strapped ass over a woman’s face (at least I think it’s a woman; the genders of the performers are often as murky as the lighting). You’d think with all these titillating sideshows that Pepper’s performance would be ignored, but the audience is spellbound, especially Bert, who appears a little turned on. Yet when Pepper offers her naked body to him (“I know all there is to know…about the crying game”), Bert is enraged that she’d think he’s anything other than heterosexual and kills her. When his attempt to dump the body is interrupted, he decides the best way to cover up the crime is to kill other trans performers and frame Chris.

Just as things are getting interesting, Gaby and Chris begin an affair. A very calm, tasteful affair. It’s the type of affair that would drive you back to your spouse, just to spice things up. What I’m trying to say is Gaby and Chris’s relationship is tragically dull, and a tragic waste of Rampling, who has little to do other than strut through the movie wearing chic-for-their-time pantsuits and smile enigmatically. At the risk of spoiling things (skip to the next paragraph now if you must), the character of Gaby would’ve been better used as Bert’s co-conspirator rather than the movie’s tragic heroine.

Mascara sort of reminded me of the 1989 giallo Arabella: Black Angel, if Arabella tried to be classy. Fortunately, Arabella knew what it was. Mascara, like its main character Bert, wants to keep its salacious subject matter at an arm’s distance when it would’ve done better to fully embrace it. As it is, Romy Haag’s Marianne Faithfull-at-half-price cover of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” will likely stick with you longer than the movie’s Madonna music video-style kink. 

Best Bitches

There seem to be some unwritten rules when it comes to how TV and movies portray friendship. In slasher movies, friends are indistinguishable from bullies, competing to see who’s the bigger asshole until they’re beheaded by a chainsaw-wielding maniac. Male friendships are usually situational, and usually action-adventure related: a grizzled cop assigned a rookie/loose cannon partner, or two partners in crime out to make one last score. In either case, they’re too busy blowing shit up to get hung up on how much they mean to each other because #NoHomo.

Kurt Russell never knew he was the wind beneath Sly’s wings.

In “chick flicks,” however, female friendships tend to go way back, sometimes as far back as elementary school, and last a lifetime, with no chainsaw-wielding maniac to put them out of their misery. The 1980s were (roughly) bookended by two such stories, 1981’s RICH AND FAMOUS and 1988’s BEACHES, both telling essentially the same story, though with significantly different results.

The friendship in Rich and Famous dates to the 1950s, when Liz Hamilton (Jacqueline Bisset), beautiful, studious and English, and Merry Noel Blake (Candice Bergen), beautiful, shallow and Southern, were roommates at Smith College. Merry elopes with Doug (David Selby), moving to California and becoming a well-off stay-at-home mom. Liz, on the other hand, becomes an Important Writer, her first novel garnering acclaim among the intelligentsia who clamor for a second book that Liz can’t seem to finish.

But Merry hasn’t been spending all her time cleaning her beachside house in Malibu and raising her daughter Debby. When she and Liz reconnect in 1969, Merry sheepishly reveals she’s written a roman à clef based on her famous neighbors, one of whom has “become far too familiar with drugs, some of which he puts up his nose!”

Merry and Doug have an unsatisfying night.

Merry then proceeds to read the manuscript to her. It’s clear Liz is not impressed, and a little angry that her friend—not a real writer—is encroaching on her territory (and possibly pissed she’s been kept up all night by Merry’s reading). However, though Liz makes a lot of oblique jabs, she refrains from explicitly criticizing Merry’s book, leaving Merry to believe she liked her novel. Merry urges Liz to show the manuscript to her publisher and though Liz resists at first, she ultimately does, assuming her publisher is too high-minded to even entertain buying it.

You pretty much know what happens next. By 1975, Merry has become a wildly successful—and very prolific—author of trash fiction in the tradition of Jacqueline Susann or Judith Krantz (though she has more in common with Jackie Collins as a talk show personality). This is also the point where Rich and Famous becomes two different films. Merry charges through the rest of the movie like a neurotic Prime Time soap villain, swaddled in fur coats and her hair perfectly coiffed, getting into arguments with whomever is in her path: with her husband, who leaves her; with her teenage daughter Debby (Meg Ryan in her film debut), who leaves her; and, crucially, with Liz.

Merry is impervious to Doug’s threats.

If Bergen acts as if she’s in Valley of the Dolls, or possibly 101 Dalmatians, Bisset, who co-produced (though only her production company Jacquet is credited), acts as if she’s in The Turning Point, giving a grounded performance as she glides gracefully through her scenes looking fabulous in silk blouses and pencil skirts, but also looking the same no matter what decade she’s supposed to be in (Bergen’s fashions may be outrageous, but at least they suggest the passage of time, whereas Bisset spends the entire movie stuck in 1978).

Liz joins the mile high club with widower Max (an uncredited Michael
Brandon). Spoiler: Max’s wife is very much alive.

Matt Lattanzi and Jacqueline Bisset audition
for their 1983 movies My Tutor and Class.

The movie also doesn’t quite know what to do with Liz, apparently finding her well-respected work as boring as the audience does. So, the movie instead focuses on Liz’s sex life. She joins the mile high club with a 30-something “widower” she meets on a flight to New York (“We hope your flight has been pleasurable,” a flight attendant intones over the cabin speakers as Liz is getting plowed in the airplane’s bathroom). Later, she’s seduced by an 18-year-old gigolo in nut-crunchingly tight jeans (Olivia Newton-John’s then future ex-husband Matt Lattanzi), before ultimately settling into a doomed romance with Chris (Hart Bochner), a 22-year-old Rolling Stone reporter.

I first thought the movie was trying to emphasize how Liz is a sexually liberated woman, in contrast to Merry who, despite writing a lot about sex, is a puritan at heart. In one of Liz and Merry’s many arguments, Liz asks Merry just how many men one must fuck to qualify as a slut. “Three!” Merry snaps. But ascribing a deeper meaning to Liz’s dalliances is giving Rich and Famous too much credit. Liz is down to fuck because how long are people going to sit for her discussing T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence with Hart Bochner?

Merry and Liz have yet another fight.

Rich and Famous is a remake of the 1943 film Old Acquaintance, starring Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins, though George Ayres’ screenplay has more in common with a Sidney Sheldon novel than the original John Van Druten play. The movie is capably helmed by Golden Age Hollywood director George Cukor, but even he can’t elevate the film. Rich and Famous is just trash.

Jacqueline Bisset and Candice Bergen toast
making it to the end of Rich and Famous.

But while being trash makes Rich and Famous an unfortunate final bow for Cukor, who died in 1983 at age 83, it’s for that very reason it’s worth checking out. Merry would be insufferable in real life, but Bergen’s portrayal of her livens up the film considerably. When I saw this movie in 1981, I’d only known Bergen as The Golden Turkey Awards’ nominee for the Lifetime Achievement Award – Worst Actress. The nomination was unfair, it turned out (Raquel Welch was the “winner,” which I also disagree with). I’ll concede that Bergen can be a bit wooden in dramatic roles, but fortunately the role of Merry allows Bergen to showcase her flair for comedy. Though her Southern accent is better suited for an SNL sketch than a serious movie, I can overlook that when Bergen’s delivering such lines as “We all have these little bits in our pants, that doesn’t mean we have to pick at them all the time,” and “If you get to thinking about boys too much, just get on the back of a horse.” You’ll never buy that these two women would still exchange Christmas cards two years after leaving college, let alone maintain a close friendship for more than two decades, but Bergen’s over-the-top performance makes Rich and Famous worth watching.

From Trash to Schmaltz

Rich and Famous was a commercial failure when it was released in 1981, but that didn’t stop Disney’s Touchstone Pictures from peddling the same story seven years later when it released Beaches in 1988.

Though the two films have the shared theme of an enduring friendship forged between opposites, they do have some key differences. The friends in Rich and Famous are on a level playing field, both being attractive, privileged women (Merry might be the rich one, but apparently there is considerable cash to be made writing magazine think pieces, judging by Liz’s a picturesque riverside farmhouse in Connecticut). In Beaches, the friendship is between the tough-talking, working-class C.C. Bloom (Bette Midler) and the conventionally attractive, wealthy WASP Hillary (Barbara Hershey). In Rich and Famous, Liz and Merry are in competition with each other in the world of publishing, whereas in Beaches C.C. is an entertainer and Hillary is an attorney. The biggest difference of all: Rich and Famous ends with a gay panic joke; Beaches ends with the death of one of its main characters. I would apologize for the spoiler, but the movie pretty much gives it away in the first 10 minutes, when C.C.’s concert rehearsal at the Hollywood Bowl is interrupted with the news that Hillary is in the hospital. 

Before she was Blossom or annoying, Mayim Bialik
killed it as Lil’ C.C. in Beaches.

Beaches’ central friendship also begins in the late 1950s, when a lost 11-year-old Hillary, played by Marcie Leeds, vacationing in Atlantic City with her family, meets 11-year-old C.C., played by Miyam “Ask me about my Ph.D. in neuroscience!” Bialik (in fairness, while Bialik is kind of annoying today, she is pretty great in this early role). Hillary is fascinated by this brash girl she meets under the Boardwalk, and C.C. is eager to please her new fan. Even though the girls live on different coasts, they maintain their friendship through frequent letters (the Iris Rainer-Dart novel on which Beaches is based tells much of its story through the main characters’ letters).

Too bad he’s not a furry: John Pierce (John Heard) is more
 into Hillary at first meeting.

Their friendship is tested in adulthood, especially whenever the two women are in the same room together. They’re all squeals and hugs in the late 1960s, when they share a cramped New York walk-up, C.C. singing in dive bars and delivering/performing singing telegrams and Hillary working for the ACLU. Their friendship becomes strained, however, when they fall for the same man, theater director John Pierce (the late John Heard).

She’ll cut a bitch.

Not pictured: Barbara Hershey and
Bette Midler

The film settles into a pattern: C.C. and Hillary reunite, resume their friendship, then fight/separate abruptly. Along the way the women marry—C.C. to John; Hillary to Michael Essex (James Read), a snooty attorney who is most definitely not a fan of his wife’s tacky friend—only to get divorced a few years later. C.C. finally achieves her dream of stardom, her bawdy musical revue making her the toast of Broadway in the early 1970s, but near the decade’s end she’s hoping recording a disco album will revive her flagging career (Beaches none too subtly mimics the ups and downs of Midler’s own career). Disco can wait, though, C.C. deciding to stick around in San Francisco to help Hillary through her pregnancy (a parting gift from Michael). Things take a ridiculous turn when C.C. begins dating Hillary’s OB/GYN (the late Spalding Gray), uncharacteristically considering abandoning show business to become his wife. That is, until she gets a call from her agent about a part in a play that’s perfect for her. She abruptly leaves for New York—and leaves Hillary to break the bad news to her doctor. “He’d take it coming from you,” C.C. says. “He’s your gynecologist!”

Hillary questions C.C.’s choices, but not that hair.

Hillary returns to practicing law, balancing her career and motherhood (easier to do when you’re already rich). But then she’s diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy, a condition that, though fatal, ensures Hillary will remain looking lovely on her way out. Cue “Wind Beneath My Wings.”

It’s titled Beaches for a reason.

The Divine Miss M adds one more ballad to
Beaches’ bestselling soundtrack.

Though novelist Rainer-Dart reportedly had Cher in mind when she conceived the character of C.C. (Cee Cee in the book), the role is tailor made for Midler. The role not only shows off Midler’s strengths as an entertainer, but it also provides Midler an opportunity to recycle re-introduce past material, as she does when C.C. performs the ditty “Otto Titsling,” originally featured on her 1985 comedy album Mud will be Flung Tonight. Hershey is good, too, counterbalancing Midler’s flamboyance with a relatively restrained performance, but really, the part of Hillary could just as well be credited as The Other One (Hershey got more publicity for getting collagen lip injections for the film than she did for her performance in it). This is Bette’s show.

Beaches was remade in 2017 as a Lifetime
 TV movie, starring Idina Menzel
 and Nia Long, retroactively making
the 1988 original look like Terms of
Endearment. Menzel and Long do all right
with what they’re given, and the script even
improves on the original slightly by
eliminating that romance between C.C.
 and Hillary’s gynecologist, but otherwise
 it’s about what you would expect.
Which is to say: don’t bother.

Beaches was a box office hit when it was released in 1988, solidifying Midler’s status as a movie star. Its soundtrack was an even bigger hit, reviving Midler’s then dormant singing career. I love Midler, so much that I saw Jinxed! during its theatrical run and liked it (c’mon, she’s done much, much worse). Yet even though it’s one of Midler’s better movies, Beaches is not a favorite. Director Garry Marshall adeptly balances the comedy and drama, but the laughs are mild—I laughed harder and more often watching Rich and Famous—and the drama hollow. Marshall’s roots in TV sit-coms are quite apparent, the result being that Beaches has more in common with A Very Special Episode than a big screen dramedy, with all the edges sanded down for a wide audience. This reputed weepie failed to jerk a single tear from my eyes, probably because I’m dead inside, but I also blame it on the fact that many of Beaches’ emotional beats feel manipulative. Rich and Famous may be trash, but Beaches is schmaltz.

Another reason I’m not a huge fan of Beaches has nothing to do with the movie itself but what it represents. It’s the demarcation line in Midler’s career when she went from being that raucous performer adored by your gay uncle to that sappy balladeer your mom likes (mitigating factor: by 1988, your gay uncle was probably dead). Instead of growing Midler settled, making saccharine dramedies (Stella; For the Boys) and comedies of varying quality, the best of which being her 1996 hit The First Wives Club, though even that movie falls short of its potential, Olivia Goldsmith’s novel being transformed from dark revenge fantasy to frothy—and toothless—romp. The Divine Miss M persona Midler had crafted throughout the ’70s only got trotted out for unsuspecting moms during live performances. Consequently, millennials likely only know her as the singer of “Wind Beneath My Wings” and star of Hocus Pocus. For Gen Z, she’s just another boomer celebrity tweeting herself into hot water.

Beaches may be the more successful ’80s movie about female friendship, but it’s the ’70s-style trashiness of Rich and Famous that I always return to. Love the Beaches soundtrack, though.

Candice Bergen and Bette Midler have each starred in more recent movies about life-long
friendships among women, now a staple in the SCAPT subgenre. Book Club was enjoyable, but its sequel, Book Club: The Next Chapter, was fucking painful. I haven’t seen The Fabulous Four yet, but the reviews have not been glowing.

Short Takes: ‘Butterflies in Heat’ (1979) ★ ½

In 1986 Butterflies in Heat appeared
on video store shelves as Tropic of Desire
(no, not that one), masquerading
as a sexy romance.

I’ll give this much to Butterflies in Heat, the 1979 film adaptation of Darwin Porter’s 1976 novel: it’s got a hell of an opening shot. The first thing we see onscreen is a close-up of the lead actor’s crotch, his jeans adorned with an elaborate butterfly patch placed over where the head of his dick rests. OK, I’m intrigued.

That lead actor is 1970s model Matt Collins, who plays Numie Chase, a hustler who’s come down to Key West, Florida, to put as many miles as possible between him and a potential murder charge in New York City. While there he meets Lola (the incomparable Eartha Kitt), a nightclub singer who loves white wigs, referring to herself in the third person, and pretty young men like Numie. However, she has no intention of paying for it (“People pay Lola,” she informs him). Numie then spots Anne (bland Roxanne Gregory), sitting alone in a corner of the same tawdry club, his interest in her strictly recreational. Anne resists his advances, but only because she is afraid of incurring the wrath of her domineering mother, Leonora (Barbara Baxley), supposedly a very rich and very famous fashion designer though her decaying mansion suggests the money and fame are disappearing fast. Numie instead settles for fucking (off-screen) Anne’s no-so-closeted husband (Numie says he doesn’t usually service dudes, but the watch he’s offered as payment is valued at $1,000). Rounding out the cast of characters is Leonora’s plus-sized housekeeper/assistant Tangerine (Pat Carroll), who is willing to pay for Numie’s body but settles for his friendship instead, and Sheriff Webb (Bert Williams), who appears periodically to rough up Numie and arrest him on spurious charges.

Butterflies in Heat—the book and the movie—sounds like the kind shit I’d love. It’s Tennessee Williams via glory hole or, at the very least, a queer 92 in the Shade. Instead, I found both to be tedious and frustrating. I bought a copy of Porter’s novel when it was re-released in the mid-1990s with a cover more befitting a gay porn video, my hopes high that I’d found some trash I could truly treasure. I barely made it through 75 pages before giving up. Porter, it turned out, was more interested in having his female (and female-presenting) characters deliver paragraphs of fanciful dialog than in Numie unleashing the monster caged within his butterfly-festooned jeans. Its gay sensibility was aimed not at bath house sluts, as its X-rated cover art suggested, but at drag cabaret queens.

I likely would have been just as disappointed if I bought
the 1976 paperback edition of Butterflies in Heat (left),
but at least that cover doesn't arouse expectations as high—
and as hard—as the raunchy cover for the 1997 edition.

Director Cash Baxter’s movie adaptation similarly let me down despite all it had going for it. Though the film’s budget is obviously meager, the production is fittingly seedy, and the cast of mostly TV veterans doubles its value. Kitt’s Lola—a drag queen in the book but more ambiguous here—is almost single-handedly worth the price of admission. Carroll, a character actor perhaps best-known today as the voice of Ursula in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, takes what could easily be described as The Shelley Winters Role and makes the character Tangerine her own. The least interesting performances are by Collins and Gregory, but then they are saddled with Butterflies’ least interesting characters. Though screenwriters Tony (Point of Terror) Crechales and George (The Killing Kind) Edwards reign in the book’s long-winded dialog, they also water down its gay appeal and any potential the movie had of becoming a camp classic. And forget any sexy fun. The movie’s one (one!) sex scene is fairly tepid, with only Gregory showing any skin. Despite everyone lusting after Numie, Collins, who sort of resembles Nathan Fillion in his Firefly days, seldom takes off his shirt, let alone his pants.

Butterflies in Heat was released on video in 1986 under the title Tropic of Desire—“not to be confused with the same-named porno movie,” the IMDb trivia page cheekily warns. Likely anyone renting the porn movie by mistake would’ve been less disappointed. At least that Tropic of Desire delivers what it promises; not so this cock tease of a movie.