Without Warning! (Allart Productions, United Artists, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 2), once my husband Charles got back from work, I ran us a surprisingly good 1952 independent thriller called Without Warning! (the original poster art did not contain the exclamation point, but the actual credit did) which was the brainchild of three men who met each other in combat during World War II: producers Arthur Gardner and Jules W. Levy and director Arnold Laven. They got a script from William Raynor about a psychopathic killer named Carl Martin (Adam Williams) who targeted young, attractive women with blonde hair because he’d briefly been married to one, and when she left him he went crazy and targeted women who looked like his ex. Other quirks in his nature is that he always committed his murders on or about the first of a new month, and he uses a peculiar pair of garden shears as a weapon. Without Warning! isn’t a film noir either thematically or visually – almost all of it takes place outdoors in bright spaces even though yet another quirk in the murderer’s psyche is that he usually strikes at 3 a.m. – though the cinematographer, Joseph Biroc, is largely known for his noirs, including Johnny Allegro (1949), Cry Danger (1951), The Glass Wall (1953), Vice Squad (1953), World for Ransom (1954), and another Gardner-Levy-Laven production, Down Three Dark Streets (1954). But it is a quite well done thriller, part police procedural and part suspense film, and fortunately Arnold Laven and William Raynor adopted Alfred Hitchcock’s technique of letting us, the audience, know from the get-go who the bad guy is and building suspense and tension from our wondering where and how the characters will find out.

It also is a film that benefited from its no-name cast; though all the actors in it are at least competent, and Adam Williams and Meg Randall (as Jane Saunders, daughter of a garden-supply store Carl shops at regularly who just happens to be his “type”) considerably better than that, there were only two cast members I’d heard of before. One was John Maxwell (as Jane’s father) and one was Robert Shayne (playing police psychiatrist Dr. Werner – well, there had to be a psychiatrist with a German-sounding name in it somewhere!). Fortunately the people in this film are not only quite good actors, they don’t have the automatic audience associations bigger-name stars would have. Imagine this movie with Lawrence Tierney as Carl and the game would be over right away! At first the police are clueless as to how to find and capture the killer, but they get a lucky break when during one of his assaults the spring on his garden shears falls off and the police crime-scene team recovers it. Police soil chemist Charlie Wilkins (Byron Kane) analyzes the dirt on the spring and realizes it comes from three separate places, so the cops deduce that he works as a gardener and does jobs at various locations in the city. At one point the cops send out a group of policewomen who all look like Carl’s “type” and have them stake out various bars in which he might be cruising – and, in a grimly amusing scene repeated in Blake Edwards’s Experiment in Terror a decade later, one of them arrests a man whose only “crime” is trying to pick up a woman other than his wife for a casual quickie.

In another noteworthy scene, Carl is trying to flee the scene after one of his killings – this time of a woman whom he murdered in her car – when two police officers drive up on motorcycles. Carl’s first instinct is to abandon the car and flee on foot, but when the police keep approaching Carl gets back in the car and tries to drive away. One of the cops comes up to him as the car’s back wheel is stuck in a pothole and asks who the woman is and why she isn’t moving. Carl says it’s because she’s fast asleep after a long night, and when the cop thinks better of it, he inadvertently turns his back to Carl, who grabs the cop’s own gun and shoots him with it. Then his partner also tries to apprehend Carl, and Carl shoots him, too, though he recovers and gives his brethren on the force valuable information as to what Carl looks like. Ultimately the police do a canvass of all the garden-supply stores in the city and eventually they hit Saunders’s. Old Man Saunders sends his daughter out to deliver a prize orchid bush to Carl at his home in Chavez Ravine – among other things, Without Warning! is a fascinating document of what Chavez Ravine looked like before its largely Mexican-American population was driven out through eminent domain and displaced to build Dodger Stadium. (One intriguing minor character is a Mexican girl who keeps interrupting Carl’s murderous rages with demands that he fix her doll, which has literally lost her head.) There’s an exciting climax as Carl suddenly realizes that Jane is his “type” and decides to kill her, while we’re kept in suspense as to whether the police, who are there to question her dad, will get there in time to rescue Jane and arrest or kill Carl. Ultimately one of the cops kills Carl just in time to rescue Jane from his fiendish clutches. Without Warning! is an engaging film and surprisingly well-made given the probable limitations of the company’s budget, and Adam Williams’s restrained approach to playing a psycho killer was well ahead of its time, anticipating Anthony Perkins’s in Hitchcock’s Psycho by eight years.

They Live By Night (RKO, 1947, released 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, July 1) I successfully enticed my husband Charles out of the bedroom, where he’d been avoiding the news, to watch a film on Turner Classic Movies that we’d seen together ages ago on a VHS dub from another TCM showing: They Live by Night, filmed in 1947 and released in 1948 in Britain and 1949 in the U.S. It started out as a 1937 novel by Edward Anderson (it was the last of two novels he published even though he lived until 1969) called Thieves Like Us. It was about a young man named Albert “Bowie” Bowers (Farley Granger), who was imprisoned for murder at age 16. Seven years later he and two other convicts, Chickamaw “One-Eye” Mobley (Howard Da Silva) and Henry “T-Dub” Mansfield (Jay C. Flippen), escape from prison and head for the home of Chickamaw’s older brother Robert (Wil Wright, reuniting him and Da Silva from the cast of The Blue Dahlia, Raymond Chandler’s only original screenplay that was actually filmed, which like They Live by Night was produced by former Orson Welles associate John Houseman) to hide out. They successfully rob a local bank and split the money. Bowie falls in love with Chickamaw’s niece Catherine “Keechie” Mobley (Cathy O’Donnell) and the two escape together, first on a bus and then in a car a corrupt justice of the peace named Hawkins (a charming performance by Ian Wolfe) brokers for them after they impulsively visit his chapel, where he offers weddings for $20 ($10 additional if you want an audio record of the service) with a ring thrown in for an extra $5. Bowie and Keechie have a conversation with Hawkins about where they can flee to, and Hawkins recommends Mexico. They end up in a mountain resort and set up housekeeping when their idyll, such as it is, is interrupted by Chickamaw, who crashes their place and demands that Bowie join him and T-Dub for another bank robbery. Bowie reluctantly agrees to join them for one last caper, but (though we don’t see any of it) that “one last caper” ends badly, with T-Dub killed in a shoot-out with police and Chickamaw jealous of the media attention Bowie is getting as the supposed mastermind of the robbery.

Desperate for a place to hide out, Bowie and Keechie end up in a motel owned by Mattie Mobley (Helen Craig), wife of a third Mobley brother who’s in prison on an allegedly unjust charge. Alas, Mattie decides to rat them out to the police in exchange for freedom for her brother, and the film ends with a shoot-out in which Bowie goes out with a revolver, the police open fire with high-powered rifles, and Bowie ends up dying in Keechie’s arms. After he expires, she reads the farewell note he’d written her. As I noted in previous viewings of the movie, there’s an ambiguous ending that can be read as a “life goes on” statement, since Keechie is pregnant with Bowie’s child when Bowie is killed and they’re both convinced he will be a boy even though there was no way to tell in advance in 1948. It can also be read considerably more pessimistically, given that earlier Bowie had told Keechie that his father, too, had been a criminal and had been killed by police before Bowie was born. There’s at least a hint that the boy will meet as nasty a fate as his father, drifting into crime and later being killed by police. RKO had bought the book in 1941; according to Edward Anderson’s Wikipedia page he got just $500 for the rights, but according to the Wikipedia page on the film the cost to the studio was $10,000. (Both could be right; it’s possible that during the four years between 1937 and 1941 Anderson might have sold the movie rights to someone else and RKO may have paid a lot more to the someone else than Anderson himself got.)

Several writers attempted to adapt Anderson’s novel for film, but the project got stalled until after World War II, when Dore Schary was hired as production chief at RKO. He came with a brief to make RKO the most adventurous major Hollywood studio, and he signed the young Nicholas Ray, who’d just got out of the service and written the script for the Monogram musical Swing Parade of 1946, on the basis of his treatment for Thieves Like Us. Schary hired Ray to both write and direct the film, and assigned John Houseman to produce, though in the end he put on a more experienced screenwriter, Charles Schnee, to help Ray flesh out his concept into a filmable screenplay. Ray insisted on hiring two of Samuel Goldwyn’s contract players, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, to play Bowie and Keechie, and Granger later wrote in his autobiography (actually ghost-written by his partner, Robert Patrick; when he came out to San Diego to promote the book it was pretty obvious that Granger’s memory was mostly gone and obviously Patrick had written the book based on his recollections of the stories Granger had told him about his career over the years), “Ray and John Houseman were among the few people who fought for me in my career. They said no, we will not make the film without him. When Nick believed in you, he was very loyal.” (I noticed both the Wikipedia page on the film and Alicia Malone’s introduction on TCM carefully cherry-picked Granger’s quotes about Ray; later in his book he said Ray was a monumentally overrated director and They Live by Night and Rebel Without a Cause were his only truly great films.)

Malone also said that Robert Mitchum had been considered for the film, but as good as he was he couldn’t have captured Bowie’s wide-eyed innocence and naïveté about the world. According to the Wikipedia page Mitchum had actually wanted to play the supporting role of Chickamaw, but either Houseman, Schary, or some of the other RKO executives felt that was too small a part for an actor they were working to build up into a major star and who’d already been nominated for an Academy Award for 1945’s The Story of G.I. Joe. Schary and Houseman both encouraged Ray to experiment with unusual filmmaking techniques, including shooting the opening scene of the three convicts driving away from prison in a stolen car and several other key scenes from a helicopter. This posed a problem because Howard Da Silva kept losing his hairpiece from the backwash of the helicopter blades, but the effect is a quite striking one that reinforces the sense that these characters are alienated from society at large. That sense is also communicated by the odd shot before the opening credits, which show Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell making love (or as close to it as the Production Code would allow) as we read the words, “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” (That does sound like Dore Schary, whose penchant for shoe-horning social comment into his films got so bad that later, when he was head of production at MGM, there was a joke around Hollywood that Schary had “sold MGM’s birthright for a pot of message.”)

They Live by Night was cited in Pauline Kael’s famous extended review of the 1967 Bonnie and Clyde as among the precursors to that classic crooks-on-the-run tale, along with two movies I think are even better: Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1949). But They Live by Night (a title change Howard Hughes insisted on when he bought RKO in 1948) still holds up surprisingly well for its doomed romanticism and the perfection of Farley Granger’s performance: he really does make us believe that despite having almost literally grown up in prison, he’s somehow retained a belief in the basic decency and goodness of the human race even as it gets sorely tested, and ultimately fails him, by the later events of the story. Mention should also be made of the traditional blues song, “Your Red Wagon,” sung brilliantly in a nightclub scene by Marie Bryant. Bryant was a singer who worked with Duke Ellington on his musicals Jump for Joy and Beggar’s Holiday, and sang “On the Sunny Side of the Street” hauntingly in the Lester Young/Gjon Mili 10-minute short Jammin’ the Blues (1944). “Your Red Wagon” is credited here to Richard M. Jones, Don Raye, and Gene de Paul, but it’s actually an old folk blues that got reworked into white hits like Hank Willliams’s “Move It On Over” and Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.”

Thieves Like Us (George Litto Productions, Jerry Back, United Artists, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In 2006 my husband Charles and I watched Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They Live by Night, shot under Edward Anderson’s original title Thieves Like Us and returned to its 1930’s setting instead of taking place in contemporary times, as a memorial tribute to Altman. I hadn’t started the moviemagg blog at that time and so here’s what I had to say about Thieves Like Us then:

The film was Thieves Like Us, a very interesting Robert Altman movie from 1974 that was a remake of Nicholas Ray’s 1948 classic They Live by Night, though Altman reverted to the original title of Edward Anderson’s source novel as well as to its 1930’s setting (Ray’s version had moved it to a contemporary time frame). Both films tell the tale of three down-home convicts, Chic[k]amaw (Howard Da Silva in the original, John Schuck in the remake); T-Dub (Jay C. Flippen in the original, Bert Remsen in the remake — and at least Altman and his writing collaborators, Calder Willingham and Joan Tewkesbury, explained that the character’s odd name is a further contraction of his initials. T. W., while Ray and Charles Schnee didn’t bother) and the main protagonist, Bowie (Farley Granger in the original, Keith Carradine in the remake), a (relatively) innocent young man — he was convicted of murder but was only peripherally involved in the killing — who enters into a desperate, doomed romance with Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell in the original, Shelley Duvall in the remake), either the daughter or the niece of one of their outside helpers: Mattie (Helen Craig in the original, Louise Fletcher — in her first film — in the remake), whose husband is also an inmate and who’s living with her brother-in-law, Mobley (Wil Wright in the original, Altman’s old M*A*S*Hman Tom Skerritt here). The critics in 1974 inevitably compared the film to Bonnie and Clyde (and They Live by Night had been one of the models for the Bonnie and Clyde movie, along with You Only Live Once and Gun Crazy — surprisingly, not Persons in Hiding, the 1939 Paramount “B” that was the first film about the actual Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow — cited by Pauline Kael in her famous extended review of Bonnie and Clyde) but, if anything, Thieves Like Us seems to have been planned deliberately by Altman as a sort of anti-Bonnie and Clyde.

Where Bonnie and Clyde was frenetic, funny (Arthur Penn, its director, was hailed as a genius for rapid alternations of comedy and violence — though that had been done before by Buster Keaton in The General and Billy Wilder in Some Like It Hot), energetic, brightly colored and punctuated with a banjo-pickin’ score by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Thieves Like Us is somber, dark, absolutely determined not to tap any opportunities for comic relief in the story, done in the past-is-brown look that admittedly wasn’t anywhere near as much of a cliché in 1974 as it is now, and with almost no non-source music whatsoever — just an ironic playing of Jimmie Lunceford’s record of “Organ Grinder’s Swing” as the three crooks go to a bank job they think is going to be easy but is going to get them into major trouble (they don’t even make it to the bank; instead their car is involved in a serious accident and Bowie is incapacitated). The rest of the film is “scored” with actual transcriptions of old radio shows of the period (the 1930’s — though, despite the credits to John Dunning as “radio researcher” and Carole Gister as “researcher,” there’s still a good deal of uncertainty as to just when in the 1930’s this takes place: a speech by Franklin Roosevelt — a recording by the real one — identifies it as 1937 and so does a travel guidebook in a bus station at the end, but one of the live broadcasts used is of the Boswell Sisters, who broke up in 1936; the heavy-duty Depression aura is characteristic of the early 1930’s but the relatively streamlined cars used[1] seem to be from the end of the decade) — sometimes ironically, as when the first lovemaking session between Bowie and Keechie occurs while they’re listening to a broadcast of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — and the 1930’s atmosphere as recreated in the film is seemingly free of anachronisms (at least I didn’t spot any, though I’m relying mostly on the movies of the period for my authentic view of what the 1930’s “really” looked like).

It’s a well done movie and its only flaw is it seems rather bookish, much the way more recent films like Million Dollar Baby and Brokeback Mountain have: it seems just too distant from the characters, too content to let us watch them from afar instead of actually involving us viscerally in their plights. Robert Altman (to whom we were watching the film as an envoi since he died recently) was mostly a pretty cerebral director — M*A*S*H, the film that made his reputation, is surprisingly atypical of his work in its comedy (Altman usually didn’t have much of a sense of humor), rapid pace and overall excitement — and that’s both the strength and the weakness of Thieves Like Us. Its strength is that Altman’s approach seems to go out of its way to de-emphasize the violence inherent in the material — the film is an hour and a half into its two-hour running time before we actually see any on-screen violence and it’s only in the final bank robbery, the one that goes incredibly wrong (the tag line in the ad campaign read, “Robbing 36 banks was easy. Watch what happens when they hit the 37th”), that we actually see the criminals in operation (though there’s one all too obvious visual quote from Bonnie and Clyde: the slow-motion in which Keechie is filmed as she watches the cops shoot her lover) — and its weakness is that we really don’t feel all that much for the characters.

It doesn’t help that, while Altman’s cast is generally at least at the level of Ray’s (and Shelley Duvall is far superior to Cathy O’Donnell in the female lead), Keith Carradine just isn’t as powerful as Bowie as Farley Granger was. Granger’s peculiarly whiny style usually was just annoying, but in the hands of a major director like Ray or Alfred Hitchcock it could turn into a quite effective portrayal of a certain kind of small-time, small-minded man with visions of reaching far beyond his “place” — and Carradine simply can’t cut it in delivering that aspect of the character, as well as he wears the 1930’s clothes and assumes the proper attitude of nice boy pretending to be bad-ass gangster. It’s also odd that Altman, Willingham and Tewkesbury left out one key piece of exposition about Bowie — that his father, also a criminal, was killed before he was born — which gave a profoundly mixed message to the ending (Bowie is shot while Keechie is pregnant with his child, and we can read that either as “life goes on” or, more pessimistically, that with his father dead before he was born the son of Bowie and Keechie will live out the same cycle and also be a criminal, shot down by police while still a young man) — and therefore deprived the ending of a good deal of the poignancy it had in They Live by Night. Still, the strengths of Thieves Like Us far outweigh its weaknesses (and it benefits from not having the attempts at literal “social significance” patched into it that were probably the product of They Live by Night’s executive producer, Dore Schary, and marred that film), and it was a good tribute to Robert Altman and the kind of filmmaking he did well. — 11/29/06

[1] — One Paul Neanover gets a credit for “cars.”

Go Fish (Can I Watch, Islet, KPVI, Killer Films, The Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 30) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for three films in an all-night marathon of movies with more or less Queer themes, none of which I’d seen before and two of which my husband Charles had never seen either. The one Charles had seen was the first one up, Go Fish, shot on black-and-white 16 mm (at a time when it was still cheaper to make a film in black-and-white than in color; now, if anything, it’s just the reverse) in Chicago in the early 1990’s (it was released in 1994 but it had taken three years to make) by director Rose Troche and co-written by her and Guinevere Turner, who’s also in the film as one of the leads. The other lead, V. S. Brodie, is also listed as an executive producer, and typically for a film made by film students on a shoestring budget, Troche is credited not only as director and co-writer but also as editor and optical effects person. Since Go Fish Troche has directed a number of other feature films, including Bedrooms and Hallways (1998), The Safety of Objects (2001), and Chinatown Film Project (2009), but most of her work since has been for series television, including – almost inevitably – episodes of the Lesbian-themed TV series The “L”-Word. From the presentation on imdb.com and the TCM Web site I’d got the impression that Go Fish was essentially a Lesbian rom-com, but while it is that – Troche and Turner used the classic rom-com strategy of presenting two characters who we can see belong together while taking their time about making the characters realize it themselves – it’s also quite a lot more. Go Fish was considered part of the so-called “New Queer Cinema” of the 1990’s, films made by openly Queer filmmakers determined to avoid the wages-of-sin miseries previous movie people had inflicted on their Lesbian or Gay characters.

It’s also a film very much ahead of its time in acknowledging that not all Queer people are white: one of the romantic leads, whose birth name is Camille but goes by “Max West,” is a Latina who’s thrown out of her family’s home when her mom discovers she’s Lesbian. And the woman she seeks solace with when that happens and ultimately moves in with as a platonic roommate is an African-American Lesbian film professor named Kia (T. Wendy McMillan), who has her own rambunctious sex life but also serves as the voice of reason. Max spots a woman named Ely (V. S. Brodie) at a table in a part-diner, part-bar with a largely Lesbian clientele, and because she’s tall, skinny and has long, stringy, hippie-ish hair Max is initially turned off by her. But Kia has become determined to get Max and Ely together even though Ely has a long-distance relationship going with a woman named Kate (whom we never see), who lives in Seattle. The two haven’t seen each other in nearly two years, but Ely is either clinging to the hope that she and Kate can become a real couple again or using Kate as an excuse to avoid any romantic, emotional, or sexual attachments with women in Chicago. One of the things I liked about Go Fish (the title comes from the children’s card game but it also might be an oblique reference to the slang term “fish,” used by woman-hating Gay men to describe either women generally or the alleged smell of their sex organs in particular) is it plays against the stereotype that Lesbians don’t get down ‘n’ dirty about sex. Not only are the characters shown in at least the beginnings of sexual excitement over each other, there’s one remarkable scene in which four of the characters, lying crossways from each other, their heads linked together, in a conversational pose that recurs throughout the movie, discuss the sexiest way to refer to a woman’s main sex organ.

Ironically, the hottest and most explicit sex scene in Go Fish involves one of the women having sex with a man – and it’s a shock when we realize that her sex partner is male. This triggers a fascinating debate that’s at least 20 years ahead of its time as to whether a woman who has sex with men as well as with women can still call herself a “Lesbian” and whether her dalliance with a man threatens her Lesbian identity. The woman in question anticipates the modern-day “Queer theory,” with its rejection of the whole idea that sexual attachments towards one gender or the other define your identity and belief that you should be able to have sex with any willing partner of whichever gender without feeling that characterizes you as “Lesbian,” “Gay,” or even “Bisexual.” There’s also a plot gimmick in that Max’s and Ely’s first date was to a screening of a new film by a Gay male director, which puts them off because even though the director is Gay he’s still stuck in the old-fashioned negative stereotypes of how to depict Queer people on screen. (Remember that this is a movie both made by and about film students.) Later Ely, who in the meantime has had all that long, stringy, hippie-ish hair cut off and ended up looking quite boyish (enough so that once she and Max get together at last, I could readily imagine people seeing them on the street assuming they’re a straight couple, just as I appreciate Rose Troche’s irony in giving both her Lesbian protagonists and a good friend of their, Mel [Brooke Webster], male names), and Max make plans for another date, though in the end they just stay in and there’s a weird scene in which Max notes that Ely’s fingernails are split, she tries to cut them with Max’s toenail clippers, Max takes over and the two ultimately end up in bed together. (One of the other characters even jokes about nail-cutting as foreplay.) Go Fish is a quite charming movie that holds up surprisingly well, and in 1994 it got major distribution (from the Samuel Goldwyn Company), got excellent reviews and did well (at least by independent-cinema standards) at the box office.

Without You I'm Nothing (Go Ahead Bore Me … , Management Company Entertainment Group, New Line Cinema, MGM, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched two more Queer-themed films after Go Fish as part of Turner Classic Movies’ June 30 marathon, but the next one was a major disappointment. It was called Without You I’m Nothing and was filmed in 1990 as a screen adaptation of comedienne Sandra Bernhard’s one-woman show premiered on Broadway in 1988. The full title of the stage show was Without You, I’m Nothing; With You, I’m Not Much Better, and I got the feeling that Bernhard and her director, John Boskovich (who also co-wrote both the stage version and the movie), might have been better off if they’d just stuck a camera in front of Bernhard doing the Broadway show than in trying to add movie-style “production values.” According to TCM host Dave Karger, the idea behind the movie was that Bernhard had begun cutting up and doing diva antics during the Broadway run of her show, and her fearsome dykey manager Ingrid Horn (Lu Leonard) felt she needed to be taken down a few pegs. So she booked Bernhard into an all-Black nightclub (though it’s played on screen by a solidly white venue, the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, near which Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. got shot and killed in June 1968 and also where I lost my virginity during a conference of student journalists in April 1973; I remember walking across the then-deserted stage of the Cocoanut Grove and recalling that that’s where Bing Crosby became a star with Gus Arnheim’s band in 1931) with a batch of disinterested Black patrons. But that’s not at all apparent in the actual movie. The audience ultimately leaves piecemeal during the show until by the time Bernhard finishes, there’s just one person left.

Bernhard’s show was mostly a stand-up comedy routine, but she periodically broke off to do songs, including her audacious opening number: Bernhard in blackface doing Nina Simone’s classic about racial and gender oppression, “Four Women.” Unfortunately, Bernhard left out one of the women (the second in Simone’s sequence, the mixed-race Sofronia, who was the product of a rich white man raping her mother), and she did the rest of the song surprisingly powerfully but was no match for Simone’s version. Sandra Bernhard became at least an “honorary Queer” by association with Madonna, who became her friend from 1987 to 1992. The two were widely rumored to have been lovers, though both denied it. More recently Bernhard has publicly identified as Bisexual and gave birth to a child, Cicely, in 1998 whom she’s raising with one of her female partners, Sara Switzer. I didn’t care for this film much, despite some genuinely creative and funny moments (including a welcome guest appearance by ex-X punk rocker John Doe, who duets with Bernhard on one of her songs), partly because Sandra Bernhard, or at least her stage persona, is one of those obnoxiously pushy Jewish “broad” types like Joan Rivers, Fran Lebowitz (who made a cameo appearance as herself in TCM’s next Queer-themed film, the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning), and others. She made some interesting song choices, including Hank Williams’s stunning lament “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (misidentified on imdb.com as “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die”) and Prince’s “Little Red Corvette,” which Bernhard first sings in a U.S. flag-based costume and then strip-teases to with Prince’s own record on the soundtrack. (One wonders how the producers got the notoriously prissy Prince, who was famous for not allowing anyone invited to his home to use swear words, to agree to let his record be used.) Ultimately Without You I’m Nothing was a real disappointment, especially after the quality and complexity of Go Fish, and though it’s nice that Sandra Bernhard is not only still alive but still active, her act remains at best an acquired taste for me.

Paris Is Burning (Art Matters Inc., BBC Television, Edelman Family Fund, Miramax, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Off White Productions Inc., Prestige, The Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Paul Robeson Fund, WNYC-TV, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the third film on TCM’s Queer agenda on June 30 was both a much better movie and a more interesting showcase for its participants. It was called Paris Is Burning and was about the low-budget drag “ball” scene in New York City in the late 1980’s. It began with a long credits sequence acknowledging UCLA’s help with restoring it, which led me to comment that it seemed decidedly odd that a film made in 1990 should need restoration. My husband Charles noted how grainy the initial images were and said, “If this is what it looks like restored, I’m afraid to think of what it looked like before.” Although at least Paris Is Burning is in color – it had to be to do justice to the stunning drag outfits many of the cast members wore – it was a pretty low-budget production. It was produced and directed by Jennie Livingston, a white Jewish woman graduate of Yale University, and since virtually all the film’s participants were people of color she was almost inevitably accused of “cultural appropriation” for having made a film about marginalized Black and Brown people. Paris Is Burning dealt with a well-defined “ball” culture in New York City’s Harlem in the late 1980’s, and my first surprise was that though the film centered around a series of contests in which the winners got elaborate trophies, they weren’t all drag shows. A number of the pageants were for the most convincing contestants dressed as men, particularly as business executives in the nation’s capital of high finance, which the participants interviewed for the film admit is because they couldn’t really hope to score such jobs because they weren’t well-to-do enough to get the education needed for jobs like that. So they did the best they could and posed as high-class business executives, just as their drag-queen brethren posed as movie stars or fashion models.

Paris Is Burning is an almost anthropological look at an intriguing subculture, in which the participants in the ball contests are generally members of “houses.” Some of them analogize these to street gangs, but they generally aren’t violent (though there’s a thin edge of angry rivalry among contestants who believe they’ve been unfairly cheated out of a prize that was rightfully theirs). They do give their members a sense of belonging, a sense of “family” that they didn’t get from their real ones, many of whom threw them out once they realized they were Gay. One young queen actually tells how his mother discovered his mink coat and, as revenge and punishment, actually took it into the back yard and literally burned it. The houses generally took their names either from the world of fashion (one is called “Saint Laurent”) or of overall hype (“Xtravaganza,” “Ninja,” “LaBeija,” “Duprée”), and most of the members use the names of their houses as their drag names. Needless to say, as with every subculture the New York “ball” scene developed its own slang, including “voguing” (a set of staccato dance moves styled, as the voguers in the movie acknowledged, after the designs on the walls of ancient Egyptian tombs), “mopping” (shoplifting garments from high-end fashion stores that they couldn’t afford to pay for), “reading” and “shining.” The latter two denote the same kinds of insult games earlier young Black men in the 1920’s and 1930’s called “dozening” – challenges to each other to see who could come up with the most creative and stinging insults – which were also at least part of the origins of rap music.

And as usual in these sorts of movies about subcultures, there’s an éminence grise in the person of Dorian Corey, who recalls the days during which he was starting out on the scene. He reminisced about the days when the great drag queens actually made their own clothes instead of buying (or stealing) them ready-made from major designers (it’s fascinating to hear the sneer in his voice when he says the word “designers”). He also said that during his early days, when all the other drag queens wanted to play Marilyn Monroe, he wanted to be Lena Horne – the first clue we have that this remarkably light-skinned person is actually Black. Paris Is Burning may have raised issues of cultural appropriation due to the white skin and relative privilege of its director, but they got even worse when Madonna, also in 1990, released a song called “Vogue” that at once hailed and exploited the Black drag subculture depicted in the film. People who’d never heard of “voguing” before Madonna’s song (including me) assumed it meant striking the “pose” of a famous movie star, past or current, because that’s how Madonna’s lyric described it. The reality as shown in Paris Is Burning is quite different; while certainly many of the “queens” in the shows were riffing off celebrities (there’s one fascinating scene in which a heavy-set Black drag queen mimes to Patti LaBelle’s hit record of “Over the Rainbow,” wearing a headdress that was intended to simulate the really weird wigs LaBelle was wearing then that made her look like an upturned lawnmower), “voguing” as depicted here is a dance form with its own integrity, at least a cousin of break dancing.

There are also some fascinating scenes showing the “queens” wrestling with their own gender identities, including one woman at a beach who boasts that she’s just had gender reassignment and therefore is truly a woman in every sense except the genetic. Two more said they haven’t had the operation yet but are contemplating it, while a more down-to-earth type named Pepper LaBeija insists that they aren’t going to go through Transgender surgery because once they take it off, they can’t put it back on again if they decide they miss it after all. It reminded me of the high rate of suicide among Trans people both pre- and post-op, as if Trans people have an inflated idea of the worth of surgical gender change – “If only they make me a real woman, I’ll be truly happy at last” – and are disappointed when surgical reassignment doesn’t magically solve all their problems. Also one of the most moving aspects of this film is the distance between the dreams these people have and the reality of who, what, and where they are. One notes the irony of the fact that one of the main balls is called “Paris Is Burning” (hence the film’s title) and says he’s always wanted to go to the real Paris. Another, a member of the Ninja house, says they want to go to Tokyo because Japan is the home of the real ninjas.

The most tragic story in the film is that of a young, petite, blonde, stunningly attractive performer who boasts that for a while he was kept by a straight sugar daddy – until the man found out that he wasn’t biologically female and immediately threw him out. His dreams were to get a sex change and find another sugar daddy who would love him as a real woman. He also shame-facedly admits that he survives largely by hustling, though at first he says that only 1 percent of his clients actually want to have sex with him. Later he revises that estimate to only 5 percent (which my husband Charles noted was still a 500 percent increase!). At the end of the film we learn that he was found dead under a bed in a cheap hotel; though we’re not told what happened to him, we’re guessing that one of those tricks went horribly wrong. Paris Is Burning is a fascinating glimpse into a group of (mostly; there are certainly some who qualify as Trans) Gay men who have built a world for themselves in which they can be celebrities and even stars even though most of the rest of the world hasn’t heard of them. It offers some fascinating glimpses into the whole nature of celebrity and institutionalized ideas of “glamour” (one queen sniffs that “voguing” is called that after Vogue magazine and it certainly would never have done to name it after Mademoiselle because that name had no cachet), and how certain people who are well aware that most of the world will remain blissfully unaware of their existence can still find stardom within their own world in which they and their kind have all the power. The final contest attracts three celebrity judges: Black actor and choreographer Geoffrey Holder, comedienne and author Fran Lebowitz, and Broadway legend Gwen Verdon – and at last the real world of stardom meets the world of the ball scene!