r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Inherit the Wind, which my husband Charles joined me for the last half-hour of (he arrived home from work in the middle of the great confrontation between “Brady” and “Drummond”), the two of us stayed up and watched five short films from a collective known as the “Gay Girls’ Riding Club.” As you might suspect from their name, they were Gay but they were not girls; they were a cooperatmve that got together in Los Angeles in the early 1960’s and made ultra-low-budget short films, many of them parodying then-recent mainstream movies, with Ray Harrison as overall director and auteur. The first films on TCM’s program of Gay Girls’ Riding Club shorts were obvious spoofs of recent iflms – Never on Sunday became Always on Sunday, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? became What Happened to the Real Baby Jane?, and an obscure film called The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone – a 1961 vehicle which reunited star Vivien Leigh and author Tennessee Williams from A Streetcar Named Desire and featured a young Warren Beatty in his second film (after Splendor in the Grass), became The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone. (The original The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone was a major commercial flop, though to my surprise it was remade in 2003 with Helen Mirren in Leigh’s role.)
The fourth film in the program, Spy on the Fly, was a generic spoof of secret-agent movies in general and James Bond in particular. The fifth, All About Alice, was a return to an outright parody – in this case of All About Eve – and marked a major budget escalation: it had synchronized sound (the other four were shot silent with dialogue titles, though the performer playing Bette Davis’s role in the Baby Jane parody lip-synched to “I”ve Written a Letter to Daddy” and I suspect they used the soundtrack recording from the original film) and it was shot in color. It also was shot in the early 1970’s; we could tell because they shot B-roll footage of the actual Broadway theatre marquees of the time, and the shows they were running were all from the late 1960’s or early 1970’s: No, No, Nanette, Follies, Hair and others of similar vintage.
Of the five films, Charles liked the first one, Always on Sunday (also a title used for two mainstream features from Europe in the wake of the international success of Never on Sunday one of which starred Ugo Tognazzi, the Italian actor who later played in La Cage aux Folles, the movie that mainstreamed the drag-film genre), best, and I could see why. The raffish settings of the original film, which dealt with sailors and prostitutes in the Greek port of Piraeus, translated well tot he drag community, even though one of the things I remembered when I was watching the movie was getting to know several drag-queen hookers who worked the docks and offered oral sex exclusively so the straight guys who paid them for blow jobs wouldn’t know that “she” was really a he. I couldn’t help thinking how much ouzo the johns would have had to drink before they were fooled by these “girls” who were really guys. The gag I liked best was one in which two blond sailors in dress-white uniforms walk in the bar and walk out with a third man, dressed in blue jeans and a masculine shirt, and it’s only when we see the three walk out together that we realize the two sailors, though otherwise butch, are wearing high heels.
The Baby Jane parody that followed showed that the members of the Gay Girls’ Riding Club were music geeks as well as movie geeks – not only did they copy the old PRC logo for the opening credits of their films (accompanying it with Alfred Newman’s famous 20th Century-Fiox fanfare), but the soundtrack included the Polka from Shostakovich’s The Age of Gold ballet (one of the pieces of anti-capitalist agitprop Shostakovich had to compose to keep the Soviet regime happy) but also appropriate 1920’s songs like Louis Panico’s “Wabash Blues” and Felix Arndt’s “Nola.” (“Nola” became so notoriously overplayed that in the 1933 musical Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Ira Gershwin inserted a call for the execution of bandleaders who performed it.) The most impressive thing about the Baby Jane parody was the impressive vintage Rolls-Royce that appeared in several scenes; I wondered what it cost the Gay Girls’ Riding Club to rent it and whether that was the biggest-budgeted item in the film. Charles also noticed the troupe’s sole Black member, who was just one of the “girls” in Always on Sunday but in the Baby Jane parody and the subsequent movies was cast as a servant or domestic; in Baby Jane she’s cast as Blanche Hudson’s caregiver and, in a weird scene, has to clean birdshit off Blanche’s chest as her lovebirds take a dump on her. At least there was a scene in which Blanche’s caregiver serves her a blazing hot flaming dish – and when she puts a cover on it and then removes it, the lovebirds fly off, alive, well and definitely uncooked. The “club” gave Baby Jane a happy ending that’s right out of Fellini: Blanche miraculously regains her ability to walk and all five of them, including Victor Buono’s character and his mother, dance for joy on the beach.
I’d probably have liked The Roman Springs on Mrs. Stone better if I’d actually seen the film it was ridiculing; as it was, it had its moments but didn’t do much for me, except for a scene in which “Paulo” (the parody version of Warren Beatty’s character from the original) is with Mrs. Stone but is also being cruised by a mystery man whom he goes off with at the end. Ray Harrison and his crew seem to have been big on the idea of having all the drag queens lust after a hot man, only to have another butch man end up with him! Spy on the Fly was the weakest of the five – just a bunch of dreary chase sequences that worked their way up the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco (with a scene set on a beach walkway at Big Sur that I remember from the one time I was there, in January 1999), though there were some nicely raunchy gags. The basic plot, to the extent there is one, is that a homely guy who’s really “Secret Agent 0069,” is charged with the task of delivering nuclear secrets because the previous courier, “Fonda Peeters,” has been murdered by the bad guys by being literally fried to death in one of those helmet-like hair dryers. So Secret Agent 0068 has to disguise himself as a woman to pose as “Fonda Peeters” and get the plans where they’re supposed to go.
“The Fly” is the name of a bar where both sides hang out, and there’s a quite funny gag in the sign announcing that this club is in business: “‘The Fly’ Is Open.” Eventually 0069 has to burn up the nuclear plans to make sure the bad guys don’t get them – he blows up the bad guys in the process – only the real plans are safe because they were engraved on his press-on fingernails. In the final sequence 0069 says he’s quitting being a secret agent and taking up a new line of work – and the last shot shows him ascending the staircase of San Francisco’s legendary drag nightclub Finocchio’s. My favorite story about Finocchio’s was about the time Marilyn Monroe was in San Francisco in 1959 and insisted on going there. She particularly wanted to meet the drag queen who played her in the show, and when she met him backstage she ended up giving him pointers on how to do her famous walk.
All About Alice was a much better movie technically than the other Gay Girls’ Riding Club productions – not only was it in color and with normal dialogue instead of intertitles, but it ran a little over an hour, just over half the length of the original it was parodying – though the dialogue hurt the film in one way. Anyone who’s seen All About Eve as often as I have will have embedded in their memories the original voices of the various actors, particularly Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Thema Ritter, Gregory Ratoff and George Sanders – and the Gay Girls’ Riding Crew actors, try as they might, can’t duplicate the authority of the originals. Fortunately, the drag queen who plays the Bette Davis role at least gives a marvelous comic impersonation of it (and both Charles and I were sure it was the same performer who played Bette Davis’s role in the Baby Jane spoof). Since this was an early-1970’s “post-Code” movie, the Gay Girls could take the sex quotient up several notches; not only id the dialogue peppered with lots of insteaces of the words “shit” and “fuck,” but we actually get to see the hot blond stud who plays “Mona Manning’s” fiancé full-frontal and with his dick showing, though they didn’t or couldn’t go as far as actually to show him having sex.
We just see “Mona” get under the covers with him and blow him with a blanket over them, and we see him snort a popper as she brings him to climax. (In one of the earlier film we saw the first version of a popper: the kind that came in a glass ampule which you broke under the nose of someone who was about to have a heart attack in order to dilate their vessels and short-circuit it.) The Gay Girls’ version runs just over an hour and manages to include all the major plot points of the original, down to a screamingly funny parody of the film’s ending. In this case, the fan who meets “Alice Barrington” in her hotel room as she’s just won the Tony Award ans id eon route to Hollywood to make her first film is a man, and as she steps out of the room he tries on her filmy garment, we see him step in front of the iconic three-way mirror from the original movie, there’s a dissolve – and suddenly we see him in full drag and we realize he’s the same performer who played “Alice Barriington” in the overall movie!
