Welcome to Episode #217 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2024, starting with Dev Patel’s caste-system fight club revenger Monkey Man.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon & Boomer watch Baby Cakes (1989).
Britnee: Have you ever believed that you imagined a movie? For years, I had faded images in my mind of a young Ricki Lake eating a bag of Sugar Babies. I had separate memories of a grocery store wedding that felt like something I visualized from a retelling of a family event. I even wrote those images down in various notebooks in my preteen bedroom, just so I wouldn’t forget. When I finally got frequent access to the internet, I plugged in these descriptions on Ask Jeeves, and viola, the answer to these burning mysteries was the 1989 made-for-TV movie Baby Cakes. More recently, I found out it’s a remake of a 1985 German film called Sugarbaby, which I have yet to see but am very interested in watching. Perhaps it’s the reason behind Ricki Lake’s candy of choice?
Grace (Lake) is an overweight mortician living in Queens. When she’s not working, she’s spending time with her incredibly pessimistic friend, Keri, or indulging in snacks while watching horror movies alone in her apartment. She’s very relatable. Her mother has passed, and her father marries a woman who is cold towards Grace, and the couple make frequent disparaging comments about her weight. While Grace and Keri are hanging out at an ice-skating rink, Grace spots “the most beautiful man she’s ever seen” skating his butt off on the ice. He ends up being a subway train conductor, and Grace, who takes the subway every day, starts to stalk him. It’s more like the type of stalking teens do to their crushes than Baby Reindeer stalking, so it’s more cute than creepy.
It turns out that Grace’s crush, Rob (Craig Sheffer), is in an unhappy relationship, and she shoots her shot. He politely brushes her off at first, but he has a couple of drinks and shows up to her apartment for a romantic dinner gone bad. Their relationship starts off with a pity date where she brings him to her parents’ home to show him off (along with her own sassy makeover), ultimately to prove to them that she can have a boyfriend who loves her for who she is. But after she and Rob start to spend time together, their relationship blossoms into genuine romance.
Baby Cakes is a feel-good romcom with a John Waters touch. What I admire about this film is that that it avoids the overweight main actress cliche by not having a segment where Grace tries to lose weight to win over a man. If anything, she leans into her love for food to seduce him. Brandon, other than Grace’s non-changing relationship with food, what are some other unique touches to the film that caught your attention?
Brandon: Like all romcoms, Baby Cakes is entirely defined by its unique touches. We know exactly what’s going to happen to our couple-to-be as soon as Grace forces a meet-cute through some light, adorable stalking, so the joys of the film are entirely to be found in the quirks of its details. That manufactured meet-cute being staged at a Sugar Babies vending machine was a memorable enough quirk to linger in Britnee’s mind for decades, as was the grocery-store wedding, which is so oddly adorable that it’s incredible the idea hasn’t been stolen by a film with a bigger budget. As with all romcoms, our leads both have quirky professions (corpse beautician & subway train conductor) and quirky hobbies (stalking & figure skating) unlikely to be shared by the audience. Then there’s the quirky prop of the awkward family portrait Grace had commissioned of her younger, thinner self and her younger, happier father, which the movie mines for genuine pathos while never losing sight of the fact that it looks ridiculous. Baby Cakes is all quirks all the time, as required by its choice of genre.
Personally, my favorite quirks were the dour personality ticks of Grace’s sidekick, Keri, who absolutely kills her job as the movie’s wet blanket. Mostly, I was just excited to see actor Nada Despotovich in an extended, feature-length role, since her biggest impact on the cinematic artform was a single scene as Chrissy in Moonstruck. It was like getting to hang out with my favorite cryptid for 90 minutes after years of only catching blurry glimpses of her in roles like “Receptionist” (The Boyfriend School), “Bartender” (Castle Rock), and “Mom” (Challengers). Despotovich’s pouting over Nic Cage’s romantic indifference (and her pouty refusal to “get the big knife”) in Moonstruck is Hall of Fame-level romcom quirk, so it’s delightful to watch her pout at length in Baby Cakes as a hypochondriac doomsayer who hates everyone & everything except her equally tragic bestie. There’s some genuine friendship drama shared between the women, too, as Keri predictably becomes frustrated when Grace finds confidence & happiness, since it ruins their miserabilist dynamic.
The audience knows to cheer on Grace’s newfound confidence, though, even if Keri has a point that she’s setting herself up for heartbreak by falling for a man who’s already engaged. The victory of Baby Cakes is more than Grace achieving self-actualization without losing weight; it’s that she consciously stops trying to lose weight and instead learns to love her body as it is. That confidence radiates off of her, making her more attractive to people who usually look right past her. One of the best sequences is a montage of Grace’s neighbors complimenting her “punk” makeover as she runs her daily errands, modeling Desperately Seeking Susan-era Madonna outfits and flipping around a ponytail. The inward search for that confidence being sparked by outside validation from a man who’s initially embarrassed to be seen with her in public is a complicated, queasy issue, but that’s exactly what drags this story out of romcom quirks and into the realm of real-life human behavior. I understand why the early, cutesy stalking sequence invites Baby Reindeer jokes from the overly cynical Letterboxd commentariat, but the modern work this most reminded me of was the Aidy Bryant sitcom Shrill, which still felt progressive for touching on these same body positivity issues decades later (if not only because there are so few other representations in mainstream media that take the inner lives of women seriously if they’re not exceptionally thin).
To me, Grace’s short-lived stint as Rob’s stalker didn’t feel entirely out of line with typical romcom behavior. Her outlandish personal-boundary violations while luring him to her apartment are just as integral to romcoms’ entertainment value as the outlandish personality quirks of the film’s various side characters, to the point where they’d be parodied by Julia Roberts’s “pond scum” protagonist in My Best Friend’s Wedding less than a decade later. The question of a romcom’s success mostly relies on whether an audience can look past the unethical behavior & eccentric personalities and still feel genuine emotion when the couple-to-be finally, inevitably gets together. By that metric, Boomer, was the drama of Baby Cakes successful for you? Did you feel anything for Grace & Rob beyond amusement?
Boomer: I found this dynamic pretty effective, honestly. I don’t know how widespread knowledge about this issue is in the mainstream, but the gay community is a pretty image-focused, fatphobic, and body-fascistic group – especially the most visible community members, who are usually white, cis men. There are historical reasons for this. In the 70s, the biggest sex symbols of the era were slender rock stars with lean bodies and who were playful with gender norms: your Jaggers, your Mercurys, your Bowies, etc. When the AIDS Crisis hit its peak, those things that had defined sexiness in the previous decade were stigmatized by society at large, as the public associated that leanness with illness and queerness with disease. This gave rise, in part, to the action star of the 80s: a he-man with huge biceps. There was large-scale adoption of your Stallones and your Schwarzeneggers as the new blueprint of sexiness affected both straight and queer communities, as gay men all over attempted to emphasize their health through bodybuilding (and steroid use, which—as a needle drug—made the situation worse). Things have swung back the other way in the years since (famously, 2018 was crowned by one writer as the dawning of the age of the twink), and back again at an even faster rate. Widespread use of social media platforms that keep its audience engaged by feeling bad about themselves, the rise of self-marketing on said social media as one of the few (extremely unlikely) bids for class mobility, the propaganda about health and virility that always accompany fascist trends, and pandemic-era social isolation combining into a horrible Voltron of body dysmorphia unlike anything history has ever seen.
I spent a long time at war with my body because of the culture I came of age in, and there’s an existential loneliness that I recognize in Grace from certain points in my life (not that I’m any less single now, but I’m managing). Life can be miserable when there’s something about your physical appearance that you can’t change, that you exhaust yourself trying to change (Grace mentions a half dozen diets that produced no results), and when people not only can’t see past that, but also see your inability to change it as a moral failure of willpower. For Grace, this is further compounded by her father’s negligent absenteeism in her life, and he and her stepmother both pile on her about how her life would improve if she just lost some weight. I felt for Grace, and so her desire to go outside the bounds of acceptable social behavior was understandable, albeit only condonable in a fictional, heightened romcom world. Grand romantic plans of this nature rarely work out in the real world, but it’s fun to watch it play out in a fairy tale fantasy where the girl with the wicked(ish) stepmother finds love with the prince when she wins his heart while breaking him free of a loveless engagement. And then they kiss in a subway!
About twenty years later, this same kind of thing would be tackled again, but less deftly. TV movies of the 90s and the turn of the century were more focused on “in” eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and were either fictionalized “ripped from the headlines” scripts or biopics like Dying to be Thin (1996). Starting around 2005, however, there were a lot more films focused on what it was like to be stigmatized as a fat person. To Be Fat Like Me, a 2007 Lifetime original starring Kaley Cuoco who puts on a fat suit to prove to her heavier family members that their experiences of bullying are overstated, only to realize that, nope, people do treat her differently (none of this is made up). A year later, the crown jewel (to some, and crown turd to others), Queen Sized, about an overweight teen girl who becomes her suburban high school’s homecoming queen, also premiered on Lifetime; this one is worth mentioning since the main character was played by Nikki Blonsky, who portrayed Tracy Turnblad (a role originated by Ricki Lake) just a year prior in the 2007 Hairspray. Although films like these are aiming at the same “accept yourself” theme as Baby Cakes, they don’t feel as authentic. They feel manufactured to fulfill a quota or try to cheat some kind of grant out of a “stop bullying” campaign rather than an honest story about a girl whose looks don’t match the current zeitgeist but who is empowered to take the reins of her life by a few passionate weeks with a troubled (but not too troubled) stud. She stands up for herself to her family, she leaves behind her abusive boss and takes the first steps into finding work in the land of the living, and she gets the guy in the end. The big speeches in the Aughts TV movies about this kind of thing are too serious and self-important, while the offbeat surreality of Baby Cakes means that Grace’s monologues can be sweet without being saccharine, sincere but injected with bits of humor that make her feel more like a fully realized person and less like a sock puppet for a workshopped-to-death speech in a basic cable melodrama.
Since we’ve mentioned most of the supporting characters who contributed to the overall atmosphere of the film, I think it would be a missed opportunity not to bring up Grace’s boss at the funeral parlor, who was both hilariously awful and awfully hilarious. He’s clearly a terrible employer, as he attempts to tell Grace she can’t take four weeks off (for her long-term plan to stalk Rob day and night, but he doesn’t know this) because she was late for a cumulative thirteen minutes that month. This tips into funny when he goes on that he needs her – not only because of Keri’s terrible workmanship (we later learn that she tried to fluff up a corpse’s chest with tissue paper, so he’s not incorrect on this point), but also because it’s the holidays, which means it’s their busy season. Later on, he can’t help but play salesman in the middle of a funeral, giving a eulogy in which he mentions the deceased’s desire to one day own a white Cadillac, and that he was “driving one today!”, smacking the casket by his side and declaring it the best that money can buy like he was peddling a 1988 Taurus. Truly wonderful stuff.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Currently, Ricki Lake is getting a lot of media attention for her recent weight loss. If you Google her, you’ll be bombarded with articles about her losing 35 pounds. I’m glad that she’s thriving, but I hate that this latest Ricki Lake revival is focused, yet again, on her body. How long until the general public rediscovers Baby Cakes? Will they reboot a second time to modernize it? My anxiety about this sacred film being tainted with a terrible remake is very real. I just know they’re going to put the new Grace on Ozempic and, God forbid, bring in Ricki Lake for a cameo where she slaps the Sugar Babies out of Grace’s hands.
Brandon: I, of course, had to watch the original 1985 German film Sugarbaby for completion’s sake, and it turns out this made-for-American-TV remake is a shockingly faithful adaptation. A lot of the exact scenes and plot details of Baby Cakes are copied directly from its source text, and everything it adds to flesh out the story is pure romcom quirk: the figure-skating hobby, the goofy painting, the supermarket wedding, the hypochondriac bestie, etc. Sugarbaby is a much sparser, sadder movie as a result, but it’s also incredibly stylish. Every scene is overloaded with enough color-gel crosslighting to make you wonder if it was directed by Dario Argento under a pseudonym, and it’s much more comfortable hanging out in silence with its downer protagonist instead of constantly voicing her internal anxieties in dialogue. It also doesn’t go out of its way to leave the audience feeling clean & upbeat. In Sugarbaby, the subway conductor is married, not engaged, and his affair with the mortician doesn’t necessarily leave either lover in better shape, making for a much more emotionally & morally complicated narrative. It’s almost objectively true that Sugarbaby is smarter, cooler, and prettier than Baby Cakes by every cinematic metric, and yet because it doesn’t have the bubbly star power of a Hairspray-era Ricki Lake (or that incredible elevator-music theme song) it ends up feeling like the inferior film anyway.
Boomer: Sometimes, looking back over the width and breadth of topics that we’ve covered, in print and audio, in brief and perhaps too extensively, I’m fascinated to see how much we’ve grown at Swampflix over a decade, but I also love how each of us has a handful of movies that “feel” like they were made for just one amongst us. I was five minutes into this one and I thought, “This is such a Britnee movie,” and I mean that in the most affectionate way possible. Weirdly, another example I thought of as a definitive Britnee movie was Mrs. Winterbourne, so I was surprised when I went back to that one to realize that it was actually nominated by a different contributor. This one shares that only-in-the-80s romcom energy where our lead finds love through fraud, stalking, and seduction with The Boyfriend School, though, which was a Britnee selection. Salud, colleague; you are a woman of distinct and delightful taste.
Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the arc of Amy Heckerling’s art & career as a Hollywood auteur, starting with her biggest commercial hit: the talking-baby comedy Look Who’s Talking (1989).
00:00 Welcome
02:28 Der Fan (1982) 05:36 Miller’s Girl (2024) 09:35 Blue Collar (1978) 11:20 Adam Resurrected (2008) 21:28 The Sweetest Thing (2002)
26:46 Look Who’s Talking (1989) 57:50 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) 1:12:09 Clueless (1995) 1:20:47 I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon & Britnee watch Notorious (1946).
Boomer: For many years, I’ve been calling Notorious my favorite film of the Hitchcock oeuvre. I’ve recently been filling in some blind spots—most notably The Birds and Dial “M” for Murder, which are pretty big ones in that canon—so I wasn’t sure if I would still hold this one in such high esteem, or if I had simply been trying to be cool as a teenager and cite a lesser known one as my favorite and had been, perhaps, wrong all these years (even if I were, I was still of a feather with Roger Ebert, who named it as his favorite work of the director’s). I still remember the first time I caught this one on TCM when I was in high school, with the requisite intro and outro presented by Robert Osborne. He drew attention to the way that the camera at one point provides a point-of-view shot of Ingmar Bergman’s inebriated driving, her view occluded by her errant hair, and how this was meant to give the viewer a sense of her drunkenness; he talked about how Hitch had received a visit from some men from the state who were curious about why the British director seemed to know so much more about uranium than one would expect for someone not involved in espionage. He praised the arch performance of Madame Konstantin and pointed out the way that the story is bookended with a Nazi’s back to the audience as he faces judgment. And, of course, there was discussion about all that Hayes Code-skirting kissing and nuzzling.
Notorious is a love story. Girl’s father is imprisoned for treason, girl meets boy, boy recruits her to infiltrate a cabal of expatriated Nazis who are living in Brazil, boy gets inexplicably jealous when she is able to ingratiate herself with the mark, girl and boy are able to solve the mystery of her new husband’s dealings. Tale as old as time. In more specific terms, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is, at the story’s outset, present for the sentencing of her father to a Miami prison for his sedition and espionage, and although we are never made privy to the details, his final statement to the court reveals that he is unrepentant. She has a party at her house to drown her sorrows, and is drawn to a mysterious handsome man named Devlin (Cary Grant). She finds herself both intrigued and infuriated by his calm stoicism, and her attempts to get him to crack escalate to her insisting that the two of them go for a drive, where her reckless speeding catches the attention of a motorcycle cop, who lets them go when he sees Devlin’s identification. The next morning, he reveals to Alicia that he has been sent to recruit her for a job in Brazil. Once there, the two of them fall in love, although their little state-sponsored honeymoon comes to an abrupt end when her mission is revealed; she is to ingratiate herself with one Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), a former contact of her father’s who, in the past, was infatuated with her. Devlin has a little pout about this and freezes Alicia out when she begs for some other way she could help, one that wouldn’t tear the two of them apart. It doesn’t work, and Sebastian proves to be an easy mark, and within a short time, he asks her to marry him. Alicia gives Devlin one more chance to speak up and pull her out, but he doesn’t, and she ends up the new Mrs. Sebastian. Her new husband adores her completely, but his hard-nosed mother (Madame Konstantin) is more suspicious of her new daughter-in-law.
What struck me on this most recent viewing is that this film is unhurried, and while an argument could be made that this is to its detriment, I think that true only insofar as one reads this as a thriller, and that it is to Notorious‘s benefit as a love story. So much of the romance is already raced past in order to establish Devlin and Alicia’s passion for one another, and I think that it might be a disservice to the believability of that love to try and abbreviate it any further. It’s fascinating that, as with the previous collaboration between Bergman and Rains, Casablanca, the things which sever our two lovers are duty and patriotism; except that in that film, released at the height of the war in 1942, our reunited Ilsa and Rick are rent asunder for what can be assumed to be the rest of their lives, while this post-war 1946 picture sees Alicia and Devlin get a happy ending (or at least are implied to have one). Spending this much time with the two of them means that the plot doesn’t really kick in until the midpoint of the movie, after an appropriate amount of time to lull you into forgetting that there’s something inevitably coming to rip the two lovers apart. It lends an air of tragedy and gravitas to their parting that they must continue to see one another but deny their passions, which Devlin does behind a screen of sex shaming while Alicia has a harder time concealing her happiness with his company, even when doing so arouses suspicion.
I’m not here to question the late master of suspense and the choices that he made, but I do think that there was room for at least one more close call for Alicia in the Sebastian manor. Madame Sebastian regards Alicia with a constant air of appraisal and unspoken but nonetheless present disapproval. The party sequence in which Alicia and Devlin, through some exciting near-misses, manage to enter the wine cellar in which the secret uranium is hidden and abscond with evidence, is a thrilling one, and there’s some truly magnificent camerawork that swoops over the great Sebastian house entryway, with its checkered tile pattern calling to mind a chessboard that Alicia must cross, before it zooms in on the tiny key in her hand. But I do wish that Alicia had almost been caught another time before or after this, to really build up the tension, although that would risk making the Sebastians seem more naive and less threatening, if she were able to get away with too much before they catch on to her. And when they do catch on to her, we get one of the great lines that I think about all the time, stated by Madame Sebastian to her heartbroken son: “We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity — for a time.”
It’s interesting that this one comes right on the heels of the war, when the potential for a Nazi resurgence on another continent after a short breather was something that would have been on the minds of every member sitting in that audience. I’m hard pressed to think of a contemporary or even recent analogy for how that plot point must have felt for the people watching the film, for whom the revelations of just how depraved and barbaric the regime had been within its borders were still an unfolding series of horrors. I wonder, Brandon, if you feel that the way contemporary events were folded into the narrative is as effective now as it was then, if the film would function as well without that element (and instead focused on a fictional cabal of more generic evil plotters), and if you have any other thoughts on the matter?
Brandon: As you’ve already implied, this is a love story first and an espionoir second, with most of the thrills in the first hour generated through the bitter flirtation between Bergman & Grant. The dialogue walks right up to the line of spilling the details of Bergman’s loose morals every time they bicker, and it’s not hard to imagine Hays Code censors tugging their collars in the screening room. As for contemporary audiences’ reaction to the secret Nazi cabal in the second hour, it’s also not hard to imagine that feeling like a more immediate, chilling threat in the 1940s that it is all these decades later. I just don’t think Hitchcock is interested enough in their fascist violence or ideology to make the specifics of their villainy central to the text. Would the movie be all that different if it were made a few years later and our reluctant couple were spying on Cold War Russians instead of Nazis in exile? I have my doubts. Casablanca was specifically about the futility of attempting to remain politically neutral in the face of Nazi fascism, and it was filmed before America joined the war. Comedies like Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be parodied the specifics of Hitler’s racism & mannerisms while he was still alive and ascending to power. Besides the Brazilian setting and the Uranium smuggling plot, there isn’t much specificity to the Nazi presence in Notorious, except as shadowy villains whose suspicion raises the tension of the espionage romance that’s front & center. The specifics of exactly why that romance is so tense (mostly Grant’s closed-minded frustration with Bergman’s disregard for womanly virtue) also go unstated, but most of the fun of the movie is in watching Hitchcock chip away at the restraints that block him from fully vocalizing them. Most of his interest is in the fictional, bitter romance he’s created, not in the real-world politics.
The only way I really felt Hitchcock’s disgust with Nazi scum was through the ghoulish specter of Madame Sebastian, who radiates pure hate in every scene while her younger cohorts act like proper gentlemen. Most of the Nazi cabal’s villainy is hidden behind locked doors, but the matron of the house proudly parades her cruelty out in the open as a voluntary enforcer and a true believer in the cause. She can’t even crochet in her rocking chair without coming across as a Nazi piece of shit, which is a major credit to Madame Konstantin’s performance. Britnee, as our resident hagsploitation expert, I have to ask where you think Madame Sebastian’s legacy falls in the cinematic canon of evil old women. It wouldn’t be for another decade or so that Hitchcock literally put the “Psycho” in “psychobiddy” (speaking of menacing rocking chairs), but it seems he was already interested in the horrors of a hateful, overbearing mother here, assigning most of the onscreen evil to the elderly Madame. The question is, was she evil enough for the task? Did she give you the proper psychobiddy tingles?
Britnee: I’m honored to be considered a hagsploitation expert and will immediately add that to my résumé. With such powerful performances from Bergman and Grant, it’s hard to focus on anyone else, but Madame Konstantin earns your attention. I’m always excited to spend time with a mean old lady who wears fancy dresses, so I was riveted during her scenes. Her cold, emotionless tone & face alone gave me the chills, along with her being Nazi trash. The scene where Alexander wakes her up to tell her the news about being married to an American agent was gold. Madame Sebastian is covered in satin sheets and lights up a cigarette with a devious smile before she starts calling the shots in a “Mommy knows best” sort of way. Alexander’s mommy issues were the icing on the cake for this thriller. It created a very eerie atmosphere, especially in the latter half of the film when we’re stuck in the oedipus mansion with a poisoned Alicia. I got goosebumps when Madame Sebastian appeared in that creepy black dress while Devlin was rescuing Alicia from their evil clutches. Once again, this is more evidence that elderly women with horrible hair make wonderful villains, and Hitchcock knew it. He may just be the godfather of hagsploitation.
Lagniappe
Britnee: Notorious was made into a 5-act opera that premiered in Sweden in 2015. From the clips I’ve stumbled upon, it looks absolutely amazing!
Boomer: I’m embarrassed to admit how late in my life I learned that Isabella Rossellini is Ingrid Bergman’s daughter (this year!). I’ve seen Bergman in a couple of other flicks since learning this, but Notorious is the one in which I see the most direct ties to her daughter. Even though this one comes after Gaslight and Casablanca, both of which I have seen in abundance just as I have Notorious, her accent here is perhaps at its most undisguised. There are moments throughout where I can almost hear Rossellini speaking through her mother, as the more senior actress’s pronunciation here is the most like her daughter’s.
Brandon: Bergman’s intro in the opening sequence is magnificently badass. Who could help falling for a cop-hating lush with a death wish and a sparkly top that exposes her midriff? The fabulously talented pervert that he is, Hathcock puts just as much effort into establishing her character in this opening sequence as he does shooting the espionage payoffs in the final act. The hair-in-eyes effects shot while she’s drunk-driving is one of his great flourishes of camera trickery, and it’s immediately followed up by extreme, twisty Dutch angles from her POV while she sees the room spinning in bed, failing to sober up. As far as noir’s great femmes fatales go, I can only think of one ferocious character intro that outpaces Bergman’s here: Ann Savage’s relentless viciousness in Edward G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945). And even she was meant to be seen as less loveable than she was, uh, savage.
Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon compare Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to Pam Grier, Jackie Brown (1997), against her early run of 1970s blaxploitation classics.
Welcome to Episode #213 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee and Brandon compare the iconic documentary Grey Gardens (1975) against its made-for-TV dramatization Grey Gardens (2009).
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Boomerand Britnee watch Torch Song Trilogy (1988).
Brandon: On a recent vacation to San Francisco, I found myself in the Haight-Ashbury location of Amoeba Music, digging through the LGBTQ section of the record store’s used Blu-rays & DVDs. There were plenty of obscure gems in there, as you might expect, and I took home copies of the surrealistic drag-queen freak show Luminous Procuress as well as the punk-and-junk porno chic documentary Kamikaze Hearts. However, my biggest score that day was a used copy of a film distributed by Warner Bros subsidiary New Line Cinema, something much more mainstream than the other standout titles in the bin. 1988’s Torch Song Trilogy has been commercially unavailable since I first watched it on the HBO Max streaming service back in 2021, when it caught my eye in the platform’s “Leaving Soon” section. Since then, it has only been legally accessible through used physical media, as it is currently unavailable to rent or stream through any online platform. The Streaming Era illusion that everything is available all of the time is always frustrating when trying to access most movies made before 1990 (an illusion only made bearable by the continued existence of a public library system), but it’s especially frustrating when it comes to mainstream crowd-pleaser fare like Torch Song Trilogy. This is not the audience-alienating arthouse abstraction of a Luminous Procuress or a Kamikaze Hearts; it shouldn’t feel like some major score to find a copy in the wild. It’s more the Jewish New Yorker equivalent of a Steel Magnolias or a Fried Green Tomatoes than it is some niche-interest obscurity. I have to suspect it’s only being treated as such because it’s been ghettoized as A Gay Movie instead of simply A Good Movie, which is a shameful indication of how much progress is left to be made.
Torch Song Trilogy is Harvey Fierstein’s big-screen adaptation of his own stage play about a drag queen’s life, loves, and heartbreaks in 1970s New York. It might be one of the few 80s & 90s gay classics that doesn’t have to touch the communal devastation of HIV/AIDS, since it’s set before the darkest days of the epidemic. The opening shot of a graveyard at the outskirts of New York City feels like visual acknowledgement of how cultural circumstances had changed between the film’s setting & production, but the mission of the story that follows is mostly to show an adult gay man living a full, healthy, normal life . . . filtered through the wry humor of Fierstein’s hyper-specific personality. There’s a little hangover Boys in the Band-style, woe-is-me self-pitying in Fierstein’s semi-biographical retelling of his own love life, but he remains delightfully charming throughout as he recalls his two great loves: one with a strait-laced, self-conflicted bisexual (Ed, Brian Kerwin) that was doomed to fail and one with a perfectly angelic partner (Alan, Matthew Broderick) that only failed because of violent societal bigotry. The major benefit of the film’s strange distribution deficiencies is that owning it on DVD means you can also access Fierstein’s lovely commentary track and double the time you get to spend with his unmistakable voice & persona; it’s like becoming good friends with a garbage disposal made entirely of fine silks. Loving the movie means loving his specific personality, from his adorable failures to flirt graciously to his fierce defenses of drag queen respectability and the validity of monogamous homosexual partnership. His stage performances as Virginia Hamm are classic barroom drag that feel like broadcasts from a bygone world (one I last experienced first-hand at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco), but a lot of his observations about seeking traditional love among strangers who are just cruising for sex still ring true, especially as modern dating rituals have been re-warped around the de-personalized window shopping of hookup apps.
There’s something about how complicated, interwoven, and passionate every relationship feels here that reminded me of Yentl of all things, except transported to a modern urban setting I’m more personally connected to. Structurally, there are some drawbacks to Fierstein’s insistence on covering decades of personal turmoil & interpersonal drama in a single picture, but the movie’s greatest accomplishment is ultimately its approximation of a full, authentic life – something gay men were rarely afforded onscreen at the time, even the cis white ones. By all accounts, the original stage-play version of Torch Song Trilogy approximated an even fuller, more authentic record of gay life in 1970s NYC, since it was twice as long as its movie adaptation. One of the producers’ only contractual obligations was that the movie could be no longer than 2 hours, which meant a lot of tough-choice editing of a play that ran for 4. Instead of narrowing in on a few key moments in his life (through the fictional avatar of Arnold Beckoff), Fierstein decided to maintain the full breadth of the play’s story for most of the runtime, so that an inopportune bathroom break means that you could miss a half-decade of love & loss. It isn’t until the final sequence that he really slows the story down to stew in the drama of one key event: a home visit from his loving, homophobic mother (Anne Bancroft). After so many sweeping gestures covering long stretches in Arnold’s life, there’s initially something jarring about stopping the momentum cold to depict a heated bicker-battle between mother & son, but that’s also where a lot of the strongest, most coherent political arguments about the validity of gay life & gay romance are voiced in clear terms. Boomer, what did you think about the lopsided emphasis on the drama of the final act and how it relates to the broader storytelling style of earlier segments? Was it a meaningful dramatic shift or just an awkward one?
Boomer: There’s something important to note here about the original staging that contributes to this: each of the three segments were meant to be done in different styles, so much so that it’s almost a miracle that they work when smashed together into the veritas of the screen. In the first segment, International Stud, the story is told in fragments between Arnold and Ed, with the two actors kept apart on stage and the narrative being relayed through a series of phone calls (staged like this), while Fugue in a Nursery, which is the play in which Alan and Arnold visit Mr. and Mrs. Ed, is staged with all four actors in one giant bed (see this image from the 2018 revival). It’s only the final segment, about Arnold and his mother, that the style is more naturalistic and less surreal, in an effort to make the pain of those moments all the more visceral and meaningful. That carries over into the film, and in all honesty, it ought to. Joy can be fleeting, especially for those in the queer community (as we see all too gruesomely with Alan’s death at the hands of a band of bigots, who are seen standing around at the scene even after the ambulances arrive, watching with impunity as their victims are carted away while they remain free men). When you’re happy and in love, it really can feel like three years pass in the blink of an eye, while pain, especially that which comes from intolerance, ends up taking up much more room in our memories than our happiness.
There’s verisimilitude in that, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t get to spend a long time in sympathetic happiness with Arnold and his loves during the good times, too, and the dilation of unhappy times isn’t merely realism for its own sake, it gives us time to really ground ourselves. This is a piece of fiction that’s about gay people but was breaking out of the mold at the time by not being simply for gay people as well. We see this in the difference between Arnold and his brother Phil, who understands his brother better than their parents do but whose life is clearly one with very few stumbling blocks and in which he can simply saunter without much trouble. The straights in the audience are presumed to be of the same cloth and thus need to have the portrait of what it’s like to have to deal with one’s (loving and beloved) mother also behave in a manner that’s dismissive, cruel, mean-spirited, and bigoted toward her own son, and they need to look into that portrait long enough to get it. Even if the need to provide some socially conscious “messaging” has dimmed in the intervening decades, this scene is also still the tour-de-force segment that makes auditioning for the role of “Ma” worthwhile, enough to attract an actress of the caliber of Estelle Getty (as in the original staging) or Anne Bancroft (as in the film). While I agree that it changes the timbre, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement that it changes the momentum, as it still feels like it’s barreling through, helped along by the frenetic energy that the desperate-to-please soon-to-be-adopted David brings to the proceedings; he and Ed never seem to really sit still, so it creates the illusion of motion even if the subject matter at hand is heavy and slow.
One of the things that I really loved about this one was that it wasn’t (and felt no need to be) a “message” picture. With the first cases of HIV being diagnosed in the summer of 1981, the triptych of plays first opened less than two weeks after the January 4th establishment of GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the first U.S. community-based AIDS service provider, on the fifteenth of that month. As such, there’s really no room in the narrative for the specter of HIV/AIDS to loom large, and although the intervening years between the play’s premiere and the release of the film were haunted by that epidemic, it’s still banished from the narrative. That’s because this is a story about queer . . . well, not queer “joy” exactly, but one in which the omnipresent shadow of social inequality, potential violence, and familial rejection is outshone by the light of authentic living, easy intimacy, and finding the humor in things. As such, although it may be telling the audience something they might not know or understand about the way that gay people are treated by their families, it doesn’t feel the need to educate them about those broader social issues, the way a lot of other queer films of the time did.
Britnee, given that this was originally a (series of) stage production(s), there’s a lot of room for more sumptuous, lived-in set design in a film adaptation, as well as the opportunity to do a little more visual storytelling. One of favorite bits of this is how Arnold shows us that the ASL sign for “fucking” is to make two rabbits with your hands and bang them together, and then we see that Arnold’s decor is more rabbit centric than your local grocery store in the lead up to Easter. Another is the change that we see in Ed’s farmhouse between Arnold’s first and (possibly) last visits there, that tell us how much time has passed as Ed has had the time to repair the steps and put up proper supports on the porch. This, more than the change in tempo, is what stands out to me about the final scenes with Mrs. Beckoff, as they are heavier on dialogue (read: argument) for exposition and character work, as those last few scenes of the two of them feel more like a stage play than any other part. Are there any visual flourishes or touches of visual storytelling in particular that stood out to you?
Britnee:Torch Song Trilogy has been on my watchlist for years. I didn’t have much knowledge of what the film was actually about or based on, but I knew that Harvey Fierstein starred in it. That’s more than enough to pique my interest because he is such a gem. I had no idea that it was based on a play that Fierstein wrote himself! Like Brandon, it reminded me so much of Steel Magnolias, which was also a film adapted from a play with a personal, auto-biographical touch. Both films have loveable characters, witty dialogue, and create a feeling of intimacy between the audience and characters. I felt like I was Arnold’s confidant, following him throughout his journey. Of course, that intimacy with the audience is very typical of a stage play, but it doesn’t always translate to film as successfully as it does in this one.
Until you mentioned it, Boomer, I didn’t notice the rabbit connection! I was admiring the rabbit tea kettle among all of the other rabbit trinkets of Arnold’s, but I had no idea that it was in reference to the ASL bit. There are just so many layers to discover! If I had to highlight any other the visual storytelling touches, there is only one that really stuck with me. I adored the opening sequence of a young Arnold playing dress-up in his mother’s closet, which then transitions to adult Arnold in his dressing room before the first drag performance. There were so many important moments that occur in his dressing room, and to remember one of his earliest crucial moments occurred in his first makeshift dressing room (his mother’s closet) really touched my heart. The ultimate sacred space.
Lagniappe
Brandon: I’m glad to hear y’all were also delighted by the overbearing rabbit theme of Arnold’s home decor. I’ve obviously only seen this movie a few times so far, but with every watch my eyes are drawn to more rabbit decorations that I didn’t catch previously. They’re hopping all over the frame, and yet the only acknowledgement of them (besides the ASL connection) is a brief moment when a hungover Alan quizzically examines a rabbit-themed mug Howard hands him with breakfast before noticing he’s surrounded by them. Otherwise, it’s just one of many small touches that makes Arnold feel like a full, real person instead of a scripted character and a political mouthpiece.
Britnee: The dramatic relationship between Arnold and his mother gave us some powerful moments, but I kept wondering about the relationships Arnold had with his brother and father. We do see these characters interact with each other and there’s some dialogue referring to each in various conversations, but I would have loved to see their relationships explored more. Since the play is twice as long as the movie, I’m curious to see if they’re more explored there and were cut for time.
Boomer: Because I always want to recommend it to everyone, especially because it’s one of the few musical theater adjacent texts that I, a musical agnostic, enjoy, I want to call attention to the fact that Tovah Felspuh is totally channeling Anne Bancroft’s Mrs. Beckoff in her introductory scene in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, beyond just cashing in on some of the same character tropes. Secondly, as a film that is filled with countless quotable lines, the one that has resounded around in my skull the most since the screening is “He used to be a euphemism, now he’s just a friend.” And finally, I find it funny that Brandon should mention the apps in his intro, since I watched this film in a way that I hope Fierstein would appreciate: lying on a bed in a Denver hostel, swiping away app notifications as they attempted to grab my attention and cover the top half of my screen.
Welcome to Episode #211 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Britnee, and Brandon discuss a wide range of Barbra Streisand films, from her Oscar-winning breakout role in Funny Girl (1968) to her Oscar-nominated directorial effort The Prince of Tides (1991).
Welcome to Episode #210 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of horror films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with the gory slow-cinema slasher In a Violent Nature.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before, and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Boomer and Brandon watch A Place in the Sun (1951).
Britnee: Based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, George Stevens’s melodramatic noir masterpiece A Place in the Sun is one of my all-time favorite films. It’s overdramatic, shocking, gripping, and stars a young Elizabeth Taylor. That alone should convince anyone to watch it. Stevens won the Academy Award for Best Director for A Place in the Sun in 1951, and several years later in 1956, he won the award again for Giant (which also stars Elizabeth Taylor!). He treats his characters with such thoughtfulness and uses unique filmmaking techniques to drill through the layers of their humanity, drilling especially deep in this one.
George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) hitchhikes to California with the hopes of starting a career at his wealthy uncle’s factory. He’s working class and comes from a poor family, but he badly wants to be a part of the upper class. That’s American dream, isn’t it? He is given an entry-level job at the factory, where he hits it off with his co-worker, Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). They become a couple but don’t make their relationship public because it’s against the rules for male and female factory workers to fraternize. Gradually, George starts to step out on Alice to get closer to Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), the daughter of another wealthy industrialist in town. He’s hypnotized not only by Angela’s beauty, but by the status that she and her family hold. Angela is drawn to George as well, and she begins to invite him to more social events with the upper crust of society. Alice becomes increasingly upset as George puts her on the backburner to attend numerous fancy gatherings, and her frustrations are elevated when she finds out she is pregnant with his child. After her attempt to have an abortion is unsuccessful (in a very scandalous scene), she begins to pressure him into marriage. At the same time, his romantic relationship with Angela is blossoming.
Angela invites George to spend Labor Day weekend at her family’s lake house, which he does after telling Alice the trip is for his career advancement. Poor sweet Alice opens the morning paper to find a front-page photo of George having the time of his life on a boat with Angela. She tracks him down and quickly arrives to the town where they’re vacationing. This is the part of the film where I yell “Hell yeah, Alice! Show him you’re not messing around!” Unfortunately, when George meets her in town, he realizes that he needs to get rid of Alice to move on to a life with Angela, and that’s when the film takes the turn into being more of a legal thriller than a melodrama.
I’m always impressed by how much I’m drawn to the humanity of each main character in this film: Alice, Angela, and George. I know that George is terrible, but I’m almost able see into his soul. All of his sadness, confusion, and internal struggle with his conscience is boldly laid bare by Clift’s performance and enhanced by Stevens’s intense camera close-ups. Brandon, did you have a similar experience with George’s character?
Brandon: For me, the most surprising aspect of George’s character is that he’s not especially violent or sociopathic by nature; he’s just desperate. When compared to the most infamous rowboat killer of Old Hollywood—Gene Tierny’s heartless murderess in 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven—George ain’t all that bad. He’s operating from a similar place of selfishness, but it’s more out of financial gloom than it is out of inhuman cruelty. His humanity didn’t strike me as especially deep or complex, though – just realistic. One of the reasons Angela is so drawn to George is that he’s so quiet & pensive, which she misinterprets as him being “complicated”. Really, he’s just distracted by the walls closing in on his potential future as the husband of a wealthy heiress, dooming him instead to a life as the impoverished husband of a lowly factory worker. The more streetwise Alice, on the other hand, sees right through his desperate social climber schemes, since she doesn’t view his troubled badboy persona through the same naively romantic lens that Angela does. Her own downfall is also one of financial desperation, making this more of a story about the evils of money & class division than it is a story about the evils of personal moral failure.
No matter the motivations for George’s mistreatment of Alice, he still behaves like an absolute scoundrel and a coward. At its heart, A Place in the Sun is an epic-scale fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor, often at the expense of less outwardly elegant women like Shelley Winters. After all, Taylor was the most marriageable woman of all time, apparently lethally so. As with most classic melodramas, I found the interior lives of the two main actresses far more compelling than their counterpart in the male lead. Montgomery Clift plays an adequate prototype for a leather clad street-tough that would soon be perfected by the likes of Marlon Brando & James Dean, but I mostly found him useful as a point of contrast between Taylor & Winters. Elizabeth Taylor is the more stunningly beautiful actor of the pair, and she would go on to become one of the most-imitated, most-well-paid, and most-gossiped-about stars of studio-system Hollywood. Shelley Winters acts circles around Taylor in the picture, though, and her talents were mostly rewarded with a late-stage career resurgence as a psychobiddy freakshow in hagsploitation schlock like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? One was great at acting, while the other was great at being a movie star, and I find it fascinating how that difference is reflected in their characters here, so early in their respective careers.
Boomer, since this is ultimately a movie about callously comparing women against each other, what do you make of the difference between what Elizabeth Taylor & Shelley Winters bring to the screen in their competing roles as Alice & Angela?
Boomer: Looking back to the Wikipedia summary for this film, I’m immediately struck by the second sentence. From the top, it reads: “In 1950, George Eastman, the poor nephew of rich industrialist Charles Eastman, is offered an entry-level job at his uncle’s factory, where he begins dating co-worker Alice Tripp. Alice believes George’s Eastman name will bring her advantages” [emphasis added]. I don’t think that this is true, actually. If it was said explicitly, then I missed it, and if it’s not explicit, I think that’s more of an inference on the part of the composer of the plot description than something that’s implied in the narrative. If anything, Alice just seems like a lonely girl stuck in the kind of job that women in the 50s were supposed to do until a man married them and they could become housewives, but there are plenty of women around her who are older than she is, so there’s an implication that she worries she could end up an “old maid” like them. The implication that Alice is concerned with hitching herself to George for financial reasons is particularly unkind to her; her willingness to terminate her pregnancy (even if she can’t find a doctor to perform the operation) makes it clear that she’s not trying to entrap him with a child, and her declaration that she doesn’t care if they have to live in poverty as long as their together rings true.
On the other hand, Taylor brings a lightness to her character that’s lovely to behold, and I think that we’re supposed to be as entranced by her ethereality as George is. Her name implies an angelic nature not just in that she remains faithfully devoted to George until the end, but also that she’s a being that’s forever out of his reach and unable to be touched. But there’s also a naivety to her, and I can’t tell if that’s something that I’m projecting from the metatext, or something that’s really there. Before this, Shelley Winters was a huge sex symbol, and her dressing down to play dowdy Alice here was actually her playing against type, and that undisguisable beauty that lies beneath is impossible to completely conceal. Some quick research tells me that this was filmed from October of 1949 to March of 1950, which means that Clift and Winters were 29 during filming, and Taylor turned 18 during February, 1950. Although Winters still has a healthy vitality and youthful glow under all their attempts to frump her down a little, Clift very much looks older than his age, and far too old for the high school aged Taylor. To me, that discrepancy implies that there was never really a chance that this would work out – that Angela’s infatuation with George, while reciprocated, is not really as deep as Alice’s genuine love for him, and is more of a passing fancy and a fascination with someone outside of her privileged class than loving devotion. Then again … I’m keenly aware that I’m looking at this from a modern perspective and from within the horizon of my own experience, so maybe I’m no better than the person who crafted that implication that Alice was a gold-digger in the Wikipedia article. At least I’m admitting it’s my interpretation and not citing it as a fact! Ultimately, I think that the fact that Taylor brings the air of the ingenue to the role and Winters, by default having to play the supposedly less desirable option, is the perfect foil to her. Both of them deserve better than what they got, but it’s particularly hard to watch what happens to Alice.
While we’re on the topic of Alice, I do want to note that one of my favorite things about this one was the way that the art direction was such a powerful contributor to the narrative, since that hasn’t been touched upon yet. In the scene in which George calls home to tell his mother about his promotion, there’s a giant sign above the men camped out in her mission house asking the reader how long it’s been since they’ve written their mother, just to underline the distance between George and his mother, and the lack of contact between them.
Still later, when George is at home obsessing over Angela, a neon sign in the distance flashes her last name (presumably on some building that her father owns) in the distance, illustrating his preoccupation.
It’s not subtle, but I do like it. One that was subtle, however, was that every time we saw Alice’s address, whether it be on a piece of mail or on the side of the building where she lived, we saw that she lives at 4433 ½. It’s just another way that she’s stuck in the margins, a place not really held for her but one where she has to find somewhere to try and dig in and make space for herself. Poor Alice.
Lagniappe
Boomer: The dissolve transitions in this movie are amazing. There’s so much storytelling happening in the visuals alone in this movie; the superimposition of shot over shot to convey mood, a character’s internal thoughts, everything — truly solid filmmaking, even if the movie milks its melodrama a little hard.
Britnee: The atmosphere of Alice’s room in the boarding house really stuck with me. All of the claustrophobic shots in that room are so haunting. Particularly the scenes with that big open window at night. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about A Place in the Sun. I really can’t explain why.
Brandon: To further highlight the difference between what I appreciated in Taylor vs Winters, I’d like to point out my favorite moments of their respective, separate screentime. Taylor’s best moment is in an early scene when she first flirts with Clift at a party, modeling an incredible, white floral Edith Head gown that has been imitated just as often in the decades since as her iconic hairstyle. Meanwhile, Winters’s best moment is in the subtle choreography of her own flirtation with Clift at a movie theater, signaling her availability to him solely through strategic shifts in her body language. Both contributions are essential to what makes this movie so great, but they’re very different contributions.
Next month: Brandon presents Torch Song Trilogy (1988)
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