This month I wrote about two films that I have called, or call, my favorite movies: Fix (2008) and Casablanca (1942). It made me think a lot about the idea of a “favorite movie.” Favorite movies are often not the best movies. Sometimes we grow with our favorite things. Sometimes we grow out of them. Other times we hang on tightly and see them through lenses and lenses of nostalgia. This makes me interested in the idea of a “favorite movie.”

Because I am me, I don’t think I can choose just one. I wanted to do something larger. I started writing about movies as a list writer, and a “favorite movies list” felt like a no-brainer, but it didn’t exactly excite me creatively. I considered adding genre, but instead I decided to go by year. However, because so much of what makes something a favorite is tied to when and where you watched it, I didn’t want to look at this movie list only through my 2026 self. So here is a list of my favorite movies from each year from 1993 to 2026. Not only what I would have called my favorite movie as a 33-year-old movie critic, but also what I would have said at the time. Yeah, you are going to learn about what I loved as a teenager if you stick with this. I also should note that these are my favorite movies, not necessarily the best movies of any year. Taste is subjective, but for every film on this list, I will either stand behind it or note my current thoughts below.

I hope this will serve as a “movies I recommend” list for people who may be looking for more recent films than I usually cover on this blog. I also think it lets you get to know me a little better. Stay tuned for the end, when I give my final thoughts.

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This week’s blog was always going to be a little late. I was on vacation and actually had another film in mind to write about this week. However, I was sitting on a chaise lounge looking out onto the surf on Fire Island when my friend Gatsby ran out across the pool deck to alert me that “Dolly Parton died.”

As a die-hard Dolly fan, it was sad news. While I didn’t actually hear it, I assume a death wail went out across the Pines. The queen was dead. I decided to pivot and cover The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. I had just finished rewatching the film when my friend Matt texted me that Tim Curry died. Hard 24 hours for fans of camp cinema. Part of me wanted to pivot again, but maybe we will have back-to-back weeks of tribute posts.

Let’s talk about The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It’s kind of a weird choice on my end. I assume when most people think about Dolly Parton movies, they think about 9 to 5 (or maybe Steel Magnolias), but I love The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and I think it’s kind of an underappreciated gem.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is about the final days of the Chicken Ranch, a small-town bordello in Le Grange, Texas. The film follows former working girl turned madam, Mona Stangley, as she tries to defend her business from a moral crusader/TV journalist, Melvin T. Thorpe, with help from her sheriff/lover, Ed Earl. Also, it’s a musical. Directed by Colin Higgins, it stars Burt Reynolds, Dolly Parton, Jim Nabors, Charles Durning and Dom DeLuise.

I am not going to lie; this is a weird little movie. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was based on a 1978 stage musical, which was itself based on a 1974 Playboy article of the same name. It is not a particularly well-reviewed movie. It has a 52% on Rotten Tomatoes and not a much higher audience score. I understand that. This is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagination, but I kind of want to extol its virtues.

When I first saw The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, I was surprised by how positively it handles sex work. Part of the film’s running “joke” is that it has such a merry, joyful tone while talking about something usually taboo. The opening sets up a “whorehouse” as an American institution with a long history. This is a little bit of a joke, but it gets at something far more real: that places like the Chicken Ranch are part of the history of the West. Brothels were common in the Old West. In an article by Erin Blakemore for JSTOR, she writes, “Prostitutes of the American West were far from fallen women—many were savvy entrepreneurs.” Euro-American sex workers in the West had opportunities. Largely, they were highly paid and in demand. They could work their way out of the profession and gain social status through their clientele.

The real-life Chicken Ranch was the last major bordello in Texas, closing in 1973. The closure came after an investigative report by Houston journalist Marvin Zindler. While at the time he said he was investigating the rural brothel after an anonymous tip, he later revealed that it was at the request of the office of the Texas Attorney General, John Hill.

The film version of this story is a musical satire, but it captures something about how we should approach sex work in America. The film has nudity, titillation, and sex, but it has an almost folksy tone. The film starts with opening narration from the deputy sheriff. In it, he says in his Southern drawl, “It was the nicest little whorehouse you ever saw!” It sets up the film as feeling like a fairy tale or parable.

The first time I saw it, I was surprised by this tone. I can’t think of a ton of films that celebrate sex work, but this film does. There is a blink and you miss it line on a newscast when, in the third act, the governor has to decide if they should shut down the Chicken Ranch. An announcer on the TV says, “As feminists line up behind the bill for the decriminalization of prostitution already in the legislature, traditionalists and fundamentalists lobby for its defeat.” This is an interesting line to me, because when this film came out in the early 1980s, most feminists were still second-wave feminists.

Many second wave feminists saw sex work through an oppression model and saw the profession as inherently patriarchal. The late 1970s saw “The Feminist Sex Wars,” in which anti-pornography feminists debated with sex-positive feminists. The sex positive feminists argued that anti-pornography feminists pushed the narratives of the right wing. This film touches on the Empowerment Model of sex work, which would have been radical in 1982 and arguably still is. While the third wave in the 1990s saw changing attitudes around sex work, it is still something that is debated in feminist circles. Maybe it is because I am personally a sex-positive fourth wave feminist, but this line made me feel like this movie understands its own political messaging well.

This film is pro-sex worker rights and, maybe more importantly, pro-sex workers. Mona and her girls are the heroes of this narrative, and Mona gets to be a fully realized character. This is not usually how sex workers in 1980s films get treated. At one point, she reveals to Ed Earl that she reads the Bible. He is surprised that she would be religious because of her profession. She speaks about how Jesus treated Mary Magdalene. She also says that people are always “confusing crime with sin.” When Ed Earl finally stands up for Mona to the Governor, he echoes her, saying, “I been fightin’ crime all my life, but let’s not confuse crime with committin’ a sin. You can’t legislate morality.”

This is the real moral of the parable and one that I think is still needed. I would argue that this film is very pro-decriminalizing sex work. Because it is a parable, I think this could be stretched even further: that this film is about not judging others for what they are. Dolly Parton is largely remembered as an ally to the queer community. She stood up for gay rights in the 1980s and, later, defended the trans community. While this movie is about sex work, I think the moral can be extended to the LGBTQ+ community and really any community targeted by the “moral right” and unjust laws. The director, Colin Higgins, also directed 9 to 5, and both films use broad comedy to explore deeper themes, especially surrounding women and labor. The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas was his last theatrical film before he died of AIDS in 1988.

While, again, this isn’t a perfect film, there is a lot to love about it. When I rewatched it, I found myself thinking, “man, I missed musicals.” Everything is bigger in Texas, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is big in all the right ways. It is undeniably camp, and a lot of that camp comes through its inclusion of musical numbers.

Many of the songs are explicitly diegetic musical numbers. Someone will tell a character to “sing it, honey!” and then a number will start. This really adds to the joyful campiness of the film to me. The numbers are also often big. At one point, the A&M football team comes to the bordello after winning against Texas. There is a huge dance number before they get to the Ranch, which is insanely impressive (don’t think too much about how all the “football” players have the bodies and moves of gay Broadway dance captains).

This film is also where the Dolly Parton hit “Hard Candy Christmas” comes from. She also sings “I Will Always Love You To” Burt Reynolds, which I like less, but who can hate Dolly singing the hits?

If I was really going in on this film, it is a little bit of copaganda. Sheriff Ed Earl is, in the end, a hero of this film. He has to get over himself to stand up for Mona and her girls, but in the end he comes around. At the same time, Ed Earl feels real. He is hot-headed and non-committal, violent even at times. He gets read down by Mona and decides to change and even leaves his role as Sheriff. While the copaganda reading of this film is fair, it doesn’t ruin this movie for me. I think there is also a very valid critique of race in this film. Theresa Merritt plays Jewel, the brothel’s maid. She’s great in it, but the character feels pretty one-dimensional at times.

This film ends(spoilers) with the Chicken Ranch closing down and Mona running away with Ed Earl. It is a deeply bittersweet ending. For all the progressivism that the film pushes, the right gets its way. Since this is based on a true story, it kind of has to. Still, the ending hurts like the end of an era.

I think a lot of people will be watching 9 to 5 this week. It is the movie that Dolly herself liked a lot more. She famously hated working with Burt Reynolds and described making this film as "a miserable, spirit-numbing ordeal." I am sorry, Dolly, but I still love this film. I love 9 to 5 too, but if you haven’t seen the other Higgins x Parton pro-labor farce, it is the perfect time to watch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

So it has been a while since I wrote about a film that I specifically watched for the first time for this blog. I really like doing this in theory. This is a blog that, at its heart, is about watching classics for the first time and not just for the reader, but for me as well. At the same time, this practice is a little risky, especially if I am going into the movie pretty blind. I could always watch something, not have much to say about it or not like the film, and then skip it, but that feels a bit disingenuous too.

Which brings me to The Little Foxes. This film has been on my list for some time. It is based on a play by Lillian Hellman, with additional dialogue by the iconic Dorothy Parker. It was directed by one of the arguably greatest and most prolific directors of classic Hollywood, William Wyler. It stars Bette Davis. It was nominated for 9 Oscars (though it didn’t win any). It has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. It has an anti-capitalist message. I feel like I should love this movie.

However, I didn’t.

The Little Foxes follows a corrupt and wealthy family, the Hubbards, as they try to bring a cotton mill to their small town in the Deep South in 1900. Regina (Davis), the sister of the family, schemes and plans to get the controlling stake from her two backstabbing and cruel brothers as her daughter, Alexandra, falls for an idealist local boy as her husband’s health fails.

It almost sounds like a Southern Gothic melodrama (something again I should love on paper), but I found it extremely hard to get into. As someone who is often extolling the virtues of classic films, people often tell me that they find older films boring. I think this is the kind of movie they are talking about. I wouldn’t even necessarily call it slow; it just didn’t command my attention as so many other 1940s movies have. I don’t like to use the word “boring,” but I didn’t find much about it very compelling.

I wasn’t even exactly sure why. There is a lot of business jargon in this film, which might be part of it. It isn’t particularly hard to understand, and I like that the business plot is revealed little by little throughout the film. The plot is also punctuated by emotional speeches, often from Aunt Birdie (Patricia Collinge), a southern aristocrat who married into the family only to be driven to alcoholism through abuse. Some of these scenes feel a little over the top, but I think they add a lot to the drier business content.

I mentioned earlier that this film has an anti-capitalism message. This is probably the film’s biggest strength, but I also wish it were pushed further. The film starts with a quote from the King James version of Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon, “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.” There is a lot of bible commentary on this verse. I am not a theologian by any means, but given the context of the film, I took the quote to be about how sly actors ruin good families/lives with greed and scheming. The grapes, Alexandra and her father, are tender.

Regina ruins her own family with her greed. (Spoilers) Throughout the film, she is so driven by greed that she loses her husband and daughter. This is the main anti-capitalist message, but it’s probably also the least interesting. In the film, it is mentioned several times that the Hubbard family has gotten their wealth through unkind means. One of the Hubbard sons only married Aunt Birdie to inherit her family’s cotton plantation, Lionnet. Regina hopes to consolidate the family’s wealth by having Alexandra marry her own cousin Leo, making them both the heirs to Lionnet. Lionnet has rich soil, and the family has offered low wages to the formerly enslaved workforce. They plan to keep those low wages at the cotton mill as well.

“Low wages and incest bad” is a message I can get behind, but it doesn’t feel very radical or complex. Arguably, this might have hit more in 1941, but I actually don’t think that is true. The 1940s had many anti-capitalist films. In the US, there was John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Meet John Doe, Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, and I could even see the case being made for Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Outside of the US, Italy especially was making anti-capitalist films. What differentiates The Little Foxes from many of these other 1940s anti-capitalist films is that it also deals with race. That being said, I don’t think that it handles race particularly interestingly or well.

The film takes place in Alabama in 1900, and many scenes include Black extras. The film’s opening scenes show Black residents of the town, and the Hubbards’ home is filled with Black maids and drivers. Most of these characters do not speak or have much agency in the plot. For a movie that is about taking advantage of Black workers, we see very little of their internal lives or really their external lives, for that matter. This might be on purpose (and not just for racist reasons). Visually seeing all these people but not interacting with them puts the viewer into the shoes of a wealthy White Southerner to some extent. This take also feels a bit like wishful thinking, if I am being honest.

Alexandra’s maid (nanny?), Addie (Jessica Grayson), is one of the few Black characters with lines. She helps and advises Alexandra while providing some comic relief early on in the film. In a later scene, she says to Alexandra’s father, “Yes, they got mighty well-off cheating the poor. Well, there’s people that eats up the whole Earth and all the people on it. Like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there’s people that stand around and watch them do it. Sometimes I think it ain’t right to stand and watch them do it.”

He replies: “There’s something else in the Bible, Addie. Take us the foxes... the little foxes that spoil the vines... for our vines have tender grapes.”

The moment is pivotal. I took this exchange as him trying to explain to Addie why he has not stood up to his wife because of his tender daughter. Deep down, he knows Addie is right, and later in the film, he does stand up to Regina. The idea that standing by while others do evil is evil itself is probably the film’s most fascinating message, and likely the one with the most value through a modern lens. I could see modern audiences considering their own complicity in capitalism and beyond. 2026’s deeply individualistic and non-confrontational prevailing culture puts the modern audience in the shoes of Alexandra’s father, not Addie.

I like that they give Addie such a big moment, and maybe this would be important for 1940s audiences. However, I think the film overall doesn’t do enough for its Black characters.

In 1940, Variety wrote in a review of the film, “From starring Bette Davis down the line to the bit roles portrayed by minor Negroes the acting is well nigh flawless.” I would agree that the acting is great throughout the film, but “bit roles portrayed by minor Negroes” says something about both the film and the society it was made in.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this film doesn’t age well. But I don’t think it would connect well with many modern audiences. I wonder how this film would have connected to audiences of the time. I think it would have been juicier, more interesting, maybe even more scandalous. I can’t say that it works in those ways anymore. Maybe that’s okay, that not every piece of media retains its full value generation after generation. Even if I didn’t love it, I am still glad I watched it. At the same time, I don’t really recommend it unless you are very interested in classic films.

Last week, my husband and I decided to see One Night Only on opening night. It was mostly a joke. We had been seeing the ludicrous trailer for months and had developed a bit of an inside joke about needing to see the “Sex Purge Movie.”

If you haven’t heard of One Night Only, it is a romcom set during the 12-hour period that non-married people are allowed to have sex after an Act of Congress outlawed premarital sex. I was surprised how much I liked the movie. It is getting terrible reviews, but I actually thought it was really funny and a surprisingly cogent critique of Americans’ response to fascism. Aside from a queer roommate, most characters just put up a sign that says “repeal” and follow the government’s orders. Watching it, I was like, “Is the Sex Purge movie a satire of abortion bans, the rise of fascism, and the backlash to sex in recent American culture? Cause it really seems like it is.”

I will say the director, Will Gluck, has been giving interviews about the movie, which makes me think that he is either a bad interviewee, purposely being coy, being taken out of context, or doesn’t understand the thing he has made at all. I am going to kind of ignore what he has been saying, because I didn’t see any of it until after I saw the movie and already formed my opinion on it in a vacuum.

I should say, I also didn’t love the end of One Night Only. Spoiler Alert: the couple that we have been following and rooting for finally link up at the end, only for the countdown clock to be close to running out. They decide they don’t want to “let the mandate win,” so they wait til next year to have sex. I am not sure that is not letting the mandate win. The sex purge night very much wins this movie. It isn’t a happy ending for me. Love under fascism can be love, but it isn’t a happy ending. They still live in a dystopia. But maybe this ending says something about straight American culture and resistance, whether it means to or not.

It is also not lost on me that this movie came out about two weeks after the NYT published an article called “Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be Onto Something” and three weeks after NPR ran the headline, “Gen Z is afraid of sex — and for good reason.” I actually don’t think this movie is about sex; it’s about connection against the backdrop of rising conservatism.

One Night Only is a very strange film, but I was still surprised by how negative the critiques were. One take I saw especially surprised me: that this movie endorses the fascism it depicts. I don’t understand this reading of the film. I fear that, as the kids say, “we might be losing the plot.” This movie is a satire; if you don’t understand that, I am not sure you have the media literacy to watch it.

The other take on One Night Only that gave me pause was “it is bad to set a romcom in a fascist state.” Because why? I am not sure. Americans are currently falling in love in a fascist state every day. Why can’t it happen in a movie?

This got me thinking about what is arguably my favorite movie of all time. Last week, I wrote about the movie that I would have called my favorite as a teen, but if I had to answer the question today, I would probably say 1942’s Casablanca. I have actually been avoiding writing about Casablanca. I felt like, what can there be said about one of the most noted films of all time? Even choosing it as my favorite movie feels a bit like a cop-out to me. At the same time, I love Casablanca (literally, the first dance at my wedding was to ‘As Time Goes By’).

And I wonder how many people my age or younger have actually seen it. It is one of those movies that everyone has heard of and can likely even quote, but I am not sure if even all of my friends have seen it. I don’t know if people today are actually seeking out an 84-year-old film.

Casablanca isn’t a rom-com, but it is a romance in front of the backdrop of fascism. I wonder if people were seeing it for the first time today, some would argue that it is “bad to set a romance in a fascist state.”

Directed by Michael Curtiz, Casablanca follows Rick, an American bar owner in 1941 French Morocco. The Nazis have taken Paris, and French Morocco has become a powder keg full of refugees, Vichy officials, and German officers. Rick comes into possession of two stolen letters of transit (papers that will allow the owners to travel freely to Portugal and then on to America). Rick has a choice to make when his ex-lover, Isla, turns up in Casablanca with her husband, Victor Laszlo. After a year serving in a German concentration camp, Laszlo, a fugitive Czechoslovakian Resistance leader, hopes to use the transit letters to escape Casablanca and continue his work with the resistance. The film follows the love triangle and who will get the two papers and be able to leave Casablanca. It stars Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, Conrad Veidt, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre.

There is a lot to say about this movie, and a lot has already been said. But one thing that I didn’t fully grasp when I first saw it was how contemporary it was at the time. Casablanca was based on an unproduced play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, written in 1940 (the same year the Nazis invaded France). The play was inspired by a trip one of the writers, Murray Burnett, took in 1938 to help smuggle money out of Vienna and help his wife’s Jewish family. On the trip, he stopped in a cafe in the south of France, La Belle Aurore, where a Black pianist played to a seedy room of French locals, Nazis, and refugees. By 1942, the south of France was occupied. The studio rushed to release Casablanca in 1942 to try to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the Allied invasion of North Africa (Operation Torch). The invasion happened on November 8-16; Casablanca was released on November 26.

This is all to say, Casablanca was made while the events of the film were still directly happening. This film predates the end of the war by three years. I think this really matters for understanding Casablanca.

While Casablanca is a romance, the central theme is about the importance of doing the right thing and in the context of Nazi occupation, that thing is to resist. Rick starts the movie disillusioned with resistance. In the 1930s, he ran guns to Ethiopia and fought with the Spanish loyalists. The film makes it clear that these were noble acts and that Rick cared about ‘the underdog’ at one time in his life. Outside of history buffs, I am not sure modern audiences know that much about the Ethiopian-Italian War and Spanish Civil War. But this is the movie’s shorthand for saying Rick was an anticolonialist and antifascist. By the 1940s, Rick has become apolitical, likely due to seeing the rise of fascism and feeling like his efforts have been for nothing.

Spoilers for one of the most famous film endings ever: After seeing Laszlo embolden a room of customers to sing the national anthem over several German officers’ attempts to sing Die Wacht am Rhein at Rick’s cafe, he realizes Laszlo’s the real deal. Ilsa tries to convince Rick to give Laszlo the papers, promising to stay in Casablanca with him if he does. Laszlo tells Rick to take the papers and Ilsa and leave Casablanca. However, Rick sets a plan in motion and at the last possible moment, he gets Laszlo and Ilsa on the plane together. It is an act of sacrifice. He believes that Laszlo needs Ilsa to keep going and the resistance needs Laszlo to fight the Nazis. Rick still loves Ilsa, but there are bigger factors at play, and he knows it. Without her, he plans to join the resistance himself. He loses the girl, but gains the backbone.

The hero in Casablanca is Rick. Laszlo is a hero, but Rick is the hero of the movie. His heroism is of self-sacrifice and action. Casablanca isn’t a satire; it is a romantic drama and specifically an anti-fascist one.

Director Michael Curtiz was a Hungarian Jew. Actor Paul Henreid (Lazslo) had to flee his native Germany in 1938 after he was designated as an “official enemy of the Third Reich” due to his anti-Nazi politics. Conrad Veidt also appears in this film as a Nazi officer. He notably appeared in the early queer film Different from Others, spent time as a cabaret performer and was likely bisexual. He also left Germany in 1933 after directly standing up for his Jewish wife to Joseph Goebbels. Madeleine Lebeau appears in the film as Rick’s mistress. Lebeau fled the Nazi occupation of France because her husband Marcel Dalio was Jewish. Much like the characters in the film, they made it to Lisbon and then the Americas, likely on travel papers from Aristides de Sousa Mendes (a Portuguese diplomat who defied orders and issued thousands of travel visas to Jewish refugees). Peter Lorre also appears in the film; Lorre was a Hungarian Jewish actor who fled Germany in 1933 and became a refugee in Paris before working with Alfred Hitchcock in London. S. Z. Sakall plays the head waiter at the bar in the film. Another Hungarian Jew, Sakall, escaped to Hollywood with his wife, but three of his sisters and his niece were murdered in a concentration camp after the Nazis took Hungary. These were artists who lost something to fascism by 1942.

The screenplay was written by Jewish twin brothers Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein along with Howard Koch, a Jewish scriptwriter who was later Blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee for being a communist. These were men who had something to lose to fascism.

Rick is extremely cool in this movie. He’s played by Humphrey Bogart. He’s sexy and funny. He owns a successful bar. He is tied to multiple beautiful women. Men of the 1940s should want to be like Rick. In this way, this film takes a stance that red-blooded American males should stand up to fascism. There is something very 1940s about this. In some ways, this could even be argued to be a propaganda film if you consider “fight fascism” a propagandist statement. I personally don’t, but in 2026, I could see the argument being made with the backlash to “antifa.”

Which brings me back to One Night Only (I know, I am sorry). My only issue with the film was the ending, but I also think the ending said something about the current state of American society. I think having them capitulate to fascism actually helps the satire (intentionally or not). The average straight couple in 2026 isn’t fighting fascism. They are living life as normally as possible under it. They are putting up their “resist” sign in the window and going about their days. One Night Only’s ending is a bit of a mirror to current American culture, one that is individualistic and passive. I wanted the couple to stand up to fascism. I wanted them to break the no-sex mandate. However, becoming a sex criminal isn’t exactly a rom-com-friendly ending and maybe is not emblematic of America’s current culture of cowardice.

Comparing these two films is strange for a lot of reasons, but I think some people might say, “it doesn’t make sense to compare any rom-com to Casablanca, it isn’t a rom-com.” I kind of want to push back on that, because it connects to one of the reasons Casablanca is my favorite film. Casablanca is really funny. I don’t think we talk about this. I think older films often are thought of as boring or maybe dry. I think Casablanca is generally marked safe from this stereotype in people’s minds because it’s often quoted. Even if you haven’t seen it, I assume you could guess it has a strong script. However, every time I watch it, I am surprised by how funny it is. Especially in the first third, there are a ton of jokes, zingers, and even visual gags.

Sometimes even in heavy scenes there are jokes. As Paris is being taken by the Nazis in a flashback, Ilsa says to Rick, “With the whole world crumbling, we pick this time to fall in love.”

He says, “Yeah, it’s pretty bad timing. Where were you, say, ten years ago?”

To which she replies, “Ten years ago? Well, let’s see... Oh, yes, I was having a brace put on my teeth. Where were you?”

“Looking for a job.”

I am sorry, but this is rom-com dialogue about fascism. And this is not an isolated incident. I love that the script doesn’t shy away from humor even when discussing hard topics. But I am not sure everyone would see this as a positive today if Casablanca weren’t already a classic.

I was thinking about what audiences might think of Casablanca today. Would they call it copaganda? It does end with a cop who sexually assaults women getting redeemed at the very end. I wouldn’t call it copoganda, but I could see the argument. Would people hate that it combines romance, comedy, and fascism? Maybe depending on how base our media literacy has gotten. Would it inspire age-gap discourse? He WAS an adult when she was in braces (the stars had a 16-year age gap… not even Bogart’s worst, but yeah, I could see this critique).

I ask, but at the same time I think people would still love Casablanca. It is hard not to. Believe the hype; it really is that good, and if you by some miracle haven’t seen it, I am jealous. I am not sure what I would give to see it again for the first time. But if you have and don’t want to rewatch it, maybe see One Night Only. Honestly, you might like it.

As someone who writes about movies, I don’t have a good answer for “what is my favorite movie?” (I don’t even have a good Letterboxd top four). If I had to choose a favorite movie, I guess, Casablanca? But honestly, that feels like a cop-out. It’s like saying Citizen Kane. It might be the correct choice, but it feels safe, fake even.

Years ago, a friend’s (now thankfully) ex-boyfriend asked me about my favorite movie. Before I even answered, he said his favorite was one by Wong Kar-wai (I forget which one, maybe Chungking Express). I remember thinking, “fuck, that’s the perfect answer.” Artsy, but not overly obscure. From a famous but still somehow underappreciated director, and also not his most famous film. At the same time, I didn’t believe this man. The choice felt too choreographed. Too perfect. It was the choice you would choose to impress people who know and sift out those who don’t.

I haven’t had a ‘favorite film’ in years, but this weekend I was thinking more about Olivia Wilde than I usually do. I just saw her new film, The Invite (if you haven’t seen it, go, it’s great) and want to see Gregg Araki’s new film, I Want Your Sex, which also stars Wilde. It made me think about the last time I had a definitive answer for what my favorite film was.

In high school, I would have told you my favorite film was Fix (2008). I hadn’t seen the film in years, but there was a time it would have been listed on my MySpace as my favorite movie. I think even slightly after the MySpace era, I would have called it my favorite film. I decided to rewatch it for the first time in at least a decade to see if it holds up and, maybe more importantly, if I still loved it. Spoilers: it is more complicated now.

Fix is a low-budget dramedy that follows a documentary director, Milo, and his girlfriend, Bella, who go to Los Angeles to take Milo’s brother, Leo, to rehab. After they find out he needs $5k to enroll, the group has to get creative if they want to keep Leo out of jail. Directed by Tao Ruspoli, the film stars Shawn Andrews, Olivia Wilde, and Megalyn Echikunwoke.

Before I rewatched it, I googled it to see if it was available on any streaming platform. I immediately saw that it has a 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not a great sign. However, I also noticed that it only has 9 critic reviews on the site (it also had an audience score of 56%, but this time from 250 reviews). Still, a score this low almost made me not want to rewatch it. I almost wanted to keep my memory of this movie more than the reality of it. I didn’t want to trash the nostalgic feelings I had for it.

From this Google search, I also found that the director posted the entire movie to his YouTube account. There, it only had about 2.5k views and 55 likes. This is what actually made me rewatch it, because it reminded me how I first saw the film.

I think a big part of why I called it my favorite film for several years in the late 2000s was how I came across it. In 2008, I was a freshman in high school in Berkeley, California. I had glasses, wore bad eyeliner, was probably too smart for my own good, and had a popular older sister, so of course, I felt like a total outsider.

My 6 friends and I looked like we could have fallen out of a canceled Freaks and Geeks: The Next Class reboot. We were listening to Sub Pop records and wearing skinny jeans that could have cut off our circulation. You have to remember that it was the late 2000s; weird girls were dancing between the true end of the hipster era and the beginning of Indie Sleeze. For several years, our little hipster friend group would attend the Berkeley Film Festival. It was a tiny festival held on one screen at the Regal UA Berkeley. They would play the entire festival slate continuously over a 20-some-hour period, letting the audience come in and out. We would sneak in snacks and try to see as much as possible even as we fought sleep towards the end of the programming.

The theater has since closed, like many of the old picture houses in Berkeley, California. The whole film festival feels like something from a very different era. But that is where I first saw Fix. It was towards the end of the night. I was bleary-eyed and exhausted, but I needed to stay to the end. Partially, it was because the director was there and it felt wrong to leave before it. But more than that, I was transfixed by it. It was like nothing I had ever seen.

Growing up, I loved movies, but much of what I had seen were my moms’ favorite films. They both had great and varied tastes, but this was something new. It was something that was mine. I found it myself. I should also say that at age 15ish, I hadn’t seen that much. But to me, Fix felt groundbreaking.

At age 33, Fix feels less groundbreaking, but I would be lying if I said it wasn’t unique. The film is technically a mockumentary. The director, Ruspoli, plays Milo, a documentary director who has a quirk that he films his whole life. The POV is completely from his in-world camera. This isn’t a completely unheard-of conceit, though it is usually found in horror like The Blair Witch Project and Rec or comedy like This Is Spinal Tap and Man Bites Dog (all of which predate Fix). I can’t really think of it used in a drama/dramedy outside of this film (I am sure I am missing some). However, dramedy feels like the perfect genre for this treatment. In the film, Milo and his girlfriend, Bella, are in the middle of making a documentary about prisons. Their characters and politics interact with the plotline fairly seamlessly.

This film also goes very far to blend the real and the imagined. At one point, the characters pass the South Central Farm and talk about how the urban farm was bulldozed. It even has footage of the farm being destroyed. Many of the scenes seem to just be of real people and places in Los Angeles. There is a charming authenticity to a lot of this film. Warning: there are far too many clips of freeways and driving in this film as well, but that also feels a little like what it’s like to spend 12 hours in Los Angeles.

Fix also takes place over the course of one day and also functions as a messy love/hate letter to Los Angeles. In 2008, I hadn’t seen Sean Baker and Tsou Shih-Ching’s 2004 film Take-Out, but I would guess that it was a heavy source of inspiration for Fix. While Fix features LA and a $5K bill, Take-Out follows a delivery man crossing New York City to raise $800 over a single day. Take-Out isn’t a mockumentary, but it is in the social-realist style and was made for only $3,000, giving it almost a documentary feel. I think if I had seen Take-Out first, I would have been far less impressed by Fix.

But does Fix hold up more generally? I would say yes and no. I rewatched this film with my husband, who had never seen it. Halfway through, he asked, “This was really your favorite film?” However, by the end, he said he liked it. There is a build to this movie.

I would argue it also has something to say about the opioid crisis in America. It can be slightly heavy-handed at times, but the handling of the subject feels personal. I couldn’t find much on this, but the movie is supposedly “inspired by true events.” I found a CNN interview from the 2008 Slamdance festival where the interviewer mentions that it is based on true events twice. Wilde, Andrews, and Ruspoli don’t respond directly to the line of questioning, but they don’t correct him. Even without it being confirmed, how Leo and his heroin addiction are handled feels personal. Especially towards the end of the film, it has a lot to say about the complexity of addiction. Without spoiling too much, the end is done so well that you forgive some of the strangeness and sins of the film.

As I mentioned earlier, this film has far too many shots of just driving around. It is gratuitous, but the excellent soundtrack really helps in these slower moments. The acting is also not great. A lot of this film is going to wacky side characters’ houses/places of business and trying to get money from them. Many of these characters seem to be played by non-professional actors, and the acting is not great. Part of me wonders if this was on purpose. I could see it being a homage to Italian Neo-realism. But I would guess it was more likely due to budget. One of the first wacky side characters introduced is a bail bondsman played by Randall Park. Park wasn’t famous in 2008, but he was an actor and stand-up in Los Angeles, which makes me think they weren’t trying to cast in some sort of Italian Neo-realism-veritas.

Olivia Wilde is also in this film. Wilde wasn’t a household name in 2008, but even I had already seen her on The OC and House by this point. Still, her casting actually makes a better case for some sort of mock-cinema veritas. In this movie, she plays Ruspoli’s character’s girlfriend. In 2003, at age 19, Wilde married Ruspoli. The two were married on a school bus at Burning Man, and divorced in 2011. Ruspoli is a documentary filmmaker and the second son of an Italian Prince. While they split amicably, something about him marrying a 19-year-old when he was 28 has always stuck with me as a little icky. It isn’t as bad as their co-star on this film, Shawn Andrews. Andrews married a 16-year-old Milla Jovovich when he was 20 (though her mother annulled that marriage quickly!). None of this really matters when it comes to the actual movie, but it was information I didn’t have at the time and now maybe this information colors my perception of it. In 2026, it is something I know about the men behind this film.

If I saw Fix for the first time in 2026, it would have never been my favorite movie, but I think so much of the reality of “favorite movies” is tied up in nostalgia. I am incredibly nostalgic about this film. Even all these years later, part of me wants to defend it, whether it deserves it or not. I loved this film. I downloaded the soundtrack on my iPod nano. It fueled the flames of the crush I had on Olivia Wilde, ignited by her brief run on The OC in 2005. Both my love for the movie and the movie itself feel a bit like a time capsule.

It was from an era when people made movies for cheap in the back of a car, and teenage girls stayed up late in a now-closed theater to watch them. Part of me will always remember that at one point in my life, this was my favorite film and isn’t that enough for me to care about it?

I recently saw Chris Nolan’s The Odyssey. While I think it is probably going to be the most famous adaptation, it isn’t the first cinematic take on Homer’s The Odyssey. The first version (at least, the first I am aware of) was 1905’s The Mysterious Island. It is a silent short film by Georges Méliès that features scenes of Calypso and the Cyclops from the epic poem. The original French name for the film was L’Île de Calypso or Calypso’s island.

Since then, there have been several films based on the poem. I would argue that the best of them is probably the 1954 Kirk Douglas classic Ulysses, but there is also 2024’s The Return, a couple of miniseries, and even an animated film from 1987. Oh, and technically the Coen Brothers’ 2000s comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (It is a loose modern take).

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I haven’t planned that much travel for this summer. However, I did go to my family reunion in Michigan. Usually when I am on a plane, I start watching and then fall asleep to Crazy Rich Asians (it’s a perfect plane film in my opinion), but this time while I was scrolling through the American Airlines entertainment options, I came across a film from the 1950s that I had never heard of before, Three Guys Named Mike (1951).

I was surprised to see any film from the 1950s on a plane. If they do have older movies on a plane, it is often a very limited selection. I have seen planes have Casablanca and It’s a Wonderful Life, but that is usually about it. I am not mad about this for the record. Again, my usual plane movie is from 2018.

I decided to watch Three Guys Named Mike, and it became pretty clear why American Airlines had this film. While it is a cute rom-com, it is also propaganda for flying American Airlines.

Directed by Charles Walters, the MGM film follows a plucky airline stewardess, Marcy, who has to choose between three romantic suitors: a pilot, an ad man and a biology grad student. The “twist:” they are all named Michael. It stars Jane Wyman, Van Johnson, Howard Keel and Barry Sullivan.

The first Mike we meet is Michael Jamison. He’s a pilot with whom she has some tension, but realizes he’s a good guy when he helps save her job after she forgets to stock their plane with lunch on her first day (the slip-up makes them turn the flight around, which surprised me… like they don’t even serve lunch on planes anymore, but I guess in the 1950s it was that important). Michael loves his job as a pilot and is fairly brash but charming. The two are given the same plane route to Los Angeles.

She then meets Mike Lawrence, a mild-mannered grad student who dreams of a quiet life. She is interested in his research, and they bond since her mother was a teacher in a small college town. Finally, there is Mickey Tracy. He’s a far too slick ad man she meets on a flight from Chicago. He takes her out, and she helps him pitch an ad idea to a soap company.

In the end, all three men have to save her from a predatory photographer who is shooting the ad for the soap company. They all propose marriage, and she has to choose between the Mikes.

I don’t want to over-sell this movie. It is very much a B-tier 1950s rom-com, but there was a lot I liked about it. The first is just how charming Jane Wyman is in it. Wyman is probably most remembered these days for being the first wife of Ronald Regan. As a funny aside, when she divorced him, she cited political reasons as a factor because she was a registered Republican and he was still a Democrat in 1948. In 1981, Wyman became the first ex-wife of a U.S. president in American history.

Outside of her marriage, she was both a singer, a four-time Oscar-nominated actress, and a soap opera star. This is definitely not her best role or most iconic role, but she is so stinking cute in it. She also has great chemistry, especially with Michael Jamison, played by Howard Keel.

I also really liked that this movie is largely about women’s work. The first third of the film is largely about Marcy becoming a stewardess. Pre-1930s, stewards or cabin boys were all men. However, in 1930 United Airlines hired Ellen Church, a registered nurse, to become the first female flight attendant. In the 1930s, flight attendant became one of the few jobs that women could have, and by 1936, most stewardesses were female. This film came out the same year that American Airlines promoted Carlene Roberts as the industry’s first female vice president.

In the 1950s, becoming a flight attendant was competitive and prestigious, and this is reflected in the film. The romance genre is all about fantasy, and being a flight attendant is part of the fantasy in this film. Marcy gets to travel, meets female friends through her job, and has an independence that many women couldn’t have in the early 1950s. However, this part of the fantasy coexists with the romantic fantasy.

Spoilers for this movie ahead: the central conflict of this film is “who is she going to choose?” I am usually pretty good at guessing these things, but I actually got this wrong. I assumed she would end up with Michael Jamison, the pilot. They have the best chemistry, and since she loves the travel aspect of her job, it would make sense for her to fall in love with a pilot. However, she chooses Mike Lawrence, the grad student who is hoping to settle down and have a family.

This surprised me. But then I thought about it, and it ties back to work. In the 1950s, stewardesses couldn’t be engaged or married. If she had chosen Jamison, she couldn’t keep her job. He would still be a flyboy, and she would just be his wife. She also loses her job by choosing Lawrence, but he offers her a life that she can still be a part of. She obviously won’t be a professor like he wants to be, but they will be together. If this wasn’t the 1950s, I could see her choosing Jamison, and maybe more importantly, I don’t think she would give up the job at all no matter what man she chose. American Airlines VP Carlene Roberts served in the role from 1951-1954. She had worked her way up in aviation since the 1930s for the position, but she resigned to get married.

In the film, Mickey Tracy never seems like a viable option. He’s too slick. He won’t let her help him at his work, but she defies him and does it anyway. He then realizes she has good ad ideas. In some ways, he offers the most. If she chose him, she could still probably work in some way, and they could have a more modern relationship. However, this never seems like a real possibility. Maybe she has to choose Lawrence, because this is the 1950s and represents the most traditional option. There is something deeply sad about this.

When looking into this film, I found that while it was written by Sidney Sheldon with a story by Ruth Brooks Flippen, it was “based on a suggestion by Ethel ‘Pug’ Wells.” I wanted to know more about Pug and found her obituary. In the obituary, it says that Pug was an American Airlines stewardess and that “One of her passengers, William Wellman of MGM, was so enchanted by Pug’s stories he decided to make a movie about them.” It also mentions that she cameoed in the film. She too left her job as a stewardess after a passenger introduced her to the man who would become her husband.

This film made me think about my husband’s grandmother, who was a Pan Am stewardess in the 1950s. She too left the airline after marrying my husband’s grandfather. This movie captures the story of a certain generation of beautiful women who worked, met, and married in the aviation industry. It isn’t always a purely happy one, but one that captures a truth about women, work, marriage, and expectations.

Part of me had to fight the “it’s not that deep, Rosa” urge while writing this review. This is a rom-com and one that is thought of as a classic of the genre. Maybe it is because it is not trying to make a statement that it has interested me. Truths about women and work and marriage are presented as facts, not themes, in this film. In this way, it captures something real.

So I didn’t get tickets to The Odyssey this weekend. I actually didn’t even try. Once I heard that people were waiting and refreshing the AMC over and over like it was an Arianna Grande concert, I resigned myself to just waiting a week or two after opening weekend (I am seeing it next week). However, the madness around it led me to consider: do the people crave sword and sandal movies again?

I am being a little facetious here. While the term is sometimes used loosely to talk about films set in the ancient world, the Sword and Sandal genre, also called peplum, actually refers pretty specifically to a period in Italian filmmaking. During the early 1960s, Italian filmmakers were producing historical epics largely happening in Greco-Roman antiquity. These films were actually a reaction to a trend in Hollywood. During the 1950s and 60s, Hollywood was going all in on historical epics. Many of these epic films were set in biblical times or the ancient world, and often specifically Rome.

Since the 1960s, there have been notable examples of films set in Greco-Roman antiquity, from Troy to Gladiator. However, the late 1950s to mid 1960s was really the heyday of this genre. I considered a lot of different films from this period when thinking of what I wanted to write about, but then I saw this photo from the set of The Odyssey.

The photo shows a 60 ft. tall puppet that director Christopher Nolan used as a practical effect while filming The Odyssey’s Cyclops scene. This photo is making the rounds online, where most people are applauding the use of practical effects over pure CGI, which got me thinking about 1963’s Jason and The Argonauts.

Jason and The Argonauts comes near the end of the era of historic epics and Sword and Sandals films, and it isn’t exactly the same genre (though it shares a lot of similarities to epics of the time).

Based on the epic poem The Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius, the film follows Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece on the famous ship, the Argo. After his father and sister are killed by Pelias, Hera takes pity on Jason and promises to help him rise to power in his native land of Thessaly. He plans to bring a blessed fleece back from Colchis, a city ‘at the end of the world.’ Jason sets forth with Hercules, Hylas, and Acastus (the son of Pelius) and encounters a titan, the Hydra, harpies, and several of the gods. Directed by Don Chaffey, the film stars Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack, Gary Raymond, and Laurence Naismith.

Before this week, I had actually never seen this film, but I was aware of it because of its practical effects. I would guess that a lot of people have seen images from this film, especially Poseidon holding back rocks or the final fight scene with the army of the dead.

There are two ways of thinking about the special effects in this film: 1) they are dated or 2) they are among the most impressive ever put to screen.

I would argue both ways are true, and it really depends on how you watch this (I do think there is a correct way to watch this movie). If you watch through a 2026 lens, it is easy to pick apart the white lines around figures at moments, sometimes how it is shot makes it obvious that the actors are lunging swords at nothing, or that most of the monsters are made of clay. However, I would call this a bad way to watch. All effects will age. Movies show this age eventually, even the ones made with modern CGI. It is an inevitability.

I prefer to watch this movie through a 1960s lens. I found myself marveling at how they pulled the special effects in this film off. The effects in this film were done by the legendary ​​Ray Harryhausen. Along with names like Willis O’Brien, Georges Méliès, and Eiji Tsuburaya, Harryhausen was a pioneer in special effects. Harryhausen reached out to O’Brien (the animator of King Kong) because he wanted to learn stop-motion animation. O’Brien pushed him to take sculpting classes, and Harryhausen enrolled at USC’s newly formed School of Cinematic Arts to learn stop-motion animation. He served in the U.S. Army’s Special Services Division under Colonel/director Frank Capra during WWII as a film crew member. By the 1950s, he had established himself in the field of special effects.

This film is considered one of his master works, if not his masterpiece. Tom Hanks even said while presenting Harryhausen a lifetime achievement Oscar, “Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane...I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made!”

It was surprisingly hard to find detailed accounts of how many of the effects in this movie were done. This was somewhat surprising to me. A lot of sources just note stop-motion animation; however, I would guess that quite a bit of chroma keying (aka green screen/blue screen) was also used, especially when gods interact with mortals. Both chroma keying and stop-motion have a long history in film, and neither was a new technique in the 1960s. Both have been around since the silent era. However, I would argue that their extended and frequent use in this film is groundbreaking.

In some ways, this film reminds me of the films of Méliès. Méliès was notable for “trick films” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He is probably most remembered for directing 1902’s A Trip to the Moon, where he used his skills as a magician to make one of the first narrative sci-fi films. All of his films predate Chroma keying, and stop motion was only emerging during his time. He mainly used substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and dissolves for effects. However, his films capture the same fantastical spirit of Jason and the Argonauts. It is effects, costuming and set design. It is about building something that will trick the eye.

Jason and the Argonauts may no longer trick the modern eye, but maybe the issue is nothing will trick the modern eye anymore. In a world where we can almost animate anything through CGI, what is the point of practical effects? Well, I would argue a lot. CGI no longer interests me, and I think as AI seeps into all forms of entertainment, I find myself drawn to practical spectacle. I am not impressed that AI could make Adrien Brody better at sounding Hungarian in The Brutalist to win an Oscar; I am more impressed that Connor Storrie had to learn Russian for a low-budget smutty Canadian TV show. I am not interested in the fact that Martin Scorsese could de-age Robert De Niro with CGI for The Irishman. I am more invested in how good Josh Brolin was at mirroring Tommy Lee Jones’s mannerisms to play a young Agent K in Men in Black III (Am I saying Men in Black III is better than The Brutalist? Probably not, but IDK maybe). I know what computers can do in 2026; I am more fascinated by what artists can do.

I think there is an art and a magic to creative choices and practical solutions in filmmaking. I don’t think I am the only one. Matt Damon said in a recent interview that for one scene in The Odyssey they used 7-foot-tall extras to play the Laestrygonians and paired them with short body doubles. Damon’s double for the scene was actually a buff woman because to make the effect work, they needed someone under 5 feet tall. This scene could have easily been CGI, but it has become a story because it wasn’t. Audiences want to be tricked. This is where the amazement of practical effects comes in. And this is how you should try to watch Jason and the Argonauts.

Harryhausen was a sci-fi fan. In the late 1930s, he met and became good friends with Ray Bradbury and Forrest J Ackerman and even joined a LA sci-fi society. A lot of his work reflects this fandom. While I introduced this film as a relative to a sword-and-sandals style epic, it has a lot in common with sci-fi films of the 1960s. Technically, it is a fantasy and not a sci-fi, but this film feels like it blends and takes inspiration from multiple genres.

Generally, classic Hollywood epics share a couple of factors. Most of them take place in antiquity. They are often deeply homoerotic. They are exceedingly long (for example, Ben-Hur is 3.5 hours, Cleopatra is almost 4). They are almost all based on legends or historical figures and have an impressive scale. Jason and the Argonauts doesn’t exactly fit into all of these categories. I would say it has an impressive scale, but it is really pretty short. Epics often have a slow pace, but Jason and the Argonauts has a breakneck pace at moments. It is really almost all action. I would also argue that while it is a little homoerotic, it isn’t as explicit as films like Spartacus or Ben-Hur (kind of surprising for ancient Greece tbh).

Many of these epics take place in Rome and feature Christian themes. Jason and the Argonauts predates many of these stories. It also explores the Greek connection to the gods. In this film, the gods play with mortals like chess pieces. It isn’t exactly the deepest reading of classical Greek polytheism, but I found it an interesting addition to a film of this age. I think the way we talk about Greek Mythology vs. Judaism and early Christianity in the Roman Empire is interesting. Many films see Judeo-Christian stories as history and Greek stories as mythology. This may have to do with age, but I would also say, since there are still people who believe in the stories shown in The Ten Commandments (1956) or The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), they are handled differently. (Not to say that some Neo-pagans don’t use the Greek Pantheon, but generally, it is approached differently).

Jason and the Argonauts is often more noted as a fantasy film than a historical epic. That is more than a fair take, but the categorization still interests me. It is one of several fantasy films based on myths that Harryhausen worked on. Others include, Clash of the Titans (1981), and the Sinbad trilogy: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973), and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977). The Odyssey is definitely being sold as an epic, but I think through this lens, it is also arguably a fantasy film (albeit one based on mythology). I personally feel like the line between ancient history and mythology is a blurred one.

While I think you should watch Jason and the Argonauts, it does come with some warnings. It doesn’t really tell a full story. There are some notable changes and omissions from The Argonautica throughout, but it is very obvious that they were hoping for a sequel. The film ends with almost a cliffhanger. However, it did poorly at the box office, and one wasn’t made. In many ways, it feels like a Greek myth. There is a lot of action, and also sometimes things just happen. As a former kid who was obsessed with Greek myths, it isn’t surprising that Hercules just kind of disappears halfway through, but it can seem odd for post-Chekhov storytelling.

The character of Madea is also kind of funny in this film. A lot of her story is omitted, and she is also introduced with 1960s cat-eye eyeliner and almost a bouffant. Yeah, it is a little silly, but I even found her styling kind of endearing. I wouldn’t come into this movie as a die-hard Madea fan (the 5th-century BC Euripides’s tragedy, not the Tyler Perry character… actually either way). There is a 1969 Italian film, Medea, that I would recommend.

Jason and the Argonauts won’t be for everyone, but if you still can’t get Odyssey tickets, maybe try out another film based on a Greek classic full of men on boats and practical effects.

I have been thinking about Rock Hudson a lot. A couple of months ago, I tried to watch Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, a documentary about the life of a famous, closeted 1950s star, on HBO Max using my mother’s Prime account. However, I still haven’t seen this movie because every time I click on it, the app instead shows me what I believe is Season 3, Episode 7 of The Righteous Gemstones: the episode where they go to a monster truck rally.

All throughout Pride Month, I was assaulted with “up next for you” and “LGBTQ Picks” categories prominently featuring Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed. I tried an amazing number of times to refresh and reboot it, but every time I was met with an HBO original sitcom about a family who sings gospel music and not a documentary about a man who died of AIDS in 1985. And since it is an HBO original film, I can’t access it or even buy it. Honestly, it started to make me feel a little like I was going crazy.

However, because of my Rock Hudson-themed odyssey, I have found myself thinking and talking about him far more than I usually would. One of those recent conversations was with my cinema-loving friend stuck in a traffic route to a noted gay beach in Queens, NY. I was saying that 1959 was a big year for slipping gay stuff into films, like Suddenly Last Summer, Ben Hur, Some Like It Hot and “the movie where Rock Hudson pretends to be gay to sleep with Doris Day,” in reference to the film Pillow Talk (1959). My friend was shocked that a movie from the 1950s would feature this as part of the plot, and even more shocked that Hudson would agree to it, given his real-life behind-the-scenes. I hadn’t seen Pillow Talk since I was a kid, and I wondered if I was misremembering it. It did seem strange. Maybe I didn’t know what Pillow Talk is about.

So, I rewatched Pillow Talk for the first time in 20 years. My memory of Pillow Talk really boiled down to one scene. In this scene, Hudson’s character does pretend to be gay in a ploy to sleep with Day’s. However, I remembered this as a far bigger plot point than it was. For some reason, I thought this was the central plot of the movie, and that isn’t really true (sorry to my friend Gary if I led you astray on Pillow Talk).

No, Pillow Talk is actually much wilder, in my opinion. Directed by Michael Gordon, the film follows Jan Morrow, a prudish interior designer in New York City who shares a party telephone line1 with the rakish, playboy composer Brad Allen. When Allen realizes that his good friend is in love with Jan and that she looks like Doris Day, he decides that he wants to pursue her himself. However, Jan hates Brad (who she has only spoken to on the party line), so Brad pretends to be a bashful oil man named Rex Stetson to romance her.

There has been a trend in film retrospectives, especially when it comes to rom-coms, to critique along the lines of “this leading man is actually terrible.” This line of criticism sometimes feels a little cringe, dare I say cheugy, maybe a little “Buzzfeed.” That said, Pillow Talk is rife for this type of critique.

Not only does Brad pretend to be a completely different person to seduce Jan, but he also speaks with her on the phone about Rex several times. The first time, Brad says Rex will invite her up to his hotel room for the purposes of sex (Brad lives in the city but seemingly rented out a hotel room, off-screen, for this con). Brad as Rex then does invite her up, but just to see the view. Brad later insinuates that Rex is gay because he hasn’t made a move after several dates. Brad says, “Do I have to spell it out for you? There are men who are very devoted to their mothers, you know the types who like to collect cooking recipes, exchange bits of gossip.”2 Jan starts noticing Rex’s (newly adopted) mannerisms. He asks about working with “colors and fabrics,” then sticks out his pinky effeminately. His gay act forces Jan to ask him if he is attracted to her, allowing a window for him to kiss her for the first time.3

These are mind games thought up by Brad to show that Rex is a different kind of person than Brad. But is he? Literally not; they are the same person. However, the film wants us to think that by the end, Brad has changed. He has fallen in love and wants to get married. Maybe he has become Rex.

This is a rom-com. We all know how it is going to end. Still, I found myself guessing how it was going to get there. The whole time I was thinking, “What are this man’s goals and how is he going to pull this off?” You know Rex is going to get found out at some point. I even wondered if there would be a twist where Brad was really from Texas and that Rex’s accent was his real voice or something. At the end of the film, I felt I knew Rex better than Brad. Brad is kind of an empty husk. Brad serves no real penance for his lie, and other than he used to be a rake, we know so little about the real him. I found myself saying, “Jan don’t marry that guy! He’s gaslighting you!”

It isn’t the right thought to have at the end of a romcom. As I sat with this film, I also started thinking about rape. The theme of rape actually is introduced early in this film. Jan is driven home by a drunk co-ed from a work party. He gets handsy in the car and tries to force himself on her. She physically fights him off, but he then takes her to a bar and won’t let her leave without drinking and dancing with him. Brad sees this happen and steps in as Rex.

Rex saves her, but he then schemes towards a different kind of rape. Jan doesn’t have sex with Rex in this movie, but that is his plan. He takes her to a weekend cabin trip seemingly for this exact purpose. He is foiled by her finding a piece of sheet music and realizing that Rex is Brad, but if he were successful, this would also be rape, specifically rape by deception. Brad is manipulative, even emotionally abusive.

So I should dislike this movie, right? After my Buzzfeed-villain-rape-culture take, I should ‘feminist rage’ against it, yes? Here’s the problem. I didn’t hate it. I even kind of like it. On one level, I think it is because I love rom-coms. So many 1990s rom-coms (the ones I grew up on and have now gotten the “he’s a villain” critique) feel like spiritual successors to this film. It seems almost foundational to a certain type of rom-com. But I think it is also about the film itself.

Day and Hudson made three rom-coms together between 1959 and 1964. The two have great chemistry, and it really helps this film. Hudson and Day also both sing in this film, which is so charming, and Hudson has a surprisingly good voice. The sets and costumes are both wonderful and feel like a perfect late 1950s time capsule. I love the cinematography. There is a scene where they talk on the phone in dueling bathtubs, which is shot and edited so wonderfully. Hudson wasn’t known for comedy before this movie, and he really delivers a great comedic performance. It is one of the few rom-coms nominated for several Oscars; it even won Best Original Screenplay. There are some really great jokes4 (I especially love the running bit where an OBGYN thinks that Rock Hudson might be pregnant after he accidentally steps into an obstetrics office). Maybe I should dislike this film on principle, but I really can’t bring myself to do so, given the experience of watching it.

While watching the movie, I kept thinking about gaslighting. Brad psychologically manipulates Jan. While it isn’t always exactly “gaslighting” in the truest sense, he makes her doubt her own perceptions of Rex by feeding her false information. The term “gaslight” comes from a 1938 play that was adapted into a 1944 film. (My friend actually won an episode of Jeopardy knowing this fact.)5

While I also knew this fact, I had never actually seen the film Gaslight. I worried that this would somehow prevent me from talking about the concept as it related to Pillow Talk. Maybe I didn’t actually know what gaslight was about and the origin of the term would dissuade me from using it in this review. So, I watched Gaslight. This was an unnecessary step. I knew what Gaslight was about, and I know what gaslighting is.

Directed by George Cukor, Gaslight follows a young woman who becomes wealthy after her aunt’s murder. She moves back to her aunt’s house with her new husband. (Spoilers, but if you know the term ‘Gaslight,’ you know what happens in this film) The husband slowly convinces her that she is going mad so that he can steal her deceased aunt’s lost jewels. Unlike Pillow Talk, Gaslight is a psychological thriller. Comparing these two films feels like that meme I hate about office harassment.

One film uses gaslighting as a device of horror while the other uses it as a meet-cute. So yes, the critique that “Brad is the villain” is well-founded. But I also think the movie kind of understands this. When Jan finds out Brad’s lie, there is a cacophony of sound. The music in the moment almost feels like something out of a horror movie score. It is louder, more intense, and unnerving. It captures the horror of the moment, of the realization. Obviously, Jan still chooses to accept Brad’s marriage proposal in the end, but this musical cue reflects a larger seriousness of what he has done to her.

This movie made me think about Pride and Prejudice. Not the movie, but the book. A couple of years ago, I read the book for the first time. Growing up, I had a “not like other girls” phase (embarrassing) and thus hadn’t interacted much with period dramas. It wasn’t until I actually read the book that I realized it was a satire. I had always thought of it as a romance, which it is, but it’s a rom-com and a farcical one at that. The realization challenged my own perception. It changed the way I saw rom-coms as a genre. While there are (especially more recently) realistic rom-coms, the genre is built on satire.

There is a (very fair) reading of Pillow Talk where Brad is awful. However, when looking at this film as a farce, it all feels like a joke. Jan only embraces Brad at the end when he says he wants to give up his bachelor lifestyle and he has fallen in love with her. She, in this moment, “wins.” Sins are forgiven because she gets what she wants... an extremely hot man to marry her. Brad thinks he is getting the upper hand, but she ends up “seducing him” into marriage. It’s, in nature, a joke. Maybe not a particularly feminist joke, but it feels 1950s.

The thing that doesn’t feel very 1950s about this film is that it is surprisingly sexual. Well, I should say surprisingly sexual for what it is. It is still the 1950s and a Doris Day movie. I was surprised to find gay jokes, (in good taste) pseudo-trans jokes, and explicit references to a stripper ex-wife. The opening features Brad romancing several women, and it gets a little explicit. This is at its heart a sex comedy, one that couldn’t fully show sex, but is far more explicit than many of the rom-coms that came before it. Partially it is this edge that makes the farce work for me. No real woman would do this, but this is not a real story.

I probably should hate this movie. But I can’t really make myself. Maybe Rock Hudson gaslit me too. Or more likely, this movie should be taken in good fun. Come on. It’s Rock Hudson and Doris Day. Take it as the fluff it was designed to be, and don’t learn any lessons about how to treat real-life women from Pillow Talk.

It was 1000 degrees in New York this weekend, so I dragged my husband into the heavily air-conditioned AMC. We saw two films that, at least, he would have never seen in theaters without a heatwave: Minions & Monsters and Jackass: Best and Last. Cards on the table, yes, I write about classic films, but I love the Jackass movies. To me, Jackass 3D is a classic. I don’t think I would usually have seen a Minions movie, but a lot of other classic-film Substackers have actually been flocking to it because it includes an impressive number of homages to early cinema, especially the silent era. (I thought Marya E. Gates’s Hollywood Babylon: Minions & Monsters (2026) was an especially great take on the film.)

The silent era sometimes feels like the final boss of classic film. I love silent films, but I have found it hard to recommend them, even to the most fervent of film bros. Even after months of writing about film, I haven’t chosen to write about a silent film for fear that people may not be interested. However, watching Minions & Monsters and Jackass: Best and Last, nearly back-to-back, it struck me that these are kind of silent films. Not in the traditional sense, of course, but they are both almost completely visual comedies. The minions speak a sort of hybrid Spanish-gibberish-Italian, and thus much of this film is communicated visually. The comedy in Jackass is also highly visual.

Both films also make specific references to silent films. While Minions & Monsters includes multiple direct homages to silent films, Jackass includes one. Both films recreate a famous stunt from the 1928 Steamboat Bill Jr., in which a house facade is dropped on Buster Keaton; fortunately, he is standing in the exact spot where the window is, leaving him unharmed. In Minions & Monsters, an animated Keaton appears for the stunt. In Jackass, archival footage of Johnny Knoxville doing the same trick is used in the credit sequence.

I would argue that the falling-house stunt has become an iconic comedy image, and I want to talk about the film it is from. Steamboat Bill Jr. is a silent comedy directed by Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton (though he was uncredited).

The film follows a young man, William Jr, who returns home from college to see his dad, Bill, for the first time in many years. Bill is the captain of an aging steamboat on the Mississippi River (unfortunately named the Stonewall Jackson). Bill’s business is threatened by a new luxury steamboat run by Mr. King. William Jr runs into a girl from college, Kitty King, in the small town. At first, Bill is upset that William Jr is effeminate and that he has eyes for Kitty, but eventually he comes around after William tries to break him out of jail and then saves his life in a storm. The movie stars Keaton, Ernest Torrence, Marion Byron, and Tom McGuire.

This movie is part Romeo and Juliet, part disaster movie, and partly about masculinity itself. William Jr. is portrayed as unmanly. The first time his father sees him, he is prancing around and playing a ukulele, trying to distract a crying baby. His father immediately tries to force him to stop wearing a beret and to dress him in a more blue-collar way. Keaton was only around 5’5” and often liked to cast larger actors in his films for comedy. Torrence, who plays Bill, towers over him and is a far more imposing presence. Both fathers find William Jr. too silly. Masculinity is a running theme throughout the film.

Early in the film, Bill gets William Jr. to shave off his mustache. It led me to wonder if this was connected to the theme of masculinity and if mustaches were considered urbane in 1928. However, I found out that the idea for the film was originally conceived by director Charles Reisner, who usually worked with Charlie Chaplin (not Keaton), which made me think it might have been an inside joke. The two snuck in a joke about hats that Keaton wore in his earlier films into a later scene (having Keaton balk at and throw away the pork pie hat that he popularized in the late teens), so it doesn’t seem out of the question.

While Keaton and silent film more generally are notable for physical comedy, there are some really funny jokes in this film outside of that category. One of my favorite jokes of the film comes when Bill is looking for William Jr at the train station. William Jr has been away for so long that Bill doesn’t know what he looks like. William Jr writes that he will be wearing a white carnation, but because of a carnation seller in town, everyone is wearing one. He first walks up to a Black man, then turns his eyes to three men all wearing carnations. He asks them via title card, “Is anyone here looking for a father?” I am honestly not sure if this was supposed to read as a gay joke; either way, I laughed.

My favorite joke in the film probably comes when William Jr. clumsily knocks a life preserver into the Mississippi River, and it sinks. It isn’t just funny; it tells the audience so much about this now-decrepit boat. It is such a small moment. I think part of what turns off modern audiences from silent films is how much you have to pay attention to them in some ways. If you are looking at your phone, you will miss this. However, this film is short and maybe more importantly, there are very few moments in this film where a joke isn’t being set up or delivered. This film moves fast enough that I don’t think you will be tempted to look at your phone.

While some of my favorite jokes aren’t physical, physical performance is really what Keaton is known for, and there is a ton of it in this movie. Slapstick humor is scattered throughout this film, but it really culminates in the last 15-20ish minutes. The film ends with the characters being stuck in a violent storm. This scene features stunt after stunt by Keaton, interspersed with some great moviemaking tricks. This sequence accounted for 30% of the film’s budget. Keaton used 6 Liberty-motor wind machines, breakaway sets, and a cable crane to simulate him being thrown through the air.

Keaton, like many other silent film actors, did all his own stunts. I started this essay talking about Jackass 5. While watching Steamboat Bill Jr, I was surprised by how many of the images of Keaton mirrored those of Steve-O and the boys. In one scene, Keaton sits on the sheriff’s face while trying to break his father out of jail. Almost 100 years later, Johnny Knoxville makes his friends put their faces in a man’s butt if they get a trivia question wrong. Early in the film, Keaton flips as he falls when a rope is pulled out from under him. The fall he takes is strangely similar to the one Knoxville takes after being hit by a bull. Knoxville has actually been hit by a bull a staggering number of times, but I want to talk about the latest one. The stunt was actually filmed during the making of the fourth Jackass movie, but appears as a clip in the fifth. It is a longer clip; Knoxville gets hit by a bull once, but he didn’t like how he was thrown, so he does it again. Unfortunately, he gets seriously hurt the second time. But the fall looks better. I wonder how many times Keaton had to perform the same stunt. While for the aging men of Jackass, pain is kind of the point, Keaton wasn’t trying to get hurt. Still, his stunts were incredibly dangerous.

Maybe this is actually what got me thinking about Keaton and his famous facade stunt. Much like Knoxville and the bull, it wasn’t the first time Keaton had performed a similar feat. Paired down versions of this appear in his films Back Stage (1919) and One Week (1920). However, this time it was bigger. In this film, he used a real two-ton facade (something even Knoxville didn’t do when he recreated it- and that man gets hit by a bull like all the time). Keaton placed a nail on the ground to know where he had to stand so he would be in the window’s path. This stunt was wildly dangerous. By the 1930s, Hollywood started using stuntmen and at least had some safety regulations. However, the silent era had really no guard rails for this type of thing.

Steamboat Bill Jr feels like the end of an era. The silent era technically ended in 1927 with the release of the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, but several silent films still trickle out after, including Steamboat Bill Jr. More than the end of the era, this was the last film made by Buster Keaton Productions. Keaton had real money troubles by the late 1920s. On the final day of shooting, producer Joseph M. Schenck announced the studio’s closure, and the film was later released by United Artists. After Steamboat Bill Jr., Keaton would sign with MGM, but they stripped him of creative control and fired him in 1933. Surprisingly, Minions & Monsters features a plotline about the end of the silent era. In this film, some of the Minions are huge stars in the 20s but struggle in the sound era, leading to a loss of creative control and money troubles, much like Keaton. God… I am comparing a real-life film icon to the yellow guys from Facebook memes for aunts.

During the late 1920s, Keaton was also struggling with alcoholism and a failing marriage. Some have suggested that he performed such extreme stunts in this movie due to his own despair. He would also later say, “I was mad at the time, or I would never have done the thing.” It reminded me of a quote from Steve-O about his own struggle with alcoholism: “I did not think I was going to live very long at all.” Both men got sober and returned to their careers in comedy, and Keaton’s career experienced a resurgence in the 1950s. While he would appear in TV shows and films until his death in the 1960s, his films from 1920-1929 really were the peak not only of his career, but of his creativity and control.

I liked Jackass 5, but there was a tiredness to it. Many clips were archival, and I think in some ways they had to be. There is a limit to how much of this kind of comedy a body can do. Much like the silent era, the Jackass era is ending. This last film had the lightest box office of any of their films. In Jackass 4, they introduced a new cast. Part of me wondered if they were trying to hand the franchise off to a younger generation, but that feels impossible. There was no replacing Keaton; in the sound era, comedy just changed. Studios and regulation marched forward.

So is Johnny Knoxville the modern-day Buster Keaton, a beautiful man who keeps putting himself in dangerous stunt after stunt in the pursuit of independent comedy? Well, I am not saying that, but I guess I am also not not saying that either.

Steamboat Bill Jr is a really easy movie to watch. I would argue it’s just as easy as two of the fifth installments of comedy franchises I saw this weekend (and it is also much better). If you have been on the fence about wading into silent comedy, this is an easy way to start.

This whole month I have been covering LGBTQ movies. This isn’t the first time that I have waded into writing about gay films. Last year, I wrote a 55 films to watch for 55 years of Pride list. While writing that list, I ran into a question of categorization. What is a queer film? Or maybe the better question, what makes something a queer film?

The easy answer would be films about queer people. But that really only captures a part of what I often see as “queer” cinema. In America from 1934 to 1968, the Hays Code stopped films from featuring explicitly queer characters. Even abroad, there were very few explicitly LGBTQ movies between the 1930s and late 1950s. While explicitly gay films stayed relatively rare internationally until the 1960s and really into the 1990s in America, many earlier films feel gay. Even as queer narratives have come to screens, there are still films that aren’t explicitly gay but feel aesthetically connected to queer cinema (at least in my mind).

So today, I want to talk about what I would call spiritually gay movies. These films might never make it onto a list of “gay films,” but I still think they can be great Pride Month watches. There are a couple of categories that these films fall into, and I want to break them down.

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All month, I have been talking about LGBTQ+ movies, but beyond that, there has been a bit of a theme running through this month’s posts. I have specifically looked at queer films in which LGBTQ people have told their own stories (at least to some extent). All About My Mother both fits into this theme and is also a bit of a departure from it.

All About My Mother (also called Todo sobre mi madre) is a melodrama film from Spanish auteur director Pedro Almodóvar. As a warning, if you haven’t seen this film, discussing it at all leads to pretty big plot spoiler territory. Honestly, talking about it as a queer film is even a bit of a spoiler.

The film follows Manuela, who, after the tragic death of her teenage son, tries to track down her son’s other parent, Lola, a trans woman and her former lover, in Barcelona. In her search for Lola, she befriends her deceased son’s favorite actress, reconnects with her old friend, and takes in a nun who is pregnant with Lola’s child.

I am generally a big fan of Almodóvar. Last year, he named All About My Mother as one of his favorite films of his and if you aren’t super familiar with his work, it is a great film to start with. It deals with many of the themes that Almodóvar explores in his films, including sexuality, identity, and motherhood. Many of Almodóvar’s films delve into motherhood and complex female characters, which are very much at the heart of All About My Mother.

Almodóvar is a gay filmmaker, but his films often don’t center gay men. Many of his best works are really all about complex women. All About My Mother doesn’t really have many male characters. The film starts with a teenage boy, Esteban, who dreams about being a writer and is fairly queer coded. His writing haunts the narrative as excerpts from his journal appear in voice-over; however, Esteban dies fairly early in the film. At the end of the film, a nun, Rosa, has a son who is also named Esteban. There are also a couple of other minor male characters (Rosa’s father, a theater worker and a john at a cruising spot), but the film is largely only interested in its female characters.

All About My Mother is a deeply queer film, but I would argue that manifests in two distinctive ways. One is simply that most of the characters are queer. The more subtle of the two is a reverence for women. While this film also explores queer identity, it also feels connected to an old Hollywood subtextual approach to gayness. The film opens with Esteban and Manuela watching the Bette Davis classic, All About Eve. All About Eve is considered a “gay” classic, though nothing technically gay happens in it. It is all subtext. Even if there is a reading where Eve is a lesbian, partially why it has become a gay classic is that a certain generation of gay men loved Bette Davis and her theatrical performance in this film. All About My Mother ends with a dedication, “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider … to all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” Almodóvar has filled this film with women as a way of showing a love of female characters that feels connected to the history of gay men idolizing actresses and the genre of melodrama itself.

I mentioned earlier that this film is a melodrama, and I worry that melodrama has become a bit of a dirty word. The genre sometimes is more associated with soap operas than with the groundbreaking films of Douglas Sirk.

While the genre of melodrama emerged on the English stage in the 1800s, many people associate it with the “women’s films” of the 1950s. The film genre of melodrama is defined by its inclusion of heightened, intense, or exaggerated emotion. Many of these films are romances or family stories. Melodrama films have generally been marketed to women, but they often have also drawn gay audiences. In Jonathan Goldberg’s book Melodrama: An Aesthetics of Impossibility, he theorizes that melodrama is a homoaesthetic. I would argue that melodrama is also a feminist genre. Still, because mid-century male directors almost all made these films, that feminism can easily slide into the realm of diva worship (a very ‘homoaesthetic’).

All About My Mother references and even shows scenes from the play A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams’ classic play isn’t considered a melodrama, but it really is by the standards of the genre. A Streetcar Named Desire is also a very gay play. In text, there is an off-screen, minor homosexual character, but I would argue the play is also dripping in homoaesthetics. Williams was gay, and the most famous film version (1951) also stars bisexual icon Marlon Brando. But even more than that, much like All About Eve, it is about complex women.

Which I guess leads me back to All About My Mother. While a gay man directed it, I was nervous about revisiting this movie through a queer lens. This is a movie about queer and trans women specifically. Most of the characters in this film are LGBTQ in some way. Manuela’s friend Agrado is trans. Esteban’s favorite actress, Huma, is a lesbian and is in a relationship with her co-star in a production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Manuela and Rosa’s sexualities aren’t strictly defined in the film, but both of them have been in relationships and impregnated by Lola, a trans woman.

As a cis writer, sometimes I worry about covering trans media, especially older trans media that I want to champion in some way. A lot of older trans media is not made by trans people, and it can age really poorly. I think overall, All About My Mother ages extremely well, but then again, I am cis, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

On one hand, I think even the inclusion of trans women is kind of radical in this movie. All About My Mother is about the bonds of womanhood; trans women are, of course, part of this. There is an intersectionality to the feminism in this film that feels very intentional.

On the other hand, I do feel like I need to mention that the character of Lola is played by a man (specifically the Spanish actor/politician, Toni Cantó). Lola is barely in the film, but I feel the need to call this out. The far more prominent trans character is Agrado. She is played by Antonia San Juan. There was a sizable amount of speculation that San Juan was trans due to this role, but she has since come out as a cis woman. I would guess that Almodóvar loved that. He often loves to play with the audience’s expectations around gender. He has cast trans women in his movies since the 1980s and often specifically works with his “muse” Bibiana Fernández. While Fernández is trans, he also casts her in cis-roles. There is a kind of gender-blind casting to several of his early works. Still, I think casting a man to play Lola ages poorly, partially because Lola is, in many ways, the villain of the film. She stands out from the other women. I am not sure if this is intentional, but even if it isn’t, it feels mean.

Early in the film, Maneula says, “Lola has the worst of a man and the worst of a woman.” Later on, after Rosa has died from the HIV Lola gave her, Maneula says, “You aren’t a person, Lola, you are an epidemic.” Unlike Agrado, Lola doesn’t really get a chance to explain herself. Agrado delivers a humorous monologue about being trans and how her authenticity came at an expense. It is probably the best remembered scene from the film. Agrado also gets to banter with a guy who wants her to suck his dick. Lola doesn’t get these moments to share her lived and gender experience. I also feel the need to mention that Manuela names both of Lola’s sons after her dead name. There is something deeply strange to me about this. This could be seen as an act of hate, but I don’t really think it is meant to be read this way. Manuela still cares about Lola. She even allows Lola to meet her and Rosa’s baby.

There are really two mothers that the title All About My Mother could refer to. I think most people would argue that it refers to Manuela, the main character, but in some ways it is also about Lola. The queer community of Barcelona that Manuela reintegrates into is in some ways an extension of Lola herself. The movie is so much about finding Lola, but at the same time she is largely absent from her own narrative. There is something tragic about this to me.

I think many modern audiences are not super familiar with melodrama and might read all this and think “a pregnant nun, an aging actress, a trans villain? This is all sounding very daytime, Telemundo, Rosa.” Pero, I think you should go into it with an open mind. All About My Mother is a tentpole of 1990s queer cinema for a reason. I hope you had a happy Pride Month.

This week, I was pretty sure I was going to write about 1999’s Todo sobre mi madre (and I may still in the future). However, the other night a friend of mine took me to the Broadway production of The Rocky Horror Show, which got me thinking about another queer movie (and no, it’s not the Rocky Horror Picture Show, but stay with me for a second). For those who haven’t seen either the Broadway show or the 1975 film it is based on, Rocky Horror is a tribute to Sci-Fi and B movies. It draws a lot of inspiration from, especially, 1930s-1950s cult B-movies. While the film explicitly references films like Doctor X and The Day the Earth Stood Still, I would argue it takes at least some inspiration from the 1953 film, Glen or Glenda.

The connection between these two films has never been confirmed, but I think it is pretty explicit. The strange thing is, Glen or Glenda isn’t a science fiction or horror film (at least not fully).

Most of the films I cover for this newsletter I heavily recommend watching. I am not 100% sure I would recommend Glen or Glenda, or at least I wouldn’t as a cinematic masterwork. I think a lot of audiences won’t get it or won’t enjoy it. Still, it is endlessly interesting. This one is for my movie history nerds, those fascinated by early queer representation in films, and my beloved freaks. Glen or Glenda is the type of movie where the story around it might be better than the actual film. But maybe I am getting ahead of myself.

Glen or Glenda is a docudrama about transvestism. The docudrama is a kind of odd and mostly dead genre. This genre heavily features dramatized re-enactments of real events. They usually try to impart some level of historical, journalistic, or fact-based knowledge through these re-enactments. Glen or Glenda definitely does this, but it is also highly stylized and, for lack of a better word, bonkers.

A quick warning: I am going to be using some 1950s terminology to talk about this film. Not all these terms are still typically used for modern queer identity or psychology. However, they were used in the film and in scientific studies during the 1950s.

The film starts with a police inspector who wants to better understand a recent case that featured a cross-dresser who killed themselves. He seeks advice from a psychologist, Dr. Alton, who tells him two stories about former clients. One is a transvestite, Glen, who is worried about telling his fiancée, Barbara, about wearing women’s clothes. The second is Anne, a “pseudohermaphrodite” former GI who has undergone successful sex reassignment surgeries. Dr. Alton narrates these stories as they are dramatized.

Much of this film feels like a PSA, but not all of it. While Dr. Alton and the cop act as a framing device, there is a second framing device on top of them. Bella Lugosi appears as “Scientist/Spirit,” a god-like character who appears in a spooky laboratory and gives several horror monologues throughout the film.

I should say this film is the directorial debut of Ed Wood (he also wrote and starred in it). For those unfamiliar with Wood, he is truly a cult figure. Wood was a B-movie Sci-Fi/Horror director in the 1950s. Many of his films have become cult classics, including Plan 9 from Outer Space and Bride of the Monster. He would go on to direct sexploitation/porno films and write a staggering number of erotic and crime novels. Wood’s films aren’t good in the traditional sense, but they are deeply fascinating. He was a pioneer in the camp aesthetic and low-budget filmmaking. His films are full of rudimentary special effects, technical errors, and strange sequences, which have led to their cult status. He’s probably more famous for his Sci-Fi films; however, Glen or Glenda features many of the aesthetics he would return to in his other films.

Glen or Glenda was originally conceived by B-Movie producer George Weiss under the title “I Changed My Sex” to exploit the media interest in Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen was a trans woman who was publicly outed in 1952 after a letter to her parents was leaked to the press. The New York Daily News published a story with the headline, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Bronx Youth Is a Happy Woman After Medication, 6 Operations.” She became an instant celebrity in New York, and Weiss wanted to cash in on the media circus. However, Glen or Glenda isn’t really about Jorgensen or even transgender people generally. This is mostly due to Wood. Wood was a cross-dresser and far more interested in making a semi-autobiographical film about transvestism. However, the interest in Jorgensen’s story was still used to market the film to some extent.

Glen or Glenda starts with a card that says, “In the making of this film, which deals with a strange and curious subject, no punches have been pulled-- no easy way out has been taken. Many of the smaller parts are portrayed by persons who actually are, in real life, the character they portray on the screen. This is a picture of stark realism-- taking no sides -- but giving you the facts -- ALL the facts -- as they are today... YOU ARE SOCIETY -- JUDGE YE NOT…”

I love this opening because it captures so much about this film. It is spooky and odd, but it also captures the film’s goal. Much of Glen or Glenda is about making the audience understand that cross-dressing and, by extension, Wood’s lifestyle are okay. Watching this as a queer person over 70 years later, I am not the intended audience. Many of the film’s PSA elements are meant to instruct a 1950s audience (i.e., society). However, I was taken by how some of this film would still be seen as controversial for many modern audiences.

In the intro to this film, a newspaper with the headline “World Shocked by Sex Change” and the narrator (Alton) ask, “Why is the modern world shocked by this headline?” It goes on to say that some people were scared of planes when they were first introduced; before that, others didn’t want cars to become the norm. It sets up acceptance as progress and these identities as natural. While I don’t think in 2026 many would be shocked by this headline, many are still deeply transphobic. Overall, I think this film would still be shocking to many modern audiences. Some of these PSA segments still seem needed, which feels, on one hand, deeply depressing and, on the other, somehow uplifting. As queer people, we have always been here. This story is old, maybe ancient.

At one point in the film, an androgynous person is shown relaxing in a chair. The narrator accuses the audience of laughing at them, but I found myself not laughing but marveling. Seeing this kind of representation in a 1950s film took my breath away a little. It felt like seeing an elder.

This leads me to Lugosi. Wood was a huge fan of Lugosi and seemingly added the Scientist role specifically for the then-washed-up horror icon. He is introduced with thunder and lightning and a monologue saying, “Men’s constant groping for the unknown, drawing from the endless reaches of time, brings to light many startling things. Startling because they seem new, sudden, but most are not new.” He goes on to perform an experiment to create life through “the science of the ages.” It sets up queerness as something ancient. Being trans didn’t start with Jorgensen in 1951; it starts with god and nature.

After this chilling opening, the film turns into a PSA. However, it is a bit tongue-in-cheek in moments. At one point, the psychologist is making the case for men wearing women’s clothes. He says men’s hats are too tight and cause balding, even claiming that 7/10 men are balding and 7/10 wear hats. This is delivered so deadpan that I caught myself wondering if that was an accepted medical theory in the 1950s, but it is very obviously a joke. In another scene, the male psychologist shares a cigarette with Anne as he tells her how to have sex as a woman. This is again a joke, but it happens so quickly and so dryly that it is easy to miss the PSA’s more farcical elements.

It seems odd to mix a PSA, jokes, and poetics on queerness, but that feels very Wood to me. He often layered stock film over his own shots. Many parts of this film use techniques that harken back to the silent era and German expressionist films. This creates an interesting visual interplay as well, as opposed to the more documentary-style segments of the film. This film is a bit of a collage made by a man yearning for acceptance.

Wood plays the titular Glen, and Glen’s fiancée, Barbara, was played by his then-girlfriend, Dolores Fuller. At the end of the film, Barbara accepts his habit, and the two share what the text calls a “happy ending.” However, it also says that Glen “gives up Glenda,” and at the end of the film, Glen is shown only in a suit. This feels sad to me. I wanted more for Glen. A couple of years after this film was made, Fuller would break up with Wood due to his excessive drinking, but said she didn’t have an issue with his crossdressing habit.

There is a line in this film that I find so deeply heartbreaking. Glen starts crossdressing by borrowing his sister’s dress for a Halloween party. The narrator says, “Glen did wear the dress to the Halloween party. He even took first prize. Then, one day... it wasn’t Halloween any longer.” As a queer person in the 2000s, I have known so many people whose first time getting in drag or exploring their gender was at a costume party on Halloween. It is a taste of freedom, and then the next day is November. The idea that this radiates back through time is heartbreaking to me. It also somewhat helps to explain the spookiness of this film. Maybe we have always loved Halloween, Bela Lugosi and getting to wear the dress, even if only for a night.

I feel like I should add a trigger warning somewhere in here. Around the midpoint of the film, there is a dream sequence. Glen falls down and hits his head. There is then a roughly 15-minute, mostly silent sequence that is a metaphorical exploration of sex and identity. The sequence features women tying each other up, a woman writhing in sheer underwear, and a rape scene between her and a shadowed man. This section feels almost allegorical, but I still feel like it warrants a warning. Motifs of dragons and the devil also overtake this section of the film, giving it a fantastical quality.

The psychologist stresses to the policemen that every story is different. This film is nothing if not intensely personal. It is about one man’s experience, specifically, Wood’s. I said earlier that this film isn’t about trans people, but I do think it is a film about gender and the spectrum it exists on. There are very few films from before the 1990s that explicitly explore the gender spectrum. Because of that, this film is often discussed in the history of trans film.

Since 2001, there have been several prominent films directed by out trans people. However, for much of film history, the trans narrative has been told by cis filmmakers. While by the 1990s more trans characters appeared in film and TV, these characters were often played by Cis actors in drag. While that is changing, it was one of the things that hit me about Glen or Glenda. Many of the actors featured were transvestites. Anne was played by Tommi Haynes. Very little is written about Haynes; however, while researching this article, I noticed that her name is often misspelled as Tommy Haynes. I wonder if she really was trans or intersex. This part of the movie was heavily inspired by Jorgensen’s story (who was not a “pseudohermaphrodite,” even though some newspapers claimed she was). So unlike with Wood’s Glen, it was likely not written especially for or about Haynes. Still, there is something about her and the rest of the film’s casting that makes me feel like she was a part of this community in some way. It all feels very radical, even punk rock for 1953.

I started this article by talking about Rocky Horror. I see so much of this film in Rocky Horror. From Timothy Farrell as the narrator to themes around transvestism to the B-Horror Lugosi elements to the mid-movie BDSM-Rape-feaver dream, I think it’s all there. Maybe this speaks to the nature of queer cult movies. We see parts of ourselves in these works from earlier eras, ripe for homage. When the Rocky Horror Picture Show came out in 1975, it also felt ahead of its time, even though it came out over 20 years after Glen or Glenda. Maybe strange movies always feel ahead of their time. They become easier to love and champion as pioneers. Glen or Glenda is not what I would call a good film, but I would call it art and specifically queer art. Art that I want to celebrate.

There are a lot of movies about making movies. As a cinephile, I secretly love this genre even if it can be a little masturbatory. When it comes to gay movies about movies, really only one comes to mind: 1996’s The Watermelon Woman.

The Watermelon Woman is a spiralingly meta film. The film was written, directed, and starred Cheryl Dunye and was the first feature film to be directed by a Black lesbian. Fittingly, it follows a Black lesbian named Cheryl as she tries to finish a documentary project about the forgotten 1930s actress Fae Richards and starts to date a White woman named Diana. While making the project, Cheryl discovers that Fae was a lesbian who also dated the White director of many of her early films. Thematically, Cheryl’s own life starts to mirror what she learns about Fae. The Watermelon Woman stars Dunye, Guinevere Turner, Valarie Walker, Lisa Marie Bronson, and Cheryl Clarke.

The film is a funny and inventive metanarrative that blends cinema history with 1990s Black queer Philadelphia. Dunye switches between 16mm film and grainy 1990s videotape to visually switch between the narrative and the project the character is making. Still, there are moments that, even after watching this film multiple times, blend the space between the real and the imagined. At one point, Cheryl’s project includes man-on-the-street-style interviews in which she asks people whether they have ever heard of the actress called the Watermelon Woman. While some are obviously scripted, some don’t seem to be. When talking with a group of young gay men outside of the Philadelphia Art Museum, they confuse Carmen Miranda with Rosie Perez and call Perez old. The screen then flashes an apology to Rosie Perez. This doesn’t feel scripted to me. Scenes like this really contribute to one of the strengths of this film: how real the project inside the movie feels.

I rewatched this film with my husband, and he turned to me early in the film to ask if Fae Richards was a real person. Fae Richards wasn’t a real person, but she mirrors several real people in Black film history. She is introduced as a mammy character in a fake film called Plantation Memories. While not real herself, Fae is mentioned in the film alongside actresses like Louise Beavers, Hattie McDaniel, and Butterfly McQueen (all of whom were real Black actresses who played mammy characters in the 1930s).

Much of the film is about Cheryl uncovering more about Fae. She talks to her aging cinephile mother, a collector, a disorganized White lesbian archivist, a clueless Swarthmore film professor (Camille Paglia actually plays herself in this role), the terrible sister of the White director Fae dated, and finally, Fae’s longtime partner. Through these interviews, Cheryl pieces together Fae’s life, and the film ends with her documentary project on Fae interspersed with the film’s real credits. Even in its final moments, the film purposely blends the real with the meta.

There is a lot to say about The Watermelon Woman, and because it is such a landmark in the New Queer Cinema movement, much has already been written about it (I especially love these BFI and Criterion Channel retrospectives). However, because this film has been covered so extensively, I wanted to specifically explore a little about the real film history behind the imagined Fae Richards and some of the references made throughout The Watermelon Woman.

Early in the film, Cheryl says she is a Black Lesbian filmmaker, she is going to make a Black lesbian film, and that “it has to be about Black women because our stories never get told.” I think this is really the thesis of the film. By 1996, there had been a couple of landmark lesbian films. Cheryl even references the 1994 Lesbian romcom, Go Fish, directed by Rose Troche (and co-written by Turner, who also stars in The Watermelon Woman). However, these early lesbian films were generally very White. The Watermelon Woman is very specifically about Black film history. Dunye is very intentional about this.

While Fae isn’t real, most of her story is based on, or connected to, real people. I think the more you know about this, the better the film actually is. Before making The Watermelon Woman, Dunye researched Black film history at Temple University.

In the movie, Cheryl first becomes fascinated with Fae because she is only credited as “the Watermelon Woman.” While at Temple, Dunye found that many Black actresses in the 1930s were not credited in movies. Cheryl mentions the real Louise Beavers early on in the film. Beavers was uncredited in many of the films she appeared in, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), 42nd Street (1933), and Tell It to the Judge (1949). Beavers often played maids or attendants. Interestingly, Beavers was credited in 1934’s Imitation of Life, in which she starred as a struggling mother alongside Claudette Colbert. In the film, Beavers’ character has a white-passing daughter played by Fredi Washington. While Beavers worked fairly consistently until her death in the early 1960s, Washington struggled to find roles because of her very light skin tone. Since many audiences thought she could pass as white, she didn’t fit into the limited roles available to Black actresses at the time. The Hays Code also prohibited suggestions of miscegenation, which further limited the roles for actresses like Washington starting in 1934. Washington was very proud to be Black and did not try to pass outside of her role in Imitation of Life. After leaving Hollywood, she worked in theater, radio, and journalism as an entertainment editor. She was also a civil rights activist who became deeply involved with the NAACP. In one of the fake film clips shown in The Watermelon Woman, Fae slaps a woman trying to pass as white. I have to assume this was at least partially inspired by Imitation of Life, Beavers, and Washington. Also, much like Washington, Fae gets involved with the NAACP after leaving Hollywood.

During her time in Hollywood, Fae also had a relationship with the fictional director Martha Page. Some reviewers of this film point out the improbability of a lesbian director in the 1930s, but I would argue that even Martha is based on a real person. During the 1930s, there was really only one working female director in Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner. While (from what I can tell), Arzner never made a movie about a plantation, she did make several films with minor black characters, including The Wild Party (1929). Arzner was also queer and had a long-term relationship with the choreographer Marion Morgan. She also had confirmed relationships with actresses like Alla Nazimova and Billie Burke, and was rumored to have been linked to Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn (though never confirmed). In the film, Martha is even styled like Arzner, who dressed unconventionally masculinely for the time. Arnzer was never publicly linked to an actress of color, but I still would guess that she is the inspiration for the character.

After Fae plays mammies and maids in Martha’s films, she leaves to make race films during the final years of the genre. The Race Film genre refers to films made between the mid-1910s and the 1950s, which were produced for Black audiences and featured Black casts. These films were made outside of Hollywood and were an early form of independent filmmaking. Many of these films are lost, but notable and surviving works include 1920’s Within Our Gates, 1941’s The Blood of Jesus, 1943’s Cabin in the Sky, 1943’s Stormy Weather, and 1954’s Carmen Jones. Many black actresses appeared in these films, including Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Nina Mae McKinney and Francine Everett.

The Race film genre ended in 1956 with Carib Gold, often credited as the last race film. As theaters started to be integrated and Hollywood gave more roles to actors like Sidney Poitier, the genre waned. Fae finds herself at the end of the genre and returns to sing at Philadelphia clubs and theaters. The Watermelon Woman includes references to several real Black theaters in Philadelphia that hosted Black plays and performances, including The Royal, The Dunbar, and The Standard. The photos of Fae from this period show her in a suit, which seems to reference queer performers of the 1950s. Visually, she is modeled after queer icons like Stormé DeLarverie and Gladys Bentley, both of whom were masc, queer, and performed in men’s suits. Bentley was a mainstay of the Harlem Renaissance and would perform as a blues singer at speakeasies. DeLarverie was a drag pioneer who is credited with throwing the first brick during the Stonewall Riots.

While most of this history is only mentioned or alluded to in The Watermelon Woman, I think all of the references are extremely intentional. In the end, this movie is both about and made Black film history.

Rewatching this film sometimes feels a little melancholic to me. Near the end, Cheryl says, “I am a black lesbian filmmaker who’s just beginning, but I’m going to say a lot more and have a lot more work to do.” While it is the character saying it, the same could be said of Dunye. While she had directed several shorts before making The Watermelon Woman, it was her first feature film. She didn’t direct her next feature film until 2004, My Baby’s Daddy, and has only directed two others since. Dunye has found more work in TV directing, especially after 4 episodes of Queen Sugar in the late 2010s. Her latest credits were for directing episodes of The Hunting Wives and You in 2025. I am glad she is getting more work, but I feel like she deserves even more. She is working on an upcoming film, Black is Blue, based on her 2014 short of the same name, which I am excited for.

This wasn’t a traditional review of The Watermelon Woman, but please know that I highly recommend it. It’s a groundbreaking film, but more than that, I think it is an innovative film for how it approaches low-budget/independent filmmaking and a classic in the movies-about-movies genre.

Last night I was invited to an early screening of Disclosure Day, and while I usually write about classic film, I thought I would share some thoughts in the lead-up to its release.

Disclosure Day follows a cybersecurity whistleblower, his girlfriend, and a Kansas City weather woman as they try to expose an extraterrestrial para-governmental program. Directed by Steven Spielberg with a screenplay by long-time collaborator David Koepp, the film stars Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo.

A couple of things stood out to me about the film. One is just how Spielberg it is. The John Williams score, the tight action sequences, the exploration of religion; it all really feels like a Spielberg blockbuster. Oh, and of course, aliens. This is Spielberg’s sixth film about aliens. However, I do think he still finds new elements of the ‘alien genre’ to explore in this film. There are two ways to watch this film. The first is a simple government conspiracy cover-up film. For the majority of the runtime, this is really what it is. The second is a more thematic approach. This is what often interests me about Spielberg’s blockbusters: almost all of them have thematic depth beneath the surface. This one feels like a meditation on knowledge and empathy.

Disclosure Day has some direct conversations on who gets to control knowledge, which can feel a touch heavy-handed, but I still like their inclusion. Ideas like “knowledge should belong to everyone” and “empathy is essential” might not seem like deeply profound takeaways, but these thematic additions elevated the movie for me. This movie is about aliens, but in many ways, I would argue it is more about people. Okay, this can be said about a lot of alien movies, but in Disclosure Day’s case, the film and its aliens feel especially like a parable for how to care.

I loved how ingrained empathy is in this film. Aside from a couple of villains, most of the characters are deeply empathetic, and even the public generally feels innately caring. They exist in a world that at moments felt foreign to me. Over the past couple of years, especially, empathy has seemingly been leached out of American culture. I think a more cynical film about the disclosure of aliens could mirror this. This year, a lot of documents about UFOs were released by the Department of War, and most people didn’t really care. There are obviously outside factors for this, but I liked that this film imagines a world where the disclosure of aliens matters and feels like the biggest story of all time. Again, I don’t really think this movie is about aliens. I think it is about knowledge. The disclosure of aliens has to be all-consuming in the text because, in a more meta way, ‘aliens’ in this film are a stand-in for knowledge more generally. People deserve to know that aliens are real because knowledge is a right. The government, religion, coverups, etc., can try to control that right, but in the end, it is a right that should be implicit. Knowledge can be upsetting. It can be destabilizing. But in the end, it still should be unalienable.

I also think the performances are wonderful in this film, with Blunt and Hewson as standouts. This also feels very Spielberg to me. I generally find his blockbusters very well acted, and this one really fits into that legacy.

My other favorite thing about this movie is its use of tension. It has several sequences that masterfully keep the audience on the edge of their seats. The film doesn’t have a lot of exposition. While by the end this did lead to some questions, I overall really liked that it didn’t get bogged down in explaining every little thing. With Sci-Fi, many creators feel the need to add a lot of technical justifications, and this film doesn’t. Walking out of the theater, I had questions about how some things worked or “what was up with that?” but after sleeping on it, I found myself not really caring. I think these questions become even less important if you are watching this as a more thematic exploration rather than a traditional Sci-Fi blockbuster.

While I liked this film a lot, I did have a couple of fairly minor qualms. My first is simply that it is pretty long. I am not really sure what I would cut, and I didn’t feel like a slog by any means. However, the nearly 2.5-hour runtime is a lot. I also didn’t love the special effects in most of the film. There are several CGI animals in Disclosure Day, and they don’t look great. Thankfully for a Sci-Fi movie, there actually isn’t a ton of CGI in this film. Still, I found it a little distracting. I have a feeling this film will be compared to Project Hail Mary for better or worse. They aren’t actually very similar films, but they are 2026 blockbusters about aliens, and I think that will lead to comparisons. Project Hail Mary also doesn’t use much CGI, but it relies heavily on practical effects. These effects look really impressive, and I think seeing that film first actually predisposed me to really dislike the CGI in Disclosure Day. My final nitpick about Disclosure Day would probably be that while the performances are overall great, sometimes the performances feel better than the actual characters as they appear on the page.

Even with these critiques, Disclosure Day really feels like ‘big C’ Cinema to me. I could probably say the same thing about most of Spielberg’s films (and specifically his blockbusters). This film has a real “hell yeah, movies are back” feeling to it.

I have seen a lot of LGBTQ movies over the years, but it wasn’t until I started researching a piece on queer film that I stumbled across Victim (1961). There is a lot of scholarship surrounding “What is the first gay film?” It is actually a very hard question to answer, but Victim holds an important distinction as the first British film to explicitly name and sympathetically address homosexuality. The film was an early addition to queer cinema and influential in shaping attitudes towards homosexuality in the UK.

Directed by Basil Dearden, Victim follows Melville Farr, a successful London barrister, who becomes embroiled in solving a blackmail case in the West End gay community. If you are at all interested in this film (which I think you should be and I highly recommend it), I would stop reading here, go watch it and come back. It is hard to talk about the plot of this movie without spoilers, and it is one of those films where the twists make it far more interesting.

That being said, spoilers. Victim starts with a young working-class man, Jack “boy” Barrett, sneaking something out of his apartment and then going on the run from the police. He asks for help out of town, but a bookseller and a car dealer refuse. He calls Farr multiple times, but Farr ignores his calls. He almost makes it onto a ship out of the country, but the police catch up with him at a diner. He rips up a scrapbook he has been cradling and tries to dispose of it in a toilet, but the police get to him before he can. There is a wonderful German Expressionist quality to these first scenes. The film leans into its neo-noir status. The city feels dark and unforgiving as the plot twists and turns, never fully letting the audience in.

Barrett is taken in and accused of time card fraud. He’s stolen thousands from his job but hasn’t bought anything. The police suspect he is being extorted, but he won’t talk. That night, Barrett kills himself in his cell, and the police are left with one clue, the re-pieced scrapbook filled with clippings about Farr. The police bring Farr in to show him the scrapbook and remark that at the time, 90% of blackmail cases in Britain involved extorting homosexuals. Under the law at the time, homosexuality was a criminal offense, and thus queer people would pay to stay out of prison and not be able to go to the police, making them easy targets.

Farr takes it upon himself to take down the blackmailer after he realizes that Barrett was paying to try to protect him and conceal a compromising photograph of them in Farr’s car. As the film progresses, we learn that Farr never actually slept with Barrett, but he admits to his wife, “I stopped seeing him because I wanted him.” We never get to see the photo of Farr and Barrett, but one character remarks that it wouldn’t mean anything if Barrett “wasn’t crying.” Seemingly, it is a photo of their breakup.

Farr risks being outed himself and his career being ruined by poking his head into the extortion ring. As he digs deeper into the insulated West End community, he finds that multiple men are being targeted, including Barrett’s ex-lover, the car dealership owner, a barber who is about to flee to Canada, and several wealthy gay men.

This film has two sides. One is a tense noir, and the other is a melodramatic PSA. The second half is largely about Farr and his wife, and whether the wife will stand by him as he is outed, but the PSA elements creep in earlier. This film has several scenes that remind me of the TV show Law & Order: SVU. I don’t have a better way of describing them. Much like in a “ripped from the headlines” episode of Law & Order, characters will congregate and discuss their various takes on morality, the law, and/or homosexuality. Generally, one will be sympathetic, and one will be more bigoted. The two will volley back and forth on the issue. These can feel a little silly for modern audiences, but I think they are fairly important historically for this film. In an early scene, two policemen are discussing the Labouchere Amendment, which made homosexual acts illegal in Britain until decriminalization in 1967 (6 years after this film was released). In this scene, a deputy tells his superior, “This law was made for a very good reason; if it were changed, other weaknesses would follow.” His superior responds, “So you are a true puritan, Bridie? There was a time that was also against the law.”

Though even before this exchange, queer characters receive a sympathetic take. Barrett runs into a friend who agrees to wire him some money after the friend’s girlfriend objects, given Barrett’s lifestyle. The friend later says, “It used to be witches; at least they don’t burn you.” This sympathy skirts the line of patronization at times, but it is a striking element of a film released pre-Stonewall.

Victim was in many ways the first film of its kind. It is very explicitly about homosexual men, far more than “queer” films in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was all subtext and “if you know you know” plot points. While the film was rated X in the UK, the MPAA denied it a seal of approval at all in the US. The US distributor tried to make a case for it and argued that it was more tactful than previous films like 1959’s Suddenly Last Summer, which only uses innuendo to communicate an important homosexual plot point. The distributor argued that Victim was “a tasteful film on a delicate subject” in his appeal to the board. The film was heavily censored in America and wasn’t released on VHS in the States until 1986. That being said, Victim is actually based on an earlier film.

I was surprised that Victim was a “remake” for several reasons. First, it feels too pioneering, but it also feels too specific. It is very much about the so-called “blackmailers charter,” aka the Labouchere Amendment in the UK. Still, it is based on a 1919 German silent film titled Different from Others (Anders als die Andern). Different from Others is a partially lost film, but around 50 minutes of it still remain. In it, a violinist falls for a male student and then is extorted for money, leading to his suicide.

Much like in Britain, Germany criminalized homosexuality in the late 1800s in paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. This law against “unnatural vice” was still on the books in 1919 (these laws were strengthened by the Nazi party, lessened in the 1960s, and only fully repealed in 1994). Dr. Magnus Hirschfield was a leading sexologist at the turn of the century and at the cutting edge of the Homosexual Emancipation movement pre-WWII. He wrote about how paragraph 175 did less to prevent the victimless crime of homosexuality than to promote the crime of extortion. Hirschfield also collaborated with Director Richard Oswald to make several “enlightenment films.” Censorship in Germany was fairly non-existent after WWI and allowed these two men to make films that explored topics like sex work, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion, etc. Different from Others was their take on homosexuality and extortion. These “enlightenment films” include sympathetic plots and a doctor giving an actual progressive lecture on the topic somewhere in the runtime. These films did well commercially but also received quick backlash from censors, and Different from Others was banned in 1920. After religious and antisemitic backlash at initial screenings of Different from Others, the film was only shown to doctors and lawyers in the 1920s. All but one version of the film was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 as they believed the film promoted the “Jewish vice of homosexuality.”

I have watched Different from Others and find it extremely interesting, but I think it will be hard for most modern audiences to digest. It is partially lost, and the existing version is heavily pieced together (generally, I also think most people just aren’t that interested in watching silent films).

In the third act of this film, Hirschfield, who appears in the film, gives a lecture on homosexuality. I am not sure how this sequence was originally included, but the surviving version includes Hirschfield’s lecture ‘Laws of Love’ complete with slides and all.

Sociologically, I find this very interesting. Hirschfeld pioneered the theory of “sexual intermediacy,” a theory that defined queerness as a spectrum of heterosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and transvestism (a word Hirschfeld invented himself). Hirschfeld was possibly the first to categorize sexuality as a scale in the late 1800s, far before the later Kinsey Scale and Klein Sexual Orientation Grid (KSOG).

The lecture section of the film is interesting, but doesn’t really connect stylistically to the rest. However, it is a little bit like the PSA parts of Victim. These films seem to understand the importance of teaching the public about homosexuality, not just using it for a plot. They care about how their messaging might shape their audience’s viewpoints.

I am also struck by the actors in the center of these films. Different from Others stars, Conrad Veidt. Veidt is probably more recognizable for later roles in films like Casablanca, but he was an icon of German Expressionist film. The year after Different from Others, he starred as the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. However, his career in Germany couldn’t last. After marrying a Jewish woman, he marked that he was Jewish on a “racial questionnaire” imposed by Joseph Goebbels during a 1933 purge of the German film industry. While not actually Jewish, he was a detractor from the Nazi party and refused to give up his wife. Goebbels threatened that he would never work again and placed him on house arrest, but he made plans to act in a British film and used his star status to flee to the UK with his wife with British governmental intervention. While he was married to several women during his life, many have speculated that Veidt was bisexual. During the Weimar Republic, he was very involved in the cabaret scene, dabbled in cross-dressing, and, later, several biographers have noted his queer identity. Even his being in Different from Others was seen as a co-signing of the pro-gay messaging of the film.

Similarly, Victim stars Sir Dirk Bogarde. The English actor was a matinee idol before taking the starring role in Victim. He would go on to be a darling of the arthouse and queer cinema movements. While like Veidt, Bogarde never came out in his lifetime, he was very likely queer. He lived with his manager/business partner, Anthony “Tote” Forwood, for nearly 40 years. It was a bit of an open secret that the two were partners. They started living together in 1949 after Bogarde served in the war. He was one of the first Allied soldiers to make it to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and the experience had left him shell-shocked and with a distaste for Germany. He would later say, “First there was the War, and then the peace to cope with, and then suddenly I was a film star. It happened all too soon.”

In Victim, one of the men being extorted is a famous theater actor. Unlike the more working-class characters, he plans to just keep playing the extortionists and asks Bogarde’s character, Farr, not to cause any more trouble. Farr responds that if he came out, it might change things for the better. While the actor stays in the closet, Farr lets himself be outed to take down the blackmailers. I wonder what it felt like for Bogarde to deliver these lines 6 years before he could come out legally as a gay actor himself. There is a meta tragedy to this scene, knowing that when he died in 1988, Borgarde would be at least publicly still in the closet. Still, doing this film cemented his status as a queer icon and a trailblazer, much like Veidt.

At the end of Victim, Farr outs the blackmailers, but he does so by ruining his own life. It is bittersweet, I think purposely so. This ending allows the viewer to sit with the realities of this law. Farr is both the hero and the victim; all the men in this movie are victims, not only of extortion but also of an unjust law.

If you are interested in queer film, I think both Different from Others and Victim are kind of must-watches for their historical significance. However, for any lover of film, Victim is also just a great watch. It is, for the most part, a tense and satisfying neo-noir with wonderful visuals and performances.

June is Pride Month, and in celebration, Watch the Gap will feature five straight weeks of LGBTQ+ films. Last year, I wrote an article titled 55 Must-Watch LGBTQ+ Movies To Celebrate Pride. While it was long (in celebration of 55 years, at the time, of Pride), it was actually one of the easiest listicles I ever wrote, simply because I had seen a lot of films in the category. I have long had a soft spot and interest in Queer movies.

I am writing this from my mother’s living room, which is fitting since I grew up watching a lot of LGBTQ films with her. One of the first I remember loving was 1996’s The Birdcage. Growing up with LGBT parents in the 1990s, I didn’t see a lot of media that featured queer families. Seeing The Birdcage for the first time (in I believe the early 2000s), the family dynamics are what stood out to me the most. However, over the 20+ years since then, I think there is much more to unpack.

This isn’t actually the first time I have shared my thoughts on The Birdcage. Earlier this year, I talked about it on my friend Tristian’s podcast, Movies to Fall Asleep To. But it still felt like an amazingly accessible choice for people who want to wade into classic LBTQ movies.

The Birdcage is one of the first gay films to be a mainstream studio release. The film was based on the 1978 French film La Cage aux Folles, which was based on an earlier 1970s play of the same name. The Birdcage follows a nightclub owner and his long-time drag queen partner who are forced to play it straight when their college-aged son visits with his new fiancée, her republican senator father and conservative mother. The film stars Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane, Dianne Wiest, Christine Baranski, Calista Flockhart, and Hank Azaria (more on this shortly). It was directed by Mike Nichols and written by Elaine May. Nichols and May were a comedy duo in the 1950s, and this was one of their several reunions post-1961.

There is an idea that all comedies age poorly, or at least worse than other genres. I am not sure I believe this, but if it is true, gay comedies are not immune to this trend. I have found that with gay comedies, this aging is often more complex than that of straight comedies from similar eras. They can have jokes, tropes, stereotypes, etc., that are offensive just like their straight counterparts (and The Birdcage does). However, there are even more ways that they can show their age. Good queer comedies capture something about the state of the community from the era they were made in. As the queer community has evolved over the years, these components can also show the age of the film. For example, many 1990s and 2000s gay comedies have anti-trans jokes (straight comedies from the era also have this, but it hurts more when it is coming from inside the house, in my opinion). As a queer critic, I feel like I can’t just wave off elements like this as “it’s a product of the time.” From a historical perspective, I also think we can learn a lot not only about the queer community of the era, but, in cases like The Birdcage (which was a major studio release), we can glean a lot about attitudes toward queer people from outside the community.

While some elements have not aged well, much of it also feels surprisingly current, maybe even prescient. A time capsule that still feels all too relevant.

Before I get into all the ways I love The Birdcage, I want to talk about two things I think do not age well (one is a big one, one is a small one). The small one is about the villain of this film. In the text, the villain is arguably Hackman as Senator Kevin Keeley, a conservative homophobe; however, he gets a bit of a redemption arc. He comes around in his own way. I actually have a bigger problem with Val, the main character’s son. Val is biologically Armand’s (William’s) son, but he very much grew up with Armand’s partner, Albert (Lane), as a parental figure. Still, Val doesn’t consider Albert as his father. By the end of the film, he claims Albert as part of his family, but in my opinion, it is too little, too late and probably the least realistic part of the film. As someone with LGBTQ parents, queer family structures can be complex, but I just don’t buy this dynamic.

At one point in the film, Albert is looking at old photos of Val, and there is one of Albert holding Val as a baby. It’s hard for me to believe it took Val until being college-aged to consider Albert as part of his family. But maybe that is just Val. Val is also terrible to his own father. He tries to force Armand back into the closet to appease the Keeleys. It’s a silly and short-sighted plan, but it makes it hard for me to like Val. He also realizes this was a mistake by the end of the film, but it happens very quickly. I don’t think Val does nearly enough penance for his various crimes.

However, Val is just a small problem; the far worse one is Agador. In this film, Hank Azaria plays a gay Guatemalan maid. In the 1990s, Azaria became known for doing various accents, usually of brown people. He has made some apologies for this. In 2021, he apologized for voicing the Indian character of Apu on The Simpsons. However, he has kind of doubled down on Agador. This year, in a video marking the film’s 30th anniversary, he said that Agador’s voice was based on his grandmother’s. Azaria grew up in a Sephardic Jewish, Ladino-speaking family in Queens, New York. Ladino is a language that blends Hebrew and Spanish. As a Jewish person who also sometimes impersonates her Spanish Abuela, I am pretty sure he is telling the truth. However, I am not sure that makes it better. This feels like an excuse to me, especially because there are lazy jokes about Guatemala and his heritage that wouldn’t age well even if he wasn’t doing a voice. I personally think Guatemala gets done pretty dirty in this movie. If you want to learn more about real Guatemalan culture, my actually Guatemalan friend has a great travel account that you should check out. I think Agador is a pretty big problem with this movie, which is unfortunate, because there is a lot that I love.

The element of the film that ages best, in my opinion, is the plot surrounding Senator Kevin Keeley. The senator believes that his daughter’s wedding could be used as a distraction from his ongoing political scandal. Keeley is a co-founder of the Senate’s Coalition for Moral Order; however, at the beginning of the film, his co-founder is found dead in the bed of an underage black sex worker. Honestly, this doesn’t seem that outlandish in the current political climate, but what really feels like 2026 is that politics comes later. In the final act of the movie, Albert gets into drag to play Val’s mother at dinner. While Armand struggles to play it straight, the Keeleys fully believe the fantasy when it comes to Albert. While talking about the scandal (knowing nothing about it), Albert says, “Of course we don’t believe a word of it… he was obviously framed, and I for one would like an autopsy,” to which Keeley responds, “That is just what Rush Limbaugh said.” In The Birdcage, this is a joke about conservatives, but I think it is strangely prescient in post- “fake news” America.

Lane’s performance is really what sells this movie in a lot of ways. In the script, there is a line later in the film where Albert says he agrees with everything he's said, but I don’t believe it because of how Lane plays the character. I think with a less nuanced performance, I might really dislike the character for possibly being a conservative (many gay men were in the 90s… and some still today, looking at you, White gays). In the script, it seems like it might have been written as a “see some gay people are conservative and some conservative people can like gay people kumbaya” kind of moment. However, Lane adds a knowingness to Albert that really works and lets me know that he is in on the joke.

It is interesting because Lane wasn’t the first choice for the role. Nichols wanted Williams to play Albert and Steve Martin to play Armand. (This is a side note, but he also wanted Adrian Lester to play Agador… however, Lester worried a Black maid would have racist undertones…) Williams didn’t want to do drag again so quickly after Mrs. Doubtfire, and Martin didn’t think he was camp enough, so Williams took the role of Armand. Lane was largely known as a Broadway actor at the time, but Williams went to bat for him, and Nichols settled on the casting. Notably, Lane wasn’t out (he publicly came out in 1999). Williams then famously protected him from being outed while on the press tour.

I think Lane’s casting actually makes this film (don’t get me wrong, Williams is great in this film too and it’s a rare comedy ‘straight man’ performance from him). In the years since this movie, there has been an ongoing debate about casting non-queer actors in queer roles. I have a fairly nuanced take on this debate (which best boils down to ‘it depends’), but I think there is something special about one of the first mainstream gay comedies starring an actually gay person.

A lot of classic gay films are pretty sad, but I think gay comedies are important. To me, The Birdcage feels like a celebration of drag, of family, of acceptance. There are definitely some issues, but it also contains some great performances and real gems.

It was just Memorial Day, and while for most Americans, Memorial Day means beach hotdogs and car dealership sales, it is a day about fallen soldiers. While I did technically just cover a war film with plans of talking about Memorial Day, 1949’s I Was a Male War Bride isn’t really that kind of film, so I didn’t really mention it last week.

I try to be really open-minded when it comes to films, but there is a genre that I have always kind of dreaded watching: war movies. Don’t get me wrong, there are many very well-made and interesting films about war, but generally, I find it hard to enjoy even the best of them. Maybe enjoy is the wrong word. I don’t like them.

This aversion actually is the heart of a long-held debate in film criticism. While discussing the 1998 film Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg famously said, “Of course, every war movie, good or bad, is an antiwar movie.” This went against another famous quote from French filmmaker François Truffaut. He said in a 1973 interview with critic Gene Siskel, “I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” I love this debate and, for the most part, find myself agreeing with Truffaut, especially when it comes to American films. I don’t think I have seen an American war film that doesn’t in some way glorify violence, righteous bloodshed, or an element of war (think brotherhood or bravery).

That being said, I do think there are a couple of anti-war films. The 1977 Russian film The Ascent comes to mind. I could see an argument made for Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (however, notably Siskel asked Truffaut specifically about Paths of Glory as a follow-up to that quote, to which he said, “I think Kubrick likes violence very much,” which I agree with). However, I think some of the best examples of arguably anti-war films come from Japan, and the two best (I would argue) are the third film in Masaki Kobayashi’s Human Condition Trilogy, A Soldier’s Prayer and Isao Takahata’s animated classic, Grave of the Fireflies. Unlike the over three-hour run time of A Soldier’s Prayer, Grave of the Fireflies is under an hour and a half. Still, even as an animated film with a short runtime, it is one of the most harrowing war films ever made.

Spoilers for the plot of Grave of the Fireflies: the film takes place in Kobe, Japan, in 1945. As the war draws to a close, a fire bombing destroys the home and kills the mother of a teenage boy, Seita, and his toddler sister, Setsuko. The two try to survive by staying with an aunt. However, as rations wane and his aunt becomes annoyed with caring for the young orphans, Seita takes Setsuko to live in an abandoned bomb shelter by a small lake. Seita struggles to get them food. Setsuko dies of malnutrition as Seita learns that Japan has surrendered and his Navy officer father has been killed. I usually wouldn’t spoil the plot of a film this much; however, the film kind of spoils itself.

Grave of the Fireflies opens with Seita, one of many orphan boys, dying at a train station. His ghost speaks the film’s opening line: “On the night of September 1st, 1945, I died.” Seita’s ghost then reunites with Setsuko’s outside the station in a field of fireflies. While much of the film is about survival, the audience knows from the first line how the story will end. Notably, WWII officially ended in Japan on September 2nd, 1945.

The film is based on Akiyuki Nosaka’s 1967 semi-autobiographical short story of the same name. While the anime follows the short story’s plot fairly closely, the opening scene is not present in the original story. Both works take inspiration from Shinju or Japanese Lover Suicide plays, a classical Japanese genre of stories of couples who choose to die together as an act of love. Traditional Shinju follow lovers instead of siblings, but some of the themes remain in both works.

While I would argue that this film is anti-war, Takahata repeatedly said, “[it] is not at all an anti-war anime and contains absolutely no such message.” He saw the film as a meditation on isolation and totalitarianism. He said, “That was an era when an extremely oppressive form of ‘totalitarianism’—the absolute worst kind of social order—was accepted as the norm. Seita resists that totalitarian era and tries to build a ‘pure family’ with just Setsuko, but is such a thing even possible?” He argued that we currently sympathize with Seita, but that might not always be the case. Seita runs away from his aunt’s house. The aunt thinks he is lazy and not helping with the war effort. She gives him less food since they aren’t helping the nation. At one point, she chastises him about being “too scared to die.” It is uncomfortable to see her treat a child this way, but Takahata mused that an era might come that people condemn Seita more than his aunt, “Anyone could become a person like the woman from Nishinomiya. I want the audience to be frightened by that.” (Interestingly, some western critics in the 2000s, did just that saying that Seita should have gone back to the aunt’s house and Setsuko’s death is thus his fault. That might be a fair critique, but personally, I think it a misreading of the themes of the film).

I understand what Takahata is saying; however, I think it is hard to see the film through this lens. I would argue that we are currently experiencing a totalitarian era, but I think it is still hard to read the film this way because of how sympathetic it is to its child characters. Even if there is a greyer reading of this film, I think it is fairly structurally anti-war. Takahata survived a major United States air raid on Okayama City in the summer of 1945 when he was 9 years old. He and a sibling were separated from their family for two days; he would later say it was “the worst experience of his life.” I think this is embedded in the work and led to a real, emotionally charged sympathy for the main characters.

For most of the film, the war looms in the background. Towns are firebombed. Rice is rationed. However, very little else is shown. There are background cries of “long live the emperor” and a brief shot of a kamikaze plane, but for the majority of the film, the audience doesn’t see the war. Instead, the film focuses on the children’s lives. Much of it takes place in a seemingly idyllic rural Japan that is, in fact, under attack. I think its focus on civilian life and loss is what makes it an effective anti-war film, especially a Japanese one. In the summer of 1945, a senior US Army Air Force intelligence officer in the Pacific distributed a report declaring: “The entire population of Japan is a proper Military Target . . . THERE ARE NO CIVILIANS IN JAPAN.” This film serves as a counterpoint to this rhetoric.

While Takahata didn’t call this an anti-war film, he himself was an anti-war advocate and worried that some could use this film as a reason to justify why fighting might be necessary to stop such atrocities.

For the most part, this film doesn’t have any imagery that glorifies war. However, there is one scene that I could see being used as a counterpoint. Seita recalls going to a naval review before Setsuko was born. He remembers glowing naval shifts, a band, and fireworks. After he pantomimes a fake gun. It is a far more usual depiction of war. It is also one of the only times in the film we see industrialization. It stands in stark difference from the rural look of Kobe.

When this film was originally released, it was actually shown as a double feature, surprisingly with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. Both films were made by the at the time new studio, Studio Ghibli. Takahata and Miyazaki started the studio together in the mid-1980s, but why they decided to show their 1988 slate together is a bit baffling. While both films take place in rural Japan, follow two siblings grappling with a mother’s sickness, and feature a somewhat similar animation style, they have radically different tones. My Neighbor Totoro is a family-friendly, uplifting children’s film, and Grave of the Fireflies is a gut punch. Initial audiences were charmed by Totoro, but where offput by Fireflies. Notably, Grave of the Fireflies is the only pre-2010s Ghibli film that Disney has never bought the distribution rights to. I cannot stress how much it is not for kids.

The realities of war are what make this an anti-war film in my mind. I first saw this film in high school and probably have seen it once since then. However, rewatching it for this review felt somehow harder. Last year, I received a set of Instagram messages from Abod and Ayham, two 16-year-old boys living in Gaza. In the months since, they have told me about living in tents after their homes were destroyed, younger siblings getting sick (one’s sister was especially sick this winter), and malnutrition. I have been sending them money specifically for food for their families. While watching this film, I was thinking about them. In August 2025 alone, over 12,800 children were identified as acutely malnourished. This year, 100,000 children in Gaza are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition and require long-term care.

It is easy to look back on the horrors of WWII and feel bad about the US’s targeting of Japanese civilians. It can be harder to sit with the realities of ongoing wars and US complicity in modern-day genocide. I believe to be anti-war, you need to be pro-people, and I wanted to show you them.

I wanted to end this review by sharing Abod and Ayham’s fundraising sites. If you liked this review or my work, it would mean a lot to me if you could donate. I sent both of them $20 (currently about the price of a single bag of flour in Gaza) before publishing this article. I would be forever grateful if you could match me.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of my wedding, and it has had me thinking about classic movies about weddings. I probably should have chosen something like Father of the Bride or The Philadelphia Story, but instead, I decided to watch I Was a Male War Bride, which I had never seen before.

I honestly didn’t know much about this movie other than that it has a pretty ridiculous, bombastic name. It was slightly surprising to me that I knew so little about it. It is one of five films directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant. I have actually seen all the others, which made this one feel like a bit of a gap I should fill. However, now having watched it, I can understand why this is not usually mentioned in the same breath as His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby; I Was a Male War Bride isn’t very good. Still, this movie is strange, and I want to talk about it.

I Was a Male War Bride stars Grant and Ann Sheridan. Grant plays a French captain, Henri, who goes on an assignment with a female American Lieutenant, Catherine, in post-World War II Allied-occupied Germany. The two start as enemies but quickly fall in love and get married. However, when Catherine is shipped back to the USA, she devises a plan to bring Henri back with her under the War Brides Act. The story is loosely based on the autobiography Male War Bride Trial to Army by Henri Rochard, a Belgian man who married an American nurse after WWII.

I Was a Male War Bride kind of feels like two movies. The first is about two army officers who must find a German lensmaker and get him to sign a contract. This is done quickly and fairly easily. Then the film shifts to being about how to get Henri into America. While the plot feels pretty disparate, some interesting themes about masculinity and gender dynamics get woven through.

A lot of this movie is dedicated to emasculating Grant. His casting is a little odd. In this film, Grant is playing a French captain. Yet, he doesn’t do a French accent. There are a couple of meta moments that poke fun at this, but no in-universe reason is ever revealed for why he sounds American (well, as American as Cary Grant ever sounded with his half-British accent). I maybe shouldn’t care, but I found it pretty distracting. Grant was a favorite of Hawks, but this casting doesn’t work for me. This role does call for someone pretty masculine, which Grant pulls off. He has to ride in a sidecar that’s slightly too small. This is played for laughs. In the final act, he has to get in drag to steal onto a navy ship. He makes for an ugly woman, and this is played for laughs again. I was actually expecting more from Grant and Hawks. There is no real wink to the camera about the theme of masculinity in this film, which surprised me.

Grant and Hawks first collaborated on the 1939 film Bringing Up Baby. There is a moment in that movie where Grant is forced to wear one of Katherine Hepburn’s marabou robes to answer the door. He gets into a short argument with the woman at the door, and when she asks, “Why are you wearing these clothes?” he jumps up into the air and says, “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!”

This moment feels like a wink to a certain audience, especially because the word “gay” in the context of sexuality wasn’t known to most audiences until after the Stonewall Riot of the late 1960s. Grant ad-libbed the line. Some have argued that he meant it in the 1930s context, where the word meant “happy,” but I don’t think so. Grant never came out during his lifetime but was rumored to be bisexual. Grant lived on and off with the actor Randolph Scott at their home in Santa Monica between 1932 and 1944. He had also lived with the openly gay costume designer Orry-Kelly in Greenwich Village in the 1920s. It is likely that while Grant never spoke about his sexuality, that even in the 1930s he would have known the term “gay” in the modern sense. I truly believe that this line is a nudge to queer audiences. A kind of screwball “if you know you know” moment. I was expecting more of these types of moments in I Was a Male War Bride, but there really aren’t any.

There is a moment where Sheridan changes into pants to ride a motorcycle, which was probably someone’s sapphic awakening. But I don’t think it is as iconic as Joan Crawford’s get-up in Johnny Guitar or Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo in Morocco, which are far more cited examples of queer coding in costuming. Similarly, Grant’s appearance in drag isn’t as well remembered as Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon’s in Some Like It Hot, or even the drag numbers in 1943’s This Is the Army. Grant’s costume in this film isn’t particularly interesting or elaborate, which may be part of it. The drag scene is also much shorter in this film than in the other comedies.

I found myself wanting more from this movie. I wanted it to say something, and it really doesn’t. I was initially interested in a romcom set during a war (or at least in the army). I couldn’t really imagine a modern movie doing this. I think Americans’ views on war have changed too much since the 1940s to pull off this kind of plot. The film itself doesn’t really delve into women in the army (other than showing they exist), but I found myself interested anyway. Catherine is in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). WAC existed from 1942 to 1978, when all units were integrated into existing male units. WAC allowed women to become commissioned non-combat officers. In the 1940s, WAC officers generally worked as cryptographers, in other communications roles, as administrators, and as mechanics.

The WAC feels like extremely fertile ground for a screwball comedy (like I Was a Male War Bride). Screwball comedies were a popular subgenre of romcoms from the 1930s to the 1950s. These films satirized love stories, and almost all of them follow an empowered woman and a man whose masculinity is challenged in a zany “battle of the sexes.” This movie certainly does this; however, it has shockingly little to say beyond “Cary Grant is hot, so it’s funny to dress him up, and the army has a lot of gendered bureaucracy.” If that feels a little thin for a movie, well, yes.

Part of this may have to do with this being a late addition to the screwball genre. While the genre would extend into the 1950s, its heyday was really in the late 30s. By the late 1940s, women’s rights were far from established, but there wasn’t the same bite to the satirical nature of the genre. So much of this genre hinges on a farcical gender dynamic, and by the 1940s, a working woman didn’t seem like such a farce. I think this has to do, in part, with women working in the war effort. This movie takes place after WWII; by then, audiences would have seen posters/propaganda campaigns like those of Rosie the Riveter (another woman proudly in pants for the army). They would have seen women taking over their husbands' jobs in towns across America. The idea of women in the workforce was far more normalized in the 1940s than in earlier decades. I don’t actually think that this kills gendered statire, but it forces it to be pushed further (possibly further than 1940s audiences would have been comfortable with).

I don’t think I would recommend this film to anyone who isn’t a big fan of screwball comedies. As a bit of a classic-comedy completionist, I am glad I have seen it, but I would rank it 4th among the 4 screwball comedies directed by Hawks and starring Grant. Maybe watch Bringing Up Baby instead… It is surprisingly more gay (happy).

A couple of months ago, I wrote an article that included commentary on Good Fortune, a movie made by Aziz Ansari. I felt a little icky about it at the time, given that Ansari was accused of sexual misconduct in 2018 and because I liked the film. This month, I was assailed by ads for the new film Outcome. Cards on the table: I haven’t watched it, partly because the reviews are abysmal.

For those who haven’t heard of Outcome, it is Jonah Hill’s new movie about an actor on an apology tour. Much like Good Fortune, Outcome is a dark comedy directed by a man who was “me too-ed” (and strangely, both also star Keanu Reeves and the me-tooed comedian). I would argue that the biggest difference between these two films, aside from one being pretty good and the other getting bad reviews, is that Outcome is a bit meta-textual.

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