WHAT
REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? AND THE FILMS OF
THE GAY GIRLS RIDING CLUB (1962-1972) Blu-rayDirector: Ray Harrison
American Genre Film Archive
WHAT
REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? AND THE FILMS OF
THE GAY GIRLS RIDING CLUB (1962-1972) Blu-rayAmerican Genre Film Archive digs into the beginnings of drag cinema with their Blu-ray of WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? AND THE FILMS OF THE GAY GIRLS RIDING CLUB.
Founded in the early sixties by Los Angeles television studio professional Ray Harrison, the Gay Girls Riding Club (GGRC) was a social club for the well-healed Southern California gay population living in secret. Far from just a hookup venue, the club scheduled social events and film screenings, and Harrison was able to make use of the club's social network to produce a series of films for club screenings. Shooting only on Sundays when the club's social events were scheduled, Harrison crafted a series of increasingly ambitious love letters to Hollywood favorites that have become camp classics in the gay community. First up in this set is the 1962 silent short ALWAYS ON SUNDAY (8:21), riffing on Jules Dassin's NEVER SUNDAY (1960) with prostitute Ilya keeping lonely lover Taki on the back burner while she searches for more lucrative prey before getting her comeuppance with a punchline that must have been stale even back then. Directing under the pseudonym "Connie B. De Mille", Harrison fashions the film like a silent film presumably as much for economic reasons as technical ones involving live sound recording in a room full of nonprofessional extras who just seem to be drinking and having a good time. The film is technically bland apart from the moments when it showcases its star strutting about like a peacock, as one would expect in any campy drag act where the star grabs the spotlight and throttles it.
The following year, Harrison mounted the much more ambitious WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (31:32). Mounted just a year after the Aldrich film's release, the nucleus of the project is actually the Oscar feud of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Opening with Blanche Hudson's overshadowing her vaudeville star sister "Baby Jane" Hudson, the film adds the additional insult of Blanche winning the Oscar in 1932 precipitating her mysterious accident. Thirty years later, "Baby Jane" (Harrison regular Warren Fremming) is planning her delusional comeback, but the adulation of her manchild accompanist for Blanche stirs Jane's pathological jealousy. The climax of the film departs from the source into the territory of wish fulfillment, not only for those who thought Davis was wronged by the Academy but also for those who acknowledged Jane's insanity yet saw remained sympathetic to her situation (and perhaps found analogies in her and their marginalization). Making use of industry connections, the film is shot in a swanky Hollywood Hills mansion, makes use of some glass mattes and animation to depict Old Hollywood for the prologue, and generally finds Harrison moving the camera, covering scenes from additional angles, and using the camera to enhance the film's delirium rather than just capturing the fake slow-motion running and sight gags. Apart from some narration and Fremming lip-synching to a warbling recording of "I've Written a Letter to Daddy", the film is played as a silent film with occasional intertitles, although Harrison depends both on the mannerisms of the actors and our familiarity with the film source to get most of the action across without transcribed dialogue.
Slighter, but better-made is 1963's THE ROMAN SPRINGS ON MRS. STONE (19:14) – inspired by José Quintero's 1961 screen adaptation of the Tennessee Williams novel "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" – depicts the retreat of stage star Karen Stone (Fremming again) from society after the sudden death of her husband. In need of companionship, she contacts madam Countess Vaseline who puts her in the company of "anything for a buck" Latin lover Paulo. Karen fauns over and paws Paulo's tanned physique poolside, but he is more interested in the muscle magazine centerfolds and eventually drops her for another gigolo, leaving her vulnerable to a mysterious dark-haired young man who has been prowling her estate.
Although the film presents Karen as a woman and not a man in drag, the twist is not a sexually-frustrated woman infatuated with a bisexual guy who throws her over for a more attractive male mate, but still that of an aging gay man's attraction to beauty and the insecurities that come with a relationship in which the exploitation goes both ways (as evidenced at a garden party where the women parade their younger men for each other's envy while the younger men lift the women's wallets and pearls). The finale also seems to represent a spiritual rebirth rather than the ambiguous death of the model film. Harrison's directorial style is more disciplined than economic – once again, he is able to convey a lot through introductory narration and physical performance in an otherwise "silent" film – and the location work appears to include exteriors of Greystone Mansion which would become a fixture of low-budget American genre films and episodic television soon after the property was leased to the American Film Institute in 1965 onwards.
1964's SPY ON THE FLY is a "road movie" in which ladies' man secret Agent 0069 (Fremming) is tasked with accompanying secretary Fonda Peters from Los Angeles to San Francisco with the plans for an atomic bomb secreted on her person. They must take the backroads since enemy agents will be watching the airports and train stations. Unfortunately, Peters meets a fiery end at Madame Toussaud's Beauty Salon from a booby-trapped hair dryer. Fellow agent Toussaud comes up with the B plan of having Agent 0069 disguise himself as Peters and making the delivery himself. While 0069 adjusts to the awkwardness of running around in a wig, dress, and heels, enemy agents underestimate the power of this broad's punches.
More chaotic than exciting, 1967's SPY ON THE FLY (43:42) is listless edited and endlessly protracted in scene after scene, with the only exceptions being the beauty parlor sequence which ridicules female beauty rituals (one woman's mud mask looks she is being smothered by heaps of chocolate pudding), and a visit to a hippie bar with the sight gag of 0069 coming out of the women's restroom in his male persona and discovering to his horror that he still has his painted nails attached only to go into the men's restroom and emerge again as Fonda Peters. The lack of spoken dialogue or even more intertitle interjections adds to one's sense of boredom. The location work is guerilla-style, and seems to be just as much a means of utilizing available light as opening up the story, and there are some bits involving pyrotechnics and acid baths; nevertheless, the film is a slog for anyone but those most interested in drag cinema and the GGRC (in other words, the purchasers of this set).
1972's ALL ABOUT ALICE (68:02) features Fremming again as aging Broadway sensation Mona who decides she needs a secretary to handle her day-to-day affairs and hires Alice (Jarman Christopher) who plucks her heartstrings with a sob story about being widowed and destitute and then flatters her with slavish admiration. Alice charms everyone – including Mona's current beau Mike (Ken Sprague) – with the exception of Mona's devoted dresser Cora (Lea Marmer) who comes across to Mona as bitter and jealous. Alice manipulates the show's co-writer Shirley (Chuck Bratton) into making her Mona's understudy when the original one gets pregnant, causing Mona to fly into a rage and walk off the stage when Alice impresses the show's backers while standing in for Mona to read with hopeful starlet Marilyn (Erik Seabourg). Since Mona has a reputation of never missing a performance, Alice seduces the show's other writer Peter (Wallace Fredericks) to delay Mona's return from a weekend jaunt to the country so that she can make her debut on the stage and in Mona's bed with Mike.
Just about feature length and in full color with synch sound and an original theme song, this riff on ALL ABOUT EVE (1950) – signed by Ray Harrison under his own name – is the most-accomplished work in the set. Not only are the production values about equal to some of the slicker low-budget Hollywood works of the period, Harrison's concern with performance, dialogue, and story is such that it is easy to forget that several of the female performers are men in drag even in the meatiest scenes of Fremming chewing the scenery. More so than THE ROMAN SPRINGS ON MRS. STONE, the film is sympathetic to its characters and does not find levity in the intersections of Mona's vanity and Fremming's less-than-feminine features, presenting her as much a woman as Christopher whose female impersonator career went relatively more mainstream with bit parts in FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, BACHELOR PARTY, and DON'T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER'S DEAD as well as some episodic television of the seventies and eighties. Made just as exploitation was crossing the line into hardcore at large, the film does feature some beefcake frontal nudity from Sprague, a bodybuilder who posed for gay publications and appeared in some early adult films under the name Dakota before leaving the business and founding Gold's Gym; however, the film is not a sex flick in the slightest, just adding a touch of salaciousness to its slavish admiration for the 1950 film.
Long unavailable after their GGRC premieres and filling out screenings of adult product, the films in this set turned up on VHS from Something Weird Video in the two volume GAY CAMP CLASSICS COLLECTION with some other titles not included in this set before being quickly withdrawn. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen presentations on this disc represent 2K preservations of the only known 16mm prints in existence, so the greater overall wear throughout the films is less of a distraction compared to what the HD scans were about to bring out of the elements that allow us not only to assess the "performances" both in terms of the characters' make-ups but also their expressivity (which becomes less showy and more refined with each film) but also the locations and sometimes threadbare elegance of the décor that look best when the camera is on a tripod and locked down. All the films have DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono tracks but only WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, THE ROMAN SPRINGS ON MRS. STONE, SPY ON THE FLY, and ALL ABOUT ALICE have SDH subtitles since the former four have narration and the latter has spoken dialogue.
Apart from a reel of silent outtakes from ALL ABOUT ALICE (10:09), the only extra is an audio commentary for WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? by queer film historian Evan Purchell and AGFA’s Bret Berg who discuss the Gay Girls Riding Club and other social clubs of the time – including the Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts (SPREE) devoted to Harrison's more prolific contemporary – their social activities and film output (noting the tendency of East Coast contemporaries towards underground film and the West Coast towards Hollywood homage), and the difficulty of seeing these films in later years. They also delve into the history of drag, both on film and the performance style's borrowings from cinema, while also providing what little information they can on Harrison who seems impossible to trace after 1975. The reverse of the disc's cover features advertisements of the films' original "public" screenings while the first 2,500 copies ordered directly from Vinegar Syndrome include a special limited edition embossed slipcover. (Eric Cotenas)