"Knives Out": Stylish Whodunit with a Gay Connection

I have seen Knives Out (2019), a classic whodunit, as a change of pace from the pandemic post-Apocalyptic movies we've been watching.

Ultra-famous, fabulously wealthy mystery writer Harlan Thromboy (Christopher Plummer) has just died.  By suicide -- he slit his own throat shortly after his 85 birthday party. 

The grieving relatives convene in his eccentric Addams Family-style mansion to be interviewed by police detectives Elliot and Wagner (Lakeith Stanfield, Noah Segan), and by private investigator Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig with a ludicrous Southern accent), who has been hired anonymously.

Everyone lies about what happened last night.  Apparently Harlan was cleaning house:

1. His son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson),who has never worked, is having an affair.  If his wife Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis) finds out, she will cut him off.  Last night Harlan threatened "You tell her, or I will."

2. Harlan has been sending his widowed daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) $100,000 every year to pay for his grandaughter's Ivy League tuition, but Joni has been double-dipping, getting the money sent directly to the school and to her personal account.  He cut her off.

3. Harlan's son Walt (Michael Shannon, left) has been running the publishing company.  Harlan fired him.

4. He had an unspecified shouting-match with his grandson Hugh (Chris Evans, top photo).

5. The only one who had a pleasant evening was Harlan's nurse, Maria (Ana de Armas).  After the party she took him upstairs, gave him his medication, played a game of backgammon, and went home.

They all have a motive for murder. But he committed suicide, right?  But then, why did someone hire a private detective?

At the reading of the will, Maria gets the entire fortune: book rights, house, assets, everything.  Then the knives come out.

Only Maria knows what really happened:  she accidentally switched the medicines, injecting him with a lethal overdose of morphine.  Since she was a close friend, Harlan decided to commit suicide so she wouldn't be implicated in his death.

Except -- someone switched the vials, so Maria actually injected him with the correct medication.  Harlan only thought that he was dying.

Someone planned the perfect murder,

Gay characters:  None specified.  I thought the fey grandson Jason (Jaeden Martell) would be gay (apparently he is in real life), but he's actually a straight alt-right perv.

Beefcake:  Everyone is fully clothed throughout.

Then what is the gay connection?

I figured from the beginning that Maria would fall in love with Hugh.  A male family member, unattached, about her age, and looking down with bemused detachment at his family's money-grubbing dementia.

When they started hanging out together, I was sure that they would solve the mystery, vanquish the evil family members, and set up housekeeping in the great Gothic mansion..  But no shipping occurred.  Not a speck of heterosexual romance between them, or between anyone else. That is extremely rare in American movies.

Freedom from the heterosexist "Girl of His Dreams" conclusion!  Who cares if there is any beefcake?

Mae West: Gay Diva of the 1930s

She appeared in ten movies between 1933 and 1943 -- a rather small body of work (during the same period, Mickey Rooney appeared in over fifty).  And two others during the 1970s.  Yet she is instantly recognizable today, and her lines are still being quoted:

"It's not the men in your life, it's the life in your men."

"Goodness had nothing to do with it."

"Why don't you come up and see me sometime?"

Like 1970s sitcoms, comedy movies of the 1930s were about people not having sex.  The Hays Code forbade any implication of sex, premartial, marital, or extramarital, so you could only talk about it through code, hints, and innuendos.  Mae West was an expert on innuendo -- her body language and intonation could make the most innocent line sound like it wasn't.

Maybe that's why she became an icon for gay men of the pre-Stonewall era.  Faced with police-state repression, where discovery would be catastrophic, they learned to communicate with body language, gestures, code-words.  That's the origin of the term "gay."

She was also a favorite model for drag queens of the era.  In fact, she claimed that she invented drag.

Mae West had a number of close friends who were LGBT, such as bisexual Cary Grant, and wrote the first play to openly mention gay people. It was closed down by the police during a run-through in Connecticut in 1927, but copies are available.  Her attitude was rather progressive for the era: she believed that gay men were feminine souls trapped in male bodies, and thus doomed to sad, empty lives.  But they weren't innate criminals plotting the overthrow of civilization.

Unfortunately, her attitude stayed the same as seasons changed, and by the 1970s it was old-fashioned and homophobic.

In her last film appearance, Sextet (1978), Mae West is presented as an ongoing sex symbol.  There's nothing wrong with the elderly having active libidos, but seeing the 85-year old actress surrounded by fawning musclemen and married to 34-year old Timothy Dalton is rather ludicrous.

Still, we get to see the musclemen.

See also: Madonna.

The Pajama Game: 1950s Beefcake

There once was a man who loved a woman
She was the one he slew a dragon for.

The American musical has traditionally been a vehicle for unvarnished heterosexism, two interspliced boy-meets-girl plotlines and as many songs about "love! love! love!" as a Cody Simpson album.  But with so many gay actors, writers, directors, choreographers, and producers, gay subtexts invariably sneak in.

The Pajama Game (1954) ran for 1,063 performances on Broadway, with revivals in 1973 and 2005, and a movie version in 1957 (starring Doris Day).  The title sounds risque, but it's actually about the Sleeptite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Romantic plot #1: Manager Sid and worker Babe, who is petitioning for a 7.5 cent raise.
Romantic plot #2: Boss's assistant Gladys and her jealous boyfriend "Hine-sie" Hines.

Gay subtext #1: Hines seems more interested in Sid than Gladys.
Gay subtext #2: Gladys has many masculine-coded traits, veering close to a stereotypic movie lesbian.
Gay subtext #3: Beefcake.  At the end of the movie, Sid and Babe unveil the new pajama style, Sid shirtless, barechested, and muscular, so risque that it was shocking in 1954.

  John Raitt (left) is the archetypal Sid, appearing in both the original Broadway and the movie versions.  University performers include Chris Ellis (top photo) and Stephen Boyd (above).

The Pajama Game is a favorite of high school and college drama clubs, for both actors and fans who can see their favorite hunk semi-nude.  Usually skittish directors insist that he perform with a t-shirt instead, as Harry Connick Jr. did in the recent Broadway revival.

More of Ike Eisenmann

Speaking of Ike Eisenmann, most Boomer boys are so fixated on his beefcake scenes in Return from Witch Mountain (1978), or maybe his superlative performance as a racist in tight jeans who has a change of heart on The Jeffersons  that they don't remember a decade of buddy-bonding and tight jeans.

1. The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon (1976), an ABC Afterschool Special about the friendship between shy, retiring Duffy (Ike) and outgoing school hunk Peter (Lance Kerwin).

2. The Fantastic Journey (1977), which had nothing to do with either of the two similarly titled movies (one about shrinking scientists, and the other about a dog and cat finding their way home).  This one was a precursor of Lost, about people from various times and places trapped on an island in the Bermuda Triangle.  Ike played the teenage Scott Jordan, who hung out with the mysterious Varian (Jared Martin).  There was also a prissy gay-coded villain, played by Roddy McDowell.

3. The "High Explosive" episode of Chips (1978), with Ike as a country boy who fires a pellet gun into traffic.  He's just aching for some hand-on-shoulder big brothering from Ponch (Erik Estrada), and favors us with several shots of an amazing aptitude beneath the belt.

4. The "Phantom of the Roller Coaster" episode of Wonder Woman (1979).  Roller coaster enthusiast Randy (Ike), who again wears extremely tight jeans, buddy-bonds with David (Jared Martin again), without realizing that David's disfigured twin brother is the sinister "phantom."

5. Preston, Scotty's nephew, in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan (1982), whom Kirk calls "a tiger," and who dies trying to save his fellow crew members.