Book Review: Cruising the Movies

[osprey_archer]

I picked up Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to the “Oldies” on TV under the impression that it was a book about queer subtext in old movies. Readers, it is NOT. Why bother looking for queer subtext when you can spend the whole movie looking at the actors’ asses? Indeed, why bother watching the movie at all, when there’s a movie poster that prominently displays said asses, as with Fraternity Row?

“I don’t know who modeled for the painting… but the figures, their butts, and their underpants are without flaw and without peer in art. In an El Greco or Delacroix grouping, perhaps only one or at most two men may look to be worth sucking off; in the Fraternity Row painting every single one does.”

This is an incredibly horny book. On occasion McDonald actually writes movie criticism, in which one gains at least a cursory idea of the mood and atmosphere of a movie (“Macao is like an Everard Baths with beaded curtains, wicker furniture, and women; the players look as though they can’t stand the sight of each other, yet want to suck each other off”), but only if his focus in the picture happens to be on an actress. If he’s focused on an actor, then the whole article is about the actor’s butt, groin, possible homosexual experience, post-acting career as a politician (this book was published in 1985), plus some vividly imagined sexual fantasies involving the actor’s life in Hollywood or, very occasionally, the actual characters in the movie. His chapter on Love Me Tender features extended musings on whether Elvis’s character enjoyed a few incestuous rolls in the hay with his brother.

Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as articles in the gay magazine Christopher Street, which was apparently where one published a raunchy thirst blog in those pre-internet days.

Is it good? Is it enjoyable? Neither of these words seem quite adequate. It is bracing, sometimes enjoyably so (“The only thing in this culture capable of awakening a ‘straight’ male’s full love and respect is a football player”), but just as often in a “bracing for impact” sort of way, as when McDonald describes his love of kung-fu movies (by which I mean his love of hairless Asian actors) or describes Tarzan’s sidekick Bomba the Jungle Boy as “a child molester’s dream.” Perhaps that one should have stayed in your head, McDonald!

It’s certainly an experience. A good experience? A bad experience? An experience too vast to be captured with mere adjectives? A sublime experience, in the old meaning of the world: too awe-inspiring to fully grasp in words.

Comments

[kore]

Woooow I had a VERY diff experience with Christopher Street authors since the one I'm familiar with is Andrew Holleran, who first published a lot of the essays in Ground Zero (1988, heavily revised as Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited in 2008). Edmund White, too.

[osprey_archer]

Maybe they published McDonald as a sort of chaser? "Okay, you've had enough serious disease reporting, now let's salivate over a poster of ten almost-naked frat boys!"

[kore]

I am totally imagining Edmund White writing like tens of thousands of words on the same topic, only it would be all twilight-moody and deeply gently reminiscent of Henry James.

[philomytha]

Yeah, I would have assumed 'semi-scholarly exploration of gay subtext' from the title as well, but it sounds like what this guy really needs is RPF actor fandom. Rate these films based on how many of the actors you would like to suck off - well, why not? This is going to be lurking at the back of my mind next time I watch anything now!

ETA: I googled the Fraternity Row poster and OMG: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076052/mediaviewer/rm1873605633/

[osprey_archer]

That poster is indeed A Lot and if you are going to write an entire article about a movie poster, especially with regard to which actors you would suck off, that is the one to choose!

[kore]

LOLLL that's even better than, say, the posters of Spartacus that focused exclusively on Kirk Douglas' thighs.

Actually when did VCRs come into common use (like when broke writers could afford one), right in 85 or a bit later? Because this strikes me as the deeply horny thoughts of a closeted teen who is stuck watching old Elvis Presley movies before cheap gay porn tapes were readily available? maybe.

[osprey_archer]

McDonald watched all these movies on TV, mostly in the early 80s - he records the date, time, and channel on which he watched them. But at the end he quotes a letter from a friend who has gotten a video player of some variety and is using it as God intended to watch and rewatch the three-second clips of, say, Elvis's pelvis.

[asakiyume]

Yowzers, yes, that's--well that is definitely something, that is!

[osprey_archer]

It's so very much what it is that it feels almost wrong to judge it by the standards that I would apply to anything else. It's not so much apples and oranges as apples and jackfruit.

[missroserose]

I can't speak to the experience of the book but I giggled delightedly all through your review, so thank you for sharing it with us! I agree with philomytha, get this man an AO3 account! XD

[osprey_archer]

To be fair McDonald did like 95% of the work here, I just stitched it together a bit into the world's most horny yet hilarious afghan.

[sovay]

This is an incredibly horny book.

I adore this book. The title does not lie. I actually feel that McDonald's film criticism is good and has gotten me to watch more than one movie and often agree with his assessment of it, but the thirsting is delightful.

[osprey_archer]

He's generally better at giving a sense of the atmosphere/mood of the movie than a traditional reviewer - he complains that other reviews focus too much on the plot, which I think is true, but also sometimes I would like to know a LITTLE bit about the plot. Just a slight shift to one less paragraph speculating about the possible hairiness of Tyrone Power's asshole and one more paragraph about "Oh yeah this is allegedly a spy thriller although the actors appear EXTREMELY bored."

[sovay]

He's generally better at giving a sense of the atmosphere/mood of the movie than a traditional reviewer - he complains that other reviews focus too much on the plot, which I think is true, but also sometimes I would like to know a LITTLE bit about the plot.

Fair! I suspect this of being a situation of varying mileage; I could usually tell from his description of a scene or a gesture context-free/thirst-optional whether I would care at all about the movie, like Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (1950) and Hope Emerson in Cry of the City (1948) where he was right that both of them are just that good. But I am also coming at this conversation from the recent experience of bouncing hard off Pauline Kael, who does sometimes tell you more about the movies she's reviewing—I opened Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968) for an example at random—

"Fanfan the Tulip (Fanfan la Tulipe). This is a sort of Louis XV Western. Fanfan (Gérard Philipe) is a handsome peasant lout with good physical equipment and no excess weight of mind or morals; his agility in bed and battlefield provides a light burlesque on the arts of love and war (although the humor, unfortunately, is sometimes of the type that can best be described as "irrepressible" or "roguish"). Gina Lollobrigida is his most decorative playmate; other ladies bursting their bodices include Genevieve Page as La Pompadour and Sylvie Pelayo as Henriette de France. With Marcel Herrand as the king, and Noel Roquevert. Christian-Jacque directed: as usual, he seems to mistake archness for style. 1953."

—but with whom I have the Anthony Lane problem among others, i.e. she can be so snarkily entertaining at the expense of her material that it's hard to tell if she likes anything. At least with Boyd McDonald, you can always tell, sometimes in anatomical detail, if he thinks a movie is worth watching.

[kore]

I love Kael's snark (which she was infamous for, before the whole internet was a gleam in Al Gore's eye) but after reading most of her books, I realized that if she raved about a movie, I was likely to hate it, and the reverse was also true. I think this epiphany came after she RAVED about some terrible movie with Willie Nelson in. It's interesting how she and Sontag were both working out aesthetics of trash and camp (de Palma is definitely camp, all the way) but in such high-minded ways that their articles are like miniature theses.

[lucymonster]

Reading this made me grin from ear to ear. Props to Mr McDonald for knowing exactly what he’s about? And you know what, it’s kind of nice to know that shameless thirstblogging predates the internet.

[osprey_archer]

McDonald had a Vision and although occasionally it is is a Vision that makes me shriek "OH BOYD MCDONALD NO," I nonetheless feel a mad respect for the integrity and single-mindedness with which he pursued his thirstblogging.

[lokifan]

LOLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

Definitely won't be reading it but thank you so much for this review

[osprey_archer]

It was definitely an experience! I had to share!

[konstantya]

WOW. Disappointing that it was not actually about queer subtext in old movies, but kudos to the guy for so thoroughly committing to his thirstiness (especially in the pre-internet age)?

Is it good? Is it enjoyable?

In a way, this kind of puts me in mind of my own experience reading Francis M. Nevins biography of Cornell Woolrich (published in 1988, so approximately the same time-frame and perhaps more accurately dubbed a "biography," as most of it is, in fact, story summaries). But, like, when Nevins isn't beating you over the head with the boner he clearly has for the idea that Woolrich was gay (the boner he seems to have for the Tragic Homosexual trope in general), he's blind-siding you with casual sexism and racism, and the occasional ludicrous story analysis. So far, I think I've learned more about Nevins from the book than I have about Woolrich, pfft.

[osprey_archer]

I suspect the McDonald book is both better and more enjoyable than the Nevins' biography, not least because when McDonald wanders off on long tangents about his subjects' possible homosexual experience, he's up front about the fact that this is a salacious fantasy and not an actual fact about the subject's life.

Never going to get over the fact that Nevins constructed an entire "self-loathing homosexual" persona for Woolrich on the basis of a supposed diary that Nevins himself never saw - and neither did the woman who told him about it! She supposedly heard about it from her sister, who was divorcing Woolrich at the time. What a chain of evidence to hang an entire biography on.

[konstantya]

when McDonald wanders off on long tangents about his subjects' possible homosexual experience, he's up front about the fact that this is a salacious fantasy and not an actual fact about the subject's life.

Yes! Which is maybe not what I'd be looking for in a book with such a title, but I can at least respect it in a weird way!

Nevins' biography is so incredibly frustrating in so many ways. I'm convinced that 99% of the people who laud it as a great biographical work (including those who bestowed an award on it back in the day!) have never actually read it, because it's an absolute mess of incompetent structure, research, and analysis.

[osprey_archer]

I can only assume Nevins did a fantastic job talking up the fact that he managed to write such a long book with such a small source base, and everyone was just so dead impressed (and possibly so bored by the prospect of reading summary after summary of stories they had never read) that they just slapped awards on the thing. It certainly worked on the writer of that article I sent you!

[konstantya]

A combination of that and the fact that he was literally the only fish in the pond for a long time, I suspect. (But ugh, that article! And to think, I was initially so excited when you sent it to me, thinking it might be a new take on Woolrich! Only to discover that, nope, it's just the same old regurgitated bullshit, SIGH.)

[evelyn_b]

This sounds delightful. And yeah, you're going to run into jokes about child molesters a lot between about 1970-1990 - it was sort of an interim period between taboos.

[osprey_archer]

The 1970s and 80s were a weird time! A year or two ago I was reading a teen novel from, IIRC, the late seventies, and the teen heroine does a lot of babysitting, and one of the dads (the couple is divorced) starts hitting on her... and the mom is sympathetic, but in a "Well you can sleep with him if you want but it might not be... the best idea..." kind of way. There's a sort of fear of being judgmental? A lack of vocabulary to express "perhaps your first sexual partner should not be a forty-year-old man having a midlife crisis following his divorce." As you say, a gulf between taboos. The old taboos against premarital sex had waned and there wasn't a new taboo to take up the slack.