Desperate Living (John Waters, 1977)

I'm facing some possible desperate living of my own as I write this post, as yet another potentially disruptive winter storm descends upon Texas, a state with its own unreliable power grid (because of liberty, you see?), except for the wise people of certain parts of west Texas, who are hooked to the national grid. Will I finish my post today or at some unspecified future date when power is restored (if the power goes out)? My wife and I lost power for seven days in 2023 and lost running water for three days in 2021, so we're both slightly on edge but reasonably prepared.

You know who wasn't reasonably prepared? The Good Housekeeping film critic, who walked out of the Desperate Living premiere after ten minutes, a badge of honor I'm sure John Waters wears proudly. Desperate Living, the only Waters film of Divine's lifetime without Divine (he reluctantly withdrew from the production due to a clash in schedules with the off-Broadway play Women Behind Bars) (the same goes for David Lochary, whose drug habit kept him from appearing in this one and who would die from drug-related injuries shortly after Desperate Living's release), is a hilariously mean-spirited, vulgar, transgressive, disgusting, and heartwarming tale of the power of women to overcome a fascist queen of a godforsaken burg called Mortville near Baltimore. We could all learn a lot from this one. (My non-storm thoughts today are with the good people of Minneapolis fighting the fascist federal government of our nationwide Mortville.)

Though I'm a fan of Desperate Living as a whole, I think the opening scene is one of the greatest pieces of comedy ever filmed and Mink Stole's tour-de-force. (Her "I hate the Supreme Court" line has become the most inevitable 2020s online meme.) I could watch two straight hours of Mink Stole yelling at people over the phone, and I'd be in heaven. Cranking Sirkian melodrama and those very special TV movies about suburban women having nervous breakdowns up to eleven (after a very Douglas Sirk opening credit sequence, except for the cooked rat on the dinner tray, of course), the opening scene begins with boys playing baseball in the yard of a suburban Baltimore home. A doctor exiting the home tells the family patriarch Bosley Gravel (George Stover) that his wife is the most neurotic woman he's ever met and that she should return to the institution. Bosley calmly tells the doc everything's hunky dory and that she's improving. In her upstairs bedroom, Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole), proceeds to unload on everything and everyone around her at fever pitch, especially when the boys' errant baseball smashes through her window. It's truly one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Stole yells classic line after classic line in her wonderfully inimitable style ("Go home to your mother! Doesn't she ever watch you? Tell her this isn't some Communist day care center! Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"). It could go on forever and I would be a pig in mud.

Through an escalating series of events, Peggy and her maid Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill) kill Bosley and go on the run. Once on the open road, Grizelda lets Peggy know the power balance has shifted: "I ain't your maid anymore, bitch. I'm your sister in crime." (John Waters should be on the Mount Rushmore of movie dialogue writers, if one were ever to exist. What a weird fucking project that would be.) The women stop to camp despite Peggy's hatred of nature ("Look at those disgusting trees, stealing my oxygen! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?"). Unfortunately, a Baltimore motorcycle cop (played by the wonderfully named Turkey Joe in his only film role) pulls in and threatens to arrest them. (There's already an APB out for them even though the killing happened minutes ago.) The cop lets them go and gives them directions to Mortville in exchange for their underwear and a couple wet kisses. A fair deal. Who is Turkey Joe and why is this his only film role? I need to know more about Turkey Joe. He also delivers a tour-de-force here, half of it while simultaneously wearing three pairs of women's underwear.

Mortville is a shanty town with no indoor plumbing (except at the bar) on the outskirts of Baltimore populated by society's outcasts. Its fascist monarchy is run with an iron fist and many whims by Queen Carlotta (the one and only Edith Massey) from her castle. She's guarded by a group of men in Gestapo-meets-leather daddy regalia, and her castle is adorned with painted portraits of Idi Amin, Hitler, and Charles Manson. Her rebellious adult daughter Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) is kept under close supervision in her bedroom, and Carlotta disapproves of Coo-Coo's relationship with nudist garbageman Herbert (George Figgs).

Peggy and Grizelda rent a newly available spare shack from the power couple of disgraced former professional wrestler Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), on the run after killing Big Jimmy Dong in the ring, and Marilyn lookalike Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay) (check out Renay's life story to take a wild ride), who suffocated her child's terrible babysitter in a bowl of dog food. Divine was originally going to play Mole, which would have been an interesting departure. Mole is a very butch masculine character, and Divine usually played such fabulously over-the-top women for Waters. I'm a little bummed we'll never see Divine's take, though Lowe is an excellent member of the Waters troupe in her own right and does a fine job here. (My favorite Lowe performance is Vikki, the salon receptionist in Waters' masterpiece Female Trouble: "Boys, she won't pay. Take the hairdo back!")

Tensions between the Mortville residents and Queen Carlotta reach a boiling point, the resolution of which involves collapsing homes, rabies potions, betrayal, gunplay, deaths, nudity, a botched sex change operation, armed revolt, a fantastic-looking Cookie Mueller, and the immortal line, "Get out of my chambers, lesbians!" It's the quality entertainment some of us deserve.

Divine is missed, but Desperate Living is otherwise top-shelf Waters. It's his ugliest, grimiest, and nastiest movie and plenty disgusting (though nothing reaches the gag-reflex high/low of Divine eating the dog shit in Pink Flamingos), and it's also one of his funniest and most life-affirming. Mink Stole and Edith Massey are so goddamn hilarious here, and, though Waters may vomit at what I'm about to type, the movie is an earnest tribute to the power of collective action over I-got-mine-so-fuck-you individuality. There's a utopian aspect to Waters' films that makes a lot more sense to me than the kumbaya hippy shit utopias we usually get in artistic works. His characters just want to live life on their own terms (as the filthiest people alive, or in specific cha-cha heels, or as a serial killer of disrespectful fellow suburbanites) without a boot on their necks, and they succeed when they team up to defeat the squares, winning or losing on their own terms without relinquishing their individual personalities or watering down their unsavory qualities. I love these characters so much.

Watching a John Waters '70s movie in the 2020s gives me melancholic, bittersweet feelings about the robustness of the various countercultures in the 20th century. In our current social media/content creator world, we have the worst of both monoculture and underground culture without the benefits of either. Almost everything shares a similar flattened aesthetic form and delivery system, but we're all consuming it separately in isolation, except for the occasional viral moment. Younger artists are too often worried about offending people or being observed and recorded or making a public mistake or being misunderstood to create the kind of joyfully transgressive work that Waters made.

I'm not trying to make the stupid right-wing argument that "no one can say anything anymore without being canceled/comedy is illegal/Rogan and his boys are fighting the good fight against tyranny because they got mild criticism for saying a few shitty words" (not pictured: me making the jerkoff motion) (the only real, long-lasting censorship in the U.S. this century has come from the right wing erasing history and banning library books, though I'll admit there are plenty of art-misunderstanding left-wing online bullies trying to police language and content from their tiny virtual soapboxes, too, but none of those people have any real power), but I'm not going to pretend there isn't a sort of self-censoring walking-on-eggshells fear-of-online-criticism approach to art in the current era where everyone and everything is on permanent display and observation. People have less freedom to try on identities and experiment and push boundaries and figure out who they are and make mistakes without out-of-proportion criticism, leading to a lot of watered-down, safe, preachy, pandering art and entertainment and a lot of media illiteracy confusing depiction for endorsement. We could all stand to be online less and create more.

I really miss the 20th century, but I'm also a guy who tries to live in the present without wallowing in nostalgia, so I'm in a sort of permanent existential crisis. Now I'm on a damn soapbox, so I'll step off and just say I love John Waters. The man is a national treasure. No one else would have given Edith Massey a film career, which is a testament to his instincts and an indictment on society. (I feel like Mink Stole would have made something happen without Waters, but I'm so glad they were contemporaries and friends.) I honor you, Queen Carlotta, and I hate the Supreme Court, too.

The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941)

The Face Behind the Mask is an unusual and poetic blend of melodrama, film noir, and horror with an excellent Peter Lorre performance and some equally excellent creepy makeup to give Lorre stiff and expressionless facial movements (except for his expressive eyes). Director Robert Florey and his cast have the ability to extract the real emotions lodged inside Hollywood clichés, and the ending is narratively and visually satisfying. It's a bit of a hidden gem that should be better known, especially if you're a fan of classic Hollywood and Peter Lorre.

The film opens with Hungarian watchmaker and engineering genius Janos (Lorre) on a ship sailing into New York harbor. Janos plans to stay in the United States and, once he's gainfully employed and financially stable, send for his fiancée to join him. Janos is such a naive, kindhearted, wide-eyed, eternal optimist that you know New York is going to destroy him, but Florey plays around with these stereotypes by having every New Yorker Janos encounters operate in good faith and help the man out. Lorre has great comedic instincts playing such an aw-shucks character (I don't think I've ever seen Lorre play a naive character before), and he has onscreen chemistry with everyone he meets. A friendly cop (imagine a cop helping someone) sends Janos to a cheap but clean tenement boarding house with a café attached. The boarding house's only two rules are no ironing (it shorts the circuits) and no cooking in the room (so the tenants will eat in the café). Janos immediately finds work as a dishwasher in the café and settles in for his first night of sleep in the Big Apple.

Unfortunately for Janos, the boarding house catches fire thanks to a fellow tenant's careless placement of secret cookware. Janos is trapped in the flames, and his face is horribly burned. Weeks later, a bandaged Janos, still eternally optimistic since his hands escaped the flames, loses that optimism instantly once the bandages come off and he looks in a mirror. He goes berserk, attacking the doctor, and has to be sedated.

Post-release, Janos struggles to find work because of his disfigured face. He breaks up with his fiancée via letter and wanders the streets. While contemplating suicide, he meets petty criminal and street hustler Dinky (George E. Stone), who treats him with respect and humanity. The pair form a friendship and Janos slowly embraces a life of crime as the only viable path to survival. Dinky's other criminal pals are not so humane, but they respect Janos' incredible skills and intelligence, and he eventually becomes the boss of the criminal gang, stealing enough loot to get a plastic surgeon to make him a face mask based off his passport photo. This mask covers his scars but gives him an eerie, frozen look except for his eyes.

Janos bumps into a blind woman named Helen (Evelyn Keyes) on the street, and the two slowly fall in love. The pure-at-heart blind woman falling in love with the disfigured man was a standard cliché even in this first half-century of film, but Keyes and Lorre breathe some fresh life into the stock romance and tap into some genuine feeling. You can probably guess that Helen's influence inspires Janos to quit his life of crime, get a dog, and move to a friendly little house in the country with Helen, and you can also probably guess that his old life of crime will find its way back to him and disrupt his and Helen's country idyll, but the movie takes this standard plot device and transforms it into a nihilistic, visually expressive act of vengeance worthy of some of the darkest horror and crime thriller classics.

Throughout, Lorre is perfect as Janos. He nails the changes the character goes through, from goofy naive optimism to despair to weary resignation to cold calculation to a less naive optimism to bringer of vengeance, and his facial control when Janos is under the mask is impressive stuff.

Director Florey is a master of pace and tone here, and he expertly handles the shifts from comedy to melodrama to film noir to romance to revenge horror with subtlety and sensitivity. It's shocking that the movie is only 68 minutes long considering how unhurried it is and how it mixes multiple genres and takes so many narrative turns.

Robert Florey was a man with an extremely varied film career. A Frenchman from Paris, Florey became obsessed with Hollywood movies as a teen and began his professional life writing for French film magazines as a journalist and critic. He moved to Switzerland and directed some short films before returning to France to work as an assistant at Louis Feuillade's film studio in Nice. Continuing his parallel career as a film writer, Florey was on journalistic assignment in Hollywood when he decided to stay there permanently and pursue his filmmaking goals. He worked his way up the ladder from joke writer to PR man to assistant director before finally making the leap to director. His notable credits include landmark experimental film The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, first Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts, Murders in the Rue Morgue with Bela Lugosi, Daughter of Shanghai with Anna May Wong, a reunion with Lorre in The Beast with Five Fingers, and episodes of Wagon Train, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits.