Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Fag Noir


BORN TO KILL (1947)


and then there’s—
elisha cook’s slavish, faggy
cocksucker devotion to his
butchy, handsome killer
hoodlum loverboy which
defines perfectly the male
femme fatale aesthetic of
the fag noir gangster style

lawrence tierney is trouble—
from the word go even tho
fem miss cook tries to reason
with the psychopathic hunk
covering the killer’s tracks,
creating alibis & getting rid
of eye-witnesses, like nosy
old landlady esther howard
and skuzzy detectives like
sleazy walter slezak

but tierney single-mindedly—
zeros in on claire trevor, no
angel herself, resulting in elisha
cook getting killed on a lonely
beach by his crazy deadly lover
instead of the ratty wretched
landlady esther howard who
hired the sleazy slezak all of
which ends up with claire trevor
double-crossing tierney so she
can off her rich sister & inherit 
all the family fortune

this grim complicated version—
of the RKO quintessential fag noir
style of the 1940s uniquely
synthesizes the expressionistic
style of welles & the moody,
gothic atmosphere of lewton to
create an excellent example of
not only RKO style but also the
offhand depiction of a new genre
of perturbing gay sexuality and
troubling tough-guy S&M cinema

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