A concise synopsis of gay-themed movies and gay interest films. Click on the photos to enlarge.

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Boca a Boca (1995)



















Aspiring actor Víctor Ventura (Javier Bardem) for financial reasons works for a phone-sex company, thrilling the men and women of Madrid with his repertoire of exciting sex conversations. Auditioning for acting roles is more humiliating than being paid to talk dirty to strangers, and the phone job is actually a more interesting professional challenge. The film mixes soft-core seduction with pratfalls. For example, there is a zipper mishap to interrupt a strained heavy-breathing episode. Events escalate once Victor, who took the phone sex job without expecting to meet Ms. Right, finds himself falling for Amanda (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who is one of his clients. She says that her husband Bill Ricardo (Josep Maria Flotas), a homosexual who is one of his best clients, has also had phone-sex with Victor, which leads to more complications.

One of the film's funny scenes has Victor being told by his agent Angela (Maria Barranco) that he looks too American to land a role in a big American movie. To compensate for this, he turns up with open shirt and slicked-back hair, smoldering dramatically as he kisses the hand of an American talent agent. Victor encounters a bratty American filmmaker whose combination of ignorance and arrogance makes him an easy target. Later Victor launches into a raging diatribe in a restaurant when the guy orders Coca-Cola, and ends up impressing everyone with a show of his acting talent. The film adds transvestite waiters to this scene, sets some of its action in a phone sex disco and lets Amanda appear in blond, red and dark wigs at different times. Most of the characters are play-acting, which gives the movie a chance to satirize show business and artificiality. Although the comic possibilities of phone sex have been exhausted, this farce gives this worn out topic a go. Written by Juan Luis Iborra and Manuel Gómez Pereira, who also directed. The English title is "Mouth to Mouth".

Victim (1961)



















Until 1967 homosexual acts between consenting adults were illegal in Britain. In the USA this film was banned, and it played an influential role in liberalizing laws regarding homosexuality. Jack Barrett (Peter McEnery) is found hanging dead in his jail cell. He was incarcerated for allegedly embezzling money from his company, which he admitted to the police. However, the truth is he took the money because he was being blackmailed for being a homosexual. After the suicide, Melville Farr (Dirk Bogarde), a married lawyer, with the help of Barrett's gay friend Eddy Stone (Donald Churchill), tries to find others who are being blackmailed. Is Farr doing this to pay the blackmailers money in return for the incriminating evidence against him (innocent photographs of Farr and Barrett) or does he want to stop the blackmailers from targeting other homosexuals? The educated police Detective Inspector Harris (John Barrie) considers the sodomy laws nothing more than an aid to blackmailers and helps Farr. The blackmailers vandalize Farr's property, writing "Queer" on his garage doors in an attempt to intimidate him. But Farr helps the police catch them and promises to give evidence in court, even if it means destroying his career. At the end of the film, Farr talks to his wife Laura (Sylvia Syms) and burns the picture that originally incriminated him.

"Victim" was the first English language film in history to use the word "homosexual". It is the first mainstream film to portray sympathetically and realistically homosexual society, at a time when homosexuality was still a crime, when to be gay was a matter of secrecy and shame. Janet Green and John McCormick wrote the screenplay. Philip Green composed the music and Basil Dearden directed.

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