Drag in Film.

I'm so glad you mentioned Gene Hackman. He is glorious and I laugh every time he worries that the white dress makes him look fat. He goes from totally shaken to really into it and so does Diane Wiest. The Elaine May script and Mike Nichols' direction make this movie a real gem. For anyone who hasn't seen it...First of all, what's the matter with you?...he played a conservative politician who gets holed up in a drag club owned by his daughter's fiance's parents, Robin Williams and Nathan Lane, and they have to sneak him out past the waiting press and camera crews. Gene comes in at the 1:40 point.



Some Like It Hot (1959) is probably the gold standard for big stars doing drag. Even though it's a comedy and not entirely bound by the rules of realism, the movie depends on Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon being able to plausibly get away with it and they both pull it off really well. From what I understand, Tony's voice as Josephine was ultimately dubbed, but the illusion is well sustained and some fun moments come in private between the two when the voices revert as they bicker about their predicament. I don't mean to slight Tony, but my favorite scene in the movie is when Jack as Daphne first meets the rich playboy played by the hilarious Joe E. Brown.



The introduction of the two men in drag is priceless, so we get to see Tony in action here too.



Some Like It Hot was originally scheduled to be filmed in color because Marilyn had it in her contract that she would only do color films, but some initial tests of the guys showed that it would be much more difficult to maintain a credible illusion that the guys were girls in color. Marilyn ultimately agreed and, personally, I think the black and white makes sense on other levels, making it seem more appropriate to the period of the 1920's. As an interesting side note, Jack appeared in his Some Like It Hot drag in the all-star Columbia movie Pepe (1960) for a comedy bit with Cantinflas, so we get to see what the effect would have been in color. The look isn't entirely disastrous, but I'm still glad they went for black and white for SLIH. Jack comes in at 2:30.

I've added THE KREMLIN LETTER to my watch list. Saunders is looking good, but wasn't he tall? making it more difficult to pass as a woman.

In the "drag as a means to an end" category, let's add this dumbass "teen musical" rip-off of Some Like It Hot from the American-International, Ski Party (1965), in which Frankie Avalon and Dwayne Hickman hatch a plot to learn how to ski by joining a group of female beginners so that they can best a showoffy male skier who's been tormenting them at a ski lodge. Makes sense, right? They resort to ridiculous falsetto voices which would normally fool nobody, but this is American-International, where people like Harvey Lembeck as Eric Von Zipper are the baseline for normalcy. This clip details their brilliant scheme and "the girls", Jane and Nora, come in at about 2:45.



As per the formula "borrowed" from Some Like It Hot, one of them falls for a woman (Deborah Walley) and the other is pursued by an ardent man a-la Joe E. Brown, leading to all sorts of hilarious (?) complications. Feel free to fast forward; the action starts at about 1:30.



There's even a pillow fight scene which I guess is meant to replicate the famous scene with Jack Lemmon and all the women in the upper berth, though, as expected, this has nowhere near the same impact or comic payoff. As usual with these movies, a little goes a long way so, with these scenes under your belt maybe you can just avoid the whole thing if you ever run across it. P.S. Doesn't Dwayne Hickman look a little like Cindy Williams? LATER EDIT: I want to revise the recommendation to skip this movie because there are some fun musical numbers by The Hondells, Leslie Gore and especially James Brown and the Famous Flames (in ski sweaters!).

The "drag" scene in The Kremlin Letter was just the moment he got recruited for the big job, sort of like how we saw each of the individual men get recruited for the big heist in Ocean's 11 (1960). The rest of the time he wasn't in drag because that would have sabotaged the whole operation, so you were right in clocking him for not being able to pass as a woman in that situation.

Sure, I would think Tony Perkins in Psycho counts. We only really get a glimpse, and not at all a clear one, in the shower scene and at that point we still think it's his mother, but the implication is pretty clear that this is his m. o., to dress in her clothing.



Creepy, but as I said before, not all usages of drag in films have been fun or pretty. Some are actually quite gruesome. In The Celluloid Closet (1995) there's a scene from Freebie and the Bean (1974), a cop buddy movie with James Caan and Alan Arkin, both of whom I like as actors, but I refuse to post the scene because it's so disturbing. A cross-dressing thief is cornered in a public bathroom and gunned down in a fusillade of bullets, blood splattering everywhere. Keep in mind, this is a thief, though admittedly one who shot at a police officer when caught, but also one who was wearing a dress. From some accounts, cheers erupted in theaters, so the welcome mat was most definitely not always out for drag in movies.

I don't want to move on from The Birdcage until I mention La Cage aux Folles (1978).

Our high school French teacher was incredible enough to take us all out on a field trip to the theatre to see this film. Teachers are so brave, dedicated - making sure we all get a chance to see things outside of our usual little realm. 

Drag has been around in film for many decades, generally in isolated sequences mostly played for comedy, but a more recent phenomenon is full-on performances in drag maintained throughout the entire film. Early credit for this should go to Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey, who elevated a stable of drag performers like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn and Jackie Curtis to "superstardom", at least in their own minds. John Waters and Divine took that ball and ran it into the end zone (Is that right? I'm not good with sports.) Divine was really the modern template for the culture of drag "personalities" who can become global icons without the public ever knowing their real names. Divine has such a special place in drag history that I want to take some time to marshal my words before I can talk about him. (I'm using "him" because that's how he thought of himself and by the end of his life he was intentionally transitioning to include male roles, still under the professional name of Divine.) Anyway, on another front, the theater, Charles Busch was following in the path of Charles Ludlam and his Theater of the Ridiculous, plugging away in series of plays showcasing himself in female roles, shows such as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom (1984) and She-Bitch of Byzantium (also 1984). Those shows were popular enough to interest backers for film projects like Psycho Beach Party (2000), in which he played a female police detective investigating a series of murders in a beach community and Die, Mommie, Die (2003), a sendup up those melodramas specifically tailored for actresses like Lana Turner and Susan Hayward in their late careers, as well as the "florid" projects Bette Davis and Joan Crawford became associated with.



There are plenty of sly movie references for fans of cinema in general and some neat skewering of the inflated egos at the center of many show biz stories, in this case the story of actress "Angela Arden". Here's a collage of some of the favorite lines by a YouTube poster (rickydoodlebug).



Before that there was Psycho Beach Party (2000), a send-up of drive-in fare like beach movies and teen slasher films. Here's Busch at work as Captain Monica Stark.



I'm not a fan of gore or slasher stuff, so I haven't revisited this one as often as I have Die, Mommy, Die, but there's no denying what an achievement it was for a drag artist to get this onto film.