PLAGUE DIARY: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Body Disappears (1941)
I got quite lost after The Body Disappears and almost couldn’t find my way back again; lost in one of those black internet holes where you’ve fallen and you can’t get up and can’t get out. The Body Disappears is a mildly entertaining comedy with two big stars — Edward Everett Horton and Jane Wyman. Of Jane Wyman nothing more needs to be said than that she was achingly beautiful — although she could act too — but I won’t hear anything against beauty in general, there is such a thing and she had it. If you see her, that face that is all eyes and cheekbones, and then the lush curly red hair! I can understand why Ronald Reagan married her. And it’s Edward Everett Horton that led me down the garden path of no Hollywood return. But just to do my duty and speak of the movie itself before I get lost in Wikipedialand, it must be mentioned that Edward Everett Horton’s black assistant in The Body Disappears is Willie Best who was in countless films (11 films in 1939 alone) and his character name is also Willie (by that time he must have been so well known that he could play a character with his own name). In The Body Disappears he plays the classic ‘Stepin’ Fetchit’ role; he is a black actor who specialises in being bug-eyed and tremblingly scared. He really is quite good — but like Edward Everett Horton — was always cast as a regrettable a stereotype. I promise to speak of Edward Everett Horton himself, soon, but first I have to talk about the invisible monkey. It just seems so relevant. In one scene the professor — Edward Everett Horton — is chasing an invisible monkey (he is a professor who can make people invisible and mistakenly gives a soon- to-be-married young man a pill after the young man’s bachelor party — a pill that makes him invisible — not bloody likely, but it’s that kind of film.). And it is an invisible monkey of his own making, or rather Edward Everett Horton made the monkey invisible and he can’t figure out how to unmake him invisible. What could be more relevant to the Coronavirus? I mean really. I can’t help thinking that one way or the other this dilemma is of our own making. Anyway it’s certainly a monkey loose in all our lives, and it may right now be shitting on our floor without us knowing it. And whether we made it  up — because Coronavirus is just some weird variation of the flu that we have ruined our economy for — or it is in fact the new plague everyone seems to think it is — we just can’t find that monkey. As for Edward Everett Horton he is famous for playing gay characters in Fred Astaire films. Well not gay of course openly, but pretty much so, one need only watch him petulantly whine to Eric Blore in The Gay Divorcee “I never ring for crumpets.” In The Body Disappears film he is a professor, which is still, today an effeminate profession in American eyes. But the cul-de-sac that I got lost in was when I went to Edward Everett Horton’s Wikipedia page and that led me to a Wikipedia ‘talk’ page (have you ever seen one of those? They’re crazy—) where they were arguing endlessly about whether Edward Everett Horton was gay or not. And someone mentioned Gavin Gordon who was maybe his lover, so I ended up on youtube looking up Greta Garbo and and Gavin Gordon in Romance (1930, one of the early talkies) and Gavin Gordon is evidently gay, which is probably why he never made it as a leading man. And Greta Garbo is just so — well she’s even beyond Jane Wyman because she’s not only beautiful but absolutely real, at every moment. How did she ever get into a Hollywood movie? She is the opposite of fakery. So as you see I got lost in a Hollywood wormhole there and now am repeating that mistake here, but suffice it to say that Edward Everett was obviously gay and obviously Gavin Gordon’s lover, and why would anyone bother to argue about it? And finally, there was a moment for me in The Body Disappears which was very gay — it was really only a gay moment between myself and the movie — because the invisible man is only completely invisible when he is naked, because when he is dressed you can only see his clothes of course (special effects!) .And at one moment the invisible man who is a rich young athlete — a golfer — is naked and talking to Jane Wyman, and Jane Wyman’s character is being quite clear about how sexy she finds him, and all I could think of was ‘wow, she’s talking to a naked man who she’s attracted to but she can’t see him naked,’ which is an awfully sexy situation, at least to my gay brain. Oh yes and one more thing. On some nerdy film page they say The Body Disappears was a rip off of Topper. And Topper frankly made me the man I am today. It was a 1937 film starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett about an invisible couple — George and Marion Kerby — who were killed in a car accident, and come as ghosts to live with Cosmo Topper. I used to love the series when I was a child (they did a remake of it for TV 1953-1955, so I was at that time about 3 years old). But I remember it. I remember how witty, carefree, and just plain fun the Kerbys were, and how little they cared about life or death (which I think is somehow relevant to the situation all of us are in right now). And I think that you can now officially stop asking the age old question — because yes, the answer is this: Topper made me gay.