guilty pleasures in braver times
by Douglas Messerli
David Sale (creator), David Sale, Brian Phillis, Peter Benardos, and others (see below) directors Number 96 (TV series) / 1972-1977
David
Sale (writer), Peter Benardos (director) Number 96: The Movie / 1974
If by some incredible accident a US citizen should happen upon and attempt to watch the movie titled Number 96: The Movie, directed by the Australian Peter Benardos, I should imagine he would have utterly no idea of what it is he has stumbled upon. If he might even recognize it as a strange soap opera-like work, its mulligan stew of a rape scene, two attempted murder cases, a comic Ruby Anniversary party complicated by the fact that forty years ago the groom’s friend mistakenly signed the marriage certificate in the space where the husband was to have written his own name, along with a failed attempt of a handsome young man to consummate sex with the female fellow worker he believes he loves, coupled with the fact the same woman soon after marries the Prime Minister of Australia and the same man who failed to have sex with her joyfully jumps naked into bed with a gay lawyer (in Australia, of course, he’s called a solicitor, which I fear, to the American ear, might suggest he has solicited the sex) whom he has just met—all occurring in the same apartment building among individuals who appear to know one another intimately—might utterly confound even those who have overcharged imaginations. And I’ve not even mentioned the hard-working Jewish Hungarian wine-bar / deli owner and his wife who lose 2,000 dollars he’s hidden in his mattress when a fire burns their bed, their nerdy clerk, a few wacko males who attempt to construct a pre-fab sauna in their building’s basement, a bi-sexual, film-loving caterer planning a lavish party for the married couple for 20 cents a head who just happens to be the former boyfriend of the lawyer (although the film seems to have forgotten that fact), and numerous other women and men who have apparently fought over the bodies of several of those mentioned above. After just a few moments of this, I would guess, this stymied Yank would click the Vimeo connection, for which he had just paid $2.99, off.
I watched it with great glee despite is
obvious flaws of coherence, color quality, and inconsistent sound. But then I
had just spent several hours before this watching a number of episodes in
black-and-white and color (most of the black-and-white ones, shot in the early
1970s have been destroyed) of the long-running (March 1972-August 1977)
Australian TV series, Number 96, the success of which had occasioned
this 35mm film. Like the Aussie audiences who made this mess of a movie an
overwhelming hit, I too now knew most of the characters’ names and some of
their history. The original audience, so I’ve read, applauded as each character
appeared upon the screen, having, by series end, joined them in their living
rooms five nights a week for 1,218 episodes. For their audience they were family
and friends.
Facing an increasingly small viewer base,
the youngest of Australia’s three commercial networks, Channel Ten, decided in
1972 to commission a soap opera from writer David Sale, then executive producer
of The Mavis Bramston Show a weekly satirical comedy review in the
manner of the British series That Was the Week That Was. Producers Bill
Harmon and Don Cash gave Sale almost carte blanche for the soap opera
series which, instead of being aired during daytime hours, would be aired at
the 8:30 p.m. slot to fit the Australian government’s quota that all commercial
network’s must produce 40 hours a month of dramatic programming.
Working without even a general series
plot, Sale created a semi-coherent story by setting his series in an inner-city
apartment block, 96 Lindsay Street, in Paddington, the inner city region of
Sydney—the site of the former home of two of his characters, the nosey, gossipy,
interruptive and conservative Dorrie Evans (Pat McDonald, who appeared in 321
episodes) and her browbeaten husband Herb (Ron Shand). Despite its heavy mix of
vaudeville humor and melodrama, along with a number of somewhat saccharine love
scenes, Sale created a sexy, often hip, culturally knowledgeable series
centered on issues of homosexuality and homophobia, drug use, racism, adultery,
rape, and even in its later incarnations episodes featuring a serial bra and
panty-snipping intruder and a bomber. Characters
often appeared in their underwear or even less, talked quite openly about sex,
and grappled with issues relating to xenophobia, transvestism, exhibitionism, incest,
hierarchical class privilege, juvenile delinquency, and numerous other issues
that had never before reached the television screen. Along with Dorrie, its primary
figure—together they were the only two characters who survived until the end of
the work’s run—was an attractive gay law clerk who eventually became a
solicitor, Don Finlayson (Joe Hasham, appearing in
297 episodes), whom everyone in the building and the surrounding neighborhood
respected and loved, and from whom they often sought legal and other advice. As
The Daily Mirror critic Matt White wrote the day after that 1972 premiere,
it was the night Australian television “lost its virginity.”
The vast majority of the episodes, 1,215
to be exact, were directed by the series creator Sale; other episodes were
directed by Brian Phillis (51 episodes), Peter Benardos (45 episodes), Howard
Scrivenor, Ted Gregory, Peter Pascoe, Derek Strachan, Ross Napier, Tim Purcell,
Kate Harvey, Eleanor Witcombe, Jonny Whyte, Lynne Foster, Tom MacLennan, Ken
Shadie, Michael Boddy, Robert Caswell, Pat Flower, and Alan Kitson, Lance
Peters, Anne Hall, Michael Laurence, Susan Swinford, and Bob Ellis.
Although there appears to be a DVD sampler
of episodes that can be played only in Australia and surrounding regions, I
have only seen two full episodes (designated without any other confirmation by
their YouTube posters as nos. 1 and 3), a collation of early gay scenes posted
by Roy Gardnerra on YouTube along with fascinating commentary on what it meant
to Aussie audiences to see a gay man regularly portrayed on their tellies, and
clips provided by anonymous contributors and the Australian Screen archive. As
I mention above, when the series switched to color, most of the original
black-and-white tapes were reused or destroyed, being seen to have little
value. Yet, it might be illuminating to relate aspects of the two early
episodes I watched just to provide a sense of what this series offered during
the six years of its existence.
When the couple finally get Dorrie to
leave their apartment, Mark expresses his frustration that, since her
pregnancy, his wife no longer allows any intimacy between them. He is obviously
a “horny” man, almost angry for the constant barriers his wife puts between
them, he suggesting that perhaps they should have waited longer after their
marriage to have a child.
Meanwhile, in another unit, shared by
Jane Chester (Suzanne Church) and the buxom blonde of the early episodes, Bev
Houghton (Abigail), Janie describes the difficulty she has in finding a job,
while Bev, who works as a sea cruise hostess, shows off her new outfit—a tight
sweater accentuated by an open leather-fringed jacket and short dress—tells her
roommate that she’s about to pose for Bruce Taylor (Paul Weingott), a
photographer who lives next door who’s doing a little “moonlighting” from his regular job (in order,
we later discover, to earn a little extra money to support the parties he and
his gay companion Don regularly throw). Janie wonders whether the seemingly
sexually promiscuous, but actually quite innocent Bev might be posing for a
“girlie magazine,” but Bev assures her that its for Mode Photography.
Shift to Dorrie—now in the downstairs
Deli run by Aldo Godulfus (Johnny Lockwood) and assisted by his daughter Rose (Vivienne
Garrett) (we do not meet Aldo’s later wife Roma [Philippa Baker] in these early
episodes)—complains to Aldo and another neighbor, Vera Collins (Elaine Lee)
about how the new tenants, having just moved in, were already “canoodling.” Vera
and Aldo both stand up for the couple’s lovemaking, after all they are newly
married. But, having heard their voices from the hall, Dorrie is distressed
that they may be noisy, arguing that “we have enough noise already” (a
complaint we later perceive about Don and Bruce’s “bachelor” parties). Vera,
whom we quickly realize has little tolerance for Dorrie’s behavior, suggests
that they might have less noise if only Dorrie would keep her mouth shut. In
response to which Dorrie describes Vera’s part-time occupation of
fortune-telling as “garbage.”
When Helen drops down to the Deli for a
bottle of milk, she briefly meets Vera, on her way out. Dorrie immediately
whispers to Helen that, in the future, she should keep away from Vera: “She’s
bad news. Very bad news.”
Upstairs, in yet another unit, we meet
Alf (James Elliott) and Lucy Sutcliffe (Elisabeth Kirkby), a couple who have
moved to Australia from Great Britain. Alf is a truck driver totally unhappy
with his new life down under, while Lucy seems to have assimilated quite
nicely. She has just purchased a new dress for her young granddaughter which
Alf insists must be of inferior quality if made in Australia. It turns out the
dress he mocked was made in England. He’s saving up to move back to Britain, but
Lucy insists that if he moves back it will be without her. (Later in the series
she does join him on their return to England). She threatens to find a new job
to bring in money for her own purchases.
Back in the Deli Mark meets Rose, talking
briefly with her in a light conversation in which he reveals he’s a schoolteacher
and she hints of her unhappiness of working, temporarily, as her father’s
assistant. When Rose goes to lift up a crate of bottles to put them in the
refrigerator, Mark intervenes in a rather macho gesture, carting them to the
fridge himself.
Mark’s wife Helen, meanwhile, has decided to
take up Vera’s offer to read her fortune. After she chooses five cards, Vera
briefly looks at them before dismissing what she sees as “meaning nothing,”
although we see a slight look of consternation upon her face. The two women
talk, Vera admitting that she had been married but that one day her husband
just walked out on her. Again Helen draws five cards, and once more Vera
shuffles them, obviously disliking what she sees.
Downstairs we observe Bruce’s photo
session with Bev in which he snaps her in several suggestive positions,
selecting a final pose of her against the wall featuring her sweater-bound
breasts. The shoot keeps getting interrupted, first by Don, who at this point
is an article clerk in his last year of law studies, who enters and seeing Bev
cries out “Oh, no,” she responding. “The kind of greeting a girl dreams of.” He
has to study he tells his lover, who asks him to make himself scare, as if he
were simply as a petulant child. “Where?” Don wonders. “Well there’s always the
bedroom,” answers Bruce. “Oh, are you talking to me?” quips Bev.
Bruce tries to reposition Bev, but the
moment he is about to snap the shutter, Janie enters to tell her roommate that
her mother has called to say it’s urgent, something about her brother Rod. “Oh
go on then Bev, your brother may have dropped dead or something.” Bev turns and
angrily speaks out: “Don’t you dare say that. You can say anything want about
my mother, but not about Rod!”
As we return to the fortunetelling
session, Vera asks Helen to pick just one card, and seeing it, admits “this
just isn’t my day,” stuffing it back into the deck as Helen is called back to
her apartment. Obviously something in the cards has upset Vera. Lucy enters
Vera’s apartment to ask if she knows anything about a possible job. “I’m sick
about Alf and his mean ways.” Vera says she might know of job in a launderette.
Downstairs again, Rose has an argument
with her father. She wants to “go her own way,” while he wants to look after
her a while longer; besides, he hopes to open up a restaurant next door where
he will need her help. When Bev enters the shop, Rose points to her as a young
woman, like herself, who has moved successfully away from parental control. Bev
mentions how much she disliked her mother but is meeting up with her because
her brother Rod is passing through on his way to the Texas King Ranch to study
beef cattle.
Rose’s former boyfriend, a tough leather-jacketed
kid, enters the shop just as Aldo heads off to inspect the new location where
he hopes to open the restaurant. The boyfriend forces her into the back room
and is about to rape her as she screams, with Mark, having just entered the
establishment, coming to her rescue. After slugging Mark in the stomach, the
former boyfriend threatens Rose that he will return.
Even in this very first episode, moreover,
we get glimmers of the series’ wide range of future topics: the budding
sexuality of Bev; the possibly of an adulterous liaison between Rose and Mark;
the questioning of Bruce’s personality and intentions; a separation of father
from his daughter; and a flash into a disturbing future for Helen—not to even
mention the thwarted rape of Aldo’s beloved Rose.
The so-called Episode 3 begins with the
Eastwoods, just as Dorrie feared, loudly screaming at one another, Helen
rushing from the apartment down the stairs past Dorrie—always serving as a
sentry for all the tenants’ actions—and falling forward down the next flight of
steps. Mark quickly follows, demanding someone call an ambulance, which soon
appears, Mark making the trip to the hospital with his wife. Vera appears on
the staircase in distress, claiming that the tarot cards she had read for Helen
had told her that this was about to happen.
Alf returns home drunk, and he and the
always patient Lucy fight. She determining more than ever to get a job just he
case he might decide to move back to his beloved homeland.
Meanwhile, Janie, an aspiring actress we
now discover, insists she has failed her audition. The American producer
evidently, like so many others, was simply seeking a “playmate,” a role she
rejects. Bev attempts to convince her that it might be worth going to bed with
him for the few lines she might be able finally to perform on a stage. (I
should note that this series is quite absurdly misogynistic, women throughout
treated like the sexual toys against which an executive in the American musical
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying of a decade earlier
warned his male associates in their treatment of the opposite sex. Very few of
Number 96’s occupants have seemingly ever heard of feminism.) Bev all but
admits that she has gotten her job as a cruise hostess by having sex with her
employer. “But you’re just the right type for a cruise hostess,” argues Janie. “So
were the other 49 birds who applied for that job,” she answers. “Do you mean
you...,” interrupts Janie. “I do, and I did.”
Dorrie, as one might expect, having heard
the Eastwoods battle royal, tells residents gathered in the Deli that she wants
Mark to suffer, suggesting that the Deli man’s daughter has been having an
affair with Mark, and that Helen had caught them in flagrante delicto.
“Didn’t you hear how they were carrying on before it happened,” inquires
Dorrie. “No,” responds Vera, “because I’m not blessed with super-sensitive
hearing, X-ray vision, and a talent for ‘sticky-beck’,” as she pulls away the
nasty gossip from the deli counter so that Aldo will not overhear her
accusations.
Yet Aldo is suspicious that Rose may have
been doing “something wrong,” which his daughter denies. She suggests she
simply not feeling well, accusing him being suspicious, shouting at her, and
making her feel like a child.
Lucy visits Vera’s apartment for a fitting
of her new launderette outfit, describing her husband the working man’s poor
Dean Martin. (Martin is almost a running joke in this series.) Despite accusing
Vera of tampering with the occult, Lucy also asks for a Tarot reading.
Bev appears in her underwear, her ample
breasts almost overflowing her skimpy bra. Again she and Janey discuss the
producer’s lecherous intentions. He’s asked her out tonight; he has to finish
casting by the next day. Bev argues, “Better a professional actress than a
professional virgin.”
Back in the Deli it is now confirmed that
Rose and Mark have been having an affair, or at least sex. He’s waiting a call
from the hospital about his wife’s condition. Mark tells Rose that Helen is the
only one he really wanted, and tries to make the young woman understand that,
despite his attentions to her, he is no longer interested in having a
relationship.
Rose
later confesses to Vera that she was in Mark’s apartment when Helen came back.
Vera: “I’ve been around. You name it, I’ve probably done it. Twice,” attempting
to convince Rose that Mark has simply wanted her because of his sexual needs
given they were not being relieved by
his pregnant wife. But the young Rose is certain that the relationship was
serious.
Don and Bruce reappear in the Deli to
purchase supplies for their next party. (From the gay compilation, I should imagine
that Episode two held the scene I saw with them rising the next morning after
their party dressed in bikini-style underwear, to clear up the mess left over
from the previous night. Dorrie appears in the hallway as they attempt to carry
the trash boxes to the basement, bitterly complaining of the noise). Suddenly
Dorrie enters, Bruce commenting, “Oh my God, it’s the Bride of Frankenstein. Maybe
we should order four kinds of cheese...to go with the flagons.” Dorrie angrily
accuses them again of having noisy parties, to which Bruce responds, “they are
simply ‘exuberant.’” She threatens to call the agent. Don says they will try to
keep the noise down. “Which shouldn’t be difficult,” adds Bruce, “since we’re
only having 100 kids in for an orgy.” Dorrie’s last words: “Well...you can joke
all you like. But let me tell you, if there are any disturbances tonight,
you’re in for trouble [pausing] big trouble.” (Evidently, from what I’ve seen
in the gay compilation Don disconnected a cord in their photograph and demanded
the party’s participants to quiet down so often, that their “orgy” was a bust,
everyone apparently leaving early, for which Bruce complains, demonstrating
Don’s sense of responsibility as opposed to Bruce’s disregard of acting any way
that doesn’t prove pleasurable.)
Mark finally gets the telephone call from
the hospital. Helen has had a miscarriage, the baby is fine. But Helen is
evidently not so. He tells Vera the news and rushes off.
The American producer passes on the
stairway, asking Vera for directions to Janie’s apartment. Finding Janie at
home without anyone else in the apartment, he insists they work “on the script”
at home, pulling her onto the couch, putting his arms around her and addressing
her, “Now, I want to find out...all about you.”
So we have now added adultery, wild gay
parties, and a possible couch casting scene—all mixed with a significant amount
of semi-nudity which evidently increased as the series moved forward (several
of Lucy’s launderette customers determining to get naked as they wash their
clothes, etc.)—all in the very first week of this series’ introduction to its
soon to be addicted audiences.
The introduction of openly gay figures to
the television world, obviously, became something of great interest to Number
96 viewers. When church and other conservative representatives demanded
that Don be converted into a straight man, Sale and his producers refused,
telling network executives that if they demanded that, he would take his series
elsewhere. Gardnerra, accompanying his gay postings of the series, observes
that “Don became one of the most popular
Since in the movie version of series
episodes Don meets up with another gay man Simon, the two of them becoming
heroes as they save Vera’s life, it might be useful to share the little bit of
what I’ve been able to glimpse of the further series adventures of Don and his
various lovers.
As I’ve suggested, Bruce does not at all
seem a right match for Don. And when we begin to perceive in later episodes
that he pretends to his employer Maggie Cameron (Bettina Welch, who plays her
character with all the wicked lustfulness of Joan Crawford) that he is willing
to fulfill her desire of bedding him, despite the fact that she is married, he
begin to perceive him as a kind of a scheming gigolo, particularly since, we
soon discover, Maggie owns the apartment and has helped purchase most of the
art that lines the walls. He accepts her demands to visit what she describes as
“their” apartment for dinner when her husband is away on business, Bruce manipulating
Don into cooking ahead of time, and then forcing him to spend long hours at the
movies with Bev, putting him in a situation much like the Jack Lemmon
character, Calvin Baxter in the film The Apartment (1960), a man locked
out of his own house.
The results are disastrous as first
Maggie’s husband, suspecting her of seeing another man, has her tailed and
throws her out of their house, forcing her to move in with Don (I don’t know
the details, but by this time Bruce has gone missing), toasting their new
minted “friendship” (“With you as you are and I as I am, what else could it
be?”): “Here’s to crime.” “What crime?”
asks Don. “The crime of you staying on here with me. You know you have a very
nice body. Oh well, such is taste.” She allows that he has every right to bring
men back home, but “When it comes to young men, I’ve got claws like an eagle.”
Don responds: “So this flat has become your aiery, has it.?” Is it any wonder
when, much later on in the series, we discover that Maggie Cameron is the
bomber?
The second victim of Bruce’s behavior is
Bev, who in another episode we see grabbing Don
Her response is perhaps one of the most
clearly expressed examples of homophobia ever on either the TV or motion
picture screen. Coming up for air, she suddenly explodes: “Sorry? You filthy,
filthy, dancing little queer,” before retreating for days into a shell of
incomprehension.
Trying to comfort her later, her roommate
Janie, when Bev admits that she still loves Don, argues that she should try to
see him and talk. “I couldn’t, it’s so revolting. Janie.”
Janie: “It’s not impossible for a
homosexual to love a woman. Well it’s an accepted part of society whether it’s
against the law or not.” That terribly hypocritical statement by one of the
most level-headed citizens of Number 96 is one of the most startlingly
statements of all. Clearly, if its still a criminal act the society has not truly “accepted”
it.
When Don attempts to contact her again,
Bev calls him “Miss Finlayson.”
“Try to understand,” he implores her.
“Oh I understand you mistook me for
another nancy boy.”
Soon after, she runs out into the hall
screaming “Finlayson is a queer. Don is a fag,” etc.
Don receives a note from Bruce, who
admits he is taking the cowardly way out. (Evidently Bruce has fled Sydney for
Adelaide after the death of Bev, of which I know absolutely nothing.)
Eventually, Bev apologizes and forgives
him. Yet even in Episode 35, when he encounter her much-hated patrician mother Claire
Houghton (Thelma Scott), visiting her daughter because she perceives that
something is quite wrong, Bev is still suffering over her love of Don, although
by this time it has become quite comic in tone.
“Well if you must know, I’ve fallen in
love with a homosexual, and I’m trying to get over it.”
Claire: “What, you mean one of those
creatures who wear false eyelashes and douses themselves in Chanel No. 5?”
Bev contradicts her mother’s conception,
describing him as just an ordinary guy, an article clerk, while Claire grandly
suggests that there are far more acceptable deviants such as the successful
dress designer they know and “that interior decorator who stands to inherit a
fortune when his mother dies.”
Bev finally comes round to expressing
the obvious in their shared homophobic conceptions: “You’re just as much a
pervert as a drag queen.”
Her mother’s response is hilarious: “Let
me be the judge of that!”
While Bev’s final retort reveals both
her general fear of any LGBTQ individual while mocking her mother’s inverted
notions of reality: “I still think you wouldn’t mind me being with a lesbian,
as long as she was a dame in the British Empire.”
I don’t tend to watch many US soap
operas, but I can’t imagine any repartee quite as cleverly campy as what we
encounter in this scene. It reads a little like Charles Ludlam rewriting Joan
Collins.
Don evidently had four lovers in the
series, Bruce Taylor, who I talk about above, Dudley Butterfield (Chard Hayward*),
a rather campy figure who first disrobes as a hippie in Lucy’s laundromat, but
later comes to work at Aldo’s wine bar, before evidently turning bisexual,
opening a disco, a hair salon, and becoming an TV actor, all before he is shot.
And then there is Simon Car (John Orcsik) who is in the closet for much
of the time, but fianlly comes out with Don in Number 96: The Movie,
which shows them in bed together and, before it was inexplicably cut, allowed
them on a screen kiss.
And finally, before I turn to the movie
version, I should mention that Aldo’s later assistant, the bookish Arnold
Feather (Jeff Kevin) falls in love with Carlotta (Carole Lea), a transvestite
who finally when Arnold is on the verge of asking for her hand in marriage,
asks “You really don’t mind me not being a girl?” “What?” “I’m not really a
girl. But you said you knew.” “I knew nothing of the sort, Miss Ross, Mr.
Ross?”
For the movie, written by the creator of the series David Sale, I won’t focus on all the subplots, which involve several characters I have not mentioned above, the Whittakers, the comic figure Flo Patterson (Bunney Brooke), and Dorrie’s more tolerant friend, lodger, and bowling mate, and several others such as Lucy and Alf Sutcliffe to which I have introduced you. The central figure here is Vera Collins (Elaine Lee) who has come a long ways from being an unhappy ex-married tarot reader to become a noted fashion designer, who, after working previously with Bev’s pompous mother Claire. is now collaborating with Simon Carr (Orcsik) on a new line of clothes for Maggie Cameron, who has returned after her divorce to appear in several reincarnations, including the owner of the Number 96 building and now a business partner with Vera in fashion.
The film’s very first scenes show Vera,
whose car has stalled, being surrounded by a gang of motorcyclists who instead
of providing the help she had hoped for, gang rape her. As beautiful as she now
is, Vera evidently cannot find her way out of the turmoil she has had to face
in her past life.
While recuperating poolside, she is taken
to lunch by Claire, who promises Maggie not to steal any of Vera’s designs, taking
her to an elegant restaurant along with her friend, Nicholas Brent (James
Condon), who is running for Australian Prime Minister. Fortunately, Claire,
self-centered as usual, so dominates the conversation that the two can exist
almost in another world while sitting at her table, and the two quickly develop
a rapport and over the next few days begin to fall in love.
Yet at the very moment they are most
happy Vera realizes that, with her past, she might possibly destroy his career, and to save him and her
later embarrassment pulls away, devoting her time to working with Simon (who as
I’ve suggest in my opening paragraph to this long essay, falls in love with her
again, attempting but failing to express that in sex).
Meanwhile, there is Dorrie and Herb’s 40th
anniversary to celebrate, which, with catering organized by Arnold Feather and
cooking planned by Dudley Butterfield (who has now seemed to have totally
forgotten his ex-lover Don) all seems to be going swimmingly. Dudley even
suggests that the stodgy Dorrie turn the affair into a costume party, which
gives Vera a lot more work to do that helps to keep her mind off of Nicholas.
If only it weren’t for Dorrie and Herb’s absurd punctiliousness when it comes
to the marriage license, convincing poor Dorrie that she is truly married to
Herb’s old, now alcoholic friend Horace Deerman (Harry Lawrence) who takes a
shine to her after all these years and makes her nights hell as she struggles
to keep away from her own bed. Fortunately, Don assures them that there is no
legal problem with the license, and that she and Herb are still officially
married. So all is well, if only Aldo hadn’t mistakenly hired Horace as a
server for the banquet!
And then there’s the most preposterous
plot Sale ever concocted right out of Midnight Lace (1960) with a dash
of Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) thrown in as spice. Former Number
96 resident Sonia Freeman (Lynn Rainbow) returns after her nervous breakdown
with a new seemingly doting husband, Duncan Hunter. He’s worried about the fact
that Sonia is beginning to lose things, first her wedding ring and then the
pendant he has asked the next door flight attendant
Diana
Moore to bring back from Hong Kong as a gift to his wife. Shades of Gaslight
are soon beginning to glower over the plot. Sonia’s old friend, serial
philanderer Jack Sellars (Tom Oliver)—who once courted the now deceased Bev
Houghton and is now shtupping Diana as well—is equally puzzled,
particularly when Sonia describes her dreams and he discovers the lost pendant
in a box in Diana’s apartment. He realizes that he himself has been cuckolded,
that Diana’s real lover is Duncan and they’ve long been drugging poor Sonia so
that any moment now she’ll go the balcony, stand the railing, and jump.
Fortunately, he’s let his old friend know
what’s been going on, and the police arrive just in time to cart the duo of D’s
off to jail.
To cheer her up Don tries to take her
out on a dinner date, which she refuses; but when Simon arrives to offer her
the same evening on the town, she has no choice but accompany both handsome men
who somehow slipped her grasp. If she didn’t know why, all three encounter a
drunken Maggie upon their return from the night on the town, who reminds Vera
and the Number 96 neighbors that Vera’s dates are both “pooftas,” Don an open
queer and Simon a closeted one. You’d think by now that Dorrie would have a clue about her nice neighbor boy who
keeps dragging in such undesirable men. But apparently she never figures it
out.
 |
| Don and Simon |
Now it is time for Dorrie and Herb’s
grand party, where every burlesque pratfall happens, including a final cake in
the face.
Receiving a message from Nick, Vera exits
this melee only to find a car racing head on in her direction. At the last
moment Simon pushes her away, being hit himself in the process, with Don,
dressed as Pierrot, leaping to capture the perpetrator, who crashes the car
into a nearby wall, sending it into flames with Tony obviously inside. Simon
recovers and joins Don presumably in bed for as long as the series can sustain
their love.
And the writer and producers order up
happy ending their endeavors well deserve; Nick has won the election and drives
in an inaugural motorcade waving at the crowds with Vera at his side. Dorrie
always knew she was up to no good.
The US has still to see a series, even
with Sex in the City, as absolutely free-wheeling as the down under Number
96. From our point of view those numbers might as well be reversed. And as
Michael Idato quotes Sale in an interview: “One executive said to me, before
he’d even read [an updated version of Number 96] ‘I feel I should point
out your original series was launched in much braver times.’”
Los Angeles, January 11, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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