Every Valentine’s Day, it seems, we are subjected to the same old top ten lists and gushing silver screen memorials to the greatest, most memorable kisses to light up the screen. Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, and now Spiderman and Brokeback Mountain are the familiar finalists — but none, I think, compare to that of The Pirate (1948), a Vincente Minelli musical starring Judy Garland as the soon to be unhappily married-off Manuela and Gene Kelly as the “amazing,” womanizing Serafin, a traveling magician and performer, who falls for her.
The Pirate, as anyone can plainly see, just might be one of the most erotic, playful films to come out of post-Code Hollywood. The “Niña” number [above], which is basically a seven-minute long thinly-disguised orgy, ends with Gene Kelly pole-dancing on a stage before a crowd of entranced, eager women. Sure, there are some clear ‘ideological’ problems with the scene — the women are, after all, rendered indistinguishable by Serafin’s womanizing song — but then again, it’s precisely this attitude that’s renounced when he meets the incomparable Manuela.
Now, without going too much into the film — a discussion of its premise, which occurs too far into the movie to reveal, would spoil its effect — I’ll just turn it over to the clips below, the first of which features (beginning at about 3:30), as mentioned, a kiss that’s remarkable not for its “steaminess” or “passion” or rain-soaked, forbidden transactions in a field — it has none of those things – but rather for its ingenious inclusion in the choreography of the number in which it occurs. It is, to be sure, more abstract and technical than loving and emotional, the opposite of what we have to come expect from a cinematic kiss. Instead of signifying ‘two souls enjoined’, it makes of the kiss a capricious, elaborate, and decidedly casual instrument for still other pleasures — the pleasures of the magician, of the trick, of a kind of spontaneous, creative virtuosity that cannot help but turn the world, body included, into its playground. And this, of course, is the heart and soul of the musical.
I have also included a second clip, the “Pirate Ballet” [below], a sequence just as transgressive and erotic in expression. Beginning with a sort of S&M whip fantasy, as registered in Manuela’s voyeuristic glances (–she’s framed by half-closed shutters, and her wedding veil), it shifts abruptly to her identification with a sitting mule around which Serafin circles seductively (which in turn echoes an earlier scene where he circles her, much to her discomfort). It then fades into her own private fantasy, which features, rather forwardly, Serafin in a thinly-clad Peter Pan-ish pirate suit, battling soldiers with gusto in the most apolcalyptic of settings. Large, jagged ominous shadows reminiscent of the German Expressionist vein of noir, or the bold Soviet silhouettes of iron men, fill the screen, with orgasmic explosions billowing up from below as Serafin, now up on the crow’s nest of a ship, drops torches below. More dramatically still, in the final moments he slides down a zipline with exuberant speed and all in the same motion lands, jogs, and seizes the treasure from two treacherous pirates (–who upon fleeing he murderously shoots in the back). Then, the camera pulling back, we see him approach and take with force — or rape, it would seem — a ‘reluctant maiden’ whose face we never see, but who for all intents and purposes is none other than Manuela, to whom the camera then returns, ending the fantasy (a rape fantasy).
They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.
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