A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, October 7, 2022

Lust in the Dust (Paul Bartel, 1984)











Lust in the Dust (Paul Bartel, 1984)

Cast: Divine, Tab Hunter, Lainie Kazan, Geoffrey Lewis, Henry Silva, Cesar Romero, Gina Gallego, Nedra Volz, Courtney Gains. Screenplay: Philip John Taylor. Cinematography: Paul Lohmann. Production design: Walter Pickette. Film editing: Alan Toomayan. Music: Peter Matz.

The presence of Divine in the cast of Lust in the Dust, and of Tab Hunter, who co-starred with her in John Waters’s 1981 movie Polyester, might make you think this is one of Waters’s films. Too bad it wasn’t: It would probably have been funnier and trashier, but Waters chose not to direct a film for which he hadn’t written the script. Paul Bartel’s movie might be described as “Waters adjacent”: Edith Massey, another member of Waters’s stock company, was originally set to play the role of Big Ed, but died before filming started and was replaced by Nedra Volz. Still, Lust in the Dust is a reasonably funny, reasonably raunchy, and certainly trashy Western spoof, with Hunter playing a character who’s obviously a parody of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name from the Sergio Leone movies. Hunter and his husband, Allan Glazer, also produced the film.

 

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