Tom of Finland
meets "Banana Splits" in the completely stupid Fortune and
Men’s Eyes.
Doe-eyed hottie Smitty (Wendell Burton) gets six months in the clink
for using pot. Smitty’s glum but not devastated by prison life, which
initially seems much like a boys boarding school – roughhousing high
jinx, buddies, power plays, and the lurking suggestion of male-male
sex. He’s shocked to learn, then, that gang raping is common, and is
only preventable by being another powerful inmate’s exclusive bitch.
Smitty reluctantly chooses to marry up with Rocky (Zooey Hall) who
expects him to bend over and put out whenever he’s asked, and, when
he’s not busy with that, make Rocky’s bed and fetch him hot drinks.
What’s worse, Smitty has to put up with Queenie (Michael Greer), one of
the most annoying gay characters in film history. Inexplicably
acclaimed by many critics for his performance in this film, Greer, who
played the same role around four hundred times on stage, overacts
beyond all acceptable limits, making Queenie completely unbearable, a
grotesque who gets on everyone’s nerves and who looks, incidentally,
for all the world like the killer from The
Silence Of The Lambs.
Things screech along desperately, climaxing with Queenie’s Christmas
party drag show (yikes!) and a riot, murders, suicides, steamed-up
shower scenes etc.
Dramatically, Fortune's
a mess, and unimaginatively adapted from the stage. Scenes are almost
exclusively internal, with nothing made stylistically of the
potentially compelling prison setting, and characters engaging in
non-stop dialogue before exiting to the left or right. Smitty is
corrupted by sex and power, rising up the ladder in double time and
turning the tables on weaker inmates who’ve supported him in the past.
His journey from rod-straight boy to reluctant bottom, then to bossy
top is too fast to be convincing. Does situational homosexuality really
produce classic gay archetypes, and play out much like a porn fantasy?
Do guys really transform into such archetypes simply from taking it up
the ass and being surrounded by men? I don’t know, but this movie could
have been better if it had explored some of these questions, rather
than sailing along obliviously. If the film makers had been less
detached from their material’s potential carnality, the movie wouldn’t
be so folksy and uninvolving – and more like a thrilling cross between Deliverance
and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Instead, it’s a cautionary, phys-ed tale about doing drugs in 70’s
Canada – don’t spark up, or you’ll end up in prison, and you know what
happens to young guys in there! – with a completely incongruous and
underdeveloped camp/homo tilt. There's a miniscule shade of a white-hot
Skott Bros. aesthetic but you have to look hard to see it.
It’s a kind of horny story, and is very porno-like with it’s prison
setting, gang rapes, and “I like my boys clean” shower scenes. Like
porn though, any nascent eroticism is spoiled by the inclusion of some
horrible acting, redundant dialogue and a ludicrous Hammond-organ
soundtrack, which intrudes shrilly at completely inappropriate moments.
There’s the occasional speech or semiotic about homosexuality, male
confinement and gender relations, but they don’t really go beyond the
same kind of things that you’d find on a TV soap. Bizarrely, the
inmates alternate between cornering and raping each other to indulging
in pillow or water fights.
So despite any earnest intentions, Fortune is an
unfortunate cross breed between Colt Studios and Boys Own Adventures
and generates nothing but a little titillation. The interesting premise
- sex and power behind bars - goes nowhere and as my viewing partner
commented, you’re better off watching real seventies gay porn, as at
least then, when aimless and disjointed scenes suddenly climax with
sex, at least you get to see the sex.
Review
by Mark Adnum
