About the Blog..

My blog title, Ossessione, American Style, is taken from a movie by Count Luchino Visconti, who borrowed the plot of his astonishing debut film, Ossessione, from James M. Cain's novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Unfortunately, Visconti never paid for the rights and his film was not shown in the U.S. until many years after its release. The star of the movie, Massimo Girotti, would be People's "Sexiest Man Alive" many years running had the zine been around at the time. We first see him as a truck driver in a filthy sleeveless athletic undershirt, another of my obsessions: remember Paul Newman in an a-shirt (e.g. Hud or Cool Hand Luke)? Nowadays, they cheapen this garment who confuse it with something tank troops wore in World War I. The a-shirt is an undershirt, usually with thin bands over the shoulders; a tank top is a shirt without sleeves, akin to a "muscle shirt," only with wider bands over the shoulders. But, I digress....)

The purpose of this photo/comment column is to present a record of my obsessions. These are wide-ranging and diverse. This blog is not intended to be pornographic. The only pornography today is in politics.

Friday, September 28, 2012

Carleton Captured Boy Dreamers




TV used to be all UHF and you mostly got snow, but from time to time shows, and that meant, eventually, old MGM musicals, which I hated (and still mostly do), even the ones with that 1950s gay icon of icons, Judy Garland, so I had to have known I would be a failed homo, and then I saw Carleton Carpenter and I thought, men can be beautiful like women.  And it wasn't even a Judy Garland musical but one with Debbie Reynolds, and I was more interested in him than her: Kenneth Anger has said that Satan won the war with Christian morality when he invented Hollywood and the movies.  I paraphrase, but you get the point.  It is an amoral world out west: when "Aba Daba Honeymoon" was written in 1914, could Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan have had any idea how positively Darwinian it sounded in a song that is essentially a duet between a monkey and a chimpanzee?  For their 1950 movie, Two Weeks With Love, director Ray Rowland used the stars to the max.

My dislike of musicals does not extent to the duet. Carleton and Debbie went into a studio and made a record of the song.  It sold over one million copies.

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