Adonis in Distress #2

If a Greek god said "Supersize me," he'd come out looking like Burt Lancaster. Burt is more of everything masculine. More handsome, more tall, more powerfully built, more athletic (he started out as an acrobat), more brooding, more intellectual, more long-lasting (he appeared stark naked in "The Swimmer" in his fifties and still looked awesome).

All that's masculine and then some: Burt Lancaster

So there is something perversely titillating about watching this big slab of manhood being forced into total physical submission by evil Paul Henreid in "Rope of Sand."

Burt knows where a diamond mine is, Paul wants to find out, so what better way than to strip Burt, hang him upside down, and whip him? Henreid's character seems not only to want information, but relishes breaking and humiliating Burt in a way that seethes with frustrated sexuality.



"Rope of Sand": Paul has fun with Burt. This eyeful of Burt's pit-hair alone is worth the price of admission.

Best known for playing romantic second leads (such as in "Casablanca"), Paul Henreid makes a surprisingly hot villain. When he's evil, his blandly pleasant face takes on a sexily menacing sneer, and he's more likely to flash some flesh (for example, in "Night Train to Munich"). Directors of his romantic roles, in which he's always suave and erudite, probably felt that the animal lurking under Paul Henreid's clothes didn't fit the image. But when he plays bad, we're treated to glipses of his well-muscled and hairy torso.


Paul Henreid flashes some hairy flesh in "Night Train to Munich"

A look at the career of the director of "Rope of Sand," William Dieterle, shows he has a long-standing interest in exploring male-male sexual tension. All the way back in the silent era, he directed and starred in "Sex in Chains," which was part love story, part erotica, part melodrama - all about male-male sexuality in prison.

"Rope of Sand" director's 1928 film about male-male passions in prison.

Adonis in Distress

Here's the way it always goes, right?... a beautiful damsel is set upon by a rapacious villain, kidnapped and imprisoned, her virtue and life threatened, until she can be rescued by the brave hero.

Or is that how it always goes?

On occasion in classic film, the beauty in distress is a humpy male, who is stripped of all his masculine power - not to mention his clothes.

In The Mask of Fu Manchu, an outlandishly delicious horror film from 1932, matinee idol Charles Starrett makes the mistake of tangling with the fiendish Dr. Fu Manchu (Boris Karloff) and his evil daughter (Myrna Loy), leading to his being stripped, whipped, restrained nearly naked on an operating table, and enduring a will-zapping injection.

Myrna oversees his stripping and whipping, making no attempt to hide her mounting sexual frenzy, as she orders her slaves to whip him faster, faster, faster! The hapless Charles dangles by his wrists, groaning and spinning helplessly, in one of the most outrageous sexually-charged S&M scenes I've ever seen in any film, much less an 80-year old classic! (Note the two hulking male slaves that do it all to him mercilessly. Be still my fluttering heart.)

Here's Charles Starrett with his clothes still on.

Here he is before, during, and after being stripped and whipped.

Following his whipping, Charles is strapped to an operating table, near-naked and writhing, as Boris prepares the dreaded serum. A ring of muscular slaves stands guard while Myrna looks on. Hold on tight as the injection is about to begin! (Key ingredient of the serum: venum from a gigantic snake. No phallic imagery there, of course.)

If ever there were an Adonis in distress, Charles Starrett is he.

"Be a good boy and open your mouth"

So says macho Gilbert Roland, straddling the chest of blond punk Peter Graves, just before force-feeding a cigar all the way down the young man's throat. The film is "Beneath the 12-Mile Reef" (1953) and the scene is jaw-dropping in its overtones of male-on-male sexual domination. So much so that the cigar-shoving segment was cut when the film was restored for widescreen DVD release. To see it, you have to find an unrestored full-frame public domain version such as the one embedded below or available here.







Mexican-born Gilbert Roland is one of my favorite classic movie hunks. Originally a silent-film matinee idol, he just got more rugged and sexier as he matured into middle age, still steamy hot into his 50's. Not just a handsome face with a killer hairy body, he was also a very good actor, imbuing his characters with warmth and emotional depth. [Best role I've seen him in: as a Cuban revolutionary in John Huston's "We Were Strangers" (1949).]



The star of "Beneath the 12-Mile Reef" is a very young Robert Wagner, who spends much of the movie wriggling underwater in his swimming trunks. An early CinemaScope film, the widescreen process was supposed to mesmerize moviegoers with the beauty of the ocean deep.... but it's Robert Wagner's beauty that steals every shot.







Gilbert and Robert play father and son sponge fishermen in Florida, and the story is a reworking of Romeo and Juliet, as Robert falls for the daughter of a rival fishing family. It's not bad as melodrama, but the real draw for me is the chance to watch Gilbert and Robert, making the film a total homoerotic treat.

You should try to see both versions: The restored widescreen version, because the picture quality is excellent, and the unrestored full-frame version, so you can watch Gilbert shoving his big thing into Peter Graves's mouth. The unrestored version is embedded here (cigar segment begins at about minute 36:00).