A centerpiece of the Cherry Grove Archives’ “Outtakes,” its first film festival, was Jerett Robert Austin’s full-color camp classic “Camille,” filmed in Cherry Grove in 1953 and given its public premiere showings at the Community House on July 16. “Camille” was kept safe for nearly half a century by Grovite Jack Davidson, who was Austin’s close friend.
This 50-minute “Camille” parody follows and comments on the basic plot of Alexandre Dumas, fils’ “La Dame aux Camélias,” Giuseppe Verdi’s “La Traviata,” and George Cukor’s romantic film “Camille,” with Greta Garbo, with an almost all-male cast and scenes definitely shot inside and possibly in the garden of Pride House here. There is no spoken dialogue, with everything conveyed in mime and on cards in English, humorously punctuated with familiar French words. There’s plenty of over-the-top grandeur and music from “La Bohème” which fits very well, from “Traviata” of course, Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Peer Gynt,” a Spanish dance from “Carmen” for one Bessie Mae Mucho, and a boogie-woogie number played by Camille to scandalize her piano teacher. There’s a fateful rendezvous at the Paris Opéra and a gala ball gone wrong. Camille is portrayed, with melodramatic flair, by one Rubye, giving it all she’s got, and at least one female character, the maid Nanine, is played by an actual woman, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen’s snide description of the effort as an “all-male version of Camille” by “the lads on Fire Island” notwithstanding. A pretty party guest, who also appears to lack an Adam’s apple, may be a woman, as well. The leading and supporting men are rather pretty, too.
Two short films preceded the screenings of “Camille” here. The first was “An Interview with Jack Davidson” (2015), the story of the preservation of “Camille,” created by George Lyter, with questions posed by Troy Files and Brian Clark. The second was Josh Rosenzweig and Greg Scarnici’s “Children of the Dune” (2010), a satiric cautionary tale about Pines men abandoning babies that they adopted so that they can return to Tea Dance and other frivolities. The tribe of feral children, raised by Gusty Winds, often in Divine mode, exacts a bloody revenge for the shoddy treatment, but fairy godmother Sherry Vine eventually leads them to the promised land—Cherry Grove. Present and past Grovites Logan Harcore, Dallas Dubois, Daniel Nardicio, Paul Martinkovic, Tim “Sabel Scities” Byars, Greg McMullen and Steven Sandoval, Adam Carman, Joey Ooofaaa, Tommy Branigan, and Greg Scarnici himself put in appearances. Justin Vivian Bond narrates.