Best known by gay historians for his activist films and early male nudies, Pat Rocco makes a stab at (relatively) mainstream filmmaking with DRIFTER, an effort from nearer the end of his '70s heyday. It's not an entirely successful film, but marks a valiant attempt at telling a sweet (if maudlin) story about a lonely bisexual hustler.
After an interesting opening depicting – in noirish silhouette – the hysterical, screaming freak-out of one member of a male couple, we join the titular drifter (the oddly credited "Joed Adair") as he hitchhikes through the desert. In a confusing sequence of parallel edits, he's picked up by both an old man and a young guy, leaving it unclear whether we're watching a montage of a single trip or a flashback.
Arriving in Hollywood, our hero hooks up with Wagner (the delightfully named Dean Sha-Kee), who offers him a place to stay. There's no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the two end up sleeping together.
The next morning, the hitcher (who's never named but whom characters refer to variously as either "Drifter" or "Drif") is awakened by Wagner's roommate Klamath (Bambi Allen), who he's surprised to discover is a girl. The two generate some unexpected sparks, and Klamath tells Drifter he's welcome to stay at the apartment despite Wagner leaving on a trip to San Francisco.
Seeking work at an agency whose address he got from the old man who drove him to Hollywood, Drifter is told he can be put to work if he gets a decent suit of clothes. Exactly what work is never specified, which rarely bodes well in '70s street-life dramas...
During all this, Drifter flashes back to his past relationship with Steve (David Russell), revealing the original hitchhike cross-cutting to be a shaky attempt at creating a dramatic parallel. While life with Steve was idyllic, Drifter's frequent trips to the city – his whereabouts and activities left undisclosed – put a strain on the relationship, which his eventual reveal of his hustling finally brought to a close. Will our hero be able to overcome his insecurities and settle down with Klamath, or is he simply born to be a drifter?
Striving to present an honest psychological portrait of a man who hustles more from compulsion than financial need, DRIFTER is never entirely successful at achieving its aims, allocating too much time to stock situations and too little toward actual dramatic insight. Given Drifter's past, for example, being given the address of a prostitution outfit by the old man really shouldn't be as surprising to him as it is, and since any exploitation audience worth its salt knows where this development is going anyway, it would be nice if the film just cut to the chase and spent more time exploring Drifter's character. An encounter with a pretty young lady (Inga-Maria Pinson) at a park similarly accomplishes nothing, setting up a superfluous love interest that never gets brought up again and making the film feel padded and digressive.
By contrast, flashbacks to Drifter's time with Steve are underdeveloped and too short - there are only three in total, and none is terribly long. The content of these scenes is standard relationship stuff - quiet happy moments mixed with "where were you last night?" shouting matches that provide tantalizing fodder for amateur thesps but don't chart much new territory dramatically. Purporting to pull back the curtain on the life of a wandering bisexual hustler, the film instead reveals his angst to be largely quotidian – a fear of commitment mixed with a pretty standard case of wanderlust.
Despite these deficiencies, the film is not without its charms or merits, however. DRIFTER is admirably progressive in its depiction of male bisexuality, for instance, with its protagonist's sexual predilections never pathologized or even commented on by other characters - he simply sleeps (and falls in love) with both men and women, without this being the obligatory result of some past trauma or of his more general personal issues. Adair is decent in the role of Drifter, and generates good chemistry with the low-key Allen – the two actually seem like a pretty good couple, and certainly make for a better pair than Drifter and Steve. (While Russell is adorable, he's undeniably wooden.) For fans of male pulchritude, Rocco dresses his characters in fashions that are easy on the eyes, and while no one in the film is a knockout, there should be more than enough flesh on screen (albeit largely clothed) to keep gay audiences satisfied.
If all this seems like I've been hard on DRIFTER, I would argue it's only as a result of the film's lofty ambitions. While undoubtedly one of the better examples of early '70s Hollywood gaysploitation, judged by the standards of the character study it wants to be, the film is nevertheless a letdown. That said, if Rocco bit off more than he could chew, he at least delivered a film which, despite its shortcomings, is rarely boring, and which occasionally delivers some truly stand-out moments. (A late cameo by Gerald Strickland, for example, provides one of the most sublime camp monologues I've seen in ages, perfectly illustrating the strange pathos the form is able to achieve by pushing so far through melodrama that it somehow ends up back at honest portraiture.)
While DRIFTER's poor contemporary reception apparently scuttled Rocco's mainstream ambitions – a shame, since despite its unpolished nature the film shows real promise – it's nevertheless deserving of reappraisal all these years later, and marks an interesting stab at straight (eh-hem) drama from one of gay cinema's founding fathers.
