“The Deuce” of director and co-writer Valerie Kontakos’s Queen of the Deuce takes its name from abbreviated slang for 42nd Street. It is years-old shorthand for the eternal criminal hustle of neighboring Times Square, the neon-soaked junction that doubled for hell in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. And this is where Kontakos introduces us to natty wiseguy Kosmas Sklifas. Now in his seventies, he worked at a camera shop in the neighborhood back in the day, sometimes running errands for “The Queen” of this piece, a firebrand lesbian grandma who lived above a gay porn theater.
“Right now, I don’t see any life,” laments Kosmas as he looks about the gentrified deuce. I see people walking around, but…if they call this life, Nah.” The theater he was a runner for, The Adonis, is now a wholly plastic-looking Irish-themed pub. Steps away is the NYC production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, housed within the shell of the dirty cinema Travis Bickle once took Betsy to.
“…a firebrand lesbian grandma who lived above a gay porn theater…”
The grandmother in question, Rachel “Chelly” Wilson, was a Greek ex-pat and associate of the Bonanno family who became one of the biggest exhibitors of porn in the states, owning seven theaters in New York while having a decades-long involvement in exploitation movie production and distribution.
Wilson’s story is told in a mostly linear fashion throughout Queen of the Deuce, starting with her life as a young woman in Thessaloniki, where her father hurriedly married her off to the first suitor to appear, a mediocre youth who bumped into her on the bus. As a doting daughter, Wilson agreed to the marriage but was deeply wounded by this low estimation. She promised her father that on his death, she would divorce her husband, and she kept her word. When he died Wilson left her husband, taking the children with her.
Then the Nazis invaded the Greek islands. Despite her pleas and warnings, Wilson’s younger siblings stayed behind (“We can work with the Germans”), and she never saw them again. They are assumed to have been rounded up and killed in the camps. Wilson hid the children with Gentiles in Spain and in Israel before escaping to New York.
"…free-wheeling and intimate..."
