David Lochary gives John Waters’s schemers the spite and impatience of a spoiled child. His wholehearted playing can be funny, but the comedy suffers when everyone pushes equally hard.
Fi1m perspective
As the blue-haired Raymond Marble in Pink Flamingos (1972), David Lochary gives scheming villainy a bratty impatience. Alongside Mink Stole’s Connie Marble, he competes with Divine for the title of the filthiest people alive, taking the contest with all the seriousness it does not deserve. We laughed at the pair’s commitment: neither performer softens the ridiculous premise to make it more respectable. Lochary’s arch delivery fits John Waters’s broad comedy, where a modest performance would scarcely register. He is worth watching in it, even when the script gives his enthusiasm too little to work with.
His work with Waters began in the mid-1960s shorts and continued through Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970). In the latter, he plays Mr. David, the barker for the Cavalcade of Perversions, a job suited to an actor so comfortable with exaggeration. By Pink Flamingos, the partnership with Stole gives that manner a clear purpose: the Marbles can encourage one another’s nastiness. Their shared enthusiasm is a substantial part of the joke.
The difficulty is that Waters does not give the dialogue enough changes of pace. Lochary and Stole keep pushing, but another excessive line is not necessarily a fresh joke, and enthusiasm cannot provide the missing variation. That is our reservation about Pink Flamingos: the performances belong in this comedy, yet they also make its repetitive writing more obvious. We would not ask Lochary to become naturalistic here. We would ask for more occasions when his petulance could interrupt the noise rather than add to it.
Female Trouble (1974) gives him his final screen role, Donald Dasher, paired with Mary Vivian Pearce’s Donna Dasher. Donald is a hairdresser, again part of a cruel, manipulative couple. There is too little work outside Waters’s films to say how Lochary would have fared with a director who asked him to do less. Try Pink Flamingos for his partnership with Stole, with fair warning that Waters sometimes substitutes disgust for a joke.
Biography
David Lochary was an American actor best known for his roles in the early films of director John Waters. He appeared as Raymond Marble in Pink Flamingos (1972), Donald Dasher in Female Trouble (1974), and Mr. David in Multiple Maniacs (1970), among other parts in Mondo Trasho (1969) and The Diane Linkletter Story (1970).
Lochary was one of Waters' regular 'Dreamlander' performers and also worked uncredited as a hair stylist and makeup artist on several of the films. He co-wrote The Diane Linkletter Story with Divine, whom he had met at beauty school in Baltimore. Lochary was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 21 August 1944 and died in New York City on 29 July 1977.
