Ron Peck | It's Ugly Head / 1974

to be touched

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Peck (screenwriter and director) It’s Ugly Head / 1974

 

This 13-minute film from 1974 was now famous gay British director Ron Peck’s graduation film at the London Film School, and as critic Mike Kennedy has observed, now “feels like a throwback to the tradition of the British kitchen sink drama, updated by inclusion of elements of sexuality

from the mid-‘70s.”

 

     David (Walter McMonagle) is a closeted school teacher whose wife Franny (Judy Liebert) is a housebound invalid, for what reason we are never advised. Together they have a pre-school-aged son Magnus (Magnus Hastings) who we discover is from a previous marriage since she addresses his father to him as David, and the couple seem to have a quite sexually distant life, she in her own bed, David busy at work as a writer in his small home office.

       Almost as soon as we meet them, the director hurries David off to an art gallery where he encounters his former lover, Steven (Michael Menaugh). Their conversation consists basically of their comments about their not having seen each other in a long while, and David announcing that

he is now married. Nonetheless, Steven appears to recognize the difficulties that relationship must entails, without missing a beat, slipping his current address and telephone number into the catalogue that David has had signed for his wife, suggesting that David “Call around some time.”

 

      Perusing the art catalogue, his wife wonders who Stephen might be, to which David replies, “Just a friend.”

       Later the next night, or perhaps a few days later David is attempting to write. Spotting a picture of him and Stephen, he tears it up, obviously attempting once more to close off that period in his life.

       A few nights later, however, he attempts to telephone Stephen and soon announces that he “might take a stroll,” Franny sees through his seemingly benign intentions, asking “Will you be back tonight?” When he indignantly questions “What she means,” she answers bluntly, “I just thought you might not be.”

       He attempts to qualm her fears by suggesting he’s begun a new chapter on his book, and will probably have it finished by summer. Two books in one year, he ponders, insisting that he has never felt happier. And at that moment he convinces himself to stay in, while she suggests that if he wants to go out, she really doesn’t mind.

       “I don’t want to. Such a waste of time. I used to waste so much time. …No, I’m not going back to that. I never enjoyed it. It’s wasteful, messy, trivial. Compulsory. No, it’s one big disappointment.”

       She seems clearly to know what he’s speaking about, his previous gay life. And she is not at all convinced about his pretense that love-making is unimportant. And she herself is disappointed. While he argues that if you want to do anything in this world you have to give “that” up, meaning sex. But she argues that it is not like that, not at all about “sublimation.” “It wasn’t like that with Alan and [sic] I. We didn’t think about, talk about it. It was normal.”

         He suggests she’s now outgrown it. She’s a writer.

      But Fran argues she hasn’t outgrown it. She just can’t have it. And work does not make her satisfied. “I get so sick of it, of lying in bed all day and all night. I get lonely. I get so lonely. Nobody ever touches me. …Nobody ever really touches me. It’s hell. I want to be touched. I want to be touched.” David sits in a chair at the end of her bed, stone-faced.

       The next morning, we observe David packing up his briefcase, presumably for his teaching. Fran is being washed by her caretaker as they discuss Gone with the Wind. Whether or not the film is a hint of her husband’s soon-to-be actions, is not established. But surely his sublimations can only take him so far before he too will cry out “I want to be touched!”

        Of course, by 1974 there had been a great many British movies and plays that referenced if not openly spoke about homosexuality. A year after Peck’s short film, the ground-breaking film The Naked Civil Servant about the life of Quentin Crisp was released. Yet at the time Peck’s student project, it was very brave for a work of cinema to deal with a married man who lived the life of a closeted gay and even more so to discuss his wife in terms of being physically disabled. Four years later Peck would make Nighthawks, one of the first openly gay films made in Britain.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).

Connor Williams | Affection / 2020

sharing the love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Connor Williams (screenwriter and director) Affection / 2020 [6 minutes]

 

The cute gay couple at the center film are very much in love, attempting to decide how their relationship will progress. Luke (Spencer Claus) is obviously more comfortable with his sexuality, than Shawn (Justin Kang) who still has difficulty expressing public affection, having grown up in a more conservative Asian family.

     A small incident in which, as the two walk along the street, a man passes them muttering homophobic language in reaction to their holding hands, primarily defines the movie. Luke turns back to shout at the man, himself apparently using obscene and abusive language to tell the man off for his homophobia. Oddly enough his own words are muted, so the viewer can only imagine what he is saying. In Shawn’s mind, the whole street suddenly has their eyes peeled to the couple, as he attempts to calm down Luke.

      US director Connor William’s film argues through Luke’s defense of his actions that the stranger was making the scene, not Luke, and that he has every reason to defend himself. It is Shawn who is unable to accept public expression of who he is sexually. The fact that Shawn just wanted Luke to stop in his public outcry becomes an act of cowardice, an expression of closeted behavior in this short film.

       Luke accuses Shawn as being embarrassed, and from there on this short film puts all the weight on some rather inexplicable guilt that the young Asian man should feel for his desire for a more temperate expression of anger.

       Although I have certainly been a highly outspoken person all of my life, causing me to many a time be shouted down and censored, I fear that in this case I might agree with Shawn. Forgetting

the danger one puts oneself in calling out every homophobic offense made against gay men, there is simply the matter of the survival involved. Homophobes are certainly not very logical individuals and such a situation might easily turn violent. Shawn’s argument, that he is not denying Luke’s words or his feelings but simply reacting to his own violent expression of them, seems to me to be quite sane.

       Yet Williams’ work puts all the onus on Shawn, forcing him by film’s end to grant that Luke was right, to admit that he’s just not comfortable with pubic displays of love.

       Perhaps it is representative of the times in which I came of age. Although we were certainly open about our gay relationship, Howard and I, my husband in particular, felt uneasy about challenging so much of the general society which in the 1970s and 1980s were not all open-minded as polls suggest they are today. I wanted to make public challenges, but in the long-run I also realized that might have been pointless. Our love and its expression spoke for itself, kisses and hand-holding on the street not necessary to express our feelings. People could read it in our eyes, a hand laid across a shoulder. I’m pleased to see a resistance to that attitude in the figures making films today. Why should gay men and lesbians feel limited in where they chose to express themselves, particularly in a world where heterosexuals feel no such hesitations?

      Context, however, seems thrown to the winds in this work. Does one pick an argument with everyone who dismisses LGBTQ+ behavior? Does one endanger one’s life just to express one’s rights? Certainly, we need to speak out when necessary, but as Shawn hints he surely has more important things to do with his life that shout down every public idiot.

 

Los Angeles, December 17, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).