a modest proposal
by
Douglas Messerli
Danny
Kish and Andy Vallentine (screenplay), Andy Vallentine (director) The Letter
Men / 2021
[9
minutes]
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The
letters, over 200 of them, uncovered in 2015, represent the largest known
collection of LGBTQ love letters during that period.
This short film quotes from a few of the letters while showing soldiers in action and a few brief scenes of the lovers before the one shipped off to war, including one scene in the London underground during a German bombing.
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Performed by pretty boys Pierce Allison as Harry and Nehal Banik as John, the two leads make up a handsome duo, but we learn little of their real relationship or what actually happened to them after the war. At one point we do see the soldier ready to burn up the letter he’s just read from his lover, obviously in fear that it might be discovered by his superiors; but he thinks better of it and hides it within his uniform instead, suggesting that somewhere during his service he hid the entire stash of the letters.
Obviously, these were quite well-off
young men, who meet on a yacht of gay revelers, falling in love, so it appears,
upon first sight. Other than that, we know very little about Harry or John
except that John (Gordon) was a mad epistolatorist with a penchant for romantic
sentences insisting that their kind of queerness was unlike that of any others
since each day “I fall more and more in love with you.”
It would have been interesting to see how
Harry survived the War, and what their relationship was like upon their return,
or if it even survived the continued British ban on homosexual activities and
the post-War II world-wide rush to heteronormative behavior. What Vallentine’s
movie seems to argue for is a real movie.
Los
Angeles, March 19, 2024
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).
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