Stéphane Riethauser | Prora / 2012

 love in the ruins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Riethauser (screenwriter and director) Prora / 2012 [23 minutes]

 

Swiss director Stéphane Riethauser’s Prora has to be one of the most sophisticated and beautiful short LGBTQ films of the second decade of the new century. First of all, it is filmed at one of the most bizarre structures in the world, the former Nazi holiday camp and later Communist military complex, Prora, now abandoned, on Germany’s Rügen Island at the Baltic Sea. Inexplicably, two friends, the somewhat timid German Jan (Tim Gramenz) and the French outwardly macho womanizer Matthieu (Swen Gippa) meet to spend their summer vacation.

     We don’t if they are there with their parents or have somehow chosen this strange spot by the ocean themselves, nor do we know how their friendship developed or how long in the past they first met one another. All we can say is they apparently enjoy one another’s company and have clearly spent a great deal of time together in the past. Perhaps their families have regularly vacationed at this resort for some time now. But clearly they have found one another without visiting each other’s home country.

      Although Jan speaks some French, Matthieu mocks his accent and keeps defining Jan, because of his lean build and seemingly shy demeanor as his “little” friend. Basically, they behave as do most young teenagers in gay movies, alternately basking in the sun, skipping along the shore, and roughhousing, Matthieu bragging of his sexual exploits with women to the other, while Jan mocks him for his often course and sometimes dangerous behavior.

      Like many “best friends” in gay films, there seems to be no real logic of why they are attracted to one another except that they each offer something that the other lacks, the German in this case being the more refined and less outwardly aggressive, while the Frenchman behaves rather more like a stumbling American oaf who offers up adventures on which Jan might otherwise never embark.

      The film actually begins near to where it ends, with Jan sitting alone on a high sea wall looking out toward to sea in contemplation of both the view and what has occurred that resulted in the deep recently stitched-up wound on his upper thigh.

    We are taken back to some of their early meetings as we discover the differences in the two I describe above as the narrative also establishes their friendship. Bored by simply “hanging out,” an activity which Jan seems to prefer, Mathieu suddenly determines to break into the endless complex of buildings that stretch almost as far as the eye can see.

     Jan hangs back as Matthieu enters through an open doorway and disappears, Jan ultimately having no choice if he is to remain in Matthieu’s company but also to enter the labyrinth. As he seeks out his friend, he quite quickly gets lost in the endless open corridors with staircases hooking up at odd places. Eventually he reaches the final floor calling out to Matthieu as he goes, without any success in locating him. Finally, when he about to retreat, Matthieu can be heard in a large open room where he has found a Nazi flag, and when Jan appears he torments the boy by calling him his little Nazi and charging at him draped in the red swastika banner like a bull, reminding him of his country’s shameful past.

      At first Jan is rightfully irritated by the obscene gestures, but ultimately joins his friend as they run through the long corridors breaking out windows as they pass, eventually finding even a larger open space where Mathieu lays down among the broken glass, exhausted by his athletic adventures.

      Before he can even comprehend his situation Jan moves toward him, towering over him, and bending down to begin—much as in the film Dear Friend—the long descent into a gentle kiss on his lips. When Matthieu remains passive, Jan follows it up with another kiss on his neck, and another and yet one more before kissing him through his ripped shirt across the chest.

 

     The camera discretely pulls away from a view of Jan sprawled atop Matthieu to show us the foreground of a long hall of broken glass and debris, as we hear the pull of belts, the snap of buttons, the slip of pants, the slurp of mouths, and the flap of flesh on flesh in a long off-stage cinematic portrayal of the boys’ sexual release. It may be one of the sexiest depictions of gay fucking and sucking I have ever experienced without being a visual witness.

    The camera returns to the room to witness Matthieu, still laying prone, as he buttons up his pants.

    If Matthieu has been utterly compliant, when he awakens from his satiation he immediately turns into a furious and frightened homophobe, rushing from the room, Jan following, pushing his former friend away as he attempts to find his way out, only to be met with dead ends and further expanses of empty space. When Jan tries to reason with him, suggesting another route, he slugs him and pushes him into a pile of broken glass, forcing the boy to remain behind to nurse the blood flowing his deep wounds.

 

     So we return the Jan at the sea wall. Soon after, with Jan sitting alone on the beach, Matthieu appears, for moment hovering over him—one might almost imagine in rage, but apparently peacefully, as he sits beside his “friend,” and eventually lays down flat on the sand, Jan joining him.

     Soon Matthieu stands and walks slowly out in the surf, Jan following far behind. Matthieu dives into the shallow waters, and eventually Jan follows his lead, the two swimming for a short while before turning back.

      It is the time for them to say goodbye, Matthieu evidently heading back that afternoon to Paris, and Jan to Berlin, where previously Matthieu had promised to one day visit him. The two hug, torn away from one another by their family abodes.

      Once more, we realize these two boys are now closer to being young men who can never again be friends, but if they do meet up once more will surely recognize themselves as having been briefly splendid lovers.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2021  

Lucas Mac Dougall | Anochecer (Nightfall) / 2012

the territory of each other’s hands

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Mac Dougall (screenwriter and director) Anochecer (Nightfall) / 2012 [9 minutes]

 

Lucas Mac Dougall’s Nightfall is almost a “best friends-turned-into-lovers-film” presented in the abstract. In this instance we are hardly told anything directly. This is primarily a movie of sound, with a lyrical piano score by Jorge Obeaga and the patter of heavy rain throughout, which perhaps explains the situation.

    A young teen (Leandro Gauto) stands in a boy’s bedroom, his backpack still strapped to his shoulder, as his friend (Juan Yarcho) drags in another mattress, the two of them placing it snugly up next to the boy’s own much higher bed. Obviously, due to the heavy rain the first boy has decided or been encouraged by the other to spend the night at his place. The boy to whom the room belongs climbs a small ladder to the linen closet to bring down bedding which the two lay out upon the bed and pat into place.  

     The second begins to strip off his T-shirt, which the guest notices out of the corner of his eye, and turns to watch. The now bed-ready friend lays down on his bed, checking his cellphone as the guest steps into his mattress on the floor. The other asks him what time he needs to leave, the guest responding 8:00. “We’ll set the clock for 7:00 then?” We have utterly no indication of where the guest for the night is going, but it is clear it’s not to school, since the other seems exempt from the hour. True to pattern of these tales, the second boy is obviously on his way to another place, whether for just the day or forever we can’t yet tell.

     The host checks his cellphone once again and turns off the lights. We hear only the heavy patter of the rain and crickets, the camera panning slowly over the room and its contents in the dark. The two boys, at their different levels, seem to be sleeping as the piano music returns, the guest switching positions, clearly not really sleeping well.

     Eventually he whispers to the other, “Are you asleep?” and when he receives no answer he lifts his head up to look into the higher bed and at the face of his apparently sleeping friend.

     You don’t have to be gay to know what’s troubling him. I’ve been in the very same position a couple of times in my life and I know the feeling. But unlike this guest positioned in almost hierarchical relationship with the other, I obeyed the symbolism of my placement. Our young backpacker, on his way to somewhere other, has evidently so such reservations, gradually moving up his hand along the side of the higher bed and feeling with his fingers for human flesh. He finds nothing, but obviously sensing his friend’s search, the other turns slightly, freeing his arm from under the covers.

 

   Eventually the guest feels the warmth of his fingers, the other moving his own fingers over those of the explorer as if to assent to the search of touch. Their fingers timidly explore the tiny territory of the back of each other’s hands, and by the time Obeaga’s piano score shifts keys, the floor-bound boy has joined his friend in the higher bed, sleeping as they cuddle up in the endless rain.

      Evidently, these friends were both ready to change their definition of themselves to lovers. But then we cannot know whether they will ever truly be able to consummate that new designation of their relationship since we have no idea where the other is going in the morning.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2021

Sophie Boyce | Dear Friend / 2011

speaking love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sophie Boyce (screenwriter and director, assisted by George Fox) Dear Friend / 2011 [16.32 minutes]

 

In many respects, Dear Friend might almost stand as the model of friend/gay “coming out” films. In this film, long time Liverpool friends Christian (Joshua Miles) and James (Julien Mack) spend their time together in 1965 mostly in Chris’ house where he lives with his father (Christopher Gee), no mother in sight. There the teenage boys, wrestle and roughhouse in a manner that might suggest much younger children, battling with one another like they were playing at sword fighting or jumping upon one another’s backs to ride them forward like horses into battle. The father sits in the kitchen mostly reading the newspaper with great equanimity and patience seemingly to recognize their ruckus as healthy male bonding.

 

     This particular evening, however, represents a special occasion. The next day James is moving to London, and this will be their last night together, which it is obvious is far more devastating to Chris than to his good friend. The directors represent his inner feelings through moments when he stands against the loud 1960s wallpaper of his room, the patterns cracking into fault lines behind his back as if the house had just suffered an earthquake. The period lava lamp replays images of Chris’ inner howling of pain and his heart throbs heavily over the possibility of losing his best friend and, we soon recognize, hopefully lover.

     After a night at the local bar, they stumble and shout back into the house recognizing that it is now their last hours together. As James, half-drunk, falls into Chris’ bed, where he has apparently spent many a sleepover, Chris sits up simply staring at him. Sensing his friend’s presence, despite the fact that he is laying faced in the other direction, James asks what he’s doing. Slowly Chris leans toward him, bending his torso in a slow arc to kiss him on the lips before briefly pulling away. When James, stunned by the act, does not move, Chris is about to attempt the gesture again, upon which his friend, clearly disgusted, shouts out “no,” forcefully pulling away from him and shifting once more in the other direction.

 

    Dreadfully hurt by the violent rejection, Chris sits up the rest of the night pondering things, and, after James shares a pleasant breakfast with Chris’ father—who clearly prefers James to his own son and sees his family’s move to London as representing financial advance, going as far as jocularly inviting the friend to move into his own house while suggesting he’ll ship his son off to London instead—faces off with James in the doorway as his friend attempts to make a quick exit to pack for his move to London.

      The show-down is terrifying as James keeps repeating that Chris is sick and wants nothing more to do with him. In one of the most painful moments in this unsettling short, Chris, near tears,      

shouts out, after claiming he is not a queer, “Don’t fuckin’ make me feel bad for fallin’ for you. I can’t help it. It just happened.”

       James’ response says as much for the tenor of the times and his inability to perceive anything outside of social convention as it does for his own personal convictions: “It’s illegal. And it’s fuckin’ sick. Why did you have to tell me about this Chris?” It is as if his friend’s honesty is the true crime, a betrayal of his own now impossible love for him.

 

     When Chris finally pulls away, he claims that the only sickness he has is from letting his friend and his ego get “inside my head.”

      The father comes out in attempt to discover why the two life-time friends are ending their last moments together in verbal sparring, only to be told by James: “You son is a puff. I hope you know that.”

      The ramifications of the boy’s words are immediately made apparent as the father enters his son’s room. Seeing the wall plastered with photos of the two boys together, the father points to James, saying “You won’t believe the rubbish that just came out of that lad’s mouth. What would make him say such a thing?” Looking at his son’s forlorn but also challenging expression, he pauses before pointing at him, his voice rising to its highest pitch: “You...you’re are going to have to see a psychiatrist. No one can find out about this! Nobody!” Once more, the concern is not about what Chris might feel or even the dangers of such feelings, but rather is focused upon societal propriety. In this world, the truth must never be told.

    There is nothing else for Christian to do but to pack his bags, stopping just long enough to tell his now heavily drinking father, “Mum would have understand,” something he has to believe in order to survive.

 

      He doesn’t get far before he is spotted by James, who calls out to him. He moves swiftly forward to his former friend and when he reaches him begins to slug him, calling him “vile.” The two clumsily struggle until they are holding one another closely. They both back off a short distance, and James signals for him to join him as they go scampering like two young squirrels across the greenyard with a song by Carl Hauck plucked out in tender accompaniment.

 

Los Angeles, July 8, 2021

Douglas Messerli | How to Lose Your Best Friend / 2021 [essay]

how to lose your best friend

by Douglas Messerli

 

A great many “coming out” and other LGBTQ films focus on men and women who have long been close friends, one (or sometimes both) of whom suddenly discovers that he feels something more than mere friendship for the other. Since, as is the usual pattern in these films, they have both maintained their friendship in the context of a heterosexual bond—one of the pair usually exhibiting a strong and boastful attraction to the opposite sex—that sudden awareness (often building up over a period of time) not only endangers the friendship, but since it is interpreted a betrayal of both their mutual commitment and is perceived as an unwanted sexual advance, often ends in some sort of violence or other retaliation before the two can either patch up their friendship or, in the best case scenario, develop a sexual relationship built upon their long friendship. Most often, the possibility of such a sexual acceptance is left open by the writer and director. And we never know whether or not friends can truly become lovers, a situation that is often metaphorically expressed by the two being pulled apart from one another by their families or other circumstances, including maturation, the time when such childhood friendships often naturally end.

     I have discussed some of these issues already in my essays on Robert Lambert’s Follow You, Follow Me (1979), Jacques Duron’s Une histoire sans importance (A History of No Importance) (1980); Roger Tonge’s Two of Us (1987, 1988); Reid Waterer’s The Kiss on the Cliff (1993); Frank Mosvold’s Bølgene (Waves) (1998); Miguel Arteta’s feature film Chuck & Buck (2000); Alfonso Cuarón’s feature Y Tu Mamá También (2001); Hong Khaou’s Summer (2006);  Mark Thiedeman’s Last Summer (2013); and Chadlee Skrikker’s Hand Off (2019). The list of such films would be nearly endless.

     In this instance, I’ve chosen to gather five such films to discuss from the years of 2011-2014, which share not only the same time-frame but significant thematic threads: Dear Friend by British director Sophie Boyce (2011), Anochecer (Nightfall) by Argentinian director Lucas Mac Dougall (2012), Prora by Swiss director Stéphane Riethauser (2012), Reel by Swedish director Jens Choong (2013), and Tomorrow by US director Leandro Tadashi (2014).

      But obviously, this genre being one of the most popular of LGBTQ cinematic expressions, there are various other sub-genres closely related to this one. In my next essay I discuss one of these, a comic variation of the “best friends” homosexual/heterosexual encounter which involves both the “I’m Not Gay” syndrome and, often, a version of the gay Don Juan myth. Perhaps it might make sense to read these two different collations together as mirror images of each other, one often ending in tragedy and the violence, the other almost always resulting in a kind of comic sense of ridiculousness.

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2021

 

Mike and George Kuchar | I Was a Teenage Rumpot / 1960 || Sylvia’s Promise / 1962 || Cattle Mutilations / 1983 || The Stranger in Apartment 9F / 1998 || Temple of Torment / 2006 || Meltdown / 2012 || Fallen Angels / 2013 || Jennifer M. Krott | It Came from Kuchar / 2009

hooray for hollywood: i was a teenage rumpot

 

Mike and George Kuchar I Was a Teenage Rumpot / 1960

                                          Sylvia’s Promise / 1962

                                          Cattle Mutilations / 1983

                                          The Stranger in Apartment 9F / 1998

                                          Temple of Torment / 2006

                                          Meltdown / 2012

                                          Fallen Angels / 2013

Jennifer M. Krott It Came from Kuchar / 2009

 

Watching seven short films the other evening by the Kuchar brothers, Mike and George, I was reminded, just a little, of the documentary film, Capturing the Friedmans, simply for the fact that the two young twin brothers captured much of their imagination—if not their homelife experiences as had the Friedman brothers—on the 8 mm. camera they were awarded by their mother at age 11.

 

     These brothers, unlike the Friedman children, were unabashedly gay and yet, despite their living together in a San Francisco apartment during the 1960s until George’s death in 2011, were rather chaste, horrified by the San Francisco Chronicle photographer’s suggestion that they might pose together naked in their bathtub. These were not the famous gay porno Bartok twins from Hungary, nor even the skinny Peters brothers which the Bel-Ami studios made famous. Yes, I have watched gay porno!

      These two wild and crazy guys, were simply interested in expressing through their film-making and art creations a vision of the gay world that harkened back to their childhood experiences of seeing melodramatic cinemas such as those directed by Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minelli, and numerous others who put their gay and sometimes heterosexual desires onto a celluloid vision that, as George assures us, made him and his brother able to love what they might never been able to attain, to be in control of their own sometimes desperate desires through the actors whom they portrayed in their hilarious send-ups of Hollywood melodramatic plots of the 1950s and 1960s. “The camera allowed us to love and control our obsessions,” he states.

       Their films included not only the tropes of the secretive and often unexpressed gay films, but the Hammer horror stories and other Hollywood B-level horror films of the period. These Bronx-raised boys, living out their rather abusive youths in the film palaces of the period, instinctively dissected the big productions they were witnessing, perceiving how the male/female characters (and yes, this was an early perception of gender differences) played out those roles on the big screen, analyzing them in a way that perhaps other adults at the time could simply not quite assimilate.

      And with their small, home-like camera—instead of like the Friedmans, turning it upon themselves—they almost immediately focused on satiric versions of the films they had seen, while nonetheless remaining slant/wise true to the vast cinematic colors of the films they had witnessed, creating, through their commercial-art training, with exaggerated makeup, costumes, and cinematic behavior that delighted the underground and sometimes art-aspiring world from the critic Jonas Mekas, to Andy Warhol, Buck Henry, and the film director who their work influenced more than any of the others, John Waters. I’d argue that without the Kuchar brothers’ films, Waters might never have even imagined his Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and in the Jennifer Kroot’s documentary It Came from Kuchar, he even admits as much. Younger filmmakers such as my friend Felix Bernstein where equally influenced. Stupid I just never perceived it.

      Although the Kuchar films, often directed separately by one another, were often hilarious rifts on Hollywood films—with early visions of Divine-like figures (portrayed in their films by the local women they met such as Donna Kerness and Marie Losier) and by male idols and lovers such as Kurt McDowell, who died of AIDS—also evinced a sincere engagement with their sources, a kind of love that they recognized was slightly insane. And their short films represented that, alternating between utter parody and a truly poignant depiction of the dichotomy between the two visions. Their vision straddled always between the silliness of what they were doing with an utter seriousness of their grungy art, which is what made them so very appealing.

     The films I saw the other night—Mike Kuchar’s Meltdown, The Stranger in Apartment 9F, and Fallen Angels (some of my very favorites) and George’s Cattle Mutilations and Temple of Torment, as well as their shared directorship of the hilarious I Was a Teenage Rumpot and Sylvia’s Promise—revealed a wide range of women, often in wheelchairs, and handsome young men like Mike Diana devoted to them.

      We know immediately that those gay men are not truly interested in their oversized, both physically and sexually, women playmates; but that’s the fun of the Kuchar brother’s stories. In one film—predicting Water’s Divine’s later demand for cha-cha heels—a woman roommate is outraged by the song “These Shoes Are Made for Walking,” destroying her sister’s record in anger.

      The Kuchar brothers’ “sins” were that they reiterated the greater sins of Hollywood movie making, highly exaggerating the cinematic presentations that most of our parent’s generation truly believed. Their antic and yet loving representation of them made us realize just how untrue were their grand gestures to real life. If we today laugh at the Kuchar’s gestures, we are also laughing at ourselves, the myths we once were captivated by, the lies into which our cultured encapsulated us.

      These films, as silly and quickly made as they were, make us realize, like Jack Smith and others showed us, how absurd were the pretensions of our lives. The situations and people we were seeing on the screen were nothing but theatrical artifices, and the Kuchar brothers, often uncomfortably, reminded us of our absolutely foolishness for even temporarily believing them.

      In deconstructing these large on-screen cinematic events, they made it clear that we and our parents were dumb-nuts who had bright into the larger US projection of how love and sexuality really existed. I now realize how, even while realizing their false projections of what I felt, I too had been transmogrified into that world, terrified of tipping out of it into my real identity.

      Hurray for the Hollywood! these odd-fitting directors finally showed us.

 

Los Angeles, February 8, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2020).

Allen Reisner | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1955

enjoying being mr. hyde

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gore Vidal (teleplay, adapted from the fiction by Robert Louis Stevenson), Allen Reisner (director) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde / 1955

 

The CBS live dramatic series, like several others on TV in that industry’s often described “Golden Years,” presented regular live dramatic productions of new and classic works on its “Climax!” series sponsored by Chrysler, hosted by Bill Lundigan.

   For this Jekyll/Hyde production, Gore Vidal wrote the teleplay, so I imagined given his homosexuality that I might find some vestiges in this version of the original Stevenson work with its coded gay references.

      At first it appeared to follow the pattern of the dozens of dreary films I had been watching, although this did get the final scene—in this case where Hyde (Michael Rennie), found in Jekyll’s laboratory is shot to death—immediately out of the way, shifting our attention from the plot to the issue of how Hyde might be caught to the dilemma of Jekyll’s transformations. Here too Jekyll, after creating and drinking his accidental potion—as in some of the versions, it was a manufacturing error that had provided the serum with its horrible effects and ability to permit the transformation from one persona to the other—goes on a wild heterosexual spree, visiting Soho dives and molesting women, in particular one girl (May Sinclair), whose fiancé Hyde later kills when he is physically attacked by the man.

       Vidal also restored the work’s original narrator, Mr. Utterson (Cedric Hardwicke), this time playing the role of narrative mind by reading Jekyll’s journal which outlines for us the story.

     But I soon begin to realize that while obviously in 1955 there could have been no way around associating the “wicked” Hyde (perhaps the “wickedest man in all of London”) with champagne, low-life bars, and women—drugs, homosexuality, Sadomasochism, and any other vision of devilish behavior was absolutely forbidden, particularly on the family-oriented TV set—the video demonstrated very little interest in outlining what precisely Hyde did with women other than ordering them about and perhaps manhandling them, let alone how he had established his reputation. Mostly he seemed simply to want to sit down, have a drink, and growl a bit over the girl’s beauty.

 

       The heterosexual incidents here are no more part of the real story than were Cary Grant’s romances with Katherine Hepburn or Irene Dunne. What truly matters in this version of the story is what was happening within himself and regarding his good friend, in this case, as opposed to his arch-enemy in other productions, Dr. Lanyon, who Jekyll describes as an “innocent” who as performed by Lowell Gilmore, is quite attractive.

        Indeed, it is his visit to Lanyon as Hyde that might be said to be the central scene of this dramatic version. Having given a box of the chemicals to Lanyon ahead of time, Jekyll has prepared for just the situation he faces after committing the murder.

        Having already established that Jekyll perceives each man as carrying within him both an angel and a monster, and that in taking the drug with which he hoped to release the angel from his soul that he has succeeded only in rousing the monster from its pit, in his conversation with Lanyon after transforming himself back into Jekyll, the doctor still admits: “I could not help myself. I enjoyed being Mr. Hyde.”

       No other Jekyll until that moment has described himself as enjoying the role of Hyde; various Jekylls cannot resist the serum and some are determined to continue the experiments simply out scientific interest, but not one has previously admitted to “enjoyment,” which the dictionary defines as “the action of state of enjoying,” the possession and use of joy, or “something that gives keen satisfaction.”

     Lanyon, who cannot believe the transformation he has seen with his own eyes and can hardly believe the words he is hearing—words if we listen closely are very much those of a man coming out to a friend, admitting his homosexuality—asks his friend: “Who are you? How can you be two men?

       Jekyll repeats his belief: “Each man is both a monster and an angel.”

       Lanyon asks outrightly, “Is it like a drug? Must you become Hyde despite of your better self?”

     And Jekyll quickly gets to the crux of the problem: “There’s something in me that craves to be Hyde and I can’t stop,” even while admitting, “I know that if I do it again I shall die. I’m being torn apart.”

       Unlike what I have described as the “residual language” of the homosexual that is retained in the 1931 film production, a language of regret and a deep belief in conversion, these are the words of a man who has discovered his true identity, or least part of it, and cannot deny himself that being.

      Lanyon’s words, those of a true homophobe or perhaps in this case a self-loathing homosexual, safe in his innocence from knowing of his own nature, utterly shocks and hurts the suffering Jekyll: “Then Jekyll I think it better that you die”

      Their further conversation says it all:

 

      Jekyll:    Can I help what this Hyde does?

      Lanyon: You are Hyde and you chose of your own will to be Hyde.

                     Never see me again.

      Jekyll:    We are old friends. Every man has a Hyde in him.

      Lanyon:  I have kept mine caged.

      Jekyll:     I experimented in innocence.

      Lanyon:  Innocence? You reek of Hell. Get out.

 

    If the superficial elements of the plot would convince the average viewer that these two men are discussing the impossible transformation of a man who has just murdered another man into an old friend who admits he rather enjoys being the womanizing murderer—in other words, a gothic horror contrivance—it sounds to me far more like a very realistic conversation between two men in a time in which gay men were condemned to never speak of their hidden desires and the lives they lived to satisfy those desires. The love-hate relationship between the gay individual and his supposedly sensitive, perhaps closeted. friend, seems quite realistic, even with its occasional Victorian moralist aphorisms.

     When a supposedly re-converted Hyde determines to test himself by returning to the scene of the crime nearly a full year later, it is inevitable that he will again become Hyde and in recognition of this run from the place in shame, returning home knowing that he must now face his death. Vidal clearly knew long before Vito Russo so brilliantly explained it to us that gay men in films and fiction mostly had to die.

     Despite Rennie’s excellent acting and his threshing around as the suffering doctor as he turns into his other self, this television drama, with its crude technical capabilities and experiments in early TV video techniques used to suggest the bodily changes Jekyll and Hyde must suffer (even though this Hyde, as Jekyll admits, is much younger and more daring than he is—closer to the Hyde we will encounter in Terence Fisher’s 1960 remake of the story) this work is generally clumsy and unconvincing except in its language and its excellent musical score by Jerry Goldsmith.

 

Los Angeles, December 10, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).