better off
by Douglas Messerli
Barré Lyndon (screenplay, based on the novel
by Patrick Hamilton), John Brahm (director) Hangover Square / 1945
For the most part in writing about the essays
in My Queer Cinema I have attempted to make a clear delineation between
the actor and his or her character. Only in the case of figures such as Ivan
Novello, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Rock Hudson, and a few others, wherein
the homosexual actor, seemingly conspiring with their writers and director to
create coded gay figures inside the heterosexual outer shell of the character
required by the plot, do I bring in the issue of the actor’s sexuality as being
important to the film. As I joke, Grant and Hudson played gay coded figures so
often that you might have thought that they had written into their contracts.
And actors such as Novello, Farley Granger, Anthony Perkins, and other
Hitchcock heroes were simply too beautiful for that brilliant director to
resist suggesting other sexual complications in his characterizations. Hepburn,
as Cukor argued, was determined to play certain strong female feminist roles
which, in the terms of Hollywood character stereotypes of the day, brought her
closer to lesbian identity.
Although not all of them were gay or lesbian, the numerous crossdressers
and pansies of the earlier films had required a certain male or female type
which often included the sexual “aberration” which the role satirized or
mocked.
And
so too in the 1940 and 50s there were some actors who simply because of their
voices and/or mannerisms were hired to play villains or comic supporting roles
who, although necessarily presented as heterosexuals in the script, read to
most of their audiences as being gay, bisexual, or lesbian, hinting at their
actual sexuality even though they generally denied it or joined in lavender
marriages to hide it. Since they were villains or fussy second bananas and homosexuality
was perceived as representing evil or at least abnormal behavior, film casters
and directors did not at all mind that they behaved slightly odd or queer both
in and out of costume. In fact it was why they were hired. The examples of
these individuals are actually quite numerous, but three immediately stand out,
each of whom made their greatest impact in movies of the 1940s and 50s when
even cleverly coded films were carefully combed through by the Hays people:
Raymond Burr, Vincent Price, and the writer I am focusing on in this essay,
Laird Cregar. These three all appeared in noirs, horror, and monster films
which permitted a niche in which their morality was at issue which made it
allowable for them to appear somewhat gay; they were after all “wicked” or,
better yet, psychologically sick beings according to the script. Both Burr and
Price would also occasionally play heroes, as Cregar might have if he had lived
longer.
Clearly in the 1945 British film Hangover Square Cregar was
attempting to escape being typecast as he had recently been in the 1941
film I Wake Up Screaming and The
Lodger (1944) where he played psychopathic murderers. For Cregar, in
particular, it was also a matter of his weight of he had been conscious
throughout his life. In being asked to play a character in John Brahm’s newest
film, he was scripted to play a distinguished British composer named George
Harvey Bone—already a clue that there was something strange about him; if you
recall Katherine Hepburn pseudonymously names Cary Grant, Mr. Bone in Bringing
Up Baby—but was romantically involved with two women, the proper Barbara
Chapman (Faye Marlowe) and a night-club singer Netta Longdon (Linda Darnell)
which
he felt might be used to his advantage to
create for himself a more romantic, leading man. And in order to gain more
acceptance as such a figure he underwent a severe crash diet, mostly through
the consumption of amphetamines, which forced the studio to film chronologically so that his
weight-loss appeared to be part of the plot itself and resulted in his
sometimes erratic behavior. Within a few weeks after shooting, Cregar died of a
fatal heart attack brought on by his weight loss, and did not get to see the
final film when it was released.
Part of this desire to change his image surely had to do with the fact
that just two years earlier Cregar’s lover, the young actor David Bacon, was
attacked and killed with a knife. The tabloids quite quickly linked Cregar to
Bacon describing him as “such a good friend” of the victim, leading Darryl F.
Zanuck to arrange for a Silver Screen article to romantically link him
with actor Dorothy McGuire which reported that, despite his weight, the actor
was considered quite sexy by many women. Surely Cregar sought to erase the
weight equation.*
We
all know that there is no “gay sounding voice,” that homosexual men speak in
thousands of various tones and intonations just as gay men look as different
from one another as does the general population. And yet, I have to admit there
are certain timbres of the voice, careful intonations of words that
inexplicably hint at the individual’s sexuality. Both George Sanders, who also
performs in this film and Cregar simply “sound” gay—although Sanders, who was
married several times including to two of the Gabor sisters, Zsa Zsa and Magda,
was apparently not homosexual—and directors cast these individuals as effete
wicked beings for precisely this reason (Sanders plays such figures, for
example, in Rebecca and, most notably, All About Eve).
Cregar is simply possessed of such a voice, and even revealing that he was
after all quite good looking, has a face that was made for this role: a fussy,
effete, artist—just such characteristics needed also to play Oscar Wilde, a
stage production of which in 1940 won him rave reviews and the attention of the
Hollywood studios—who in this case is also psychologically affected by noise (a
situation that hints of the same condition of Poe’s Roderick Usher) that makes
it clear that we will never win the love of the showgirl Netta, for whom he
wastes his precious energies while he should composing his concerto by spinning
off popular songs for her new musical, Gay Love**—surely not an
accidental use of the word “gay” since Cary Grant had publicly revealed that
word’s urban usage in his 1938 film Bringing Up Baby.
Although, Bone is convinced of his love for Netta, even she hints that
although he has spoken nice words, he was never even attempted to “get close,”
and she describes her seduction of him as a painful experience to both her
friend Mickey (Michael Dyne) and the man to whom she gets engaged to be
married, Eddie Castairs (Glenn Langan). Her love for him is a pretense to milk
her
for her successful musical numbers.
Barbara, the music-loving pianist, who is the daughter of the great
conductor Sir Henry Chapman (Alan Napier), may believe she loves the man of
such talent, but it is a pure and prim kind of love by which composer Bone is
not aroused...if he is ever by women aroused. He treats her more like a loving
sister, admitting his most personal of problems including the fact that even he
believes that something is wrong with him, having suffered throughout much of
his life by moments of blackout but which has suddenly, as the film opens,
stealing an entire day from his life as he returns home without remembering
anything that has happened.
We
see what has happened, as he stabs a Jewish shop owner of fine art curios. In a
clearly anti-Semitic slur, the doctor-detective Dr. Allan Middleton (Sanders)
who Bone consults—when after reading in the newspaper of the shop owner’s
murder, he fears he may somehow in involved—absolves him of the crime
suggesting the victim had been cheating his customers, hinting that he somehow
deserved being murdered. Yet despite the fact we have seen Bone plunge the
knife into the victim’s chest, Middleton finds no trace of blood on the weapon
nor can he match the blood on the composer’s coat with that of the
shopkeeper’s. Nonetheless, he still suspects him, and even has Bone followed.
Upon his second near-blackout, when he discovers Netta has been lying to
him about her activities, the composer unsuccessfully attempts to strangle
Barbara, who still does not suspect her friend, would-be lover.
But by his third blackout, when after discovering that Netta is about to
marry Carstairs, he kills her, placing her body at the top of a pyre set up in
celebration of Guy Fawkes Night,*** although police still have no evidence,
Middleton finally puts together the facts and prepares to arrest the murderer,
who escapes to finally perform his completed concerto with Barbara in
attendance and her father conducting.
Finally, trapped by the police, Bone sets fire to the place, and
realizing his own monstrosity, plays the remainder of his concerto until he is
burned alive, Middleton commenting to Barbara, not so very differently from his
statement about the Jewish shopkeeper, “It’s better this way.” Bernard
Herrmann’s own “Concerto,” accordingly becomes to true unspoken hero of this
work, surviving its fictional composer and outshining all the film’s characters
in its splendiferous sounds.
I
wonder what Cregar might have thought about his performance if he had seen it.
Certainly it’s a tour de force, among the best of noir
incarnations of the often unintentional evil that propels such plots. One
wonders, however, whether he would have seen an actor in himself able to take
on leading man, romantic roles. I fear not. And, most terrifyingly, you can
almost hear Zanuck or some other studio exec saying the cruel words they
actually had wanted Sanders to speak, but which he absolutely refused to utter:
“He’s better off this way.”
*As any reader has surely realized by this
time, I am fascinated by unlinked connections and coincidence. Raymond Burr was
also obsessed by his weight, particularly early on in his career. As he
revealed in a 1993 interview in the Toronto Star: "I was just a fat
heavy. I split the heavy parts with Bill Conrad. We were both in our twenties
playing much older men. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a
3-D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth
Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take
one look at me and scream and can you blame them? I was drowned, beaten,
stabbed and all for my art. But I knew I was horribly overweight. I lacked any
kind of self-esteem. At 25 I was playing the fathers of people older than
me."
**In another interesting but somewhat
unrelated coincidence, after Netta Longdon’s murder, we see the poster of her
play Gay Love begin plastered over with another announcing a performance
by French dancer/actor Gaby Deslys, an historically real performer interviewed
by Djuna Barnes in April 1914. If Netta is clearly a woman who has used the
admiration of a gay man to benefit her career, Deslys was known for her
absolute “deviltry,” rumored to have stolen Jean Cocteau’s heart (he wrote a
prose poem about her) and infatuated Sir James M. Barrie, the Scottish creator
of Peter Pan (he wrote an entertainment for her, Rosy Rapture).
In her interview, Barnes claims to steal away her reputation for that deviltry,
revealing her to be simply an exhausted young doll-like girl—precisely the kind
of woman Barnes herself loved. One has to wonder whether set decorator Thomas
Little, who designed some 504 film sets over his career, including for Laura
and All About Eve, was subliminally telling us something that even
director John Brahm didn’t know.
***Finally, it is perhaps worth nothing that
it is on Guy Fawkes Night that director Ken Russell choses for his Oscar Wilde
character to attend the last (and only) performance he saw of his play Salomé
in Salome’s Last Dance (1988), during which of course a great deal of
sexual activity occurs.
Los Angeles, January 23, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January
2022).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.png)
