Unknown filmmaker | Psychiatric Teaching Interview with Gay Teenager / 1969

the little gray men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Unknown filmmaker Psychiatric Teaching Interview with Gay Teenager / 1969

 

This interview with a truly troubled young New Orleans teenager is one of the most painful documents of the era I have encountered. That’s not to say that I haven’t seen more brutal attacks on young gay men or that I haven’t seen more troubling documented statements of tormented LGBTQ youths. The issue here is that the entire US psychiatric establishment has worked to make this young man feel that he is truly insignificant.

   His dreams are in gray, with men telling him what he should do. I presume his little gray men are the authorities themselves demanding that he join them. “They’d tell me to keep believing in them, that their way of doing things, that escaping through this was right.” But, as he admits, he has not at all been helped through their interventions with his sexual assimilation. In fact, these terrifying fantasy creatures have basically disappeared from his dreams.

      He seems to identify as a bisexual whose childhood encounter with a peer led to that young boy’s feeling he that he had been brought into sexual contact without permission: “One time on of the boys I had relations with decided that he hadn’t done so much on his part to provoke the incident.” Authorities were told, and the young teen, realizing that he is trapped into an impossible sexual scandal, raises enough money to leave town.

     His description of the situation, even though he sounds like he has been “calmed” by a heavy dose of drugs, sounds somewhat like the desperate elderly escapee Carrie Watts of Horton Foote’s A Trip to Bountiful, although his voyage is not into an imaginary world of the past, but a uncertain world of some future. Nonetheless, as in the Foote play his family, having heard from a close female friend of his intent to escape, he is “saved” by his mother and father, who apparently, like so many well-meaning heterosexually normative, and implicitly conservative parents seek out psychiatric treatment which today might be described as something close to sexual reorientation, in this case not occasioned by some fringe element but the approval of The American Psychiatric Association's perception of gay behavior as a medical abnormality that would not be altered until five years after this short tape.

      This young man seems to honestly admit that despite all the help he as received from “coming up here” to the hospital, his sexual desires have not altered, and he is still committed to his then unthinkable bisexual urges.  

      As several commentators to the YouTube reacted, they would like to know what happened to this calmly speaking, Southern-born US boy. But we now know it is the story of not one young man, but thousands like him.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Michael Powell | Hotel Splendide / 1932

the little tin box

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ralph Smart (screenplay, based on a story by Philip MacDonald), Michael Powell (director) Hotel Splendide / 1932

 

This gang world little gem, Hotel Splendide, was a British “Quota quickie,” one of the movies made on the cheap to satisfy the 1927 law that 20% of all films released in Great Britain had to be shot at a British studio with a UK producer and with 75% of salary costs paid to British cast members. Since US distributors had now begun to take over British theaters, the US studios often financed such “British made” films which usually ran at about an hour in length and were perceived as films that might accompany a feature that was usually US backed. Sadly, 60% of the Quota quickie films have been lost.

     But Michael Powell’s film fortunately remains as a perfect example of the great filmmaker’s early works. Much of it doesn’t make sense. Indeed, we hardly get to know the company with whom Jerry Mason (Jerry Verno) is unhappily employed. He mocks the director and can’t abide his fellow employees. Fortunately, as in many a film of the 1930s, when financial fantasies were a requirement to find one’s way out of the morass of the Depression, Jerry discovers that he has suddenly inherited a seaside hotel in Speymouth. He quickly leaves his job and rushes off to his new life.

     But we have also just seen “Gentleman Charlie” (Edgar Norfolk) released from jail. Although he was found guilty of a robbery of pearls, the baubles themselves were never discovered, he having hidden them under a tree in Speymouth where our hero’s hotel now stands. Obviously, Charlie and his old partner are also on their way now to the hotel. There is only one man Charlie fears might stand in his way of recovering his treasure, fellow thief “Pussy Saunders” named for his affection for his black feline friend.

    The filmgoer almost immediately realizes that Charlie should have yet another man to fear, the awkwardly nouveau riche Jerry, who has already been told by this time by the former hotel manager, Joyce (Vera Sherborne), that the hotel is a failure and is deep in debt. At present there are only a few guests, an elderly deaf woman, Mrs. LeGrange (Anthony Holles) accompanied by a caretaker, and a brother Mr. Meek (Philip Morant) and sister, Miss Meek (Paddy Browne), posing as travelers.

      Jerry’s first act is to put up a flag to turn what really looks more like a boarding house into a real hotel, and the arrival soon after of Gentleman Charlie and his companion and various detectives seems to justify his meaningless act. While the whole the flag was being dug up, the workman discovered the little tin box and tossed it aside. And, of course, that box, discovered by various of the hotel guests, almost all of them posing as someone other than they are, grab up the box, put it away in the hotel safe, and seek to control its contents.

     Jerry Mason is clever enough to himself open up its contents, allowing him, in the end, enough money to support his new inheritance.

    In the meantime, we are treated to a camp delight as one by one we discover some of the males appearing in drag, including Miss Meek, and to watch the male duo of thieves readily agree to share one of the hotel’s narrow beds.

     Gradually, the cat leads them all—accompanied by Gounod’s “Funeral March of the Marionettes” (popularly known as the theme music for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents)— to Splendide hotel room number 7, wherein sits Pussy Saunders, who has successfully appeared in drag as Mrs. LeGrange throughout. Even the British Film Institute, describes this film as a campy film.

     After working at a desk job, director Michael Powell had himself gone to work with his hotel-owning father at the Voile d’Or at Cap Ferrat near Monte Carlo. Despite the “Quota” dismissal, accordingly, Powell sought out to make a serious film comedy, with himself appearing as the gang member’s bugging device engineer, Marconi.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).