Euros Lyn | Heartstopper: Friend / 2022

the possibilities of friendship

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Oseman (screenplay), Euros Lyn (director) Heartstopper: Friend / 2022 [Season 1, Episode 5] [27 minutes]

 

Superficially one of the weakest of the first season’s offerings, episode 5 of the popular gay series Heartstopper begins with the endless problem—at least for William Gao’s character Tao Xu—concerning his friend Charlie Spring’s (Joe Locke) infatuation with the rugby jock Nick Nelson (Kit Connor). Celebrating with their close friends, Tao, Elle (Yasmin Finney), and Isaac (Tobie Donovan) can’t seem to even enjoy each other’s company given Tao’s endless worries over Charlie’s current “date.”

     This is all made even more problematic with Charlie’s insistence that Nick be present at his birthday party, an event that is more than a simple representation of his coming of age, but also perhaps signifies the fact that he is gradually moving out of their circle into a different world in which they inhabit.

 

   The episode attempts to sort out those problems, which frankly are far less interesting than Charlie and Nick’s own ever-growing deep love for one another, and diminish the fact, basically, that Elle and Tao are growing closer together as a nearly impossible couple given their own variances.

      The series doesn’t make light of any of the problems, including Nick’s own attempts to finally make it clear to Imogen (Rhea Norwood) that he’s not truly interested in her, made far more difficult given the fact her dog has just died and, so she proclaims, this is the worst week of her life. The empathic Nick is put in a position that makes it difficult to explain his situation. And what’s Nick to do when he also joyfully accepts Charlie’s invitation to celebrate his birthday while at the same time Imogen is announcing to the world that she and Nick are going out together on the same night?

     Yes, these are adolescent dilemmas, but they truly do matter in a burgeoning underground gay relationship, particularly given the inevitable problems facing such relationships in many such still closeted worlds.

     The issue of “Friend” is quite simply whether Nick is going to remain a distant “friend” or someone who now sees Charlie as someone he might truly want to describe, if even only to himself, as a “boyfriend,” the early stage of what in the gay world is defined as a lover. And, of course, Tao is there precisely to keep tabs about that relationship, cynical as he is about its reality.

     These may be false tensions, but in the minds of 16- and 17-year old boys and girls, they are quite substantial. Moreover, what’s worse is that Tao, in support of his friend, interferes even when

Nick himself attempts to calm down Harry Greene’s (Cormac Hyde-Corrin) homophobic comments about both Charlie and Tao. As Charlie attempts to explain to his life-long friend, he’s only making everything worse. When you’re in the closet, as Nick is, it’s even worse when uncloseted boys such as Charlie and Tao interrupt even make the vaguest of supports by the closeted boy to speak out. How does someone come out of the closet when, on one hand he’s being protected by his best friend/lover and, on the other, being suspected of being straight by that friend’s long-time friend? How can that door even be gradually slid open?

     The psychological pull in this film is between Charlie’s old, open outsider friends and his new insider lover Nick. Neither side seems able to break down the prejudices of the others, often with good reasons, leaving Charlie in a tug of war that might finally break him apart. And actually does, as we shall see in later episodes. Coming out, so Oseman’s and Lyn’s challenging series reveals, is a never-ending process, even for the one who has openly declared his sexuality. It’s no longer a process of whom to come out to, but how to help others through the same process, and how to break down the truly tribal warfare that exists even in societies that believe they might accept “the other.” The problem is always who that “other” might include; and in this case that “other” is the high school jock hero. If Charlie is dispensable to the straight world surrounding him, Nick is not. He is one of them, so they believe, and speaks for their own sexual “difference.” The planet of “difference” has suddenly swung into another direction.

    Nick bravely chooses to keep his date with Charlie, but how now to face the outsider world head-on?

    In this series the characters seem to have penchant for overhearing each other in the bathroom and other private spaces, and this time when Charlie meets with Tao in the men’s room, where he finally explains that Nick is his “friend”—a coded word even in this openly gay series that means everything that truly matters—Tao is forced to back off, and Nick, having heard the uttered word, is a bit astounded. He needs obviously, to rethink what friendship truly means.

     And yes, of course, even somewhat thick-headed Nick finally realizes that he finally has to explain to Imogen how things stand. What’s terribly sad, however, in this teen rom-com is that Nick wishes that he had met Charlie when he was younger! What could that possibly mean, a time before puberty, when he and Charlie might have played sexual games without any of the teenage anxieties? We know things might have ended even more complex if that had been the case.

      For anyone who thinks this series might have been simple, I suggest they attend to this quite serious exploration of gay teenage problems and the complex emotions that go along with them. If episode 5 is not particularly profound, it summarizes the concerns that need to be resolved between young boys finally coming to terms with themselves.

      Nick cancels his late date with Imogen, kisses Charlie full on the lips, and the next morning tells his ex-girlfriend “You’re a really nice person, but I don’t like you like that,” a purposely queer sentence construction which explains everything. He adds, “I’m not sure we fit together. I’m not sure I fit with you.”

       If Imogen doesn’t quite get the message, Nick certainly has begun to comprehend the difficult transformation in which he about to engage: “Did you ever feel like you’re only doing things because everyone else is? And you’re scared to change? Or do something that might confuse or surprise people? Your real personality has been buried inside you for a really long time. I guess, um, how I’ve been feeling like recently.”

       I have rarely heard a better definition of what it might feel like to realize that you’re not the person you and others have been imagining, that you, in fact, don’t share the same sexuality expected of you. This should be broadcast as a major “coming out” lesson.

        Even Imogen “gets it,” and tells the bullies that she and Nick have decided that they’re best as friends.

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).  

    

Norman McLaren | Neighbours / 1952

little white houses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Norman McLaren (screenwriter and director) Neighbours / 1952

 

As Emilio Martí López noted in his insightful essay on Norman McLaren “McLaren’s Closet: Expressing and Hiding Homosexual Desire in Norman McLaren’s Filmography Through the Reinvention of the Body and Space,” the mostly abstract and animated films of the noted Canadian filmmaker were hidden and coded works since the author, working before gay liberation at the basically liberal NFB (National Film Board) of Canada which, accordingly, was carefully watched through the Cold War by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. One’s dress and hairstyle or even a casual discussion of opera might lead to one’s dismissal for being a homosexual. McLaren’s cinematic contributions, accordingly, were definitely part of what Vito Russo described as “The Celluloid Closet.”

     Unfortunately, not all of McLaren’s films have yet been discussed in the LGBTQ context, but with the help of Martí López and others such as Thomas Waugh, I have been attempting to reconsider as many of his films as possible. Perhaps one of the easiest of these is his 1952 eight-minute short Neighbours, a bit easier to “read” simply because it involves live human actors instead of animated animals and symbols. Even here, however, things often appear to represent the opposite of what they seem to be suggesting.

     This film consists of two human cartoon-like men who, living next door, who obviously get on well, even if they read the same news from slightly opposite perspectives, one newspaper headline reading “Peace Certain If No War” and the other “War Certain If No Peace.” But it is clear, even from the shape and outline of their two cartoon houses in the background that they somehow are the mirror image of each other and would be better off if they could join forces, their seemingly “half” houses becoming a whole.

     They sit with their bodies half directed toward in each other, both with Oxford shoes, brown-toned pants, and blue dress shirts with ties hooked round their necks, one a bowtie and the other a regular necktie. Both have black hair and both are smoking pipes. Given the perspective they seem to be sitting on the very edge of their property lines about as far away from their houses as they can get which might be saying something about whatever is within and their relationship to it. In any event, they seem comfortable at being mirror images of one another, suburban-living males who still can treasure the trees and grass growing around them. This reads almost as a Canadian version of Leonard Bernstein’s suburban opera fantasy, Trouble in Tahiti, without, at least in the few first sequences, any apparent “trouble” in their paradise.

      That is until something strange happens. A small yellow flower, which from a distance might almost be identified as a dandelion, struggles into the sun popping up in the small distance between where they have placed their feet about half-way between where they sit and their houses.

      In unison, they both stand and walk toward it, the man on the right (I’ll call him the clean-  shaven man, the other, the man with a moustache) demonstrates his delight in its sudden arrival. The flower itself seems to curtsey to each of them before bowing down for a second and standing erect once more.

     You half expect the other one to be offended by such a weed growing on or so near to his property, but he too sniffs it, showing his utter pleasure of its existence. Clearly these are not quite your typical macho homeowners who might immediately pull out their pruning shears and snap it off or, at the very least, push out their lawnmowers and return their yards into a pure green expanse.

      Indeed, these men carry their joy a bit further, the man with the moustache rowing through the grass in joy on his buttocks, as he returns to the other when they both bend down again to smell the flower, wrapping their heads in union around it in opposite directions and shifting them in the opposite direction in almost what might be interpreted, from a distance, as a mutual kiss. 

     They stand, look at one another, join hands and begin a series of seemingly animated balletic movements, leaping into the air and pirouetting through space, while spinning and reeling through the air in absolute terpsichorean delight.

      These are not at all your typical suburban male neighbors. In fact, you can only say given their graceful maneuvers they are extraordinarily “queer” in the ordinary meaning of that word. These suburban dwellers have something more in common with Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote or even the Roadrunner than your Sunday suburban family man. The East Texans have a word for folks who possibly cross over the sexual lines; these men are definitely “loose in their shoes.”

    But the same wild energy they show in their pleasure remains buried within; and their obvious joy becomes something that both men have so longed for that they now desire to hold onto it, to possess as their very own, as if were something akin to their very identities.

    The flower they might have easily shared becomes the source of a territorial fight, a battle of possession which they express by both insisting that the flower is growing on their property, not in that indeterminable area in-between. For if they admitted that the flower belonged to both of them it would also mean that they would have share themselves, at least regarding their own feelings about the flower and, just maybe, the physical bodies wherein those feelings reside—a total impossibility for the place and time in which they exist. To be good neighbors is one thing but to actually “love thy neighbor”—which becomes, in fact, the moral of this fable—is too dangerous of a concept to admit.

      The only way these men know of how to truly touch —including expressing their true feelings for—one another is through contact sports, in which they soon engage. As they build a fence between them in order to protect their new prized treasure, the very word quickly leads to the idea of “fencing” and ultimately to wrestling, which ends in actual wounds and pain, the very opposite of the pleasure they are trying to protect.

      Their “sport,” moreover, quickly turns into battle and spires out of control into the war of which the headlines warned them at the beginning of this film. As we know, war nearly always inevitably ends by involving and hurting the innocent who suffer the warriors’ increasing anger and frustration.

     As Martí López argues, like Dorian Gray, their hidden violence suddenly becomes evident in their own faces, which is now revealed in the childlike war paint they suddenly wear. As they tear down their cartoon edifices to reveal behind them their wives and babies, they too are violated and destroyed as if they were mere mannikins or dolls.

     The flower for which they are fighting has died in the battle, and at last both men fall on the battlefield of their respective territories, apparently dead.

      Martí López summarizes what I have been saying from a more traditional psychological perspective:

 

               The neighbours of this film, faced with the appearance of (homosexual)

               pleasure that the flower represents, act with the violence of repression: the

               very fence that is erected is a metaphor of their internal defences, those

               defences that closeted homosexuals are specialists in constructing in order to

               hide their feelings and sexuality from the world and from themselves.

               Furthermore, this wooden barrier is yet another of the film’s phallic symbols:

               the way in which a neighbour threatens the other with one of its vertical slats

               would be a subconscious invitation to the sexual game with an erect penis.

               Neighbours is thus a tirade against violence, but also a reflection on its

               causes, fundamentally (sexual) repression, control. The fight between the

               men would, therefore, be a way of venting sexual tension, a theory that is

               applied to “contact sports, extreme fighting” but also precisely to “cinematic or

               videographic warfare”—safe means for the “heterosexual man” to exhibit

               himself as well as look at other men.

 

     Having fought a symbolic sexual battle both within themselves and with each other in space, and in so doing having done away with any pretense of family ties, we see them in the last frames buried next to one another like a married couple. Yellow flowers creep upon the grass-carpeted rise of their graves, one on each, singular but matched as these two sexually repressed neighbors were forced to be throughout their active lives.

     So does McLaren explore within his simple fable about waring neighbors a sublimated tale of homosexual desire repressed by the “pretend” society in which they exist. Just as in Bernstein’s suburban opera, “behind the front door of the little white houses” in.... “Scarsdale, Wellesley Hills, Ozone Park, Highland Park, Shaker Heights, Michigan Park, and Beverly Hills”...and yes, even Scarborough,  Etobicoke, and Vaughan is homosexuality, loneliness, and fear. “Ratty boo.”

 

Los Angeles, July 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Willard Maas | Image in the Snow / 1943-48, released 1952

the dream of unhappiness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willard Maas (screenwriter and director) Image in the Snow / filmed 1943-48, 1952 released

 

Poet and filmmaker Willard Maas was an absolutely fascinating being. Married to fellow experimental filmmaker Marie Menken who, despite his regular extramarital sexual relations with other men, seemingly tolerated his homosexuality, the two held regular salons to which they invited a wide range of intellectuals, visual artists, writers, filmmakers, poets, and others. For many years he was a faculty member at Wagner College in New York, involved with the New York City Writer’s Conference, held at that college.

     Despite their sexual tolerance, however, the couple were notorious for their shouting matches, particularly when they both were drunk. Andy Warhol described them: "Willard and Marie were the last of the great bohemians. They wrote and filmed and drank—their friends called them 'scholarly drunks'—and were involved with all the modern poets."

      Fellow filmmaker Kenneth Anger has described them as possibly being the models for George and Martha of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—certainly possible since Albee was a writer in residence at Wagner.

      Maas’ 1948 film Image in the Snow, a film he apparently worked on over a five-year period before its release in 1952, is very much the kind of “coming out” film in the manner of what I have designated the A version of that genre, exemplified by Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Curtis Harrington’s Fragment of Seeking (1946) and  Picnic (1948), Gregory J. Markopoulos’ Christmas, USA (1949) and his Twice a Man (1963), James Broughton’s Adventures of Jimmy (1950), John Schmitz’s Voices (1953), and A. J. Rose, Jr.’s Penis (1965), among others.

      In Maas’ narrative, as in most of the films above, a handsome young man is lying on a bed asleep or half between sleeping and waking. We soon discover that this young man is living with his mother well past the time when most men of his age have married and pursued their own lives, and he is anxious to break the ties he has with her.

     In his dream he sees himself climbing down from a rooftop water tower, apparently the same water tower he sees outside his bedroom window. On the rooftop he goes over to peer down into a small rectangular space in the midst of the brick building in which lives, apparently a space used as a burning pit. He spies a body spinning into that space.

      Meanwhile, he has not yet noticed that a well-fit man, clearly a bodybuilder dressed only in work-out shorts, has begun his poses. Observing him, the man  leans slightly back as in awe of the figure as he continues to display his muscles. The boy’s eyes attend immediately to the crotch and just as suddenly the body-builder disappears into thin air.

       Again the boy turns to look into the pit, watching another body spin through the air to its death. When he turns back, he sees a lithe, young man without a shirt and dressed in white sheer pants climbing down the fire escape. The vision suddenly leaps into the rooftop arena and begins to dance, jumping, twisting, and turning in various positions to Ben Weber’s marvelous twelve-tone score.

        Just as suddenly, the dancer also disappears, and the boy is left alone, puzzled by his visions.

      A final vision appears as a woman (“a princess”) holding an urn which eventually she hands the boy. Within is a dove which the boy holds lovingly for a brief while before letting it fly free to join other birds in the night sky.

       The camera turns back to the boy back in his bed, as he rises, dresses, and joins his mother in the kitchen where she is frying him eggs for breakfast. She serves them up on a plate and he turns as if to eat, but finally with growing frustration and anger resulting from his dreams, he throws the plate to the floor, puts on his coat, and leaves the house, the mother looking out the window with a tear running from her eye, knowing that he has left home forever in search of happiness and love.

        Before I proceed, I should mention that so far this young man’s visions parallel those of the other bed-bound dreamers of Anger’s, Markopoulos’, and Schmitz’s works, in which just such a bed-bound being faces his past ties to women, his attractions to the male body, and his relationship to them. As in these films as well as those of Harrington, Broughton, and Rose the dreamer ultimately must turn his back on those images in order to face a future of his own making.

       And in this case as in all of the filmmakers’ works I mention above (with perhaps the exception of Broughton’s) that future, however, is seemingly futile, a dark world which does not allow entry—indeed at one point, as in Schmitz’s Voices Maas’ young man stares into a window like a voyeur only to realize he does not belong to the world he witnesses therein—ending inevitably in a sense of total loneliness, isolation, and a death associated with traditional religious iconography. In short, there is little hope for the man dreaming of a life with other men. In coming out, the creator reveals his own fears of societal and religious rejection leading to an empty bed of the kind that Mark Gaspar spoke of in his 1989 film by that title. In short “coming out” ends, in these fearful early films, almost always in a symbolic death.

        It’s a terrifying viewpoint, belied by what he have to presume were other realities that most of these young gay men found available to them. And, obviously, it is a viewpoint of young gay men who in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s who held very romantic notions about love and, by extension, life itself.

       But never was this made more apparent than in Maas’s almost maudlin poetry which accompanies his film. Whereas the others’ films expressed these concerns, fortunately, mostly in the silence of their images, Maas’ central image of snow, alas, does not result in a quiet covering over the dying world, but in an accompanying noisy recitation of his hot-house poetry that might remind one of a fin de siècle-like gay writer such as James Branch Cabell representing a homosexual world filled with fairy queens, princesses, and heroes in shining armor.

         After the preface, read as the screen is dark, to the quite arresting first images he creates, Maas verbally intrudes with an endless series of tremulous poetic lines that turn the modern angst of his black-sweatered mid-century hero into a doomed figure of the past who apparently cannot escape “the iron lock of love,” warning us of even the man’s loving mother:

 

             Mother, mother, your chains of flower twine like a hangman’s chord.

             Alone the lonely seek the happiness happiness is.

     As our young gay hero climbs down from the water tower to look into the pit of what he fears will be his life, the poet in Maas cannot help but send him verbally spinning out of control:

 

“Down the ladders of dream the boy descends into the sweet country where joy triumphs in the wish and anguish bearing the scar of the kiss takes fire in a vision of love whose vision are the lonely pictures of pleasure, fairy princesses, crowned hero...” etc.

 

    The fairy princess, in fact, shows up: “In a dream the princess comes bearing a fairy urn of blessedness. Within is a dove.”

        As our unhappy young man discovers the dove, finally letting it free, the poet recites:

 

             From your hand the dove flies high

             Joining doves in the night sky

             Fly, fly, high in the sky

             Fly, fly with the stars before dreams die.

             Before overall, the cold snow falls.   

                 

       Finally, as the young man leaves his home for what seems like a permanent search of the streets of New York City, we get another despairing stanza to see him off:

 

           Where is the door through happiness comes dancing

           As the terror of day is lost in the tinkling of stars.

           Through the walls of loneliness the dreamer goes

           The cross of his longing burns through the shadows of sorrow

           And always the spectral angel haunting the meadows

               of want and the snow, the falling snow.

     Maas’ images of that new world, mostly of dark and dreary streets, abandoned buildings (which appear as well in Schmitz’s and Rose’s work), backlots of litter and ruin, and finally a cemetery with reliquaries and shrines where he finally curls up as if he were making a snow angel on the ground before being buried up by the snow itself—are all quite striking and explain the interest in his films by critics such as Jonas Mekas. But, alas, I can’t separate Weber’s powerful music and Maas’ fascinating imagery from the sentimental viewpoints expressed in the filmmaker’s poetic endeavors.

      We realize that for many artistically inclined young post-war boys suddenly facing a world without the normative familial and cultural structures of life must indeed have terrified them regarding their futures; but how I wish, at times, for the wisdom of another gay man living in New York at the very same moment, Frank O’Hara:

 

            Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.

 

Los Angeles, May 18, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).

 

 

Joseph Losey | The Big Night / 1951

going haywire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Losey, Stanley Ellin, Hugo Butler, and Ring Lardner, Jr. (screenplay, based on the novel Dreadful Summit by Stanley Ellin), Joseph Losey (director) The Big Night / 1951

 

The burly owner of a local bar, Andy La Main (Preston Foster) is planning a special night at a boxing match for his son George’s (John Drew Barrymore) birthday; he’s even bought him a birthday cake with candles. But the youthful, book-loving George, who has just been pummeled by a local gang, can’t even get up enough wind to blow them all out, director Joseph Losey, hinting, as he does in so many of his films, that there is something a bit “different” about his likeable character, both in his seeming tenderness (babies immediately love him) and in his demeanor (he’s far too gentle, it seems, for the bar and boxing world his father inhabits). Without saying it, the director hints that his protagonist, a boy without a mother, is perhaps gay. As Losey, himself bisexual, has one of his other characters express it: “I mean, each of us has got secret things deep inside, and if we don't have someone we can share them with, we usually go all haywire.”

     A few minutes into this first scene upon witnessing a noted sportscaster, Al Judge (Howard St. John) entering the bar with his henchman to demand that Andy bare his chest so that he might severely beat him with his cane, the boy bursts into tears. Why didn’t his strong father fight back he demands to know from the bartender, Flanagan, who has evidently lived with the father for 16 years since Andy’s mother left. Soon after, when George pockets a gun kept for protection behind the bar and races off into the night, we recognize the subject of this film will be the discovery and vindication of the young’s boy’s manhood.

      The journey he takes in his “big night,” is, quite naturally, led by an alcoholic professor, Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), the standard pedant of anatomy fictions, who after buying George’s second ticket to attend the fight (a fight, incidentally that Losey doesn’t even bother to show us, and ends after only a few moments into the first round), takes us into the late-night noir underworld of jazz clubs and after hours bars that Cooper inhabits and where George hopes to be able to confront his father’s attacker.

 

     Under the professor’s corrupt tutelage, the boy meets Cooper’s unhappy girlfriend, Julie (Dorothy Comingore), a corrupt cop, and a beautiful black singer (Mauri Lynn, singing Lyn Murray’s and Sid Kuller’s appropriate composition “Am I Too Young”), and finally, Julie’s sweet sister, Marion (Joan Lorring), while embarrassing himself as he compliments the singer’s beauty with a racial sidebar beginning with “despite the fact….” Clearly George is too still too young and unknowing to get along in this world; and besides, for the first time in his life he becomes drunk, awakening to be told by Marion that he has spent a long while getting to know the stairs.

      Nonetheless, by the close of his big night, he does meet up with Al Judge, only to discover that the woman whom his father was seeing, Frances, who had suddenly disappeared from their lives, was Al’s sister, who committed suicide when George’s father refused to marry her. When Judge turns George’s shaking gun on the boy himself, it goes off, presumably killing Judge; but rather than being an intentional act, this time it is only accidental. George fails, it appears, even if he succeeds.

      Returning home, he admits what he has done to his father, discovering that Andy could not marry Frances because the boy’s mother is still living and he is still married to her, having refused to get a divorce. More sentimental than George has ever perceived, Andy remains in love with the woman who has left him for another man.

      Inevitably, the police arrive, believing Andy has tried to retaliate for his beating, but George, finally proving himself as an adult, screams out the truth from his bedroom window, confessing to the act. It appears that, in fact, the shot only grazed Judge, without killing him. And Andy insists that he be the one to go to jail for a short time.

      The New York Times critic of the day, Bosley Crowther argued the story, based on a novel by Stanley Ellin, is “presumptuous and contrived.” But I think Crowther, given the rest of his rant against the film, simply misunderstood the work.

     Losey is not truly interested in the standard noir themes of strong men and their loose women, but uses the scene, rather to explore what it even means to be a man—or woman, for that matter—in a world that demands penance for being someone other. Losey’s film can easily been seen in a long line of Menippean satires filled with stock figures of both high and low worlds. George is young and gentle, a bookworm instead of a street tough; Andy, still pining for his wife, has evidently taken up with his bartender; Cooper is a man unable to face up to the cruelty of the world, and his girlfriend is a kind of sadist in her love for him; even the pure-minded Marion realizes that, despite the gentle kiss she receives from George, that she is too old for him.

       In short, Losey’s film is not truly about boxing, guns, and macho wise-cracks, the staples of the genre in which he has set his character types, but about outsiders, those who truly do not fit into that world. Ultimately, it is not they who have gone haywire—although on the surface it appears they all are quite crazy—but the world around them that miscomprehends, perverts, and destroys their decency and love.

      If later Losey found far more complex representatives of his vision in actors such as Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, and Michael York than in his early films of green- and blond-haired boys, it is still utterly fascinating to see how consistent his vision was. And, in the end, I admire this 1951 film for what it attempts.

 

Los Angeles, June 7, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2017).