learning to waltz
by Douglas Messerli
George Green and Dale Van Every (story and
screenplay, with additional dialogue by Clarence Marks and Tom Buckingham), William Wyler (director) Tom of Culver / 1932
Tom of Culver was apparently assigned by the studio to Wyler, not something that he
might have chosen to direct. Yet it makes what, on the surface, is a rather
standard “poor and tough kid goes straight” kind of movie into a somewhat
deeper character study by pushing it on several fronts through the introduction
of unpredictably comic elements with regard to Tom Brown’s (played by the actor
of the same name) employment at a coffee shop and relationship with the shop’s
owner. Add to these his later friendships with Elmer “Slim” Whitman (Slim
Summerville), and the somewhat intense and homoerotic boyhood relationships Tom
has at the Culver Military Academy with his roommate, Robert Randolph III
(Richard Cromwell) and the handsome, obviously carefully casted cadets (which
included youthful appearances by Tyrone Power, Alan Ladd, Dick Winslow, Matty
Roubert, and Kit Wain) and you suddenly realize you have a hot gay movie.
The film begins as a boxing flick, with Andy Devine as a gym manager,
but fortunately shifts away from its “Dead End Kids”-like beginning to
Slim’s coffee shop after having a surprise visit from Tom’s supposedly dead
“war hero” father (H. B. Warner, who performed in 9 other films in 1932 alone); Tom is sent off by Slim with the help the American Legion to the military academy
in memory of his supposedly war-hero dad.
Predictably, Tom does not immediately take to the barrack-like
conditions and the requirements of a soldier-like training, but after his at
first confrontational relationship with his roommate Robert, he quickly adapts
to school and succeeds in becoming the good kid who wants to become a doctor
that any father might have wanted. The plot is basically empty except for a few
standard and expected incursions of authority, evaded by the boys’ covering up
for one another.
The earliest scenes in the movie read more than a military training film
than a feature family movie. And the only engaging scenes involve Tom’s
attempts to circumvent his conversion into a militarized robot, which in some
senses is what he will have to become if he is survive in this environment.
A
trip back home during the holidays shows up Tom and Robert’s good boy
possibilities, as Slim gets them together to pass out Christmas presents to
patients at the Legion Hospital, one of the men in the beds being, unknown to
Tom, his own father.
In other scenes at the diner, Wyler attempts to turn Slim into a comic,
but when that fails he brings in a truly “daffy” customer played by Lew Kelly
who performed from 1928-1944 in over 200 films. At one point, after delivering
up several absurd statements which Eugène Ionesco might have loved, Kelly,
about to leave, stands to orate: “I'm sorry, but if I leave before I start I'd
have to come back, so I'd better wait here till after I'm gone so I'll be sure
and be here when I return.” This is early Beckett language.
Robert, moreover, has a crush—a bit like gay boys of my age might have
had for Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand—for the buxom actress of the day,
Dolores Delight (Betty Blythe), going AWOL to catch her performance during a
holiday break, Tom covering up for him by providing a dummy to fill his bed and
a convincing shift of voice tones to call out his name upon nighttime
inspection.
Tom, of course, has to face the central challenge to their friendship
and the major plot development of the film which comes in the form of his own
father who, despite his determination to keep the facts—after his makeshift
tent of a hospital in which he was operating was bombed, killing all his
colleagues, he deserted, exchanging badges with one of the dead men—from his
son. He cannot resist showing up from his junior graduation ceremony. A sudden
rainstorm, whose thunder calls up his memories of the bombings, forces him,
totally unconvincingly, to admit the truth to Tom before running back to his
hotel room with the intention to kill himself.
Realizing the full significance of the visit, Tom follows the “stranger”
back to his hotel and saves him from the intended bullets of his gun, insisting
that instead of his father moving on to a new life that he will join him,
dropping out from his senior year.
Finally, discovering the reasons for Tom’s inexplicable decision, a
teacher helps him to comprehend that his father’s desertion was actually shell
shock (what today we would describe as posttraumatic stress disorder) and
arranges for his father to receive an honorable discharge, allowing Tom's dad to remain near to Tom for his son’s final year at school.
But there is a long empty space between these major issues of plot,
Tom’s matriculation and his meet-up with his father, and Wyler fills that with
the interactions of the young cadets with one another and a slightly coded
love-affair between Tom and Robert.
Almost as if to ease his audience into accepting what is clearly a
growing love between the two boys, the writers and director reveal the normal
patterns of all male boarding schools, asking one slower-to-mature cadet than
the others to play a kind of school “faggot” who mostly spends his time writing
letters home to his mother, a boy whom his peers have tagged as “flutters.” As
usual, this poor kid is bullied by the other boys, including Tom and Robert, in
one crucial scene even denying him entry to Tom’s birthday party where the boys
have devoured a birthday cake sent by Slim without leaving a slice for the uninvited
boy. Following the boy back to his room, presumably to further taunt him, Tom
and Robert suddenly catch him at the very moment when he receives a cable
announcing the death of his mother, putting an immediate stop to his peer
bullying, while still establishing the fact that movies of the 1930s did not
like to admit that there were males who didn’t fit into the established
heterosexual pattern.
Indeed, Wyler suggests that Tom and Robert might be headed there as
well. Obviously, Wyler has seen William Wellman’s film Wings and poses
his even younger military “friends” in face-to-face encounters that hint that
they enjoy one another’s company for a bit more than simply to chatter.
But
it is when the time comes for an instructor to teach the boys how to waltz that
their “romance” truly is allowed to bloom on camera. Despite the fact that the
two have just had a tiff over the fact that Robert has returned to campus late,
they almost light up when asked to take each other in their arms to learn how
to properly dance. And when the teacher insists that they further wind their
hands around each other’s bodies, moving closer together, their intense stare
into one another’s eyes says everything, as well as unwittingly taking us back
to one of the first seeming queer images in all of film history, Edison’s two
dancing “brothers” of William Kennedy Dicksons’ 1894 or 1895 early film.
Of
course, the movie reassures us, with Tom’s father's return and reclamation, that
the boy will grow up to be a successful family doctor with his own family to
look after as well. The friendships he made at the Academy are those that help
to make a man. But Wyler’s images can never lie, the lunge forward of Tom into
Robert’s open smile tells us everything.
Los Angeles, December 28, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December
2021).
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