Gregory J. Markopoulos | Swain / 1950

escape from hell

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos (screenwriter, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, and director) Swain / 1950

 

Gregory Markopoulos’ 1950 short film Swain has a great many things in common, structurally and narratively, with the works of Curtis Harrington (in particular his 1946 film Fragment of Seeking), Kenneth Anger (Fireworks of 1947) and other early “coming out” works—what I describe as the “A” version—of the period, including his own Christmas, USA of 1949. The major difference, however, which also perhaps requires us to even reconsider the earlier works I mention, is that Markopoulos’ Swain, in its exaggerated tropes and its early-color vignettes, as if we were skipping through a scrapbook, is also very funny, seeming at moments, almost to make light of the genre his dear friends and he himself had already established. Perhaps, we suddenly perceive, Harrington, Anger, and others, despite their serious pleas for an escape from normative sex, were also having more fun with their expressions than we might have imagined, laughing at times at their own suffering.

     Like the previous works, Swain concerns a ritualized rejection of heterosexuality. Our hero, played by Markopoulos himself, has clearly had enough in the pits of his hetero-pretense represented in this case by a swamp full of alligators, a moccasin snake, and a dead bird from which a worm on his wing, as our hero climbs out of his own “slough of despondency,” struggling his way back into the Ohio landscape (Markopoulos was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio) wherein he is more at home. The scene of him clawing his way up to the highway can only remind one of a scene in Harrington’s 1948 movie, Picnic, where the queer figure, in search of escape, climbs up an endless staircase with crooked steps that seem to be growing as he struggles to make his way to the top.

    Markopoulos, our queer hero, does eventually scramble up the bank to reach the highway, doing what can only be described as a little dance of joy as he runs off in his escape from the matrimonial pits he has been facing.

    He next goes seeking his home, a kind “room of one’s own” to which he can escape to rest and create. On the way into the house, he stops briefly to caress a statue of a pan-like figure, the commentator named “Blogn” on letterboxd describing him traipsing around “a masculine statue in a way I can only describe as sultry.” He further communes with the demonic and satyr-like masks lining the rafters of the house like iconic male protectors.

     As in nearly all the early “coming out” films, the first thing he does once inside is to lie down on a bed, obviously the best place to rest after one’s struggle with the opposite gender and to further contemplate one’s decision to move away from the conventional. Yet Markopoulos’ bed is not the narrow hospital-like bed that shows up in many of these works, but a large double bed upon which he falls to sleep.

   Soon after, however, we see that he has been followed by the film’s symbol of the female sex and the expectation of matrimony, performed in this work by Mary Zelles, swathed in a silken white dress that clearly reminds us of a wedding gown.

     The hero, upon discovering that she has followed him, retreats to the greenhouse, the in-house version of a solarium which was often the scene to which young couples retreat. But the greenhouse, in this case, is a world of flowers, not potted palms, which the male accepts as he rightful domain, having become in his own mind, symbolically speaking, a feminized gardener of dahlias and lilies.

     But even here he is not safe, as the woman follows him, striding forcefully toward a world of beauty in which he feels safely hidden behind the fragile leaves and petals of nature. But she enters without hesitation, seeking him out. He backs away, turns tail, and hurries off into another hothouse chamber, she a bit like an Electra seeking revenge follows.

     He escapes, she still following, this time with a long black coat over her white dress, as she crosses a train bridge where she observes a man walking with a small child—reminding her surely of what she may lose without if she cannot change his mind.

     Yet, as she observes in an abstract work of art leaning against the walkway, perhaps by her former male friend himself, his life has been a hell; the work seem abstractly to reveal this history of our hero to date, including his attempt to escape the devilish world below, and in her realization walks off to a destination other than his, the smoke for the train engine billowing upward and reminding us, perhaps, of the final leave of the two would-be lovers in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945).

       A change in the music and the images of several high ornate towers suggests perhaps that she travels elsewhere and hints at a kind of release to the heavens.

     Our hero, meanwhile, walks across a must smaller bridge over a rivulet and moves off into a mark, stopping at one point at a small memorial before meeting up, obviously much later, with his former girlfriend, now dressed in a handsome blue suit with red collars. She smiles broadly as he appears, the two having cast away their “armor,” now joining in a friendly conversation with each other, without their previous constraints.

     For a moment, many of the terrifying images of the past flip by before the camera returns to their pleasant repast on the memorial in which they’ve seated themselves. And this time, it is she who stands up and leaves him alone.

      For one last moment, our hero imagines yet again that she has locked him up in a room from which he cannot escape; but then he soon realizes he is free to move off alone.

    With the use of serious classical music, some of it sounding like Stravinsky, and the highly wrought narrative, there are moments in this “coming out” work that in its melodramatic tropes approaches camp, and almost appears to be satirizing the work of his peers and himself of a few years earlier. Yet the serious message of the queer renunciation of the conventional sexuality remains as a powerful statement in this 1950 film, at a time when commercial Hollywood had long been forced to abandon all such concerns.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).