Karina Grinstein | El Chicle (Bubble Gum) / 2020

blow-up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karina Grinstein (screenwriter and director) El Chicle (Bubble Gum) / 2020 [13 minutes]

 

I’m sorry, despite how much Argentine director Karina Grinstein attempts to convince me that all a boy, a bit confused about this sexuality, really needs is a good stick of pink bubble gum, I’m truly not convinced.

      Mariano Rojo (as David) is certainly cute, and I might go to bed with him any night, if he’d only take that bubble gum—which in most cases in this black-and-white universe appears as a surprising pink bubble—out of his mouth.

   I’m glad he runs into the businessman Javier (Hernán Statuto) and finds his true love in a red bubble, and most importantly, gets rid of the totally black-and-white, heterosexual Zoe (Zoe Peressini). This film attempts a kind of mythological romance in the manner of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 movie The Red Balloon, but really, pink bubblegum is not my thing. As Zoe quite easily reveals, it sticks to you and leaves the sad memory behind on your heel or even, in another occasion with a possible pick-up, or perhaps even your butt.

      This cute pick-up also seems so sexually confused to the degree that only a “chicle” moment appears to tempt him into the bed of another man. Perhaps David and Javier might really stick it out together, but really, chewing gum is not the cohesive force to last through decades of difficulty, as I can assure him and the director Karina Grinstein.

      The music by Leo Blumberg is charming, but really not enough to keep me attending to the pink bubbles blown out of a passing vehicle of intervention.

       If only this short film had simply dropped David into bed with Javier, why then we might have gotten somewhere! As it is, it’s only a silly triviality of the streets.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

Michael Heldman | Boys Beware (3rd edition) / 1979

what they did

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Heldman (screenwriter and director), Boys Beware (3rd edition) / 1979

 

Although this 14-minute film describes itself as the 3rd edition of the Boys Beware series—which it literally is since the first version was produced in 1955 and the second of 1961 was just a colorization—it seems to have forgotten that the true “second edition” had a different title. More importantly, however, is that this film, made by Michael Heldman, not Sid Davis, that represents a totally different approach to the subject of adult sexual molestation of young boys. Why it would even want to associate itself, accordingly, with the first two versions is fairly puzzling.

    Heldman’s work not only lists a number of serious consultants, but was filmed in cooperation of The Pasadena Police Force, as opposed to the Inglewood, California organizations. Like the earlier version, it uses variant examples, the first based on the newspaper boys from the Sid Davis film, maintaining basically the same character names and plot, except in this case much more dramatically portraying the events.

      The second incident, however, is a far more complex, new story involving a young black boy, Mike, who becomes a “friend” of a black man with a Porsche named Bert. In this case, it only takes Mike to visit his friend a second time before Bert invites him to what appears to be a slightly hippie-like party with both men and women drinking and smoking dope. It quickly becomes apparent, nevertheless, that Bert is serving as a pimp for one of the partyers, a white man who has been waiting for the young boy to show up, shoving him quickly into the bedroom to engage in sex. It is a far more specific and gruesome incident than in the earlier films, and we are not certain that the white bearded partyer is the only one who molests the child, particularly since the boy’s voice narrating the event, speaks of “what they [italics mine] did,” using the plural.

       The film’s third example, focusing on one of the most common forms of child abuse, concerns sexual molestation from a trusted friend of both the boy and his parents, in this case the boy’s baseball coach Mr. Galloway, who having troubles with his wife, turns his attentions to his young player. Since he lives near the boy’s family home, the coach always drives the kid home after practice. But like Ralph in the earlier series, this eventually escalates into the man buying the boy a Coke. Like Ralph, moreover, Galloway tells the boy some dirty jokes. He also pats his young friend on the shoulder, referring to the development of the boy’s body, all seemingly innocent acts but which, nonetheless, make the boy uncomfortable.

     The next week after practice, coach Galloway asks his young charge to stay after for a while. The coach shares pictures of naked women, unlike the earlier version making quite clearly the male sexual gender of the “pornographic pictures” the elder shares with the boy. But at this point the elder puts his arm around the young man suggesting they had known each other long enough to have some real secrets together.

     The narrating child recognizes immediately the strangeness of the behavior and leaves, reporting the events to his parents, although like so many boys in his situation fearing that they would not believe him since the man was such a good friend.

      In this case the parents take their son’s report quite seriously, and they, in turn, “call some people to talk to Mr. Galloway.” What that comment actually means is terribly vague, but presumably they called a psychiatrist rather than police authorities or, even worse, the juvenile authorities as the mother did in the earlier version of the film.

      The narrator reminds boys that it is not always easy to talk to one’s parents about such a situation, providing a list of other possible people the boy might approach: “teacher or counselor, police juvenile officer, doctor, clergyman, or a crisis hotline.”

      The final moments of the film summarize the dangers, reiterating the appropriate behavior, but also mentioning, if somewhat off-handedly, “not every adult who offers you a ride, asks for your trust or becomes physically affectionate intends to attack you.” 

      But the truly important aspect of this revisionist version of the film is that not once is the word “homosexual” or even “pedophile” mentioned. The abuser of the boys is simply called the “attacker,” and there is no suggestion that any of these figures might be a homosexual, particularly Mr. Galloway who is engaged in a crumbling heterosexual marriage. 

       The film also describes itself as an ancillary work to demonstrate that not only young girls can be attacked, but young boys equally. Although, it might have been interesting if the film had included an attack upon a young boy by a woman, a crime that often doesn’t get reported because it is perceived by both the boys and the culture as normative behavior and for some young males almost seen as a kind of “trophy.”

     Increasingly, however, the idea of conveying our cultural fears of child abuse by film has diminished, presumably in favor of more informed discussions with family or educators. But, in fact, it appears that many parents and teachers are simply incapable of discussing these issues, and over the past few years, more importantly, child abuse has become such a taboo subject that it cannot even be brought up in a classroom and is talked about almost in hysterical whispers by most parents. A sane discussion of the numerous issues surrounding such a truly complex issue is now almost impossible. Perhaps in retrospect, the “Boys Beware” films were the last attempt to even openly discuss this serious problem.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).

Sid Davis | Boys Beware / 1955 || Boys Beware / 1961 || Boys Aware / 1973

homosexuals, the lurking monsters

 

Sid Davis (director) Boys Beware / 1955

Sid Davis (director) Boys Beware / 1961, colorized version

Sid Davis (director) Boys Aware / 1973, same text with a different cast

 

One of the most notorious films of anti-homosexual content, Boys Beware, is often listed as being released in 1961, the Public Broadcasting Company and other reliable sources describing it as black-and-white film, directed by Sam Davis with the cooperation of the United School District and the Police Department of Inglewood. The date is important since it makes clear that the film cast its influence over the classroom for a far longer period that is often imagined, from 1955 until at least 1979, when a new, revised version, also directed by Sid Davis, but with a new direction and text my Michael Heldman, the latter version supported by the Pasadena City Police Department—a film I discuss separately.  

     Surely the city of Inglewood or any other US community might not be blamed for wishing to show their students the possible dangers of sexual predators not only upon girls (a separate film, Girls Beware appeared in 1961 or perhaps earlier) but upon young boys. Their attempt was to logically explain how predators might represent at least four variants of behavior: a passive friendly stranger meeting up the boy and befriending him before gradually involving the child in sexual activities (what today we might describe as grooming the child); a violent predator who almost grabs his victim and kills him the moment they are alone; a trickster who lures a boy into sexual action through clever lies; and a man hanging out in a place where young boys often gather, a public bathroom to attack, like a jackal, when a boy separates from his friends. 

      We all know such people exist and that statistically most of such stalkers of male children are male adults, who younger or older and often relatives or family members, uncles statistically being the most frequent offenders. We all know, moreover, how many thousands of boys and girls were molested over the years by priests and ministers. And undeniably, a large number of these individuals also displayed homosexual tendencies, either closeted or openly.

       Indeed, as I have learned, sometimes to my detriment, it is impossible to discuss gay film without discussing, on some level, gay child abuse—just as if I were discussing heterosexual films I would encounter a large number of movies, perhaps even more, also dealing with child abuse. Child abuse is a problem in both the straight and gay communities, most statistics suggesting that it is more common in the heterosexual world however. But the topic of 10-minute Boys Beware,

obviously, is boys, and many child molesters, we cannot deny, are gay, even if the abuse of boys is far less common than that of girls.*

   The horror of this small film is its total ignorance about homosexuality, its insistence that homosexuality is itself a horrifying and even more astounding, a contagious “sickness of the mind,” and, even more terrifying, its total conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia. In fact, people, male and female, who are sexually interested in pre-pubescent children or teenagers are often not homosexual or are attracted to children of both sexes. If some pedophiles are also homosexuals, the vast majority of homosexuals are not pedophiles and are as disgusted by such behavior as any heterosexual parent might be.

     In these films accordingly all homosexuals seem to be equally attracted to boys, and homosexuality, as the culture believed in the 1950s, was described to its student audience as a disease, or as the film describes specifically in relation to the character of Ralph, who has gradually become a friend to a youth named Jimmy: “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick. A sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious: a sickness of the mind. You see Ralph was a homosexual, a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex.”

       Told by a character named Lieutenant Williams (narrative by Timothy Farrell) on his way to lecture to students at a school, the officer previews his lecture in his Chevrolet Biscayne. He begins, as I suggest above with the “passive” offender, Ralph. After playing a game of ball, Jimmy makes the first mistake that Williams points to, he decides to thumb a ride. A stranger (Ralph) pulls up and offers a ride. Inside the car, Jimmy finds the stranger to be quite friendly, engaging in a full conversation with him until he reaches Jimmy’s home. The next day the stranger is waiting for him at the park, and Jimmy gladly jumps in for another meeting. Before taking Jimmy home, Ralph stops by a drive-in to treat Jimmy to a Coke. And days after, so the film indicates, the two are visiting a duck pond and then fishing together, now on a first name basis.

       The film casually mentions something that I find quite fascinating: “Jimmy hadn’t enjoyed himself so much in a long time.” Clearly, the film, perhaps unintentionally reveals, something is not right at Jimmy’s home when a simple event with stranger represents one of his most memorable days of his young life.

        In the very next frame, the stranger is sharing some pornographic pictures with the boy—one wonders are they male or female images, and if male, why the teenager reactions so positively to such images. The narrator tells us: “Jimmy knew he shouldn’t be interested, but well, he was curious.” Surely they must be male figures since the next statement is the one I quoted above about Ralph’s sick homosexuality. Is Jimmy’s sense of knowing that he should be interested a statement about his own latent sexual feelings? The straight-forward text becomes increasingly ambiguous as it goes along.

        For example, we are now told Jimmy now felt a fondness for Ralph and they continued to go places together, the camera showing us a picture what appears to be a miniature golf course. We’re told, in fact, that Ralph has taken him to many interesting places and done many things for him. But just as they seem about to climb the stairs to a motel room, the narrator comments, “but payments were expected in return.” The way Jimmy willingly strides up the stairs suggests he is not going to bed with Ralph quite as unwillingly as the narrator hints. “You see, Jimmy hadn’t recognized Ralph’s approach soon enough.”

       And we have to wonder, where were his parents on all these outings; how did they respond to the gifts and money his son was receiving. While the narrator moralizes that Jimmy should have discussed the matter with his parents or a teacher, we can only wonder why weren’t these figures represented as being there in Jimmy’s life all along. Certainly, a father or mother might wonder about a son going on a fishing trip with an adult male? If nothing else, themselves questioned him about his long absences from home.

       All is resolved in this film, however, when Jimmy finally tells his parents, who report it to the Juvenile authorities, the result being Ralph’s arrest. But Jimmy too is held responsible, released on probation in the custody of his parents. Clearly there will not soon be a special day like the one in which he and Ralph went fishing. And why didn’t these concerned parents go straight to the police instead of reporting Ralph’s behavior to juvenile authorities first, as if their son were responsible for his obvious sexual encounters. I have to say, I’m as troubled by the parental care in this section of the film as I am in the actions of the molester.

     The next example, that of the violent molester, is more clear-cut. Mike Merritt is simply playing basketball when he is spotted. The game breaks up, and Mike’s companions leave, but the lurker observing the game approaches, offering to play another round of basketball with him—despite the fact that he is dressed in a suit and bowtie—a better situation, Mike concludes than playing alone. When he’s ready to go home, the stranger offers him a ride. But soon after getting into the car, the stranger pulls out a gun, the narrator hinting that Mike is killed after being sexual abused, trading “his life for a newspaper headline.” Clearly Mike is not involved in a “trade of any kind,” a decision made for him by the killer, the somewhat unsympathetic narrative using Mike’s naïve behavior almost as weapon with which to warn their young audience of the dangers of the world. Although this murderer is not named as a gay man, his clothing is the standard signification of gay men, fussily dressed in the middle of the day, hanging out with boys instead of being part of the working heterosexual world.

      In the third situation, two boys are busy sorting out newspapers for delivery, when a car suddenly appears having evidently been chasing another boy on a bicycle. The boy, so the driver of the car claims, has stolen his son’s bike, and he asks the boys to join him on the chase since they might certainly recognize the thief. Denny quickly joins the man on the chase, while his shyer and clearly more thoughtful friend remains, writing down the driver’s license. The friend soon visits Denny’s mother and tells her what’s happened, reporting the license plate number to the police, whom she quickly calls. The police catch the man when he has already captured Denny and wrapped him out into a blanket, a molester preparing to leave the state.

     The fourth incident is the least disturbing, except that once more it clearly suggests that homosexuals are almost exclusively responsible for such crimes. It begins with a standard assertion: “Public restrooms can often be a hangout for the homosexual.” Having not noticed the man when they changed their clothes, Bobby tries to convince his friends to take the route under the pier home, but his friends, we are told, prefer the “more traveled way home,” presumably referring to Robert Frost’s 1915 poem “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps even chastising the already conservative Frost for bringing up another possibility.

    Fortunately, Bobby quickly recognizes the man following him as having been in the bathroom and changes his plans, returning to the path his friends have chosen, the narrator praising his decision to “stay with his friends,” describing it as a wise decision that may have saved his life.

      Communal behavior, obedience, and the lessons taught by parents and teachers are at the heart of this moral homily, proving that any deviance might result in molestation and possible destruction by those already having parted ways from social and sexual conformity.

      When one thinks that thousands of students over the years saw this film, many of them surely taking heed of its lessons and homophobic attitudes, one is appalled. As late as 1965 Florida State Attorney Richard Gerstein argued that high schools in Dade County, Florida show the film not only to protect their students from possible molestation but as a lesson to “prevent homosexuality.”

      On the other hand, when a Missouri high school teacher attempted to show this film in 2015 to his students as an attempt to demonstrate the attitudes towards gay individuals in earlier times, he was suspended, an early example of now equally close-minded leftist agenda to prevent taboo subjects of the past to even be openly discussed.

      As I mention above, the film was colorized and re-released in 1961, the date IMDb gives for the film’s release. And in 1973 the same text was used, under the new title of Boys Aware, in a version with a different cast, clearly meant to update styles and to introduce more diverse individuals, one black boy appearing as one of Bobby’s friends.

      I discuss the 1979 remake, a very different movie, below, along with the several spoofs and satires later made and films clearly influenced by its moralistic tropes about the salvation of young unsuspecting boys.

 

*To give the reader some sense of the vast differences in sexual molestation between the sexes, I quote from Howard N. Synder’s 2000 report from the Bureau of Justic Statistics covering abuse from 1991 to 1996. Nearly all forcible rapes (99%) involved a female victim. Females accounted for 87% of sexual assault, and 82% of forcible fondling. Only regarding forcible sodomy where there more male victims. “A greater percentage of juvenile sexual assault victims were male (18%) than were adult sexual assault victims (4%). Males were 15% of the juvenile victims of sexual assault with an object, 20% of the juvenile victims of forcible fondling, and 59% of the juvenile victims of forcible sodomy. Presumably the category “forcible sodomy,” moreover, is a subsection under the larger offense of rape. For victims under age 12, the male proportions were even greater: sexual assault with an object (19%), forcible fondling (26%), and forcible sodomy (64%). What this suggests is that except for forcible sodomy, females far out-numbered the males, even at younger ages where the male assaults increased.

      One might imagine that at the time of this film, when even being a homosexual was a near impossibility, and certainly identifying as a gay man was the exception of even those with homosexual desires, that the differences of those percentages might be even higher, females far outnumbering any male juvenile assaults.

      This is not to suggest any sense of diminution of these horrible crimes committed by and upon both sexes.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).

Douglas Messerli | Warning Signs: The Day the Earth Stood Still

warning signs: the day the earth stood still

by Douglas Messerli

 

By the late 1950s and certainly by the early 1960s, as I’ve argued in several essays in this and other of My Queer Cinema volumes, something had radically changed with regard to the US view of the queer world. Of course, along with the Communist threat, the Red-baiting right and Christian fundamentalists had long feared what they believed was the “gay” threat, men and women who, given the attacks on their heteronormative culture, were, in their minds, a truly subversive force in the government. But by 1955 or soon after, gay men were also perceived as something other than simply “different,” but characterized as sexual predators, men primarily who sought to “convert” a younger boyhood generation into their sexually perverse world. The confusion with being gay and being a pedophile was one of ignorance, of course, but remained a terribly dangerous misconception that would, frankly, never completely be removed from the general homophobic attitudes that resurged again in the late 1970s through the rhetoric in individuals such as Anita Bryant, and which may have been responsible, in part, for San Francisco Board of Supervisor member Harvey Milk’s death.

      With the rise of Trumpism and the neo-right of the second and third decades of the 21st century, it has gained new credence, and remains a serious threat to a logical discussion of gay, bisexual, and transsexual behavior. The current attacks of transgender individuals is simply (although that word is always quite complex) a carry-over for the desperate fears of gender and sexual otherness upon a dying white-based tradition of religious society that is truly terrified for their inability to continue their cultural dominance of the society at large. If they have already lost the fight, they are even the more dangerous for their attempts to maintain their patriarchally based values, and are viciously fighting back in order to keep the empty ground they feel entitled to.

     It is terribly important, accordingly, to discuss the roots of this vision, which reach far back before the films this essay discusses, but still remain lodged in US and even some European consciousnesses.

     I’ve gathered these important and, at times, unfortunately well-meaning institutional, city, and school-board funded films into several essays, beginning with the various versions of the 1955, terrifying, if now somewhat laughable Sam Davis’ movie, Boys Beware,  instructional movies I’ve gathered under the subtitle of “Homosexual, the Lurking Monsters,” along with discussions of so many serious and comic of films that followed in response: Christopher Peterson’s short, Only Once (2005), the “OneMinuteGallatica’s” 2011 satire Earth Boys, Beware, Ivan Bellaroba’s spoof Beware of the Homosexual (2014), Gregory Pennington’s strange appropriation of the Boys Beware from of the same year, 2014, the 2015 (?) Los Angeles LGBT Center satire Boys Beware, the film of possibly the same year by “Bella@the Bellzar” by the same title, Devon Green’s satire of 2015, Beware Homosexuals, as well as the continued exploration of dangerous homoeroticism in the 1950s films by Callahan Bracken, again titled Boys Beware (2017), Trevor Scholten’s 2019 satiric work with it's referent Boys Beware 2 title, and the final Boys Beware version of 2021 by Eden Poag.

     Who might have imagined in 1955 that so very many gay works would have grown out of the Sam Davis’ closed-minded work in which he collaborated with the Los Angeles United School District and the Police Department of Inglewood? The terror of the time might certainly be laughed at, but it is still a horror with which nearly every gay man and many a lesbian (I might surely have included in this medley of horror Clu Gulager’s A Day with the Boys of 1969, Jan Oxenburg’s A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts of 1975, Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s Abuse of 1983, Gianni da Campo’s The Flavor of Corn of 1986, and Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche of 1986) in which loving and caring homosexuals were suddenly traumatized for their adult-based love and concern for the youth which they wanted to help come to terms with their life through non-sexual mentoring. I now realize just how fully my own fears of being perceived as a predator kept me away from helping to be a loving uncle to my own nephews and perhaps even more importantly, my fear of becoming friends with obviously gay children of dear friends.

     One of my friend’s mother pleaded with me to talk about gay issues with her grandson, but I couldn’t possibly imagine such a discussion without the presence of his parents, which obviously delimited any open conversation we may have had. Yet I was terrified always that I might be perceived as being predatory, an issue very much at the center of Connor Clements' 2008 film James in which a teacher, once the boy divulges his sexual confusion, feels it necessary to abandon any discussion of sexuality, leading the boy to explore the gay world on his own.

     This fear has impacted not only individuals such as me but homosexual couples, trying to adopt children. In some states, the very notion that a gay couple, male or female, want to raise a child in a loving manner creates red-flags to the homophobic community which dominates. Entire states of the US and countries around the world have refused to even hear of our parental and mentoring possibilities. I might have been—no, actually I could have been wonderful father; but given my time of birth, by upbringing in the very age when these early films of exaggerated fear appeared—in 1955 I was only 8 years of age, hardly able to perceive what a homosexual predator might mean—I resisted sharing my experiences with young men and women.

     When I was a young man, I served as a babysitter for several young boys, the fact of which I am often ashamed to even admit today, and even have been reprimanded that I had served in such a role on the internet. In some incidences, I was only 5 or 6 years older that the children I cared for. Today, I think such a caring role would be perceived as being utterly perverse. Saturday Night Live has mocked Scout masters (performed by Alec Baldwin) and sexually interested babysitters such as Buck Henry (caring and a perversely leering uncle for his nieces Lorraine Newman and Gilda Radner). The society continues to suggest that we, queer men and women, are a predatory breed. The stigma remains. The sour pain of our own inabilities to properly nurture young men and women still stings. That 1955 “warning sign” still roars in my head “Beware of young boys!”

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

 

Joshua Logan | Picnic / 1955

a dystopia of small-town life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Taradash (screenplay, based on the stage play by William Inge), Joshua Logan (director) Picnic / 1955

 

A freight train stops briefly in a small Kansas town (an amalgam of Hutchinson, Halsted, Nickerson, Salina, and Sterling in the movie), a stranger who’s been riding the rails jumping off, washing his face and hands in a nearby waterfalls, and wandering over to a neighborhood of small white wood-frame houses. His name is Hal Carter (William Holden) we soon discover, but as strangers to small rural communities throughout history generally have been perceived to be, his handsome face and beautiful body spells trouble. After all, we are in the very middle of the 1950s when anything outside the norm was a national dilemma and even this very movie caused hearts to heave and declarations of moral outrage to be delivered in response to what now seems far tamer than a Doris Day / Rock Hudson feature film. But in 1955, this film shook up the Hollywood industry. As The New York Times critic Stephen Holden (no relation to William) wrote of the film’s 1996 reissue:

“In Joshua Logan's film version of the popular William Inge play, the sight of Kim Novak and William Holden eyeing each other like pieces of raw meat as they stepped out to slow-dance at a pavilion while friends and neighbors enviously ogled them was considered extremely provocative. The mystique of the virginal blond beauty helplessly drawn to the irresistible hunk had never been so plainly depicted in an American film.”

     Even today, when our tastes are so comparatively jaded that it is difficult not to laugh at their attempts to dance to a kind of jive / jazz influenced version of “Moonglow”  that requires sliding the hands together to get into the rhythm of the beat (Hollywood legend has it that, despite his many lessons, Holden was so nervous about performing the piece that he arrived to the set drunk), one has to admit there is still something breathtaking about the way Novak the lioness slinks down the concrete steps into the little clearing under the Japanese lanterns to meet her fellow feline head on. Their eyes, their torsos, and whatever other body parts they put into motion crackle with lust, Logan stopping the action every few moments just so that we watch the electricity flowing between them, helped along by the brilliant cinematography of James Wong Howe and the Copeland inspired score by George Duning.

   And it doesn’t stop there. Jealous, schoolmarm Rosemary Sydney (Rosalind Russell) tries to steal Hal away from the young girl, and when the startled stranger calls halt to her kidnapping, she accidentally on purpose rips away his shirt as if to get a better look at his rippling abs, before she lets go all of all her cannons about middle class respectability, denouncing him to the entire community, leading any acquaintances he’s made in his brief time in town and his old friend Alan Seymour to turn against him.

     The picnic of the title, which oddly enough was mostly held off stage in the theater version, is all too languidly laid out by Logan in the 20 minutes just previous to this remarkable scene. In comparison, it’s the most boring segment of the entire film, filled with, as critic Roger Ebert describes it, “crying babies, laughing babies, frowning babies, three-legged races, pie-eating competitions, balloon drops, concerts and boy-girl contests,” to name only a few of the attempted diversions. Picnics, are by nature perhaps, nearly impossible to depict on film. The worst scenes and the most banal songs of major works that feature them—The Pajama Game, The Music Man, and this film—represent arguably the worst moments in these films: “Once-a-Day-Year” (which even the mad dust-up dancing of Carol Haney can’t save), “Shipoopi,” and Picnic’s “Hail Neewollah.” Is it any wonder that, as Mrs. Potts reminds her neighbor Flo Owens, “Don’t you remember that at picnics everyone disappears.”

     Other than the dance sequence, the important events of the film take place before and after the Labor Day celebration, when there’s still plenty of emotional hefting to be done.

      It may seem odd, but it’s certainly predictable, that gay playwright William Inge spent most of his life writing about heterosexual relationships in small-town America, particularly from the viewpoint of women. In the 1950s when Inge was at his best, few stage dramas and no movie could discuss homosexuality, so a writer had little choice but to focus his intentions on the dominant forms of love.

      All of his figures suffer instead the mid-twentieth century American angst about class, identity, and sex while outwardly supporting and sustaining the very forces which are the causes of their inner suffering. In Picnic the females include an elderly woman, Helen Potts (Verna Felton) whose long-ago marriage was nullified by her dominating mother for whom she is still caring, and whose sexual life, in effect, has been terminated at an early age (information that appears in the play but not in the movie). It is no wonder that throughout the play she is fearless about inviting young men to “tromp” through her house and is the most encouraging character in the play for sexual encounters, particularly with handsome outsiders.

     Her next-door neighbor Flo Owens (Betty Field), on the other hand, has been in love and raised two daughters, but has been seriously hurt and damaged by her husband’s extramarital affairs which ended with his leaving her; it is inevitable perhaps that she seeks a seemingly “model” husband for her beautiful but not intellectually talented daughter, Madge (Novak), who, despite Flo’s moral scruples, she almost pushes to become more sexually involved so that the boy, Alan Seymour (Cliff Robertson), son of the wealthiest man in town, will quickly marry her before her beauty fades as she feels her own has, helping to cause the breakup of her marriage.

     The boarder in her house, the school teacher Rosemary Sydney (Russell) is perhaps the best example of this small-town hypocrisy. As a teacher she pretends to keep the highest of moral standards, but as a woman she is desperate in her middle-age to find a husband and willing to do nearly nearly anything to push even the man she doesn’t truly love, Howard Bevans (Arthur O’Connell), into marriage. She is the most openly conflicted person in the play, attacking those who drink while secretly imbibing and enjoying it, even to the point of becoming rather drunk at the picnic. As I mention above, she makes a desperate pass at Hal who, when he rejects her blatant sexual advances, she attacks as a sexual degenerate the moment after she has ripped off his shirt. She is desperate and sad in the pulls her society has demanded of her, displaying a horrific schizophrenia of church-going spinster and a sexually needy woman.

       Flo’s younger daughter Millie (Susan Strasberg), an intelligent, curious young, good-looking teenager who is beginning to realize that it is time for her to begin wearing dresses and dating young men, is equally confused by her tomboyish behavior, her dislike of all the young boys in her town, and her longings to leave and become a writer like the woman whose book, The Ballad of the Sad Café, she is currently reading, Carson McCullers. Inge codes this young girl as a future lesbian without needing to say a word about her sexual proclivities of which even she is still unaware.

       And finally, there is Madge, the most beautiful girl in town, a not terribly bright woman who, nonetheless, is tired of being merely the subject of the male gaze, and auditioning for the role of a future trophy wife that has no meaning other than through her physical appearance. She goes along with the path chosen for her by her own mother and the community at large, winning beauty contests such as the Neewollah Queen (Halloween spelled backwards, an interesting commentary about all of these Labor Day events), and making herself pretty, but is exhausted in seeking who she herself might truly be, while at the same time representing the essence of an insider, beloved by all.

     None of these women is happy, but then neither are the men of the community, even if Inge does not bother to explore most of their personalities in depth.

   The local paperboy Bomber (Nick Adams) would be a lover but hasn’t the looks, brains, or personality to be anything other than the loud-mouthed challenger he feels compelled to portray.

   Bevans is perhaps the most well-adjusted of all the characters—except for the fact that as a meek business man who has enjoyed the company of Rosemary, and who he lets himself be bullied into marriage simply to qualm her mid-life desperation.

    Even the wealthy young Alan realizes that no matter how well he achieves he will never be important in his father’s eyes, who likes prizes and contests, the richest man in the world, the best football scorer, the Queen of Neewollah, etc.

     The outsider to this community is the most angst-ridden of them all. Hal Carter (Holden) may have been once known as the best college football player of his day, but he comes from not only what is often described as “the wrong side of the tracks”—where, given the barriers of small-town USA, even the Owens’ and Potts’ small, white-framed houses are clearly located compared with the Seymour mansion—but is from a dysfunctional family in which the father was alcoholic and his mother involved with another man. He himself was arrested and sent way to reform school for stealing a ride on someone else’s motorcycle. And like Madge, he is not intellectually gifted, having flunked out of college. Only for a few years of fraternity life, when star football players are given permission to share quarters with wealthy frat boys when he met Seymour, has Hal lived in a world of permission, and even then, he was disliked for being a braggart.

    Since then, Hal has attempted to get a job in Hollywood, worked as a farmhand, and bummed around the country surviving through part-time jobs without ever being able to find something that might make him feel the glory he was awarded between the football game goal posts. Hal, in short,  is the all-American boy-man that constitutes so very much of the stereotype of the US male, the prom-King in high school who lives the rest of his life as kind of Willy Loman traveling salesman or serves out his sentence of adulthood as a janitor with a household of four or five children, the only difference being this man has had no high school days and no woman who has wanted him except women like the two he has met along the way, who engage him in sex and steal all his hard-earned wages.

    Yet finally, in this dystopic world, Madge and Hal meet up and discover a love for one another that changes their whole perception of themselves and is strong enough to make it worth leaving their known worlds for a strange urban haven. The city Hal chooses, ironically, suffered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history in 1921, but by the 1950s had come to be described as "American's most beautiful city."

      Inge makes clear that this couple, in their dependence upon emotion over intellect and their necessary reliance on their own good looks for survival, belong together. And it’s almost humorous to realize that in a film in which most directors (we have Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, and Richard Quine to prove it) would have circled their cameras around the star wagon of Novak’s almost ethereal beauty, the actively bi-sexual Logan, just as the play’s author plants its gaze firmly upon the endlessly shirtless male of this work, making it one of the most notorious of Beefcake movies in a time when Bob Mizer and others were quite actively establishing that genre through their muscle magazines and short films.

      But for all of the film’s notoriety and the hullabaloo surrounding it, Inge’s work and Taradash’s film adaptation is not truly about sex as much as it is about the dystopia of small-town life and values. The picture postcard realities that most Americans of the day kept in their heads about the joys of rural communities—an increasing number of new US urban dwellers having been raised in such villages and towns—was nonsense. Inge knew, despite his continued dependency on his childhood experiences from his hometown of Independence, Kansas, that any gay man had to escape that world for New York or California simply to keep his sanity. Unfortunately, in his continued focus on small town life, Inge was not able to deal successfully with his homosexuality nor the fact that his plays increasingly seemed out-of-touch with the contemporary concerns of the most Americans by the 1970s, taking his own life at the age of 60 in his Los Angeles home.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).