Stephen Chbosky | Dear Evan Hansen / 2021

something’s wrong with this picture

by Douglas Messerli

 

Steven Levenson (screenplay), Benj Paske and Justin Paul (music and lyrics), Stephen Chbosky (director) Dear Evan Hansen / 2021

 

Based on a highly successful Off-Broadway and later Broadway musical which won six Tony Awards, the movie version of Dear Evan Hansen was a failure.

    Critics and audiences perceived to major problems. One was the appearance of the film during the COVID-19 pandemic which severely delimited audiences to film and theater performances. But the far greater critical response was the fact, arguably, that the major actor of the workshop and later theater productions of the film, Ben Platt again performing in the title role, was simply too old at the age of 27 to be perceived as a high school student of 17 years of age.

     There is no question that Platt, who understandably wished to perform the character he had so memorable performed on stage, was no longer believable as a teenager, particularly as the film progressed to its later scenes, when he played across the character Zoe (Kaitlyn Dever), although she was also cast against type at age 25.

     Platt sang wonderfully the rather tuneless songs with clever lyrics by Benj Paske and Justin Paul, but simply was unable to convince us in the close-ups, particularly with tears running down his doleful eyes. Yet, just to put this in perspective, Larry Kert the original star of the Broadway musical West Side Story was the very same age in 1957 when he was nominated for a Tony Award, still recognized today as one of the greatest performers of role of Tony. And Richard Beymer, who played the 17-year-old role in the film version of that great high school Romeo and Juliet-based story was 23, the same age as I would have graduated with a college degree had I not run away for a year to New York City. As I have mentioned in another My Queer Cinema essay, James Dean, performing his memorable high school character of Nick Adams was 24 at the time, again the age of a college graduate.

      Platt’s age, I would argue, is not truly the issue. Although the quirky musical about a young man with what is generally described as “social anxiety and depression”—what might today be described as a variation of autism—is a fascinating exploration of the differences many young men and women experience during their teen years, the problem lies with the music and the script.

      To give it credit, Paske’s and Paul’s music is far more complex than what I have often described as the two Broadway standard of musical expression, three notes, alternated with pattern and volume to the fact that there is no where the music intends to move on to (the most obvious example is Wicked) express. Dear Evan Hansen has a full scale of perhaps 8 notes, and its lyrics, particularly in its opening song, “Waving Through a Window,” is quite memorable:

 

I've learned to slam on the brake

Before I even turn the key

Before I make the mistake

Before I lead with the worst of me

 

Give them no reason to stare

No slipping up if you slip away

So I got nothing to share

No, I got nothing to say

 

Step out, step out of the sun

If you keep getting burned

Step out, step out of the sun

Because you've learned, because you've learned

 

On the outside, always looking in

Will I ever be more than I've always been?

'Cause I'm tap, tap, tapping on the glass

I'm waving through a window

I try to speak, but nobody can hear

So I wait around for an answer to appear

While I'm watch, watch, watching people pass

I'm waving through a window, oh

Can anybody see, is anybody waving back at me?

 

    So I can at least give this musical some credit for its far more complex subject matter and the attempt to embody that it both its lyrics and text. 8 notes, however, do not present us with a great sense of melodic joy. I know I exaggerate these musical descriptions, but basically that is what the contemporary Broadway musical offers us; if nothing else, there are no deep arpeggios into complex musical expression such as those offered by generations of composers from Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Frank Loesser, Kurt Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Burton Lane, Leonard Bernstein and so very many others.

     Yet the real problems with this movie (since I did not see the stage musical version, I will not even pretend to discuss what might have been the original difficulties) is that it refuses to fully explore its own premises.

      We feel the deep despair of Evan Hansen “tap, tap, tapping on the glass” that seems to separate him from others. But in the film he basically appears simply as a kind of uncomfortable nerdish person, who feels far more at home with his friend, Jared Kalwani (Nik Dodani), who is described as a “family friend” without any explanation. Is he the son of Evan’s overworked mother, Heidi (Julianne Moore)? And despite their “friendship,” what actually connects these two? Jared even refused to sign the cast Evan has on his arm after falling out of a tree.

     Jared appears to be gay, although we can never quite tell whether he’s simply being cynical or actually expressing a secretive desire when he shares the tidbit at summer camp that he met a beautiful guy who had a body-builder’s physique. I think the “admission” is a joke about how rotten his experiences were in the camp, but still the musical pushes his evidently gay desires forward when he is asked, soon after, to create a “secret” cache of e-mail correspondence between Evan Hansen and his former fellow student Connor Murphy (Colton Ryan) who, almost the moment after he impulsively signs Evan’s arm cast, commits suicide.

    What we don’t know at this point is that Evan himself has fallen from a tree—not at all in Connor’s favorite orchard hideout—in his own attempt a suicide. But the very fact that he has written a letter to himself (encouraged by his psychologist) in an attempt to try to brighten up his day, along with the fact of the signature of Connor so visibly present on his broken arm makes everyone, particularly Connor’s grieving and guilty parents (Danny Pino and Amy Adams), believe that the two boys had a secret relationship.

      Such “secret” relationships have traditionally been expressed in movies and drama, which Jared astutely points out, as gay romances. But since Evan is straight, the movie (and presumably the musical) takes an entire song, despite Jared’s own gay desires and his e-mail tropes and sung almost perversely by the now dead boy, to make it quite clear that Evan is heteronormative and that the “secret” (actually nonexistent) relationship between the two boys was simply that of two male friends.

     Thankfully, perhaps, we don’t have yet another situation in which a young gay man has taken his own life. Vito Russo would have appreciated the attempts of the writers to set the matter straight, that Connor was, in fact, straight, and that his death was a result of drugs, not a hidden love affair.

      But, in fact, the long deconstruction of various possible personal narratives, wherein Jared keeps using homoerotic images which Evan continually attempts to sanitize, makes for a kind of cringe-worthy experience for any gay man since it basically attempts to erase and release Evan Hansen and Connor Murphy from any possible homosexual desires.

     Actually, it might almost have been more interesting if Connor, in Evan’s imagination, had held some secret sexual attraction to him. Surely it might have goosed up the sexual plot, in which we are left only with the quite difficult to believe possibility that one of the school’s most popular cheerleaders, Alana Beck (Amandla Stenberg) is also on the autism scale—it’s nearly impossible to believe that, despite her sing out (“The Anonymous Ones”) that she might be perceived as anything but a kind of gifted schoolgirl, and finally that Connor’s suffering sister had long been attracted to the stuttering apologetic Evan.

    All the kids and adults in this cruel world, so the film tells us, are apparently secretly suffering, and if only we’d get to know them (the people and their problems) we’d comprehend that life isn’t easy. But that is just the issue. The film doesn’t truly allow us to get to know anybody very well. Cynthia Murphy, Connor’s mother seems to be some kind of vegan, gluten-free loving parody, her second husband Larry a selfish, sports-loving empty being whose major gift to his son is a now disintegrating pitcher’s mitt. Their daughter Zoe is a bitter, over-looked suffragette her own brother’s psycho behavior. Evan’s own mother is a terrified woman, who in the song “So Close/So Small” reveals her own fears about become a working mother to support a son and large house after her husband left her.

     The guilt for this entire mess, quite strangely, is put upon Evan for simply wanting to be loved and unable to fully express his own sense of isolation. He lied the film proclaims and so deserves to be punished.

      It might have been easier for all of them, I would argue, if the musical and film had retreated to the terrible cliché that the real problem was that these two boys were gay outsiders, unable to truly express their mutual love. As it is, no one in the entire work really gets to demonstrate their love for one another, except perhaps for Julianne Moore, whose caring refusal of a college grant from Connor Murphy’s family for her son makes it clear that she is determined to look after him without any outside support.

      What it really means is that Evan must put off his college education of a year of hard work and community college courses in order to make enough money to pay his for his education. What it really means is that despite this film’s anthem that “You Will Be Found,” is that you can even fall from the highest branches of a tree and there will be no one there to find you. As Evan finally admits to Jared, when he jumped from the tree, there was no one who came to save him.

       I don’t know, but perhaps Jared had the right idea. Imagine a love affair with a beautiful Brazilian body-builder. Everyone might have been happier if Evan and Connor had been secret gay lovers. Surely it might have explained Connor’s death and Evan’s inability to properly tell his tale. Obviously, however, it would reinforce the idea that being gay is the worst thing possibly facing young boys of 17. I guess the problem was that ten years later Ben Platt had no reason to explain the situation to the expectant audiences. After all, Platt is an openly gay man who married Noah Galvin, who later took over his Evan Hansen role.

 

Los Angeles, February 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

Bob Mizer | The Naughty Fauns / c. 1968

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Marcel Carné | Les Tricheurs (The Cheaters) aka Youthful Sinners / 1958

a knight in shining amour

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Sigurd (screenplay, based on an idea by Charles Spaak and Marcel Carné), Marcel Carné (director, assisted by Serge Friedman and Paul Seban) Les Tricheurs (The Cheaters) aka Youthful Sinners / 1958

 

These 20-some year-olds, some of them members of gangs, descend upon the mansion en masse—a few without even an invitation—to drink, smoke, and dance with the music turned up as loud as it can get. Their goal is to get stoned, and they mix whatever bottles of liquor they find together in a huge bowl. In a corner some play out a version of “Truth or Dare,” while in other corners a few bemoan the meaningless of their parents’ generation, indeed the absurdity of all bourgeois values. In some of the bedrooms couples who can’t wait or have no other place to go are already busy fucking. Some are so drunk already that they’ve begun picking fights. Couples who arrived together have begun to switch companions. They dance late into the morning, trashing the place before they drive off.

     If this sounds like a Los Angeles canyon party-house rave, an end-of-the-year frat bust, or a New York penthouse wilding, think again. Indeed, perhaps you might need to rethink cinema history since the scene I described above occurs twice in a film by the great French film director of the classic of poetic realism Children of Paradise (1945)—a film which appears on nearly all the lists of the greatest movies—Marcel Carné, working with cinematographer Claude Renoir, the nephew of director Jean Renoir, and the grandson of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

      All right, these kids are all attired in dresses, suits, or sweaters; they smoke cigarettes not pot and they don’t shoot up with other drugs; and the music they’re dancing and listening to is hot and cool jazz, records by Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillepsie, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Dawkins, Herb Ellis, Gus Johnson, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, and Oscar Peterson. The mansion is in Paris, belonging to the wealthy parents of one of their gang, Clo, short for Clotilde de Vaudremont (Andréa Parisy), who by film’s end discovers herself pregnant and is on a mad search to find the unwanted kid a father. The year is 1958. And actually, they’re just a year ahead of the characters in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and three years before Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1961) along with the other directors who are recognized as having completely altered French filmmaking with The New Wave, all of them standing in strong opposition to Carné’s brand of filmmaking and his narrative values.

     Yet this film, like the New Wave works that followed, attracted a huge audience, winning that year’s Grand Prize for French Cinema. The old master was 52 at the time while Truffaut and Godard were 26 and 28, just a little older than the characters he portrayed in  Les Tricheurs (known in English as The Cheaters and Youthful Sinners) performed by actors such Jacques Charrier (who quickly became a big movie sensation in France and a year later married Brigette Bardot), Laurent Terzieff (who the very next year acted in Mauro Bolognini’s La Notte brava, which I review in these pages, performed extensively on stage, and later appeared in Luis Bunuel’s The Milky Way) and a third “newcomer” by the name of Jean-Paul Belmondo (who, of course, starred in Breathless and numerous other works by Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Resnais, and almost all the other major directors of European cinema). It is clear that Carné had an eye for youthful male beauty in this trio and in the character of the lead figure Bob’s (Charrier) best friend, Bernard (Pierre Brice), although Pascale Petit as Mic (Michèle), with whom Bob falls in love, does not make a bad stand-in for Jean Seberg in Breathless.

      In fact, you might say that Carné, as a gay man, features his male figures in this work in a manner that in this work’s earliest scenes almost seems to skew his narrative in a direction that might take us down the wrong track of what, at heart, is a normative heterosexual tale.

      The handsome Bob, it is made clear from the very beginning of this story, is an outsider to the wild youth set to whom he is introduced and with whom he becomes thoroughly involved. He is from what they describe as “the suburbs,” meaning anything outside the “French Quarter,” and his family is most clearly from the well-do environs of the right back and Champs Elysée. Whenever he even pauses to consider whether he might join in the “gang’s” (more of a band of friends rather than what we might describe as a gang) actions, determined mostly by the group’s leader Alain (Terzieff), he is accused of backsliding and of being, like all parents and people who embrace the societal order, “bourgeois.” And the film begins evidently after his involvement with the group at the center of the rest of the story, after he has finally graduated with his B.A. and is on the phone assuring his father that he has clearly determined what he further actions will be after the series of the events we about to witness.

    In essence, accordingly, we cannot truly yet evaluate his relationship with the obviously heterosexual gang, made up of Alain, Mic, Clo, Lou (Belmondo), Nicole (Dany Saval), Gérard, and the numerous others. Bernard, with whom he begins the story, is clearly from his Right Bank friends, not a member of the “idle” gang with whom Bob spends most of his time on film.

     So when Bob, in a voice over, begins his tale by observing two young boys hovering over the juke box to play jazz, as he calls up an earlier, more innocent time when he first met Adrian in a record shop, we can only wonder whether the blue funk he is clearly now suffering has to do with a love for Adrian—whom a bit like a puppy-dog he watches stealing a record in the shop, soon after paying for Adrian’s listening-booth time, and taking him for a drink. At the first of the two parties to which Adrian takes him, the two sit on a couch together observing the dancing crowd, Adrian asking “So where am I going to sleep tonight.” But then, we quickly discover, Adrian must find a bed or couch in someone’s house every night since he has no apartment nor any money to rent one. He relies solely on “the kindness of strangers,” so to speak, having already been given a substantial amount of money by his newfound friend.

     Upon observing an American boy (Alan Scott) being approached by a boy named Danny, who has obviously been to bed with him previously, asking “do you have to go back [to Fontainbleau] tonight?” The American answers, “Sorry Danny, not tonight. It’s better.”

     This is a minor incident of seemingly no importance to the rest of the story, but Carné has introduced it, rather inexplicably, and cannot quite let it go. Adrian asks Bob with whom he has overheard the entire conversation, “Are you bothered?” Bob answers, almost predictably, “No, but I prefer girls.” But Adrian’s answer is a bit odder, “Me too. But I don’t have any prejudices.”

      One can suppose that a complete cynic such as Adrian, whose God, as he explains, “used to be dead, but is now indifferent,” could have no prejudices, particularly since he can’t be choosy in finding a bed for each night. But we still wonder why this scene is even in the movie. Surely you’d never find such an incident in a work by Godard or Truffaut. In Godard, gay boys in a bathroom are something to mock, but little else. And in Truffaut’s world, other than the occasional ménage-à trois, his pictures seem basically to be free of all things relating to sexually queer behavior.

      In The Cheaters Bob is quickly hurried away to Clo’s parent’s bedroom where apparently to two have sex and a conversation in which you better get to know Clo, while Bob remains a kind of pleasant smiling and cute cipher.

     Yet by the time they rejoin the party, Adrian literally has gone out of a limb, in fact a high window ledge and crossbar, to save the cook’s cat, and is almost sure of falling until Bob, stripping off his coat, leaps to a nearby windowsill to help bring his friend in safe. If Adrian has described Clo as being from the Crusades, it is as if Bob where a knight in armor determined to save his friend or lover.  Indeed, that becomes a clue for how to comprehend his misadventures throughout the rest of the movie.

       But it is useful to recall that his first such manifestation of his romantic tendencies is performed for a male friend, not for the woman with whom he soon falls in love, Mic, Clo’s best friend.

       Mic (Petit) is perhaps the most fascinating figure in Carné’s work. From a poor working family, she has evidently dropped out of college under the influence of Adrian and the others, determined to be even more cynical and nonchalant about societal values than anyone else. Having no money with which to pay her rent, she visits her mother, who simply doesn’t have enough to loan her; yet each time Mic visits her mother notices cash missing from her shop register. Mic’s brother Roger (Roland Lesaffre) who works as a car mechanic is more generous, at least willing to give her enough for food; but he also cannot pay for her rent. While in his garage she notices a new sports car for sale for 600,000 francs, and becomes determined that she will one day own the car, even though she is allergic, like all of the others of her friends, to any concept of a job.

       From the meeting at the party, Bob and Mic fall in love, she inviting him to visit her, and soon after the two going to bed. The central focus of the film is their sudden and deep passion for one another, which, given the restrictions of their group dismissal of sentiment and bourgeoise emotion, they intentionally refuse to express. And so what might have been a traditional love story  for Carné in the 1940s and 1950s becomes a kind of tragedy of silence in this film, as they quickly get involved in a societal situation which demands moral attention, another human expression disallowed in their post-World War II hothouse bohemian philosophy. For them, all moral values are simply corrupt.

      One morning, while sleeping on another friend’s bed, Adrian is visited by a stranger who slips a substantial amount of money under the door, suggesting they meet that evening at a bar to settle up the rest of the matter. We soon glean that the other boy, who has had an affair with an older woman, is involved in a blackmail scheme, which the wealthy woman and her husband are willing to pay if he returns her love letters. The boy himself has clearly gotten cold feet and left town, telling Adrian to burn the letters.

      But now announcing the news to his friends Bob and Mic, Adrian suggests they meet with the mysterious man named in the note, Hippolyte Félix (Jacques Marin) to negotiate the amount. In fact Adrian is simply happy with the down-payment, allowing him to eat and drink for a few weeks. We perceive throughout that despite his power over the group, he is no schemer. The record he stole in the early scene of the film was for a friend. He relies, as I have said, on others for his survival, and seems disinterested in manipulating anyone or demanding anything from his friends.

      Mic is a different creature, and Bob, influenced it appears by the most recent person with whom he has taken up, is willing to join her in meeting up with Mr. Félix. They do so, she negotiating enough money for the car, another bill, and a few weeks of lunch money.

     But at the last moment, when they are to meet for the payment, Bob appears to regain his moral compunctions, telling her that he has burnt the letters because of the sordidness of the whole thing. Mic, we suddenly realize, is immature and greedy, furious for his inability to carry what she considers an easy payment for the wealthy “cheater,” possibly allowing her the possibility to fulfill her dreams.

       Bob disappears, and out of anger, Mic takes Adrian home to her apartment for sex.

     In the meantime, we discover Bob has not really burnt the letters and has gone through with the shady business, acquiring the money, his second try at rescuing a friend in distress. When he discovers Mic is no longer in the bar, he runs to her room to discover her in bed with his Adrian, whom he has realized has also loved Mic but refused to interfere with his own affair. He simply tells Mic that it has been a joke, yet Adrian and Bob both seem more disturbed by the end of their own close friendship than any embarrassment for the sexual events concerning the woman they both “love.”

       He cannot bring himself to show his disappointment about her behavior, but simply throws the money at her and leaves. Mic, realizing her errors, nonetheless buys the car and proceeds to pretend that it is just as well that their relationship is over.

        The “cheaters” of this work’s English title do not truly care deeply, I would argue, about what Americans might imagine: people cheating on one another sexually. Bob is not so disturbed by her having slept with Adrian as he is by her inability to express her love for him. She is cheating herself out of her own life by refusing to admit to the everyday sentiments—love, caring, and responsibility—out of her silly commitment to her “gang” code of behavior.

       Yet Bob also has mindlessly joined up with the gang, and is just as unable to admit his own feelings, both for Mic and, I would argue, for Adrian.

         As the pretend cynic of all time Adrian would never be able to express his admiration for and love of Bob, and instead taunts and teases both Bob and Mic for their secret longings. At Clo’s final bash, he puts himself, Mic, and Bob through a “truth and dare” game to which, simply to save  face in front of their friends, they all lie, exposing themselves as horrible human beings, when in reality they are basically loving and caring kids who simply feel they can no longer trust the human values which destroyed their parent’s lives.

      Clo has called her friends together for her last bash because, as I mention earlier, she has discovered that she is pregnant, and has no knowledge of who the father might have been. Presumably it could be Bob, but she asks him if he might marry him not for that reason but because she realizes that of all her acquaintances he is the only one in her financial “caste.” The marriage she offers him, in which she would never intrude upon his life, is precisely what this entire generation of young men and women, and particularly those of the Right Bank, most detest.

     Predictably, Bob says no, she perfectly understanding his decision but obviously now desperate nonetheless.

       After Bob and Mic go through their play-acting lies of the game of “Truth” in which they both reiterate that they have utterly no feelings for one another, Bob returns to the main room where the now utterly drunk Clo has just shouted out that she is going to get married. The crowd, gathering around, demands to know who. And suddenly Bob, in his third attempt in this film to save a life, has finally become a confused knight in shining amour, rising in the midst of the chaotic celebrating to shout out “Moi.” But his continuation of his rash announcement, “Since all women are the same, whores and bitches at least with Clo there won’t be any surprises,” reveals he perhaps does not like girls as much as he thought he did.

        Mic immediately bolts, a Cinderella who has not just lost her shoe but her prince. She speeds away in her Jaguar, with Bob soon in chase, his final and most fatal rescue attempt.

        Since we know immediately the result of this countryside race, surely Bob must also know what he is doing, that the closer he gets to her the more she will speed up until something is put in the way to bring her to a stop—in this case a truck slowly driving the rural lane into which she seemingly purposely crashes.

        Carné ridiculously postpones the inevitable in order to have Bob and Roger meet up in the hospital so that the latter can express the director’s own moral sympathies for a new lost generation who must face a “treacherous world” alone. Mic dies, Bob becomes brave, and an even younger generation of boys and girls make plans for a wild party that night. So, sentimentalizes Carné, who previously worked so very hard to resist his moral homilies: youth will always seem wild and out of control to the generation before it as the new gradually are forced to come to terms with their lives.

       But where is Bob going in this “brave” new world of his without Mic and with a resentment of women that almost suggests a misogynistic view of the world he inhabits. Maybe he’ll go off with his best good- looking best friend, Bernard, although he’s got a girlfriend he’s about to marry. Or maybe Bob will marry a woman like Clo who, like his and her parents, will be both wealthy enough so that they never need bother each other for sex. Maybe Mic was right: better to die like James Dean in a fireball of anger and passion than close oneself off from love.

       Bob isn’t gay perhaps, but he’s surely confused about his sexual life. At least he now may have learned that before he attempts to come to the rescue of anyone else he might first try to save himself.

 

Los Angeles, September 11, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).

George Abbott and Stanley Donen | Damn Yankees / 1958

a way out

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Abbott and Douglass Wallop (screenwriters, based on the novel by Douglass Wallop), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (music and lyrics), George Abbott and Stanley Donen (directors) Damn Yankees / 1958

 

About twice every summer, Howard and I watch the 1958 movie version of the American hit musical Damn Yankees. In 1995, moreover, we saw the Broadway revival of that musical with Bebe Neuwirth as Lola and Jerry Lewis as Mr. Applegate.  It was only the other night, however, that I realized that this work—which I believe I first witnessed at a community theater production as a child in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—metaphorically expresses the tribulations of those I have described throughout my writings with regard to the American boy-men: adult males who, through their obsession with their memories of childhood activities, particularly sports, appear unable to cope when faced with their older selves. It’s part, of course, of the so-called middle-age crisis, when both women and men, but particularly males begin to question what they have missed out in their lives. Sometimes it even signifies a moment when males realize that they may have been severely closeted gays for all their previous life.

     Women also have a parallel phenomenon, perhaps in the form of the eternal “beauty queen” syndrome, but I have particularly noticed this painful condition in American males, the perfect example of which is the character at the center of Damn Yankees, Joe Boyd (Robert Shafer), “the most devoted fan of the Washington Senators.”

     Like many a sports fiend, his relationship his wife has not always been that of an attentive acolyte in even the best of their days. Six months out of every year, he literally abandons his wife (Shannon Bolin) as his attention turns to sports, particularly baseball. But this year, more than ever, he is furious with the Yankees of their string of losses, and is willing to sell his soul for “one long ball hitter.”  

  Suddenly the devil appears in the form of Mr. Applegate (played on stage and in the film by Ray Walton, who died on New Year’s Day this year), whom passing friends of his wife (Jean Stapleton and Elizabeth Howell) cannot even see. To them Joe appears to be aging, muttering to himself. No matter; as fast as you can say Hannibal, Mo., Joe signs away his life, and, transformed into a much younger man (played in the movie by Tab Hunter), who leaves his wife Meg a short note that explains that, while he’ll miss his “old girl,” he must be off.

    Although we recognize that in the movie the separation will likely be only temporarily (after all Joe has insisted upon an escape clause), metaphorically speaking his disappearance stands for the thousands of American boy-men who at middle age suddenly seek out women other than their wives and/or are convinced they must escape the “confines” of their marriages (we’ve seen public examples of that behavior in all walks of life, including several Presidents, and I have personally observed such behavior by some of my relatives and friends).

     Like many such males, Joe, without his marital ties, feels like (and in terms of the play’s device, actually is) a younger man. But we all know that youth, after one has lost it, can never be regained “as it was.” Joe can suddenly hit the ball out of the ballpark, but he is clearly unprepared for his transformation—he literally cannot fit into his shoes—and as he explores his new-found youth, he is as shy and bashful as a virgin.

      In his newly discovered role as a handsome young man, he can barely tolerate the advances of Applegate’s minion, Lola, a sexy bombshell (brilliantly played in the original production and the movie by Gwen Verdon) who climbs around, over, and across his body in her attempt to seduce him (“Whatever Lola Wants”). Tab Hunter’s obvious gay discomfort in the role is absolutely perfect, for whatever new-found power and freedom Joe now feels, he is quite unable to consummate a new relationship, and, consequently, seeks out a way to return secretly to his abandoned wife. Joe the character is not gay, but metaphorically speaking, Joe might as well be since as the young Hunter he inhabits another’s body who is disinterested in young women of his physical age.

     But then Joe as Hunter also has the advantage of looking unlike his previous self, and it is likely that, having rented him a room in her house, Meg feels some vague sexual excitement herself, even if Joe cannot return it.

      The joy of this work is our observation of the mad machinations of the Devil in disguise, Applegate, as he attempts to cheat Joe out of the agreement and send him on his way to eternal damnation—which in the 1950s was what some folk deemed as the natural punishment for such behavior. And ultimately, Joe feels as lost in his new identity as Lola is in hers—having been centuries ago transformed from the ugliest woman in Provincetown, Rhode Island to the beauty she is now. Ross and Adler’s lovely lament of their condition, “Two Lost Souls,” might as well be described as a homosexual threnody sung by a gay boy and his female best friend when neither of them can find the right lover and, accordingly, they feel of estranged from life.

 

Two lost sheep, in the wilds of the hills
Far from the other Jacks and Jills, we wandered away and went astray
But we ain't fussin'
Cuz we've got "us'n"

We're two lost souls on the highway of life
And there's no one with

whom we would ruther
Say, "Ain't it just great, ain't it just grand?"
We've got each other!

 

       Enraged by Lola’s betrayal, Applegate transforms Lola back into an ugly hag, and, as Joe reaches for a catch at the end of the final game, he changes him back into the middle-aged misfit he was at the beginning of the movie. Suddenly, they do not even have that lamentable friendship.

      Despite Applegate’s fury, however, Joe does catch the ball, saving the day, dashing off to return to his marriage with Meg.

       As the Devil attempts to convince Joe to return, Joe begs Meg to hold him tightly as he sings of his failed attempt to solve the fears and frustrations of old age:

 

A man doesn't know what he has until he loses it,
When a man has the love of a woman he abuses it,
I didn't know what I had when I had my old love,
I didn't know what I had 'til I said, "Goodbye, old love!"
Yes, a man doesn't know what he has 'til it is no longer around
But the happy thought is
Whatever it is he's lost, may some day once again be found!

     

    So ends Douglass Wallop’s and George Abbott’s fable about mid-life male heterosexual infidelity in the “Age of Anxiety.” Would that all such suffering men could so clearly perceive their inevitable fates.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2008

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (January 2010).