William Wyler | Tom of Culver / 1932

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).