Sidney Lumet | A View from the Bridge / 1962

london bridge is falling down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Norman Rosten (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur Miller), Sidney Lumet (director) A View from the Bridge / 1962

 

Obviously, it is not London Bridge in this American film based on the play by Arthur Miller, that is falling down, nor even Brooklyn Bridge near the shipping yards where the Carbone family lives and works. The bridge is a symbolic one, common to Miller’s dry literary conceits, representing Eddie Carbone’s (Raf Vallone) role as the bridge to his sister’s past through his caring for her daughter, Catherine (Carol Lawrence), and to his wife’s Sicilian roots given his invitation into their home of the immigrant relatives, Rodolfo (Jean Sorel) and Marco (Raymond Pellegrini).    

     Carbone also begins the drama as a human link at least, if not a bridge, between the dock workers, administrative brutes, and the workers’ lawyer, Alfieri (a role excellently acted by Morris Carnovsky). And we quickly perceive Eddie as a solid edifice who supports and loves his family, alternately teasing and attempting to please his adoring but increasingly troubled wife, Beatrice (Maureen Stapleton, in a strangely muted performance that more closely resembles the acting style of Jean Stapleton in the TV series All in the Family than Maureen’s usually endearing outsiders).

    The trouble is that this human bridge is gradually falling apart, his emotional rivets slowly being loosened by deep psychological yearnings of which the simple Italian workman is unaware. His role as protector to Catherine has, over the years—due to both his wife’s and the girl’s maternal sympathy and loving placation to his sometimes violent temperament—has grown into unspoken love for the niece, his “Madonna,” that is quietly smoldering into lust. 

     The arrival of his wife’s relatives, the ox-like, married Marco and the handsome blonde Southern-Italian Rodolfo, who quickly falls in love with the beautiful girl who is close to his own age, changes everything, and shifts the family dynamics so completely that Eddie is suddenly forced to perceive not just the impossibility of his unconsciously burning fantasies but that he is no longer a man in his prime. As nearly all of our major American dramatists, from O’Neill, Williams, Miller to Albee have made evident: sexual desire and aging are nearly always an incendiary mix.

      Director Sidney Lumet has done nearly everything he could to take Miller’s self-consciously claustrophobic, hot-house drama into the real world, spilling out crucial events into early 60’s derelict New York streets that reminds one a bit of Elia Kazan and Martin Scorsese. The scene in which Eddie literally trails after the couple, Rodolfo and Catherine, following them into a automat, insistently watching them as they enter a movie and, later, a dance club, adds texture and deeper dimensions to Miller’s stagey work, as we begin to wonder which one of the two is he really stalking, and imagine his emotional responses to the apparently innocent acts he witnesses. 

     And the final street battle between Marco and Eddie and Eddie’s suicide, with a curved metal lifting-hook, could not have been better dramatized. But the problem with Miller’s drama is that his simple-minded and brutish lead, Eddie, needs to be told, time and again, apparently, what his problem is—without him ever catching on—which puts nearly every character in the work in the position of verbally accosting him with the “facts,” as if each were required to take turns at playing a hack psychologist. Accordingly, although the audience catches on quite quickly to the heart of the matter, the drama requires that the “hidden reality” be restated over and over in sometimes yawn-inspired declarations.

   What is suggested in Miller’s script, without being fully developed by either the author or his commentators, is that Eddie is not just jealous of Rodolfo and desirous for his niece, but—in his macho conceptions of the handsome tenor, since he can dance and design dresses evidently with equal ease he views as a homosexual—that he, himself may have other latent desires as well. In the intense scene played-out as a demonstration to reveal to Catherine what Rodolfo “really is,” wherein Eddie plants a full kiss upon the kid’s lips, Eddie literally displays the sexual tensions from which he is suffering, as in the very next instant he attempts to embrace Catherine as well.* 

    But it is all too much to imagine that this brute of a man could possibly be so conflicted; and, besides, by this time we no longer care. He’ll never be able to figure it out and resolve any such psychologically complex concepts. The only thing he can imagine to ease his passions is to turn into a “rat,” turning in his wife’s illegal immigrant family members over to the authorities, much like a family member calling up ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) today. And even then, he cannot comprehend that in that act he himself has forever dirtied his name, not Marco or his neighbors, who he blames.                    

    Since the view from this collapsing Brooklyn bum reveals that he is ready to dump all those who he once supported into the dirty waters of the East River; and since the internal scenes were inexplicably shot in France, this film, about Italo-Americans, dubbed into both French and American-English, might as well have represented it’s view as emanating from a falling London Bridge. As The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther pointed out, “Mr. Miller’s longshoreman, unlike his salesman, is better off dead.” Yet that sounds dangerously close, for me, to a suggestion that as a closeted gay man Eddie might be better off dead.

     Still we can’t quite help ourselves wishing that in this south-borough version of West Side Story, Tony and Maria (Carol Lawrence’s most memorable film role) might escape as Rodolfo and Catherine to Manhattan, along with Beatrice and Marco, to start a new life: the singing duo might have easily discovered brain, heart, courage enough to carry on in Lumet’s The Wiz! Besides Rodolfo always wanted to see Broadway! Maybe he was more than a little bit gay after all.

 

*I suddenly remembered a related event wherein an acquaintance I’d made as a Freshman in 1965 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee told me that he was reading Miller’s play, and was struck by the major character’s homosexuality. For years after, reading reviews and commentaries about the play, I found absolutely no mention about Eddie Carbone’s possible homosexuality. In hindsight, I can comprehend why. Perhaps the young friend was simply being a particularly astute reader— or perhaps he was trying to bring up another discussion, of which, in that year, I was yet quite innocent.

 

Los Angeles, May 14, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2015).

 

 

Dave Fleischer | Any Rags? / 1932 [animated cartoon]

a big bag full of love

by Douglas Messerli

William Bowsky and Thomas Goodson (animation), Dave Fleischer (director) Any Rags? / 1932 [animated cartoon]

 

This cartoon, featuring a 1902 ragtime song for line dancers, was made when Bimbo and Betty were still a couple, whose best friend was Koko the Clown.

    Bimbo is a rag collector in this work, a long lost figure who used to wander the streets begging for old clothes, bit and pieces of fabrics, or anything else the tenant-dwellers might wish to dispose of. As usual Margie Hines provides Betty Boop’s memorable voice.

     Bimbo as rag picker clearly isn’t very picky, grabbing up anything he can, including stripping the clothes off of many of the people he passes, including a vagrant male, who is distraught for having had Bimbo take off his pants. At another point, a housewife sending unwanted possessions his way through the tenant-dwellers clothesline finds herself riding caught up in the line whereupon Bimbo strips her as well, something that in pre-code films was still comically possible.

     In one case, a wife tries to rid her husband of his old clothes, which as fast as she puts out for the ragpicker, he pulls back to wear for a few more years.

     Finally, an entire barrage of bowls, bottles, and buckets fall from the heavens, clonking out Bimbo so that he imagines he’s dead and gone to a better world, led on by a jazz playing angel where nearly all the neighbors now put things out on their ledges, including Betty, a cow who delivers presents him with can of milk, and even a fish presenting up a can of sardines, all for the garbage man.

     Betty, however, has nothing to give him, as her dress keeps dropping to expose her frilly bra. Finally, she does toss down a full bag which Bimbo tosses into his cart, which now attracts an entire chase of feral cats.

     Bimbo now moves on, himself playing a jazz trumpet rendition of the “any rags” song, one of the hep cats joining in.

     Several animal figures are now gathered into a group waiting for Bimbo to arrive and auction off his daily haul. Koko the Clown here plays a sissy man who, shouts out “75 dearie,” purchasing a statuette of Atlas holding up the world.

     Finally, Betty herself pops up out of one of the bags that goes for 99 cents, Bimbo awarding her a kiss as all the bits of furniture and junk join in a dance, the two B’s rolling off in the cart, which overturns to create a house replete with all the goods left over, including a dog returning home to Betty, now the happy housewife.

 

Los Angeles, November 13, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

Joseph L. Mankiewicz | The Quiet American / 1958

a fable of faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph L. Mankiewicz (screenwriter, after the novel by Graham Greene, and director) The Quiet American / 1958

 

Mankiewicz’s The Quiet American begins well enough, with Michael Redgrave as the British reporter Fowler endowed with an even drier and more intense wit than Michael Caine in the same role in the later film. Although not a subtle actor, the heavily decorated World War II hero, Audie Murphy seems like a near perfect Pyle. And, if she is not quite as beautiful as Do Thi Hai Yen’s Phuong, Giorgia Moll has a quiet elegance that makes her quite believable as the woman torn between the two radically different lovers.

      Although the version’s presentation of General Thè and Pyle’s relationship too him is so vague that it is hard, at times, to know what is to made of Pyle’s “third force,” and, indeed, throughout this film it seems more like a crackpot idea that having any possible meaning within the 1950s French Indochine world. In fact, Pyle seems throughout this work more like a bumbling Candide than a possibly dangerous force, and as such seems, at moments, acts like he should be rewarded “the girl.”

       But that is just the problem with Mankiewicz’s infuriating vision; he has taken Greene’s ambiguous political tale and turned it into a simplistic love story, where Fowler, out of his jealousy for losing Phuong, coupled with his Old World cynicism, is manipulated by the Communists into believing the worst of Pyle. And ultimately the director manipulates the audience into believing that Pyle was just that: a bumbling American Candide who is truly innocent. In short, this version takes all Greene’s outrage and turns in on its head, suggesting that the Americans of the period not only seemed guileless but actually were innocent.

       What we are left with, accordingly, is a kind of moral fable, wherein we perceive that the believer without values ends up with nothing, with no moral ground and no girl. Indeed, awarded a divorce by his wife and permitted by his London paper to remain in Viet Nam, this Thomas Fowler will surely die in Viet Nam in complete isolation, instead of staying on to report the truth as Greene’s figure does in the cinematic remake.

       Not only is this work dishonest but it is made from what might have been a powerful political statement into a little moral fable about faith. There has always been something openly crass about Mankiewicz’s films—the hang-them from the rafters nastiness of All About Eve, the stagey Southern gothic-ness of Suddenly, Last Summer, and the just awful travesty of Cleopatra—but why he bothered to convert Greene’s anti-American investigation into a pro-American diatribe, argued, moreover, by the local loyalist French police detective, is simply beyond reason. This work simply demanded a new and better adaptation—and fortunately got it.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2017). 

 

Jeffrey D. Brown | What If I’m Gay? / 1987

 

how do you know if you’re gay?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Cooper (screenplay), Jeffrey D. Brown (director) 

 

Yesterday, January 6th—one of the most frightening days in American democracy when Trump supporters dared to attempt to take over the US Capitol Building to reassert their fantasy that this sick being had actually won an election he had massively lost—I still took time out to watch another queer movie, realizing that at this fraught time it was more necessary than ever before to record the history of the LGBTQ community as expressed through cinematic representations. Although the rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transsexuals, and those questioning of unsure of their identities were not specifically being attacked on this day, we all know that if the people who support Trump and other such rightists might have their way, all of our hard-won rights would be stripped, and we would return to the days in which we had to hide and cower rather than speak out freely about our existence.

     It was appropriate, I’d argue—although like much of what I do, it was simply a matter of coincidence—that I chose to view the 1987 45-minute film, What If I’m Gay? directed by Jeffrey D. Brown. As I began to view this work, in between tracking the horrors of what I was witnessing on television, I felt that I’d seen this story—about a young high school student suddenly coming to the realization that he might be gay and having to face his suddenly hostile former friends daily in the hallways of his school—many times before. Indeed, in its slightly histrionic, almost melodramatic telling, the tale of the young soccer team captain, Todd Bowers (Richard Joseph Paul)—who is suddenly suspected of being gay by his teammates and long-time friends Kirk (Manfred Melcher) and Allen (Evan Handler) when they discover a nude muscleman magazine in his desk drawer—seemed almost derivative until, looking back on my essays, I perceived that in the 1980s when this film first appeared as a “CBS Schoolbreak Special” there were very few examples of what we can now recognize as a “coming out” movie featuring 17-year-olds. The significant models of those films such as Get Real and Edge of Seventeen were still a decade away.

     Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, LGBTQ films dealt mostly with adults who had long ago accepted their sexualities, and even in the few “coming out” movies such as the 1982 film Making Love the central figure was an adult coming to terms with being gay after several years of heterosexual marriage. In the one exception among the films I have already written about (albeit I have yet about 160 films from just 1980 yet to screen) which involve a young boy, The Flavor of Corn (1986), it was the younger who taught his older teacher about the potentiality of gay love rather than the other way around.

       In short, this film presents us with one of the few examples of the decade that would later become a genre of its own. Moreover, even the later young high school coming out movies usually involve the love of another teenager or slightly older youth. In Todd’s instance, not only is there not a potential or actual lover to lead him through his sexual searches, but he knows no one, as he laments later in his confession to a school counselor, who is gay, and has had no gay sexual experiences—which reminds me of my own situation at that time of my life.

      Only his unconventional friend, Allen (Evan Handler) has an uncle who went through a similar experience. In fact, given the title of this work we might suspect Allen as being gay before we—and his friends—discover that Todd may have gay desires. After all, Allen is the one who, contrary to the “normal” student behaviors, likes anchovies on his pizza, prefers jazz to rock ‘n roll, participates in no sports, and seems to be constantly skirting any date with the girl who likes him, Nancy (Gabrielle Carteris). Not only does he have the gay uncle, but he is the only male who remains friends with Todd despite the possibility that he will be now also defined as gay, attempting to help guide his friend with all too savvy advice, occasioned by the necessity of the script meant to help guide young viewers out of just such a cul de sac in which Todd seems to be trapped. Worried about their friend’s state of health, it is Allen and Nancy who are willing to break into his house to make sure that the depressed Todd has not attempted to commit suicide. It is Allen who offers the most profound advice of this not terribly profound movie, “You will never be happy until you come to terms with who you are.”

      But that, of course, is the nearly impossible choice, particularly when you have had no previous encounters with queer life. The most poignant question this work evokes is “How do you know if you are gay?” A question for which there is no answer. Todd, with rather remarkable equanimity given his previous rather violent attempts to prove to himself and others that his is a “normal” male—attempting to beat up his childhood friend, Kirk, with whom he grew up considering almost as brother and almost raping his girlfriend Debra (Viginia Rae Robinson).

       Todd begins to perceive that his obsession with a national football hero whose every move he followed, clipping out and saving newspaper articles about him was not just a young sports-loving boy’s interest in a hero’s achievements, but represented a kind of “crush” he had on the player, a feeling he still holds inside. His interest in muscle-building magazines like the one in which some of the figures are shown in the nude, the magazine his friends discover in his desk drawer, was akin, we perceive, to the numerous male beefcake magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s—publications which assert an interest in the health of the male body, but actually serve another purpose of satisfying the masturbatory desires of necessarily closeted homosexuals.

      He even comes to terms with his differences, realizing that his dating was an attempt to prove himself as a heterosexual. And the advice of his rather incompetent, I’d argue, school advisor who suggests Todd see a psychiatrist and have a conversation with his former best friend who he argues is perhaps now fearful that given their friendship he might also be harboring gay feelings, seems almost doomed to failure given the toxic masculinity of Kirk and the others like him. In this short film it appears that the solution to Todd’s difficulties is to reassure his friend of his heterosexuality as much as to demand acceptance for his own differences. 

       Unfortunately, in this well-meaning lesson to students on how to deal with their LGBTQ feelings (and obviously this work is focused almost entirely on gays, whose problems and solutions are not entirely the same as all the others of the community) represent rather simplistic answers which result in unbelievably favorable results. If nothing else, looking back on this work from five decades later, the work belies the dishonesty of the truism that “it gets better.” Certainly, if the 2019 French film PD (Fag) is to be believed, the same almost total and sudden ostracization of young men perceived by their classmates to be gay still today faces youth whose queerness is perceived or even falsely questioned in their teenage years. Easy answers which this film makes such as sit down and discuss it with your parents, are not always helpful; my loving father proclaimed he would send me (or any son, presumably meaning my totally straight, sports-loving brother) packing if he ever discovered us to be gay*; and even the gay country singer, Will Lexington, a regular character on the TV series Nashville (which ran from 2011-2018) was left on the side of the road when his father discovered his homosexuality. When Todd earlier dares to even take up the subject with his father, the elder admits that as a young man he too bullied a young gay boy he knew in school. When he asks Todd if it’s “anyone I know,” his son answers what all those who are secretly gay come to realize: “Naw, you don’t know him.” That’s the problem for all young LGBTQ people, they feel so isolated in the conventional worlds in which they often live, that they cannot even imagine anyone might know what they’re feeling.

     Todd remarks that he sat outside the gay and lesbian center for a long while before he decided to speak with this school counselor, another well-meaning figure who declares he’s glad the boy decided instead to seek him out. I’d suggest he might have fared better if Todd had entered the center, sat down, and had a long chat with perhaps the first gay person he had ever met.

     But you can’t help but like director Jeffrey D. Brown and writer Paul Cooper’s little movie for daring to take on this subject in a popular medium in 1987, the year which in October over 800,000 (some estimate closer to a million) men and women marched in Washington, D.C. for lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights, while earlier that same month the Minnesota Supreme Court, by refusing to hear a case, upheld that state’s anti-sodomy laws, which made any gay sexual act punishable by imprisonment.

 

*When I finally told my parents I was gay at the dinner table in Howard’s and my Washington, D.C. apartment, my father stood up and signaled my mother, who together got into their car and drove straight back to their home in Iowa. I was then 23; had it happened six years earlier, I do not think I could have handled it as well as I did in 1970, with the man who I have now lived with for 51 years.

 

Los Angeles, January 7, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

 

Jacques Demy | Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) / 1964

picture perfect

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) / 1964

 

I first saw Jacque Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg upon its original US release in 1964, and I recall still today the wonderful pleasure of experiencing what was basically a pop movie opera instead of yet another French comedy spice up with heterosexual sex or a drama spiced up with heterosexual sex. This was something different.

 

   Since then, I have seen it several other times, carefully swallowing its sentimentality—the director himself admits to his to bring people to tears at the film’s end—without really bothering to consider whether or not this film had anything serious to say.

    This time around, however, the film not only brought tears to my eyes, but, particularly in its beautifully restored condition, affected me on a much deeper level. Certainly in 1964, with the US involvement in Viet Nam, I must have perceived that the central couple’s (Geneviève and Guy, played by photogenic Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo) problems are very much related to France’s involvement during the years that the film documents (1957-1963) in Algeria. 

     Perhaps I had not recognized, however, that Demy in fact structured this film around the way, divided as it is into the chapters: “The Departure,” “The Absence,” and “The Return.” It is the hero’s uncontrollable “absence,” in fact, during which his girlfriend discovers she is the pregnant, that destroys their relationship, pushing them both into marriages with loving but less adventurous companions: in Geneviève’s case, with the jeweler Roland Cassard (Marc Michel) and in Guy’s case with his aunt’s caretaker, Madeleine (Ellen Farmer).

     But I have gotten ahead of myself since for the first third of this film all we see is the splendiferous and truly magical love affair between the two young individuals. Even then, however, we know that their perfect relationship is doomed because of the shopkeeper mother’s bourgeois values. As one of Demy’s friends tells us in a short film about the making of The Umbrellas, a woman who is the daughter of a shopkeeper simply is not permitted to marry a mechanic in the provinces where Cherbourg lies. Madame Emery (Anne Vernon), the girl’s mother, makes it quite clear from the start that she is opposed to her daughter marrying Guy.

    As the mother argues, Geneviève is much younger that she supposes herself to be. And she does not have the resolve needed to bear with Guy’s slowness in writing letters, particularly given the pressures of bearing a child out of wedlock, as it was described in those days. Her mother’s pressure for her to marry the wealthy Roland winds out over her own feelings; and her ignorance what it is like to be at war leads her to believe that Guy is no longer serious about their relationship.

   Geneviève chooses a passivist route, declaring she will marry Roland if he accepts her being pregnant. A reasonable and kind man, who is also very much in lover with the young girl, Roland easily wins her over.

    In a sense, accordingly, the tears that fall at the end of this sad tale are rather pointless. Both Guy and Geneviève are perhaps better off with the mates they have finally chosen or have been chosen for them. Yet we sense in that touching last scene—acted out in the cleanest and brightest of Esso stations ever in existence—that Geneviève is, as the French might say, somewhat trist, a bit resigned by her fate, and that Guy, particularly in his refusal to see his “daughter,” waiting I the car, and his final statement that it is time for her to go, that he still feels some bitterness.

     A moment later, however, both turn to their children with obvious joy and pleasure, so that we know that any grieving they feel is a passing feeling. Like so many of Demy’s films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, logically speaking, ends quite happily.

     Perhaps our tears emanate not so much from the resultant loves of the two major characters, but from the exquisiteness with which their earlier love was portrayed. To me, it now appears, the true wonder of Demy’s work is not its fragile story nor the soap-opera emotions of its characters call up, but the sheer perfection of the fantasy world that Demy has created.

      In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Demy has whipped up a Hollywood-like operetta that even outdoes Stanley Donen’s and Gene Kelly’s lavish spectaculars, or the musical splendors of Vincent Minnelli. If Demy appears to be blind to the wonders of dance in this work (he makes up for that in his later Les Demoiselles de Rochefort with Gene Kelly as one of its stars) his set designer, Bernard Evelin, is a magician. Composer Michel Legrand’s lush chords and easy to assimilate melodies, with his occasional jazz interpolations, demand even less from the listener than do composers like Gershwin, Loewe, or Bernstein but offer up almost as much pleasure. Despite the seeming oddness of a full operatic film, Demy’s work seems so perfectly artificed that we do not for a moment think it unusual, without even the early shock of the moment when we first see the Jet gang in West Side Story break into dance.

     The work is so grandly theatrical that it doesn’t even matter, at moments, that the two lovers float down streets without even moving their feet, of that, because all actors had lip-synced the pre-recorded score, their movements were so precisely timed that they were allowed no opportunity for improvisation; or, finally, that in that very last scene Geneviève’s “detour” has taken her more than five hours in the opposite direction from where she has begun her trip. The Cherbourg of Demy’s opera is not any more real than the plastic model of the toy Esso station that Guy keeps in his bedroom. In Demy’s world everything, even the raindrops, are as carefully timed as the tears Deneuve admits she found difficult to produce as Guy’s train pulls away in the first “Departure” act of the piece. No matter, we cry in her place, not so much out of sadness for the events of the story I now believe, but because we have at the end to go back to our real worlds.     

     And there lies the rub. Any queer person watching this fantasy immediately knows that the true hero is not pretty Geneviève, but the very sexy Guy, who after all has served his country only to be dumped by a girl unable to live up to her convictions of love and only far too ready to abandon herself to an older and wealthy man who will financially protect her and her child. While this film superficially presents itself as a heterosexual fantasy, accordingly, it is actually a coded queer one, centering on Guy the outsider who eventually finds love in the arms of a much kinder and less traditionally pretty girl—read another “boy”— who has long had to keep quiet about “her” secret love for him. Together they have forged a squeaky clean new life that might be at home in Kenneth Anger’s vision of Kustom Kar Kommandos of only a year later. Notice, that Guy and Madeleine (read Matty) celebrate their Christmas in the Esso station at film’s end.

     At one point, early in the film, the director even visually hints at the alternatives that exist for Guy even while he is closely hugging a dismayed Geneviève. There’s that quite boy coming down the or the sailor waiting, his face turned to the wall.

     Demy, a bisexual (married to filmmaker Agnès Varda), mostly gay man, who died of AIDS at age 59 in 1990, has reversed the gender of the usual Hollywood heterosexual melodrama—wherein it is usually the woman (think of Ginger Rogers as Kitty Foyle or Barbara Stanwyck as Stella Dallas) who lack the social status and behavior to keep their wealthy lovers—here representing the bourgeoise by Geneviève and her mother with pretty boy Guy being the outsider. Any queer viewer automatically sides, I would guess, with Guy, even if we might feel sorry for the decision his former lover has had to make. If we cry, it is not for sadness, for but the happiness that Guy has found despite his ostracization from the protected society that the umbrellas of Geneviève and her mother provides. We can only feel a sense of relief that Guy has not been entrapped in the relationship with Geneviève whose mother would certainly have demanded that Guy seek other employment and that big, beautiful Esso station would have remained only the toy version of his dream.

     The beautiful and innocent girl of the early part of the movie is now a well-dressed woman in a bouffant hairdo has gotten the life she deserves, going miles out of were way just to remind herself of what she has lost.

    As Steve Erikson summarized in 2024, long after I’d written the above review:

 

“Demy and fellow filmmaker Agnes Varda had been married two years when he made The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. However happy they may have been, the film’s narrative reflects the pain of being unable to publicly embrace a part of one’s sexuality. It offers several variations on the closet. At first, Guy and Genevieve conceal their dating from her mother. Although Roland genuinely likes Genevieve, their marriage is a convenient way to take care of her daughter and avoid the stigma of being a single mother. The theme of being unable to follow one’s heart to its seemingly logical conclusion is a universal one — after all, life has a way of interrupting the plans we make — but as expressed by a queer man, its resonance is more specific, even in a film about heterosexual romance. The melancholy arc of the story bears the mark of an outsider’s perspective on marriage.”

 

      By film’s end, Guy is the man who got away, the gay boy who has found a new, more fulfilling life. In 1964, Hollywood was still four years away from ending the Production Code, replacing it with an age-based film rating system, so Demy had no other way to tell his “gay” story but through the coded tale, as he had done in previous in Dead Horizons, Lola, and Bay of Angels; but this time he clued us in by making sure we understood that the story about love he was telling was not real one, but a kind of fairy-tale, an obviously artificed simulacrum representing the real world where a high school couple might break up for reasons other than simply going off to battle and not growing up on the right side of the tracks.

 

Los Angeles, November 15, 2015; revised November 13, 2025

Reprinted from World Cinema Reivew (November 2015) and My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).