let’s do it
by Douglas Messerli
Roger Lambert (screenwriter and director) A
Seaside Story / 1986
British director Roger Lambert has filmed
several tales of young gay or queer-oriented young boys, Follow You, Follow
Me (1979) and I Want to Be Famous (1976) among them.
Superficially his 1986 short film, A Seaside Story is ostensibly
not a gay work, staring two young boys, Martin (Martin Plunkett) and Sam (Sam
Butterfield) who go on vacation for a weekend together in Lyme Regis.
If this might simply seem to be a
recounting of a series of incidental events happening to the two 17-year-old friends
who have very different interests, however, look closer. For Lambert’s work is
a very subtle satire upon on several issues, including the heteronormative
attitudes of young men out to simply get a kiss or possibly a fuck from a young
female meet-up, the values of young boys with regard to the immediate pull of
their testosterone and higher intellectual concerns, and a delightful satire regarding
the younger generation in connection with the elderly.
It
all begins with the boys’ arrival at a guesthouse where they are met by an
eccentric landlady (Gwen Nelson) who is absolutely delighted to meet up with
the very youngest guests she has ever entertained in her basically elderly vacationers.
She even rustles up a bottle of wine left to her by her long-dead husband for
the only customers who have dared to ask for a wine list. Indeed, she dotes
over the boys, particularly the far cuter Sam, who she encounters in a bath towel
after he takes a shower, requesting that he change a light bulb for her, which,
obviously means, accidently dropping the towel—much to her delight. Her
comment: “In vaudeville they used to do it with feathers.” She holds it up, to
protect him from our camera view more than from her own perusal.
Martin,
meanwhile has gone off to bed, imagining how next day he will meet up with the
girls he’s already scouted out, Zaile (Zaile Burrow) and Sarah (Sarah Mitchell)
who are vacationing with their mother (Sue Tracy) and her obnoxious boyfriend
Phil (Phil Rowlands).
The
landlady invites the young boarder to come downstairs and have a nice night-cap
with her, and Sam spends the evening playing Fats Wallers “Ain’t Misbehavin” and
Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” on the piano in the parlor with Gwen humming
along. Martin, in fact, is a bit annoyed by all the late night music.
The next day while Martin heads off to the beach to impress Zaile and
Sarah, Martin sneaks off to the seaside village’s bushes where he comes upon a
rare Monarch butterfly feeding off the milkweeds, probably having been blown
off course from North American on its way to the Canary Islands or the Azores.
Since Martin and his two new girlfriends seems rather disinterested, Sam
runs back to tell the elderly Gwen of her news, who completely knowledgeable of
local flora and fauna, dons her World War I military camping clothes, pulls out
her tent, and marches off the watch the friendly Monarch.
Since he shows utterly no interest in them, the girls ask Martin if his
companion is gay. As a commentator on the IMDb site notes, Martin is somewhat
of a “mullethead” who answers, “No, he’s just an ecologist,” under the
illusion, evidently, that they’ve equivalents and you can’t be both.
Just from his love of nature, and musically accompanied in this film by
Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love,” Sam camps out (quite literally, but
also a bit in the contemporary gay sense) with Gwen and Zaile, having fallen in
love with nature itself.
Martin gets his longed-for kiss from Sarah, as well as a wet drubbing
from three young local boys whose soccer ball he has accidently kicked into the
ocean. But Sam, the boy who’s more interested in the birds and bees that in the
female species, seems to have all the real fun, discovering the beauty of the
world around him and in the process completely transforming the life of a bawdy
old woman and a young girl who, unlike her sister, is now perhaps more
interested in making a new friend than in capturing a couple of quick smooches.
If Martin ever happens to wake up, he might find a beautiful gay boy in
love with life in the very next bed.
Los Angeles, February 17, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February
2026).
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