boys in arms
by Douglas Messerli
Rex Wilson (screenwriter, after the
novel by Thomas Hughes, and director) Tom Brown’s Schooldays / 1916
In the manner of the films I’ve
already described that retold very abbreviated stories of works by Charles
Dickens and William Shakespeare, British director Rex Wilson (born George
Edward Wilson) in his very first film chose to retell episodes from the popular
1857 novel by Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which was retold
several times in cinema over later years.
The original novel was far more sexually open that Wilson’s own telling,
which included a female love interest for Tom Brown that was not at all in the
original telling. Clearly, Wilson in his attempt to reiterate Victorian values
for a British audience facing World War I—the oldest of the three Tom Brown
actors, Jack Hobbs having already in real life volunteered for the
military—that preached the tenants of childhood resilience, deep family
commitment, and gentlemanly virtue which would help young British soldiers put
up in wartime deprivations. Certainly, the original novel, although by today’s
standards featuring some very strange notions of male relationships, focused on
the complex issues of male bonding that would allow war-time men to live
together for years in the World War I trenches.
Tom Brown, who like so many British boys is sent off to boarding school—this
school devoted to the almost inexplicable mass deep body contact sport of rugby
wherein the ball seems almost beside the point to the boys’ pressing of their
bodies against one other—where boyhood bullying, endless pillow fights and
fisticuffs, and so-called mentoring relationships between older and younger
school boys that border on sanctioned pedophilic friendships were common.
Rugby school, to where Tom (first played by the female actor Joyce
Templeton) is sent, is a world of the older demonstrating their power over the
younger, the later forced into become fags—having little to do with what we now
describe as “faggots” (at one point Tom begs the bully Flashman, “Please, Flashman, don’t toss me! I’ll fag for you. I’ll do anything only don’t
toss me!”)—referring to younger boys who run, fetch, and regularly serve as
menials for the older boys. Tom is almost immediately identified as a good
sport, and although he suffers the blanket tossing (which might easily end in
broken bones) of the elder bully Flashman, he survives long enough to provide
elderly friendship (as actor Jack Coleman) for his first young mentee, Harry
East (who is simply credited as Mr. Johnson).
The friendship that develops between the two is comparable to that of
Hitchcock’s 1927 movie Downhill, the much later 1968 Stephen Frears film
if…, and even the Danish boarding school film by Lasse Nielsen and Ernst
Johansen, You Are Not Alone of 1978, not to ignore the university
boy-love relationships of the 1981 TV series Brideshead Revisited and
the 1987 James Ivory film Maurice, to name only a couple.
Although Wilson somewhat attempts to tamp down the sexual intensity of
the elder/younger boy relationships in Tom Brown by introducing a
youthful heterosexual love interest in his professor’s daughter, even here,
when he encounters her with East by his side, the film through its careful
observation of how the boys drop their handholding while still reaching out for
one another’s fingers suggests East’s fear of abandonment and reinforces their
sense of physical dependency for one another, restored the moment she leaves
the room.
The subplot, which despite the episodic nature of the film’s plot is
quite well done, and further takes us down the road of boylove enchantment,
this time regarding Tom’s beloved older sister, Cynthia.
Soon after Tom leaves home as a young child, Cynthia (Evelyn Boucher)
runs away with her boyfriend, and despite her father’s attempt to stop her,
marries a young man. Squire Brown (Mr. Daniels), in response bans her from ever
returning home. Cynthia’s young husband dies soon after, leaving her with a
young male child, Arthur (Eric Barker). Almost penniless, she nonetheless works
to support him and sends him away when she can to the same boarding school
where her brother (now played by Jack Hobbs) is an upperclassman.
Having now proven himself as a
responsible young adult, the head of the school demands that he give up his
relationship with Harry East and mentor instead the young new boy, Arthur.
The familiar relationship obviously should allay any suspicious we might
have about the two forming a sexual bond, but strangely the acting becomes even
more physical as Hobbs, presumably to establish his tender feelings for his new
young charge, endlessly throughout the last third of the
film keeps his young charge close to
him, with his arm about him in a manner that cannot help but be seen as a
gesture of sexual love. Although they sleep in separate beds, Arthur and he
seem almost to share their life together in Tom’s room, wherein he keeps a
portrait of his sister without Arthur ever noticing it.
Once more, the even more towering presence of the professor’s daughter
looms over the two young men’s male romance, but in this case it is clear that
Tom is far more focused on his young charge Arthur.
Arthur, in turn, clings to his new friend in a physically dependent
manner, neither of them knowing of their avuncular relationship.
And when Tom returns to his private room, telling East that he has now
found a new friend, it is rather apparent that his new friendship is not simply
a social one, but something that envelops both of their physical lives as well.
When East asks him forthrightly, “Who’s the new boy?” Brown answers him
in kind: “Sorry, East, old man, he’s taken your place.”
Accordingly, even if the director was desperately attempting to
establish a true idealistic mentorship between the elder and younger boy, the
sentimental tropes and acting gestures of the day only reinforce the kind of
relationship that the upper “Whips” in if… .have with the young boys
they perceive as sex objects.
In the original book, as critic Shane Brown reminds us, Hobbs even more
strongly hints at the homosexual undercurrent between the two, having East
describe Arthur as “a pretty little dear,” to which he adds a footnote: “There
are many noble friendships between big boys and little boys but I can’t strike
out the passage. Many boys will know why it was left in.”
By film’s end, of course, any suggestions of a sexual relationship
between uncle and nephew are hurriedly wiped away with the discovery that
Arthur is, in fact, his lost sister’s son, and Tom’s good deed of bringing both
his new “roommate” and the boy’s mother home for a visit, thus reuniting the
seemingly recalcitrant father and daughter, becomes the closing moral act of
the work.
Yet the way Wilson has chosen to tell Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the
story remains basically a tale about schoolboys pressing their flesh against one
another, and not at all focused on their selfless encouragement and admiration.
Los Angeles, March 3, 2026
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(March 2026).
