Jacques Tourneur | Out of the Past / 1947

into the frame

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Mainwaring (screenplay, based on the novel, Build My Gallows High by James M. Cain, with uncredited writing by Cain and Frank Fenton), Jacques Tourneur (director) Out of the Past / 1947

 

It’s interesting that in the vast majority of American film noirs, it is the women who betray the heroes, usually world-weary gumshoes or seedy punks who are taken advantage of by wealthy crooks or society figures; the women surrounding them lie and murder, leaving the male figures very much “framed” and in the lurch. Never has this fact been made more apparent than in Jacques Tourneur’s masterful 1947 film Out of the Past.

      The “hero” of the film, Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has, in fact, attempted to escape his shady past with a move to the small paradisiacal town of Bridgeport, California, where he now runs a gas station, fishes in the nearby pristine creeks and rivers with a young boy who can neither hear nor speak (Dickie Moore)—the perfect fishing partner, one might argue—and has fallen in love with a local girl, Ann Miller (Virginia Huston). In this prelapsarian world, he has almost able to create a new life; but before the film can even begin, we are introduced to the hulking figure of Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine), a well-dressed stranger on the prowl for Jeff, whose past, we quickly perceive, has suddenly caught up.

      The rest of the film is swallowed up in the story of that past and its continuing consequences, which, as in nearly all such films, ends, through the fewer and fewer choices available to its central figures, in death. A great part of Jeff’s (whose last name, as he tells Ann, is really Markham) story is presented as a kind of confession to Ann, revealing how he was hired by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to track down his girlfriend, after she has attempted to kill him (shooting him four times) and stolen $40,000 of his money.

      Not really wanting the job, but unable to turn down such a large payment, detective Markham tracks down Sterling’s girl, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) in Acapulco, where, under a more brutal sunlit landscape, Jeff is forced to spend his days drinking as he waits to encounter Whit’s woman friend. When he does finally track her down, it is almost love at first sight—at least for him—as Kathie slowly tells her side of the story, insisting that although she had tried to kill Whit, she has stolen no money:

 

                               Kathie: But I didn’t take anything. I didn’t Jeff. Don’t

                                            you believe me?

                               Jeff: Baby, I don’t care.

 

      Together, the two plan escape back to the States, but at the same moment Jeff encounters Whit and his henchman in Acapulco, checking up on him. Again, Jeff asks to be released from the case, but Whit refuses. Insisting that Kathie has slipped past him on a steamer heading south, he hurries off with Kathie to San Francisco.

      The San Francisco in which this couple hides out is not the brightly lit city of Northern California but a dark, hidden world, as the two attempt to escape notice. When they temporarily let their guard down, they are spotted at a race track by Jeff’s old detective partner, Fisher, who was to share 50% of whatever Jeff got for bringing back Kathie. The two break up, taking different routes to a rural cabin in order to get Fisher off their track. But when Jeff turns up to the cabin wherein Kathie waits, Fisher is already there. As the two men begin a fistfight, Kathie picks up a gun and shoots Fisher dead, and Jeff suddenly realizes that she has not only lied to him about stealing Whit’s money but has now framed himself for Fisher’s death.     

 

     So Ann and Jeff arrive, back in the “present,” Jeff returning to the dark grille of Whit’s country estate, the grille itself reminding one of the long act of confession we have just experienced. At Whit’s house, Jeff finds, unexpectedly, Kathie once again living with her former boyfriend. As usual, she has made the convenient choice.

      This time Whit is in trouble with the Federal government for failing to report taxes, and his crooked lawyer, Leonard Eels, is blackmailing Whit for more money. Again, Jeff attempts to escape his fate, but realizes that if he does not help he will be accused for having killed Fisher.

      The world-weary Jeff perceives it as another frame-up, and back in an even darker San Francisco tries to warn Eels of the danger he is in. Another woman, Eels’ secretary, Meta Carson (Rhonda Fleming) is involved this time around. Like Kathie, she is willing to kill her boyfriend, and does, as Jeff slips back into Eel’s apartment to find him dead. Hiding the body, he slips into a nightclub where Whit’s documents are kept—along with an affidavit that Kathie has signed insisting that Jeff has killed Fisher.      Again on the run, Jeff returns to the nearby Bridgeport streams, joined by his friend, the Kid. But unknowingly to him, Kathie has ordered Stephanos to trail the kid, who leads him to the river where Jeff is fishing. Stephanos, about to shoot Jeff, is spotted by the Kid, who sends the tackle and hook of his fishing rod up to the rock where Stephanos stands, about to shoot, causing Kathie’s henchman to fall to his death.

     Back at Whit’s, Jeff attempts to convince Whit of Kathie’s double cross, trying to convince him of her murder of Fisher. But when he returns again to Whit’s Lake Tahoe house, he discovers that Kathie has killed Whit, and that she is now in charge. Either Jeff joins her or she will accuse him of all three murders! Finally, Jeff has no escape left—except to secretly call the police and warn them of their route.

      Suddenly observing the roadblock ahead, Kathie realizes that she has been betrayed, and shoots Jeff dead. The police kill her, beside her a large cache of money has fallen from her purse.

      After Jeff’s funeral, Ann attempts to make sense of events, while her boyhood lover, Jim, tries to convince her to turn her attentions back to him. Asking the deaf Kid whether Jeff was truly running away with Kathie at the time of his death, Ann eagerly awaits his response. The Kid sheepishly nods his head “yes,” and she turns back to the town and her ordinary life there. The Kid looks up at the gas station sign declaring Jeff’s name—the same sign that drew Stephanos there in the first place—and salutes it, as if, in his act, he has done Jeff’s bidding in allowing Ann to go on in a life removed of regret and grief.

      The plot of Out of the Past, if not exactly opaque or clear, at least makes reasonable sense, especially when compared with works such as The Big Sleep, Laura, or Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. But the important structures of this dark work are the film’s movement from light to a more oppressive light, and into the black of the final last scenes of this film. For the haunted characters, moreover, the work functions almost as a puzzle-box in which door after door closes for each of them, until they are all trapped within each other’s fates. If even one of them had been able to say “no,” or to truly escape—as Jeff has so nobly attempted—all or at least some of them might have been saved. But the events of the past, in this film, are like steel bonds of fate, drawing them again and again closer to each other until they destroy every individual in their claustrophobic circle. Only with the Kid’s final gesture is the past finally over and done with, freeing Ann to remain out its grasp, even while it dooms the true hero to a kind of eternal damnation in the minds of those remaining in the still unfallen world. The only link between those worlds is a young boy who cannot and will not speak the truth. Yet in receiving and hearing Jeff’s confession, Ann has, unknowingly, forgiven him, even if she cannot save him from his past acts, as so too, in attending to this sad tale, has the viewer.

 

Los Angeles, September 14, 2001

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2013).

Robert Lambert | Follow You Follow Me / 1979

best mates

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Lambert (screenwriter and director) Follow You Follow Me / 1979

 

It’s fascinating to think of the British half-hour short by Robert Lambert, Follow You Follow Me  of 1979 as an unintentional prequel to Roger Tonge’s 1987 BBC educational film Two of Us. Lambert also worked on educational films for Southampton, and both films feature young teenage boys coming of age who, feeling closely bonded, determine to strike out on their own, turning their backs on the restrictions of their families and society. Both also are concerned with larger social issues, Lambert’s film featuring a battle between a factory owner and a strike leader, fathers to the two boys; Tonge’s film was a response to the restrictions on the expression of homosexuality by the Thatcher government (for a fuller explanation of this, see my discussion of Tonge’s significant work).

     Lambert’s work remains somewhat tepid when compared with Tonge’s simply because the two boys of Follow You Follow Me, although defining themselves several times as “best mates” have not even begun to explore their sexuality, while the boys in Tonge’s film, although at times confused about their sexual identities, are clearly in love with one another and see their “on the road” journey as a kind of “marriage.”

     Lambert’s boys, Joseph (Francis Gibbon) and Peter (Stephen Bratt) get no further than the next town before they are forced to give up their journey, and they end up, after a brief train ride, in the very city, Southampton, where Joseph’s family are moving. The boys may remain friends over time—although even that’s uncertain given their societal and spatial separations—but it is highly unlikely that they will ever explore their sexual identities, with the likelihood that Peter, in particular, will fall in with one of the girls with whom he practices kissing, get married, and lose contact with the shyer, more innocent, and far sexually confused Joseph.

      Any speculation, however, is pure fiction that lies outside of the verisimilitude of Lambert’s drearily mostly brown-, pea-green-, and rust-hued color film. Perhaps in Southampton Joseph will meet another young boy and return to the far more exciting and eccentric road trip that Tonge’s work features.

      Yet, there is something almost daring about Lambert’s attempt to play out the tropes of a gay coming of age movie against the backdrop of the growing division between worker and management being played in the small town of Hythe.

      Joseph’s father (Gilbert Wynne), the owner of J. Cook & Co., is having financial difficulties and is in danger of losing his factory which hires 80 local workers. He’s even put up his family home as collateral, and is now in danger of losing everything unless he lays off half of his employees or sells the business. Peter’s father (Kevin Moore), on the other hand, is the local union leader, heading the picket lines demanding remuneration for the 40 soon-to-be furloughed employees. It’s no wonder, accordingly, that neither father approves of their son’s relationship with the other boy, while their wives beg them to leave their children alone. But in keeping the boys uninformed, their sons come in danger of being swept up in the larger local political upheavals.

      The two go everywhere together, each night joining up, sometimes just to hang out in Peter’s room talking while Peter toys with his childhood soldiers and Joseph pages through a copy of Mayfair magazine his friend has found while cleaning out his father’s shed. Together the boys attend a teen dance, where Peter gregariously dances with a girl while Joseph sits it out like a wallflower. Yet all during his encounters with girls, Peter looks over at Joseph and smiles with affection. One has the feeling that he is exploring the opposite sex out of a sense of duty more than any intense desire. And when he finally encourages another girl to pay attention to Joseph the two sneak out for kissing practice which Joseph miserably fails, the girl responding that he is “slow,” both girls moving away in disappointment with their male companions.

     When the two discuss heterosexual sex, relating their juvenile fantasies, Joseph asks whether Peter’s “done it yet” with a girl. But the boy responds in a manner that suggests he is not quite maturing into heterosexual normality as quickly as he might: “No, I wouldn’t do it with a girl unless I really fancied her.” Obviously, he’s not yet found a girl he fancies. Yet both are ready time and again to claim “we’ll always be mates.”

      At another point they consider purchasing what we called at their age a “girlie” magazine, but when Peter considers “nicking” it, Joseph disapproves, and they leave the store without the item that brought them in.

      Yet again Joseph displays the differences in their upbringing when, after someone at school has described him as a “wanker,” he asks Peter what the word means. Obviously, he is a “wanker,” a male who masturbates instead of having sex with women, another way of suggesting he might be queer.

      And those very differences, Joseph’s polite and sheltered upbringing as opposed to Joseph’s working class, streetwise learning, lead to violent expression given the labor issues facing the community. Joseph is grabbed by several of his classmates while his best friend punches him in the stomach. 

   

      Forced to take the action by his classmates, Peter quickly moves off while the other boys mock him for not continuing and move in to further kick and pummel their fallen prey. It’s one of three instances that reveal just how emotionally involved the two boys really are. As Peter turns away, watching from the corner of his eye how his “mate” his being beaten, tears stream down his face and, after a few moments, he rejoins the fray in order to break it up.

     Obviously, such actions inevitably result in a severance of their friendship. Joseph is sent away to a far posher school in Southampton—as he later tells Peter he must take courses in “Latin and other things”—and the two are no longer able to “hang out” together. Soon after, his father announces that the family, now that he has sold the factory, will be moving to Southampton. Heartbroken, Joseph steals away from school taking the Hythe ferry back to his hometown to wander the streets and finally to encounter his old friend. At first he runs away from him in partial fear that he will mock his new school uniform, but also still unsure of Peter’s feelings toward him. “When you hit me,” he finally asks, “did you really mean it?”

  

                        peter: They made me do. They hit me as well.

                        joseph: Why?

                        peter: Because I’m mates with you.

                        joseph: We’re still mates?

                        peter: Best mates.

      And, finally, on the day the family is scheduled to make the move, we see Joseph lying in bed, a tear running down his cheek. He suddenly rises, packs his duffel and grabs his skateboard, knocking at Peter’s bedroom window to say goodbye. As the two briefly talk, he suddenly comes alive in way we’ve not previously seen this “follower” behave. “Let’s clear out. We’ll make our own decisions for a change.”

      So begins their brief adventure which, as I state above, ends nowhere. Unlike Phil and Matthew in Two of Us Joseph and Peter never make to Sussex—but then they live in the neighboring county of Hampshire in sea-side cities. What could Seaford mean to them? These two never truly leave home and probably will never escape their societal designated identities that thoroughly delimits the definition of “best mates.”

 

Los Angeles, March 14, 2021

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

 

Andrzej Wajda | Panny z Wilka (The Girls of Wilko) / 1979

where sheep eat wolves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zbigniew Kaminski (screenplay), based on a story by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Andrzej Wajda (director) Panny z Wilka (The Girls of Wilko) / 1979

 

Wiktor Ruben, who manages a farm connected to a school for blind girls, has just lost his friend, Jurek. Standing over the gravesite of a man whom Wiktor describes as "ordinary" (but whom the priest later reveals as a poet), he falls to the ground, temporarily fainting. The doctor suggests Wiktor take a few weeks off by returning to a popular summer spot where he has, before the war, regularly visited, and where Wiktor's aunt and uncle have a farm.

  

     Wiktor arrives at the neighboring farm, Wilko, a peacock running ahead of him which he seems to be prodding with a horse crop. Indeed, what he discovers at Wilko will demand that he control his pride (which the peacock’s symbolize) as much as possible; for inside the house sit five sisters, Julcia, Jola, Zosia, Kazia, and Tunia, four of whom he has known—along with another now-dead sister Fela—from his childhood visits to this spot. The women have all grown a bit older, and what one can imagine as their lithe, youthful bodies have rounded out a little, but they are all still quite glorious beings, the first four now married with children. They are astounded to see Wiktor after a fifteen-year absence, but it is obvious that they are also delighted by his return; he is still fit and handsome, and they, it quickly becomes apparent, were, at one time all in love with him.

    "Where is Fela?" Wiktor wonders. Slowly it dawns on the viewer that her death has been connected to his departure so many years ago.

      Wajda's quiet and sumptuously beautiful film appears, accordingly, to be headed in the direction of a meditation on past and present, focusing on these beautiful women, none of whom, apparently, won his heart. Tunia, not of age on Wiktor's previous visits, is now solicitous of his love. His aunt and uncle encourage him in that direction, but as his aunt mentions, divorce is always a possibility in the Wilko house; for the women of Wilko are all unhappy in their marriages, particularly the eldest, Julcia, whose husband now penuriously controls the estate. While it is clear that she was once beautiful, in her hairstyle and dress she now looks quite maidenly, having long ago retreated into her intellect—and kitchen, where she cans hundreds of jars of jam.

      Accordingly, while Tunia, who fondly reminds Wiktor of the dead Fela, devotedly watches over his comings and goings, each of the daughters attempts to rekindle her past love and perhaps win him over to her cause. Clearly Wiktor is attracted to and amused by all these appealing—and sometimes, emotionally, not-so-appealing—beauties. And Jola, specifically, seems quite ready to fall into bed with him. Yet, as Dan Schneider has noted in an online review of the work in 2007, instead of greeting these attentions with joy, Wiktor (Daniel Olbrychski) "deftly conveys the sense that the character is not in conscious control of his reactions, with seemingly involuntary twitches and facial expressions" that, I would further argue, reveal his discomfort in the various situations. Asked why he never chose any of them for marriage, he admits he was a "coward."

      That has, in turn, led many critics to see the film as a portrait of a failed man, a man unable to accept the joys of life; Wiktor seems more comfortable, as he mentions earlier in the film, working; life's pleasures seem as elusive now as they evidently were in his youth.

       As Schneider also astutely points out, however, the "lambs" of Wilko—who seem so willingly led to sexual slaughter—live in a world, as one of the sisters describes it, where "wolves are eaten by the sheep." If the sisters work as a kind of sexual unit, they also cleverly manipulate the men around them, and as each secretly vies for Wiktor's love, they employ everything from military-like maneuvers to various kinds of passive aggression.

      In Wiktor, however, unlike their equally unhappy husbands, these "maidens" have met their match. Despite all their ploys and gestures, their suicidal threats, he remains aloof, as if, he suggests, he were "a strange soul from another planet." Accordingly, the past repeats itself, as Wiktor once more leaves these lovely "girls" of Wilko in the lurch in order to return to a world of the blind.

     Perhaps Kaminski and Wajda were attempting to create just such a shadowy figure, a man trapped in his own indecision, a being unable to truly engage in love. But I believe, if one carefully focuses on the earliest scenes of this film, it becomes quite apparent why Wiktor has chosen none of these manipulative women for his wife.

     The only truly emotional response he demonstrates in this work, one must remember, is his collapse at the grave of his friend, Jurek, the man he describes not simply as his best, but his only friend. Without pinning Wajda's subtle film to one reading, I would venture to suggest that Wiktor is gay*, and that the cowardice to which he admits, has little to do his inability to fall in love with one of the Wilko women, but with his refusal to admit his love of men. He is, indeed, from another planet, a world outside of the orbit of these provincial beauties. His world is not so much a world of the blind—even though he is surrounded by the blind—but of the hidden, faced as he is by an unnamable love, now forever lost.

 

*I should note that nothing in Iwaszkiewicz's original story, nor in Kaminski's script, for that matter, says anything specific about Wiktor's sexuality. Jurek is simply described as his "only close friend." The key passage in Iwaszkiewicz's story begins with Wiktor telling the local doctor of his relationship with Jurek: "He couldn't sleep at night, he felt very nervous and he couldn't work at all. And he couldn't stop thinking about his friend who had died of consumption two months earlier. He told his story casually, but he couldn't talk about Jurek without emotion. Jurek was the only close friend he ever had. He was a seminarist, the nephew of the camp's Mother Superior, not an unusual person, but Christian, quiet and good." The key words here, that Wiktor “couldn’t sleep at night,” that he “felt very nervous,” that “he couldn’t stop thinking about his friend,” and that Jurek was his “only friend,” might, obviously also suggest that Wiktor had simply been moved by Jurek’s death to ponder his own fate, particularly since he as an extremely isolated individual. But the combination of these statements suggest something else lying just below the surface, particularly the description of Jurek being his “only close friend,” code for a friend with whom one did not simply have causal relationship.

      Shortly after writing the piece above, I sent it to the author of the script, Zbigniew Kaminski, who, coincidentally, lives during the summers in my condominium building. Zbigniew wrote that "Your main argument is absolutely true. Nobody before you discovered it."

     We later met to discuss my publishing the work in the Green Integer book series, and he explained that Iwaszkiewicz was gay, although evidently closeted by Polish society.

     In late May of 2013 Wajda, after Kaminski had given him a copy of my first film volume which included the three Wajda reviews, wrote me personally, thanking me for the essays: “It’s very important to me that you have become interested in my three movies, and more importantly, that you were generous enough to include them in the first chapter of your book, which contains an analysis of the most important works of European cinema. It is a great honour for me.” He went on to describe that he was currently working on a film about Walęsa, which he described as “one of the most difficult movies in my long life, not only because the character on the screen is alive and been so thoroughly described in my books, but also because the selection events in his life was not easy.” I was, obviously, quite delighted by Wajda’s response.

 

Los Angeles, Valentine's Day, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (2012).

 

 

 

John Erman | An Early Frost / 1985 [TV film]

without even a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (screenplay, based on a story by Sherman Yellen), John Erman (director) An Early Frost / 1985 [TV film]

 

1985 was an important year for the LGBTQ community in connection to the recognition of the AIDS crisis. That was the year, if you recall, that Rock Hudson died of the disease, not only shocking many everyday Americans with the revelation that Hudson was a gay man, but that anyone might contract and die from the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, including Hollywood’s hunkiest leading male actor.

      What is usually described as the first major AIDS film, Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies premiered late that year, as well as the first TV drama that dealt with the subject, John Erman’s An Early Frost which reached more than 34 million people when it was broadcast on November 11, a month after Hudson’s death.

 

    The film, written by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman (who later created Queer as Folk), took over two years in development with 14 rewrites. And, alas, the film reveals many of its numerous committee-like decisions.

     Unlike Buddies, which featured a more radicalized and almost indigent victim of the disease, Erman’s work was pitched almost entirely to the bourgeois and upper-middle-class aspirants, similar to the figures in the next year’s excellent Parting Glances, 1989’s Longtime Companion and Philadelphia of 1993. As Erman himself admits, his audience as he saw it was his working-class Aunt Myrtle, “so that she will realize that gay people are just as good as anybody else.”

     As in Philadelphia, An Early Frost’s poster boy for AIDS Michael Pierson (Aidan Quinn) is a handsome well-to-do lawyer with a basically loving upper middle-class family—Nick (Ben Gazzara) and Katherine (Gena Rowlands), sister Susan (Sydney Walsh), and a grandmother played by the wonderful Sylvia Sidney—who lives in a basically monogamous relationship with an equally handsome lover Peter Hilton (D. W. Moffett) in a spectacular Chicago apartment that today would certainly be worth millions. The Pierson family home was represented by a house in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, a real-estate agent’s dream.

      At large, this strategy is understandable. If people like Hudson and the handsome character Quinn plays can contract AIDS, then anyone might. And, put together, what all the films I mention above make clear is that people of wealth were just as subject to the pernicious disease as others. And you have to give the director credit for his casting choices given the original desires by NBC executives who envisioned Michael’s family members to include, as Jay Blotcher reported in The Advocate, “Elizabeth Taylor or Audrey Hepburn as the mother, Gregory Peck as the father, and Helen Hayes as the grandmother.” The nervous network nellies, one suspects, might even have imagined Norman Rockwell as the set designer. So the Leave It to Beaver-like Brentwood house is not as absurd, in hindsight, as it might first have appeared. 

     At the time of this TV film’s shooting, although a Gallup poll showed that 95% of the US population knew what AIDS was, the majority still perceived it as a gay disease. Accordingly, although it focused on a gay man and his family, Erman clearly saw his film clearly as an educational tool, and accordingly took its character, who had remained closeted regarding his family and was evidently for too much of a workaholic to have kept up with information that the gay community itself had long before perceived, that although it the US and Europe it had first stricken predominantly gays, in Africa and some Asian countries it was a heterosexual disease as well, and in the US it had hit hemophiliacs, drug addicts, others who had had blood transfusions, and was rapidly beginning to enter the lives of heterosexual men and women and even their children.

      In an attempt to maintain authenticity Erman had Quinn undergo an AIDS test which Blotcher describes: “The doctor noted that the actor’s lymph glands were swollen and his white blood cells elevated.” Quinn remembers, “And I thought, Jesus Christ! Do I have AIDS? Is this some bizarre trick of fate that here I am doing this groundbreaking thing and I actually have it myself? The actor lived through a couple of days of mental agony—'I was kind of freaking out’—before his HIV antibody test came back negative.”

      When Quinn’s character, Michael finds himself hospitalized after a coughing-jag at his office, the doctor, diagnosing AIDS puts him under a whole gambit of reactions that those who find themselves afflicted generally exhibit: confusion, denial, rejection of any relationship to others who have come down with AIDS, anger, accusation, and refusal to accept the inevitable result of the disease which in that period represented almost certain death. In this instance when Michael discovers that Peter has had outside sex a couple of times when a law case took him out of town for a long period, and accordingly, that he may have contracted AIDS from his lover, he insists the he is the one most able and willing to care for him leave.

      The network standards and practices committee were insistent that Peter be presented as the villain of the piece in their attempt to portray homosexuality in a negative manner. Erman rejected their demands, threatening to reveal their tactics to the media, and they backed down. They continued to insist, however, that there be no physical contact between the two gay characters—ridiculous when one perceives that one of the lessons of the film was that AIDS was primarily contracted through physical sexual contact. On television they weren’t even granted a kiss.

       After Peter accuses Michael of still not having come to terms with his own life, Michael flees back to his family, faced finally with not only telling them that he is gay and that his next-door friend is his at-home lover but that he is ill with AIDS.

      Michael’s father, a lumberyard executive, cannot believe the truth, like so many fathers facing even less dire reports, absolutely rejecting his son. Fortunately, the mother is played by Rowlands who has spent her life creating a treasure-chest of feisty lovers and mothers, and takes on the role of Katherine Pierson, a woman who refuses to abandon her son in his time of most need, and with relish. In fact, as the movie goes forward it becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend why such a caring and outgoing woman could have lived most of her life with such a gruff and grumpy being as her husband Nick. Although she continues to beg Michael not to give up on his father, we gradually begin to comprehend why the son has not ever been able to “come out” previously to his father, and we begin to wonder whether her husband will be able to live up to her assertions.

      In many senses this work is so overstuffed with all the possible familial and societal dilemmas and roadblocks that sufferers of AIDS might face that we lose sight of Quinn’s character. He becomes instead a kind of modern-day Job, a symbol of what it means to suddenly be faced at a young age with one’s own death living among a still basically homophobic and terrified populace.

      When Michael suddenly undergoes severe uncontrollable tremors an ambulance is called only to be told by the drivers, upon discovering that their patient is sick with AIDS, that they refuse to transfer to the hospital. His father must carry his own son down the stairs and drive him to the institution by himself.

       Michael’s own sister, with whom he has long been close, refuses to visit the house; she is pregnant and fearful, despite assurances, that she might catch the disease simply from being in the same room with him. Michael’s father, still unable to come to terms with the son he loved but apparently never truly knew, refuses to visit him throughout his hospital stay.

       Peter finally visits the family, he and Michael returning to some sort of normalcy, and Katherine realizes what a perfect choice her son has made in his companion. But he is made to feel unwelcome by Nick and the other tensions surrounding Michael and his relationship, and returns to Chicago to await Michael’s own return.

       Yet for all of the stuffgeschicte that the creators felt necessary to portray the struggle gay AIDS patients had to face, one cannot help but be moved by An Early Frost and be thankful for its existence. As Erman, himself a gay man, was working on his film his cinematographer, Woody Omens, was concerned that every time he looked over at his colleague he saw him in tears. I dare anyone with a shred of empathy to watch this film without them.

       There are some scenes, moreover, that simply stand out in their stark surreality. Encouraged to attend a therapy session in the hospital with other dying AIDS patients, Michael is horrified with their conversation, particularly by the gallows humor of the most flamboyantly gay of them, Victor Mitado, played brilliantly by the always entertaining gay actor John Glover. Immediately identifying Michael’s condition, Victor admits, “I’ve had everything. I’m a medical marvel.”

       When another member of the group, a black man, tells them that he was fired for having AIDS and lost his health benefits, his boss having had his office disinfected, Victor snaps back: “Lemon-scented or pine?”  When the conversation turns to the straight man among them who reports that when his wife left she hugged him, but turned away her face, another responds that at least he had someone to hug, expressing his sadness with the fact that he will never be hugged or kissed again. Victor interrupts, “Well no one’s asked me. I’m available!”

       Finally, when the others become aware that one of their group is missing, the discussion leader reports that he has died. One young man, Todd, his face covered with tumors, begins to cry. “You know I’m getting tired of making friends who keep dying.” Victor once again turns the sorrow into levity. “I know what you mean. It’s almost impossible to put together a dinner party these days.” But when the same young man suggests they all should just...”end it,” Victor is the only one who reaches out and puts his hand lovingly on his shoulder, pulls him toward him and hugs him close,” asking him to openly relieve his grief.

       Michael gets up and leaves, unable to deal with the only way these people have learned to survive their ordeal. “I don’t belong here,” he claims.

        Yet later he becomes close friends with Victor, awarding him his own bathrobe which Victor has admired and serving as his “lawyer” as his new friend makes out his last will and testament. Unfortunately, Victor does not complete it before his death, Michael discovering a cleaning man in his room, throwing all his possessions, including the robe, into the trash before disinfecting the place.

      And, when at the lowest point of his own suffering our reluctant hero determines to commit suicide by automotive asphyxiation from which he is saved by his still someone begrudging father, we realize that before the curtain falls the elder will be forced to recognize that his son has been more of man in openly facing his life choices and death than he himself has ever been. 

      Eventually, Michael determines to return to Peter and live out whatever time he has left with the man he has chosen as his “lifetime companion.” even if that lifetime must now be condensed into only a year or a few months. As Nick and Katherine wave goodbye this time to their son, they know that it may be forever, but surely, offscreen at least, he will be awarded by Paul with many a kiss.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2021

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