hurling oneself against a stone wall
by Douglas Messerli
Gerald Savory (TV adaptation, based on the play Sud
by Julien Green), Mario Prizek (director) South / 1959 [in the British
television series “Play of the Week”]
On November 24, 1959 British LGBTQ
history was made with the TV broadcast of the first known gay drama in England.
Based on French gay author Julien’s Green’s play Sud—which producers had
hoped to present as a theatrical production in 1955 until was banned by the
Lord Chamberlain—openly gay director Mario Prizek cast the closeted gay actor
Peter Wyngarde in the lead role in what was to become a milestone of gay history.
The tape of the production was long thought to have lost, rediscovered
in 2013 by curators at the British Film Institute, shocking most commentators
who had not even remembered its existence, believing that the first
representation of a gay man on film and TV was Dirk Bogarde’s character in
Basil Dearden’s The Victim (1961).
Green’s play presents a rather hothouse environment of the days in the
South of the United States leading up to the Civil War not unlike something
Tennessee Williams might have created, but with a far less poetic language.
Nonetheless, Green is able to create a more complex view of Southern sympathies
and diversity of behavior than most US films have been able to.
Plantation owner Edward Broderick (Alan Gifford) has already freed
several of his slaves, some of whom have returned of their own accord, and
moreover he is currently housing a young Union soldier stationed at Fort Sumter
in North Carolina, Jan Wicziewsky (Peter Wyngarde) who he treats like a son,
although their actual relationship remains vague having something to do with
the young Jan’s father, a Polish man killed presumably during what sounds like
a Jewish pogrom. All of it remains vague, however, and it is clear that
Broderick would like the young man to stay on at the plantation in a role that
resembles that of an older son to Broderick’s far younger boy, Jimmy (Karl
Lanchbury).
The plantation also houses another Northerner, Regina (Helena Hughes)
who is evidently related by one of her parents to the Brodericks, and has come
to live with them after their death. She is clearly not happy in the South and
threatens throughout the play to leave and return North, which Broderick is
perfectly happy to allow her to do. Yet we gradually discover she is actually
in love with Jan, the two of them left alone on a Sunday morning as the two,
Jan and Regina, of the non-churchgoing kind, remain behind.
In this first scene, and actually throughout the rest of the play, the
two play a kind of brutal game of trying to have a conversation without ever
saying what’s on their minds. The far better player, Jan keeps trying to corner
Miss Regina into telling him the truth about her love for him, but which she
continues to resist knowing that he will not—and more important cannot reciprocate.
Moreover, their quibbling often forces him to speak in a metaphorical language
that no one else on the plantation, and perhaps few other normal men in the
community, speak, further adding to her frustrations. His is a logic-ridden
language without the proper niceties and a different kind of concealments of
most of the other Southerners in this work.
Outwardly, they talk about the inevitability or impossibility of Civil
War, of her determination to return to the North, his intent to simply follow
his orders even if it means joining in a battle against Broderick and others
like him. In the gaps of those words are insinuations and revelations that soon
after lead Regina to publicly announce her detestation of Jan and that he is an
evil man of which the household should be wary.
While the others are at church, we also witness an older black man on
the plantation,
Uncle John (John Harrison) now blind
requesting a young boy (Randolph McKenzie) guide him to Mr. Broderick to warn
him of imminent danger of he has heard directly from God which will destroy his
house.
Interrupting Regina’s and Jan’s conversation is the return of what might
be described as the truly Southern contingent of the Broderick household,
Broderick’s sister who rules the household like a Southern mistress who spends
most of her day resting and changing outfits for evening affair, her flighty
young daughter Angelina (Karal Gardner), and the young Jimmy.
Jan appears to be the one to whom all the elders confide their secrets
and to whom the younger generation keep their secrets from. For the sister,
asking him to rock her in her chair, reveals that for the evening dinner she
has invited a young man, Eric MacLure (Graydon Gould) with whom she would like
to link up either Regina or the young Angelina.
The two girls, meanwhile discuss the men, Angelina making up a false
tale of receiving a love letter from Eric. Regina warns her against the evil
Jan, probing yet again why Broderick is so very fond of him, before she finally
admits that despite what she sees as his disdain of her, she is secretly in
love with him—clearly the reason why her emotional responses to him shift 180
degrees in a manner of a few seconds.
In the meantime, Jimmy slaps an elderly black man in the stable who
delays in setting up his saddle, an act when he is forced to confess, terribly
angers his father who assigns the job of punishing the boy to Jan, who is
perhaps the boy’s best friend and, as Regina warns, should never be trusted
with their son alone.
By this time, given Regina’s constantly shifting behavior regarding Jan,
the gossip of some of the servants, and the very oddness of his own comments we
sense that there something about him—as well as Regina and perhaps even Edward
Broderick’s relationship to him—that we are not being told. But then no one
actually “tells” anyone the truth about anything in this drama.
The women insist war will not possibly be permitted while the men,
amongst themselves, fear its inevitability, keeping their feelings from the
female sex. The men all seem to have a rather benevolent attitude toward their
slaves while the women attempt to keep them in the place, Broderick’s sister
warning one of them of daring to run away now that war may be imminent. The
black kitchen servant is convinced that she is really so light-colored that she
might pass for white.
It is not Faulkner’s wisteria that wafts
through these rooms but what Tennessee Williams’ Big Daddy (of Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof) describes as the “powerful odour of mendacity.”
Jan’s self-delusions immediately come to
an when the evening’s special guest Eric MacClure arrives, suddenly coming face
to face with Jan on the plantation porch. It is as if Jan has been struck by
lightning, the young man reminding him of someone he knows, perhaps a fellow
soldier he has met at a military dance (hinting that perhaps Jan has had previous
gay experiences). When Eric immediately denies it, Jan comes to but still
behaves most strangely, obviously struck full in the heart by the pernicious
arrow of cupid.
From that moment on, Jan is in a world of his own, behaving like a ghost
at a table of women, some of whom talk about the possibility of war with the
greatest of delight, others terrified by even its mention. We discover that
Eric has long ago freed all of his slaves, does not believe in the institution,
and has reasonable views in this household of extremists.
Some of the guests wonder if Jan’s
silence and incommunicability is to do the fact that he has just been ordered
to return to his post, but he assures them the war and his position in it has
absolutely nothing to do with his behavior. After dinner, alone with him for a
moment, Broderick tries to get his would-be son to talk, even suggesting that
perhaps he too has had some experience with such feelings and might,
accordingly, be able to advise him. And we begin to wonder whether one of the
reasons Broderick keeps Jan so near perhaps has something to do with his own
love for the young man.
Jan, however, refuses to speak about it,
instead asking for Angelina’s hand in marriage, which Broderick immediately
denies him, telling him to his face that it will not solve the problem he is
facing, and leading to what will perhaps be the last words between the two men
who so much admired one another.
Jan speaks of hurling himself upon the
source of the problem who will not even recognize itself as being the cause of
his emotional distress. But a moment later he rushes into Regina’s room and
begs her forgiveness, praying she might take his hand to convey that she
forgives him for his continued abuse. But she proudly denies him.
Almost perversely, Jan confesses most
openly to his friend Jimmy while telling him his nightly bedtime story.
"You know, Jimmy, odd times, freedom of will is a crushing weight and it's
not always possible to choose. I'm in love Jimmy, as no human being was ever in
love before," he says to the bewildered boy. When asked by the boy what
he’s going to do, he suggests, “I going to hold myself against fate as you hurl
yourself against a stone wall,” adding when the boy confesses his confusion,
"It's better not to know what men are thinking, it's almost always sad or
shameful. I'm not ashamed, but I am alone. Hopelessly alone."
Although Jan has begged Broderick not to
let him and Eric be alone together, he now faces Eric in an empty drawing room
from which the others have all escaped. Jan attempts to tell him of his
“problem,” about his love for someone to whom he dare not speak it, and Eric in
a wave a youthful empathy seems to finally appreciate Jan, responding that he
too knows what that feels like since he also has failed to tell another whom he
loves because of current “situation.”
For a moment, in a brilliant
Shakespearian aside, Jan expresses a desire to himself that he might be able to
stop the conversation there, imagining at least that the “love” of whom Eric is
speaking might be himself. But, of course, Eric, a blind young man disturbed
only because he has been unable to tell Angelina that he loves her, must
express the truth—he in his utterly awful innocence being the only real
truthteller in this world—leaving Jan in a rage for his imagining a youthful
failure to express a love that is probably equally felt by the other, can
possibly have anything to do with his own desperate impossibilities.
Going to him, he grabs him by the head
and holds him to look into the mirror, an action witnessed by Broderick
returning to the room, who demands to know what is going on. Jan reports that
he is insulting the guest in his presence, that he is calling him a coward and
slaps him across his check, the shocked young man having no choice but to admit
that he has indeed been inexplicably attacked. Jan tosses out a handkerchief
and the young romantic has no other idea of what to do but accept the
challenge.
Broderick refuses to be involved, and
will not stand as a second for Jan, as Jan calls for another, the two preparing
for a duel.
Suddenly, like it was a sports event,
Broderick’s sister becomes absolutely delighted by the situation, calling for
the slaves to bring out water and unguents for whoever might be hurt, and
almost giggling with delight at the situation. Angelina is horrified, fearful
that Eric might be hurt, while Regina races to the spot in the woods they have
chosen for the duel in an attempt to stop it.
Standing near, Broderick once more attempts to force the young men to
stop the nonsense which he perceives Jan has created for no logical purpose but
perhaps his own death.
And indeed, before Regina can reach the
spot, Eric has stabbed his opponent as Jan almost runs into the sword before
falling to the ground dead. He has chosen to die from his lover’s own hand.
As Eric attempts to explain that it
looked like Jan almost opened himself to his thrust, Broderick interrupts him
to shame him for trying to justify murder. And we realize in his sentiments
that he well understands what Jan has done to resolve the problem of his love
that cannot be spoken, that he has literally died for love.
Regina, arriving, not only forgives Jan
for being unable to tell her what she already knew, but to hold him in her arms
with the love she feels for him nonetheless.
In short, both Regina and Broderick have
indeed known of Jan’s sufferings, of his homosexuality and his inability with
the confines of their own society to speak of it.
One can argue, of course, that this
televised film is simply another work in a long line of gay-oriented dramas in
which the queer must die. But Green explains to us that in such a mendacious
world there is no other possibility. Even the truthtellers in such a world
cannot recognize the full truth.
And course some of the critics of day chose to continue lying to
themselves, describing homosexuality as a terrible sickness that needed to be
expunged from the world: The 1959 reporter of the Daily Sketch was
typical of this response:
"I do NOT see anything
attractive in the agonies and ecstasies of a pervert, especially in close-up in
my sitting room. This is not prudishness. There are some indecencies in life
that are best left covered up."
On the other hand, the review from The Stage, argued that
"Green's dialogue was so full of compassion, understanding and tenderness
that his subject didn't seem distasteful, and Mario Prizek, a new Canadian
director, toned down his production so much that it kept perfect pace with the
script.” He goes on to note, “Peter Wyngarde as Jan, the man who couldn’t talk
of his life like other men, gave a stunningly brilliant performance, controlled
and delicately pitched.” As numerous critics have pointed out, Wyngarde was
brave indeed to have performed this role with such honest intensity,
particularly given what we now know, that he was in was in a long-term
relationship with actor Alan Bates, which might have outed then both and
perhaps even led to their arrestment.
Mark Brown, writing in The Guardian, adds: “None of that was
known at the time, with Wyngarde going on to be a star and housewives' favorite
from 1969 as Jason King, an agent in the secretive Department S. With his
handlebar moustache, enormous hair and largely unbuttoned shirt, King was the
ultimate ladies' man and was one of the inspirations for Mike Myers's Austin
Powers nearly 30 years later.”
Los Angeles, October 31, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (October 2022).
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