Jim Gable and Barbra Streisand | Barbra: The Music, the Memories, the Magic / 2017

songs porcelain and silver-plated

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Jay-Alexander, Jay Landers, and Barbra Streisand (screenwriters), Jim Gable and Barbra Streisand (directors) Barbra: The Music, The Memories, the Magic / 2017

 

Just before Christmas, I sat down to watch the first recording of a Barbra Streisand concert that I had seen since I was a teenager.

      In several ways, this older Barbra is even better than your younger self of the 1960s when she performed in My Name Is Barbra and Color Me Barbra. Certainly, she now seems less showy and far surer of herself. She loves, as this Netflix-sponsored film makes clear, to be in charge. And she is in charge, apparently of nearly everything: the songs she sings (even in Funny Girl she insisted to Flo Ziegfeld that she had to choose her own songs), the instrumentation, the pacing of her performance, and, most importantly, she utterly controls her amazing tonal modulations, altering between a quiet hum, melodic whispers, and old-fashioned vocal “belting out.”

     If anything, she now has greater vocal control, but she’s always had one of the most remarkable voices in song-singing history. Like the very greats, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Rosemary Clooney, and a few others, Streisand’s voice is always recognizable and memorable in a way that has attracted what seem to be worshippers more than a mere audience. The Miami audience here felt that they not merely needed to madly applaud each song, but turned every number into a standing ovation, to which Streisand generally and seemingly honestly awarded with a “Thank you,” “Wow!” “I’m glad you liked it!” or “You’re a wonderful audience.”

     If you like good music and, like me, are a hardened liberal, what is there not to like? Although Streisand restrained herself at this concert, you clearly knew what she felt about Trump and his kind, and if you live in Los Angeles, it’s hard not to know that she has given millions to hospitals and other charities. And, because of her talent and goodness of heart, you can almost forgive her from some of her crazy obsessions, like constructing a kind of mini-mall, just for herself, in the basement of her Malibu house. The very fact that she’s still singing so very gloriously is a cause for celebration. So what if she centers much of this concert around her own past achievements, singing far too many of her standards such as “The Way We Were” and “Evergreen?” Give the girl some credit.

      And credit she certainly got from her audience. As Robert Lloyd summarized it in the Los Angeles Times:

 

Like any great artist, she is at the mercy of the character she converts to art. ("I could not help but do it my way" is a theme of the evening.) She is complicated and contradictory, a Countess from Brooklyn, ethnic and elevated. Her singing is the sound of aspiration, of arrival, of indomitability. It is practiced and it's punk, it's tender and ferocious; she can create an impression of great power by getting very quiet. Her diction is impeccable, her accent unreconstructed. She is precise with her consonants and extravagant with her vowels.

 

      Yet why did I still have this strange feeling that I would have preferred to be hearing Garland and Clooney, or even the far rawer Bette Midler; certainly for Broadway theater Barbara Cook would have been more fun. Or listening to a great Broadway songstress like Christine Ebersole, Bernadette Peters, Audra McDonald, or Patti LuPone, all of whom I’ve heard live on stage. Of course, I too liked Streisand on the movie musicals of Funny Girl and Hello Dolly! What I kept asking myself was wrong with this wonderful performance?

       When Streisand sings a stage musical number such as Sondheim’s “Being Alive,” Anthony Newley’s and Leslie Bricusse’s “Who Can I Turn To,” or Jerry Herman’s “Before the Parade Passes By,” I immediately wake up; I too might have given her a standing ovation just for the Newley piece. And I have to give her an award for hutzpah for tackling the dead-on-arrival Rodgers and Hammerstein walnut, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (with Jaime Fox, no less).

     But the problem is, and always has been, is that, at heart, Streisand prefers the kitsch. She clearly prefers working with Alan and Marilyn Bergman and other pop composers as she did in her Yentl’s “Pappa Can You Hear Me?” (sorry not the same Yentl I recall from Isaac B. Singer)—gifted purveyors of populist nonsense, as opposed to the greats like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, or Stephen Sondheim. Even with all her talent, Streisand still prefers the musical silver-plated and porcelain-like knock-offs produced for Hollywood in the manner of The Franklin Mint. Almost every time she has a choice, Streisand chooses sentimentality over wit. A rose and teacup are her emblems. And in the end, despite the wonderment she brings to nearly every musical offering, her artistry suffers.

       It’s not that LuPone or McDonald have never sung the Broadway versions of these same knock-offs, written by the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Disney composers; it’s simply that they keep it in proportion, returning to Sondheim or even Jule Styne (the man who actually made Streisand famous), whereas Streisand obviously would rather work with her long-time friends, the Bergmans. I am sure that many in her Miami audience actually prefer “Evergreen” and Neil Diamond’s “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” over her nearly perfect rendition of “People.” But Streisand, seemingly, doesn’t even recognize the difference.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (December 2017).

 

Matt Tyrnauer | Studio 54 / 2018

the damned looking into paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Tyrnauer (director) Studio 54 / 2018

 

I can’t imagine entering the magic doors of Studio 54 at the famed opening in 1977. Besides I was not in New York in those days and would—given my limited time in the city when I devoted my attention to theater and food—never have found time to even try to get “into” that famed disco nightclub. I like dancing, but perhaps I am not as graceful (despite my 1969 studies at the Joffrey Ballet Company) as I might have once imagined. In a Brazil club, where the dancers moved with the only lower parts of the body, my pumping torso and hand movements looked perverse.

      Finally, and most importantly, I am not a night person—at least I wasn’t one in the late 1970s, even if a decade before, when I did live for a year in Manhattan, I spent late hours in gay bars and participating in endless nighttime sex.

      No, I watched Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary about that famed nightclub, located in the former Gallo Opera house on 254 West 54th Street, which also was used as a CBS studio years later, because I knew and had written about how my friend Charles Bernstein’s mother, Sherry, had been a club regular, dressing up in beautiful gowns and her famed John Pico Johns’ hats. When I first was told of her nightly ventures, Charles and his wife Susan admitted that they too had accompanied her a couple of times into the glorious halls where into so very few ordinaries were admitted. They described it as truly boring, as I imagine they might truly have perceived it, since their interests do not concern the drugs, sex, and general revelry that characterized the activities of the place.

      Sherry does not appear in this documentary, although many figures with whom she was photographed do, including her dear friend, Disco Sally (the former daytime lawyer, Sally Lippman [see My Year 2006]). Photographs with the Studio 54 celebrity denizens, which Sherry collected on the walls of two bedrooms in her Central Park West home, was clearly one of the major perks of owner’s Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager’s—and of course a publicity tool that made it clear that anyone of importance was attending their highly theatrical studio events.

     Studio 54 was not so much a disco bar—indeed Rubell and Schrager obtained an actual liquor license very late in the club’s existence, preferring to rely instead on a day-to-day catering permit that allowed them to serve liquor—as it was a grand theater experience in which anyone who got through the doors could participate. The waiters and bar boys all appeared in white shorts only, and the dance floor was placed on what had been the stage. In the balconies people might watch, have sex, and do whatever else they might wish to.

      If, at first, I might have dismissed this over-the-top, anything-goes club experience, I gradually began to perceive that these two gay men had, in fact, created a kind of gay-trans-heterosexual space that allowed for whatever one wanted to do, not so very dissimilar to the gay bars I had attended (without all the stars and hype) a decade earlier, when I nightly visited, not far from the now-revered small Stonewall bar, a big gay bar near the docks on the lower West Side named Badlands which contained a back room where, at a certain witching hour, everyone broke loose into a huge orgy of twisting and turning bodies. Anyone who was willing went along to do any kind of sexual act one might have imagined. I loved it. It was a far less theatrically-conceived version of Studio 54. No one there knew who anyone was (you just had to be good-looking or at least attractive to your neighbor) while in Studio 54 there were many well-known figures (not always so beautiful but gloriously famous) surrounded by the beautiful nobodies. For those within, everyone was equal; as one commentator put it, “we danced with the entire club.”

     In short, what Rubell and Schrager were able to create was a kind of back room with not only lovely figures but celebrities, lights, music, dance, and theater (most of the design and lighting had been created by theater people). You could be a grand dame voyeur as was Sherry, or a mad bacchante, or you could be, as the documentary voices speak in refrain, anything or anyone you wanted to be—if only you were blessed by entry.

     As this film surmises, however, that issue, the permission or lack of entry was one of the downfalls of this paradisiacal world. As Schrager puts it, those on the outside were the like the “damned looking into paradise.” And that hierarchy brought with it a smoldering hostility which ultimately worked against the Brooklyn gay friends who had made this hedonistic world possible.

      There were numerous other problems: the drugs Rubell used to lure many of the celebrities in were so obvious that he often simply hid them in his coat.

     The very fact of so much press coverage made authorities aware of how they had abandoned the liquor codes. And the vast amounts of money that they daily accumulated surely led the government to question their taxes.

      These were the issues which ultimately led to the arrest of the two owners and their later imprisonment. That and the absurd procedures of one of the most horrific lawyers of all time, Roy Cohn, who led the Rosenberg’s to their death, supported Joseph McCarthy, and was also a personal mentor to now President Trump. He was a kind of monster which these Brooklyn boys should have stayed as far away from as they might. But then Cohn was gay, and, I suppose Rubell and Schrager were drawn to him for that very reason. His strategies, involving government officials who had attended the club, brought them into a world of which they were totally innocent, leading to even darker vengeance.

     Even worse perhaps, was their timing. It might have been dangerous to attend such gay orgies, as I did, in the late 1960s. But by the late 1970s, hosting a huge gay-heterosexual orgy at the vast scale of Studio 54 was deadly: AIDs had already shown its ugly face. Both Cohn and Rubell died of it, as did many of the Studio 54 participants. The damned, those who might not be permitted entry, were perhaps saved by that very restriction.

    It might be interesting to see how many of the Studio 54 participants are still live today. Some of the most famous patrons—Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams, Lou Reed, and so many others, have died for various reasons, many of them having nothing to do with sex. Yet, even if Studio 54 may have been a special place to celebrate one’s personal identity, it also reflected a darker image upon the entire culture than this film seems to suggest.

      I must, finally, admit, I too have been to Studio 54, now a theater again owned by Roundabout, where I saw, perhaps significantly, an excellent production of Waiting for Godot.

 

*My disco-loving Sherry died, at the age of 97, this October 2017. Sherry, the Grande dame of all time, was given special entry into Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager’s club. She described her experience of the clubs she attended in my 2006 interview with her.

      “Did she truly enjoy all of this activity? I somewhat skeptically inquired. “Oh yes, you can’t imagine. You arrive and everyone is taking your picture, and immediately you’re allowed in, usually through a special door, and taken to a separate VIP room. And then everybody’s there!”

      Sherry was clearly one of the saints of this Studio 54 paradise. In connection with her funeral, officiated by her son Charles, two photographs were printed. The first was the woman I knew who, when I often stayed in her apartment, would appear on her way out to her exciting evenings.  This lovely woman truly understood Rubell’s and Schrager’s world better than others. It represented for her, clearly, a “fountain of youth” for those who might be allowed through its doors.

  

Los Angeles, March 9, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2019).

Nathan Adloff | Miles / 2017

into a possible paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Adloff, Justin D.M. Palmer (screenplay), Nathan Adloff (director) Miles / 2017

 

Over the years I have watched perhaps too many stories of LGBTQ boys and girls coming out during their late high school years. Frankly, given my own closeted condition during that same period, I have enjoyed most of these, and even feel there may need to be more—if for no other reason than to assure young men (and women) such as I was that although in small towns they may feel utterly alone (Until just recently, I long believed that in my high school class of about 100, I was the only gay individual, and in 1964-65 there were no possible models through which I might have comprehend my feelings except in the general “world out there”) there are many individuals in their same positions. Films like David Moreton’s Edge of Seventeen, Simon Shore’s Get Real, and, more recently, Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon—while presenting some of the darker aspects of the fear and sense of loneliness, even displaying the actual dangers involved—also make it almost seem “cool” to be a bright gay kid, knowing something about oneself that others simply could not imagine. I wish I’d had such films as a young boy; I looked instead, to the witty comedies of the 1940s and 1950s, reading between the lines of figures such as Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, James Dean, etc.

     Yet, while watching Nathan Adloff’s 2016 film Miles yesterday, I became a little frightened that the genre was perhaps wearing itself thin, or, at the least, was now a bit dated.

     Clearly, Adloff’s comedy/dramedy (as Los Angeles Times critic Katie Walsh described it), based evidently on his own experiences, is well-intentioned. And this time around, the 1999-situated story has more than a few brushes with the darker aspects of being in a school in Springfield, Illinois while desiring to be instead in the big city of Chicago to the north.

     Unlike me at this age, Miles (the talented Tim Boardman) knows precisely how he is different from most of his classmates: he wants to be a movie director and he’s most definitely attracted to his same gender, even if this film shows no actual sexual scenes. For Miles, it appears, his only solution is to communicate on his now rather odd-looking “You’ve Got Mail”-like computer with his luverboi217 correspondent, describing himself as SmallTwnboi_17.

      There are also very few villains in this work. Miles, in his senior school year, has an excellent relationship with his mother, Pam (a great Molly Shannon), and serves in the school as a beloved AV assistant. At nights he works the projector at the local movie theater. Generally, he seems to be a very well-adjusted and well-liked. His mother is also one of his teachers.

      The only true villain of this work is Pam’s husband (Stephen Root), who virtually ignores his patient wife and treats his son, who opposes his dreams of attending Columbia College in Chicago,  his father insisting that he can only attend Springfield Community College. Miles is determined to leave what he describes as his sleepy town rather than, like so many others including his mother, be locked within its confines.

      One almost roots (sorry for the pun upon the actor’s last name) for his father’s death, which occurs with a sudden implosion of his heart soon after—a symbol clearly of the emptiness of his love. And at the funeral itself Miles’ mother opens up to her son, admitting that she (and her son as well) has long known of his affairs and his near complete ignorance of their own lives. What she and Miles are not prepared for is that he has used their meager savings for Miles’ college education to buy a new car for his current young girlfriend. It comes as a shock to Pam, who has clearly devoted her whole life to family, and, obviously, is a terrible disappointment for a young man eager to move on.

     Yet Miles, seemingly unchallenged by even these dire circumstances, simply seeks out possible scholarships that will allow him to make his escape. The only one that seems possible is an athletic award for something the director has not yet prepared us for: volleyball. Evidently Miles (the movie has been hiding the fact) is a great volleyball player. The only problem is that his high school has only a woman’s volleyball team.

     When queried, the dubious but sympathetic woman’s volleyball coach admits that when a young woman attempted to join the football team, they had little choice but to allow her to join. And so too, after a tryout, is Miles allowed to join to volleyball team, although not without complications.

     Soon the school is winning all of its games, but their opponents also begin a kind of retribution by refusing to play out the competitions when Miles joins the front line. City patricians also begin to complain, and even the normally kind and bland Superintendent of Schools (the role my father played in my life), who is now dating Pam, becomes forced to question Miles’ role on the team.

      This might have been, in a different kind of movie, a great statement about a young man’s break-through in civil rights. But everybody here seems pallid and almost as unresponsive in their love and values as the father has been. The local theater owner finds a way to fire the young would-be film-maven, and even Pam, who discovers his computer conversations, never bothers to confront him with the truth she now knows—this, after admitting after her husband’s death, that the lies can now be stopped.

      One might almost say that “things fall apart” without splintering. Although forced off the volleyball court, Miles still gains a scholarship for another Chicago school, Loyola, and is even presented with a gift from his mother (although one hardly imagines where she might have found the money to pay for it) of a film camera, as Miles leaps unto a bus into his possible paradise.

     It’s a touching film, and you can only delight when Miles suddenly finds a way to move off into the proverbial “sunset.” But, I’m sorry to say, it just doesn’t quite make sense. Things don’t quite happen like that. Children who are told they are not allowed to do things, come to resent the world; women who only serve their families, like Pam, grow bitter. The determined Pam and the implacable Miles seem to me to represent myths of an endlessly-loving mother a knowledgeable young gay man totally ready to embrace his new world.

     I used to sneak views in local grocery stores of the males in fan magazines (the Gee-Bees had incredible bulges). On one occasion I bought a book of boy porno (still available in those days) in my senior year in Waukesha, Wisconsin, sneaking it into a public bathroom, where the person in the next stall tried to get my attention, presumably for sex. I was just embarrassed, shocked by my own desires.

     Let us hope Miles and his mother, like the entire school community in Love, Simon, simply represent a new world where there is no pain for having to rediscover one’s entire life. But Adloff turns his central characters simply into likeable ciphers, unable, it appears, to even to scarred by the world in which they exist. I’d like to think that suffering such feelings of being removed from the society is a thing of the past. But I’m afraid it’s simply not. If nothing else, might not Pam realize her son’s desperate attempt to escape has something to do with her own entrapment in that society?

     And I’ve been to Chicago many a time. It’s terribly cold and horribly hot, a city with a very large amalgam of American life. It’s also dangerous city itself. I used to escape there as a young man through bus-trips from Iowa, not for sex (although there was one hotel encounter with a restaurant colleague when I indeed might have realized my sexuality but did not) but for theater and museums.

     In the 1980s my poet friend Charles Bernstein and I were both invited to read at the Chicago Contemporary Museum. While watching this film, I suddenly remembered that our sponsors were students and faculty members from Columbia College Chicago, the institution which Miles so desired to attend. The audience was enthusiastic and appreciative. Outside of Philadelphia, it was one of the best readings of my life.

     Our hosts, after the reading wherein they declared that both Charles’ and my books had been stolen from their library, took us to an excellent Armenian restaurant, Sayat Nova (I was impressed since I’d already seen the Paradjanov film, and had published a book by the director). They then took us to a party in a distant Chicago community, where I realized that several of these beautiful young men were gay.

      Suddenly, in the midst of festivities (drinking and enjoying their young company), I perceived that I’d left my carrying bag at the restaurant. A call to the restaurant proved that an employee had indeed found the bag and would gladly meet us at a bar nearby in the Loop restaurant at 12:00 A.M. One of the young men drove me there for that late appointment, and friendly restaurant employee appeared with my bag. I offered her a financial award, but she simply allowed me to buy her a drink.

      I think the cinematic Miles would have adored Columbia College of Chicago and given the total honesty of the people I encountered there, perhaps congratulated himself for having chosen the right place to dive wide-eyed into his new reality. I hope Miles did as well at Loyola.

 

Los Angeles, February 17, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2019).

 

 

Grigori Chukhrai | Баллада о солдате (Ballada o soldate) (Ballad of a Soldier) / 1959, USA 1960

how to live life

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentin Yezhov and Grigori Chukhrai (screenplay), Grigori Chukhrai (director) Баллада о солдате (Ballada o soldate) (Ballad of a Soldier) / 1959, USA 1960

 

Russian director Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier, despite its sad messages about World War II and the death of the film’s hero, Alyosha (Vladimir Ivashov), presents such beautifully innocent characters that the somewhat tragic story seems almost to be a sweet comedy.

      The work actually begins as a kind of dark comedy, as Aloysha and his comrade are trapped in a battlefield as invading German tanks move toward them. The friend, frustrated with their lack of cover, attempts to escape and is immediately shot down. The more foolish—and throughout this film, Aloysha is presented as a kind of holy fool—escapes only after the tank has literally run over him; he has no possible hope of escape in the pock-marked earth in which these behemoths gather to destroy him. He can only jump from small dugout to another, finally, quite by accident, finding an automatic rifle which he takes up instinctively only to survive. Miraculously he destroys one tank, and then a second. And he, as Soviet forces fly in to destroy the others, suddenly becomes a hero.

      Fool that he is, he rejects a ribbon or a commendation for a quick trip home to his poor mother so that he might repair her leaking roof. We now know he is truly an innocent and holy fool, and the general cannot refuse such a simple and meaningless request. He asks only for two days, but the general allows him nearly a week.

       As we soon learn, he will need far more time, as he meets a depressed older soldier, certain, now with a missing leg, that he will be rejected by his wife, and later a young stowaway girl, determined to return to her husband, Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko)—a girl as innocent as he is, but far more terrified by her journey. He saves the disillusioned soldier’s life and promises to deliver up soap to his wife. He quickly demonstrates his protective nature to the young Shura, ultimately gaining her trust and amazement that a man like him might even exist. Along the way, he bribes a greedy trainman, misses his connections, and time and again demonstrates his total belief in human goodness, winning friends wherever he goes—all despite the fact that we already know that this “ballad” to be a sad one, with a horrible ending (never actually detailed) for the truly brave and quite idiotic young soldier.

     Chukhrai reveals his character in loving realist detail infused with sentimental shadings. But we never feel he is quite manipulating us in the process. The young actor, Ivashov, is so utterly convincing that we’d ourselves, if forced to enter this terrible terrain, would surely follow him to his destination. People are simply attracted to this highly moral figure, and he, recognizing their evils, accepts and also rejects them according to their worth, taking back the soap from the cheating wife and awarding it instead to her suffering father and mother.

      Shura finally comes to trust him so fully that, when after a run for water during a station stop, he does not return, she waits for him; and she finally admits, in what we, if not our innocent hero, perceives is a complete embracement of his love, that she has no fiancée ready to accept her kisses. But he moves only forward for, finally, only a few moments time left to see his mother, and giving up all the love he has offered others.

      It, finally, is that tragic fact, that this boy so full of joy and love can’t truly receive it from all the others he meets, that makes Chukhrai’s film so totally international. He’s not just a Russian soldier of World War II, but is everyone who believes and trusts, he is every young man so in love with life that he seems almost invincible. Unfortunately, the world does not allow such a being to easily survive.

     Despite competition at the 1960 Cannes film festival between international giants such as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and new works by Bergman, Antonioni, Buñuel, along with the American blockbuster, Ben Hur, Chukhrai’s small Russian film received great acclaim. As critic Vida Johnson has written: the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Gerassimov explained the film’s fresh appeal: “The pathos of Fellini in La Dolce Vita could be put this way: One should not live like this; the pathos of Chukhrai in Ballad of a Soldier could be summed up as: We should live like this.”

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2016).

Jack Conway | Brown of Harvard / 1926

true love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Melvin Ellis, Donald Ogden Stewart, and A.P. Younger (screenplay based on the play Brown of Harvard by Rida Johnson Young), Jack Conway (director) Brown of Harvard / 1926

 

Brown of Harvard (1926) is one of the best of the “Going to College” films of the 20th century. The usual plot involved, in one way or another, a young self-sure or shy boy or occasionally girl going off to college and encountering a series of new adventures having to do with roommates, falling in love with a professor or college president’s daughter or son, and participation in sports or some other group activity which makes him or her popular among his or her classmates. Many of these were also “buddy” movies, the central character developing a close relationship with his roommate and others in his or her dorm or fraternity or sorority. Particularly in later variations, the individual often gets into trouble just for being involved with the others.

      Most of these works are heterosexual fantasies aimed younger audiences. But with the “buddy” bromance, some of these movies border on queer or at least homoerotic relationships of enough importance to include them in these volumes. Among the examples I’ve written about in the years from 1887 to 1939 are Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) (1913); Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s Hamlet (1921) (much of this version of Hamlet involves his studies at Wittenberg University); Norman Taurog’s Sunny Skies (1930); Dudley Murphy The Sport Parade (1932) (this film begins in the university before it moves elsewhere); William Wyler’s Tom of Culver (1932) (a military academy here serves as a college-like experience); Elliott Nugent’s She Loves Me Not (1934); and Arthur J. Goulding’s A Chump at Oxford (1939).

      Of these Sunny Skies and a second in the “Tom Brown” series, Tom of Culver, share many affinities to Brown of Harvard. It might be said that Tom Brown (William Haines) serves as a model for the equally complacently self-centered and assured Jim Grant of Sunny Skies who also bunks up with a loser of a roommate who quite literally falls in love with the campus rake, unable to see any of his flaws. Brown, like Grant in the later film, persistently pursues the campus beauty, in this case Mary Abbott (Mary Brian), loses a major competition (the boat race) for Harvard through heaving drinking, and finally makes a comeback as a football hero, spurred on by the heroine’s love. And like the hero of 1932 film, Tom still finds time to seriously care for and even protect his unpopular roommate, demanding that where he goes so too does Jim Doolittle (a role performed quite wonderfully by Mary Pickford’s younger brother, Jack).

       The majority of the film’s story is predictably taken up with Tom’s wooing of Mary—a exercise in self-destruction since in two instances he oversteps the boundaries of proper college courtship, grabbing and kissing her after she has rather emphatically said “no”—and his several sports mishaps, namely his getting drunk over Mary’s rejection of him and his having been scratched from the rowing team. When his rival Bob MacAndrews (Francis X. Bushman, Jr.) suffers a hand injury, Tom is asked to return to the rowing team, but because he has not kept in shape he is unable to stick it out the whole distance as a rower, falling into fatigue at the very moment when the team most needs him, like a Muybridge athlete who fell apart.

        Embarrassed by his major failures during his freshman year—academic achievement seems to be of little importance in this silent picture—Tom is ready to drop out until his father insists that he must return if only the win the hand of the woman he is now certain he loves.

        And much of the second half of the film, accordingly is taken up with Tom’s attempts to prove his worth through playing football—another team from which his is seemingly scratched—and continuing to offend Mary, who clearly loves him despite her moral scruples and her superficial connection to MacAndrews.

       Yet one would have to be truly blind to miss the fact, as even the sales pitch from the Zeus DVD catalogue notes, that “the real love story, and the one that truly moves the film's plot, is the one between the handsome, athletic Brown and his weakling sidekick Jim Doolittle (Jack Pickford) (in fact, the physical contrast between the two men is echoed in another important buddy film which came out some 40 years later—Midnight Cowboy).” Putting aside the comparison with John Schlesinger’s 1969 film—a more apt example of the physical attraction might be a comparison with Tom Brown’s relationship with his buddy Robert Randolph III in Tom of Culver or between Baker and Brown in The Sport Parade—their relationship is clearly deeper and less fraught than Tom’s with Mary and the rest of his colleagues, despite the fact that at film’s end he wins the girl and the adulation of his classmates who invite him to become a member of The Dickey Club, the Harvard honor’s organization, seemingly again with academic consideration.

      Jim falls for Tom from the first time when Tom, invited to join his fellow dormers at a party, insists that Jim accompanies him. And throughout the film, he serves as Tom’s most ardent supporter when he almost gets trounced in a fight early in the film with Bob MacAndrews and even after Tom is ridiculed for his loss in the rowing competition.

      But by the time Tom returns for his second year to Harvard, again bunking up with Jim, the one-sided friendship has blossomed into mutual caring, and when Jack repeats his general statement about his feelings for Tom, “Gosh, you’re great fellow,” his idol even initiates physical contact, gently pushing Jack away in awkward embarrassment for his admiration, which is repeated by Jack’s pushing and pulling back, leading to further rowdy play.

      Earlier, when Jack, carefully watching Tom dress, queries him on the notches on his belt—cut evidently in celebration for every woman he conquers—Tom, for the first time, comments on his friend’s costume, suggesting he get rid of the galoshes and heavy raincoat, a foretelling of later events. And in the freshman year, when Jack returns home drunk the night before the boat race, it is Jack who attempts to sober him up and hide him from school authorities, even at one point knocking him out—an act which he immediately regrets, fearing he may have seriously hurt him and delighted when Tom again begins to mutter drunken nonsense.

      During the sophomore year, Jack becomes sick, suffering evidently from the colds he suffers, as he has warned earlier, from rain and cold. As he lays in bed, Tom takes up his friend’s rubbing ointment and gently applies it slowly for several long frames over his Jack’s chest as he mulls the Crimson’s news report that his name his scratched from the football team lineup.

      This scene has to be one of the most physically sensuous scenes between two males, aside from Richard Arlen and Charles Buddy Rogers’ deep kiss on the lips in William A. Wellman’s Wings, and the two prison lovers’ holding of hands and faces in William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains, in the first half century of cinema. And we recognize in it the vast chasm between Tom’s eager attempts to put his lips to Mary, an act for which he is punished by both Mary and MacAndrews, and the deep love expressed in the hand rub of Jack’s chest and nipples.

 

    Tom leaves Jack to pick up his parents in Boston, having to explain to them that he will not be playing in the game they have traveled to Cambridge to witness. But almost the moment he leaves, the football coach calls, demanding to know where Tom is. He has not benched Tom even if the Harvard newspaper has, and insists that if Tom doesn’t show up in a half-hour, he will be dropped.

     Sick as he is, Jack barely gives it a second thought and he enters the monsoon-like rainstorm to track down his friend, missing the trolley by a few seconds as he clings on to its side. When the conductor discovers his presence and stops the car, Jack falls to the street deathly ill, while yet able to mumble the news to Tom, as his lover—how else now should we describe Tom at this moment who realizes his friend has chanced his life in order to help him—picks him and carries him to bed, demanding he is immediately hospitalized.

      As I suggested above, Tom soon after wins the game for Harvard over Yale, even allowing MacAndrews to get credit for the winning touchdown, while the film pretends he is spurred on by his love for Mary, who sits in the audience along with Tom’s parents. But we know it is his love for Jack, who he tries to telephone even during the intermission, that truly motivates his actions.

 

    Instead of basking in the glory of the win, Tom rushes to the hospital only to discover that Jack has just died. The tears and utter grief that gay act William Haines evinces upon the screen were surely motivated by his ability to imagine the death of another male whom he deeply loved such as his real-life lover Jimmie Shields. Certainly, cinema had never before seen a man more openly express grief than in this remarkable scene. Even Mary becomes just a shoulder to cry upon, no longer holding the power of her feminine mystique.

      The film’s ending wherein Tom is paraded on to the Dickey club seems like something tacked on to a picture which, in this case, is truly emotionally “moving” as opposed to consisting of a simple flickering series of images of the light.

       Five months later would see the release of Jack Pickford’s penultimate film, Exit Laughing, which I review elsewhere in this volume of My Queer Cinema.

*Pickford was known as a notorious “ladies’ man” who married three Ziegfield girls, the first of whom, Olive Thomas, died of unintentional poisoning after they both attended a wild party in Paris. But there also rumors, none of them confirmed, of Pickford, at least early in his Hollywood days, being involved in gay sexual liaisons. Darwin Porter’s grand, gossipy fiction, Hollywood’s Silent Closet portrays him as actively gay. D. W. Griffith’s wife, Linda Arvidson claimed in her memoir that silent film actor Dell Henderson often “would often cop little Jack Pickford as his bedfellow.” (see William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969)

Los Angeles, June 8, 2022 

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).