Howard Hawks | I Was a Male War Bride / 1949

great expectations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass, and Hagar Wilde (screenplay, based on a book by Henri Rochard), Howard Hawks (director) I Was a Male War Bride / 1949

 

Film historians have recounted the near-disastrous filming of Howard Hawks 1949 movie, I Was a Male War Bride. Shooting much of it in post-War II Germany, Hawks and his crew managed to capture some wonderful scenes of the still mostly bombed-out cities, particularly Heidelberg. But the cold European Fall of 1948, when the film was in process, resulted in a series of cast and crew illnesses that delayed the production for months, resulting in a total budget of over two-million dollars.

   First, the director broke out in hives over his entire body. Cary Grant, one of the film’s stars, developed hepatitis complicated by jaundice, closing down production for three months until he recovered and gained back the 30 pounds he had lost. When screenwriter Charles Lederer also became ill, he called upon his friend Orson Welles to write part of a short scene that remained unfinished.

     Perhaps this accounts for what several critics found as a diffused and unfulfilling story for the early half of this work. Writing in The New York Times Bosley Crowther, for example, writes:

 

“That gay old Hollywood practice of shooting a picture ‘off the cuff,’ which meant making up the story and the situations as the filming went along, appears to have been the one followed by Howard Hawks and Twentieth Century-Fox in banging out I Was a Male War Bride, which came to the Roxy yesterday. We don't say it was, necessarily. Three writers are credited with the script and the whole thing is said to be based on the actual story of one Henri Rochard. But the flimsiness of the film's foundations and the disorder of its episodes provoke the inevitable impression that it all fell together en route. Not that this mode of construction is incongruous to the brand of farce that is wildly tossed off in this picture when it finally slips into full speed. The illusion of spontaneity that accumulates in the last half is entirely appropriate to the nonsense that glibly and haphazardly occurs.”

 

    I don’t know whether Crowther was playing on the pun “gay” in his review, but I’d argue that the first half of Hawks’ work, much as in his early Grant film, Bringing up Baby, sets up the story that will be played out in the second half by broadly hinting to an audience in the know, that any shift of the film to conventional mores is an intentional sham. In this case, his soon-to-be marriage with a woman in the later half—which requires him, most queerly, to become his own wife—is necessary to please unknowing viewers and get his gender-bending homosexual story past the censors.

     Indeed, Grant spends the first half demonstrating his absolute distaste for the woman, Lt. Catherine Gates (Sheridan), with whom he has shared a previous “mission,” delivering up her some of the most intimate items of her clothing in one of the early scenes, leading her peers to believe it might be something she left behind, but rather representing the fact that their laundry has been accidently shipped to each other. What has he might have been doing with those woman’s clothes gets comically answered in the final scenes.

     In 1949 when senator Joseph McCarthy was already naming “Communists” in government organizations and looking for them in early red lists of Hollywood figures, as well as preparing to launch, along with others, an organized assault of homosexuals in the US and in Europe which would fall under the rubric “the Lavender Menace,”* it is amazing that Hawks and his writers, Charles Lederer, Leonard Spigelgass, and Hagar Wilde, got away with a screenplay laden with so many gay sexual allusions.

     But then Lederer, nephew of actor Marion Davies, and who had long worked with Ben Hecht who described him as an incessant practical joker often pairing up with Harpo Marx to play jokes on Randolph Hearst’s guests,** was by 1949 a well experienced and respected writer (he worked with Hawks previously on the brilliant movie His Girl Friday); Leonard Spigelgass was the writer in his long career of scripts for 11 Academy Award-winning films and others. Among them was Big Street, Mystery Street, A Majority of One (based on his play), Silk Stockings, and Gypsy, he being quite openly gay within the Hollywood community; Hagar Wilde wrote the original story for and worked on the screenplay of Bringing Up Baby. In short, perhaps that brilliant trio explains their running gags that establish Grant’s French officers’ actual inaccessibility to the opposite sex, which is really what I Was a Male War Bride is all about; or, to put it as they did after the previous World War, “How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?”

      Let us begin with the absolute necessity in any Cary Grant film: a woman or several women make nearly all decisions, dominating and blocking nearly all of his mostly flustered attempts to regain any power, identity, or dignity. In the previous mission, for example, for some misperceived transgression Lt. Gates (Ann Sheridan) has thrown French officer Henri Rochard into a tank of blue dye, the color which is perceived in Russia, for example, as describing someone who is gay, just as in the US gays were defined by purple or lavender. Interestingly, even after several months, Rochard has not been able to wash the blue color out of his skin. Well, once it gets under the skin…as Cole Porter observed, “Don’t you know, you fool, you can never win?”

      In one of the first scenes of the film, Rochard, attempting to determine the various acronyms posted on the doors where he has been called to a meeting, is fairly successful in interpreting some of them (WAIRCO, for example is, he whispers to himself, is probably War Administration Industrial Relations Coordinates Office) until he arrives at a door saying LADIES, in front of which he stands for a few moments attempting to decode its meaning while wondering whether to enter or remain outside.

   When he does find the proper office, he is told by the woman commander that he is to be accompanied by Gates on his new mission. Troubled by having to face the woman with whom he has had so many previous run-ins, he attempts to ask if there isn’t someone else who might accompany him. Gates, apparently, is the most capable as well as being the only one available. As the Major asserts, “Gates, she’s your man!” “Wish she were!” the Grant character mumbles.

    Soon after when Gates attempts to describe to a colleague just how terrible it has been to work with Rochard, whom she defines as someone who will “run after anything in skirts,” Rochard protests: “Why did you say I run after any girl in skirts?” Gates shoots back; “I say anything in skirts,” suggesting perhaps that Rochard is equally interested in any male in drag, the issue that will soon be the major subject of the picture.

    Of course, there are no jeeps available for their planned journey, so they have to commission a motorcycle with a sidecar for riding. Rochard, being a foreigner, does not have the proper license, but Gates has the proper document in hand, and off they go, leaving behind the sidecar with the displeased Rochard much like a skit in a Marx Brothers movie.

    Later, after losing their way—one of the sub-themes of the film is not being able to find one’s way among the coded messages and lack of proper signage—almost being hurled down river through the rapids of a powerful damn and numerous other indignities suffered primarily by Rochard, they finally wind up at their destination in Bad Nauheim and find an inn for the night.

     After all their adventures by motor bike and boat, Gate’s back and neck are aching, and Rochard is about to bring her some rubbing alcohol, a towel, and his gentle messaging fingers. As he knocks on her bedroom door she at first contemplates refusing entry to the man she suspects of being a rude and improper lecher. Finally, she asks: “Who is it?”

 

                                         rochard: Cinderella.

                                         gates: What do you want?

                                         rochard: My slippers.

 

     When he does finally manage to slip in and successfully allow her to slip away into sleep he discovers that he has not left behind “his slippers” but his route of exiting the “ball,” as the doorhandle falls off both inside and out. For propriety’s sake and to simply not awaken this mad lioness, he is forced to sit up the entire night in a most uncomfortable chair. (It’s strange having seen this film, just after watching Paul Morrissey’s Flesh where poor Joe Dalessandro after a hard day of hustling finds it nearly impossible to get a good night’s sleep; and another of Hawks’ subthemes is the impossibility of Grant’s character to find a bed anywhere in which he might rest his worn-out body). Of course, when she awakens to find him still in her room, there is hell to pay until the proprietress of the inn reveals that the doorknob needs to be fixed.

     From these few examples, anyone might get the idea that the first half of the film only attempts to set up the fact that when Rochard finally does marry Gates it is only a convention created to please the conventional-minded audience. Yet once the couple have exchanged rings, three times in fact, the writers, having made it apparent about Rochard’s disqualifications for being a proper heterosexual partner, turn their attentions on the ways in which the society, using the synecdoche of the military establishment, defines not only marriage, but sexual identity, and gender, thus making it clear just how such a marriage might be totally inappropriate.

     Just as they are about to celebrate their wedding night, Gates’ military attachment is ordered back to the US, which means that her new husband must become the male equivalent—of which there appear to be no previous examples—of a war bride. In short Mr. Rochard must become Mrs. Rochard in the many forms they are required to fill out. As a military lawyer advises them, “I was thinking of you [pointing out Rochard] as the bride. It says spouses not sex.” Rochard’s rejoinder is one of the last gestures to clear the cobwebs away from anyone’s imagination that this character is mimetically available to marry a woman: “The process of turning into a woman is enormously complicated.” Evidently Cary had carefully considered the difficulties of becoming transgender!

      As they begin to actually fill out the paperwork it becomes clear to the always befuddled Grant that “I am my own wife,” long before Doug Wright’s 2003 play by the same name based on the famed German lesbian, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf.

      Rochard goes on, in filling out the application, to knock down any gender limitations—and here you have to give Hawks and his writers credit for totally breaking through the barrier of even their own clever codes—insisting Gates fill in one box that he is “expecting,” a joke used later as a coded way of hinting about Rock Hudson’s homosexuality in Pillow Talk of a decade later and of declaring Jacques Demy’s bisexuality in his 1973 film A Slightly Pregnant Man.

      After many further “complications,” including a Private from Brooklyn suggesting that if the now utterly exhausted Rochard were already in New York he could have slept with his old man, all the plot truly requires is the tried and true cinematic trope of cross-dressing, Grant appearing with a horse-tail bob in a long skirt and silk hose—not a very pretty sight, but like Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, just enough to wow any sailor and get the expectant couple on board the ship sailing to New York. Having tossed any sense of reality out the window with it the key to unlock their prison door of gender or to explain the logic of this plot, the couple sails past France’s gift to the open arms that may be awaiting them. Now if they can only get through Customs.

 

*Leslie Feinberg catalogues just a few of the events that shortly after this film led to increasing attacks on gay Americans and Europeans:

 

“In the 1950s, more bombshells were to detonate in the overall offensive against the "Lavender Menace," which had become a foil for the right-wing in the domestic Cold War.

     In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two gay double-agents working in British intelligence, fled to the Soviet Union. This was grist for the mill, linking homosexuality with communist "treason."

     In 1952, worldwide publicity accompanied the entrapment and arrest of British mathematician and computer innovator Alan Turing. He was one of 1,686 men rounded up and charged with "gross indecency with males." Turing had risen to fame during World War II after he deciphered a Nazi secret code.”

 

** Hecht wrote: "I have met a new friend. He has pointed teeth, pointed ears, is nineteen years old, completely bald and stands on his head a great deal. His name is Charles Lederer. I hope to bring him back to civilization with me.”

 

Los Angeles, October 1, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog (October 2020).

 

Julien Duvivier | Au Royaume des cieux (The Kingdom of Heaven, aka The Sinners) / 1949

itching to sin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julien Duvivier and Henri Jeanson (screenplay), Julien Duvivier (director) Au Royaume des cieux (The Kingdom of Heaven, aka The Sinners) / 1949

 

The 1949 French film Au royaume des cieux, known in some markets as The Sinners, has all the ingredients of later lurid lesbian reformatory and prison films made mostly for heterosexual male audiences. Director Julien Duvivier’s film is set in a reformatory where fifty post-pubescent girls are housed for crimes ranging from revolutionary anarchistic activities, immoral behavior, and robbery, to prostitution and even murder. The girls, some of whom demonstrate lesbian desires, are often seen dressed in their underwear and generally grouped closely together in busy, crowded frames, bantering, verbally fighting, and, at one point, engaging in an out-of-control cat fight in their vast group bedroom.  

    The director of this institution, clearly a frustrated man-hating lesbian, sadistically punishes and tortures her charges, at one moment participating in an incident that today might be described as rape.

     Although all of these things do occur in variations throughout The Kingdom of Heaven—the English title (closer to the original French) which I prefer—is a far more interesting and complex work than it first may seem, and has little in common with the Grade B movie genre I described above. While there is no question that this film belongs to the girl’s boarding school (Mädchen in Uniform and Olivia) / women’s prison dramas (Caged) genre, the film far transcends it as it centers upon the lives of some of the local townspeople and, most importantly, a true-love heterosexual story between the newest inmate, Maria Lambert (Suzanne Cloutier) and her lover on the outside who comes to her rescue, Pierre Massot (Serge Reggiani).

     Just as intense as the pent-up human lusts and hate boiling in the inside of this institution, outside the rivers and streams roil up with the annual rains in this land of water and mud, threatening to drown the townspeople just as the emotional pressures rise within the old fortress transformed into a what has become a young womens’ prison. It is no accident that when the dam walls break, so too do the women inside rise up and rebel against their sadistic director, bringing together the redeeming heterosexual love story and the internal “queer” emotions that have been kept under lock and key within the institution, creating a perfect symbiosis between the normative and queer forces at play in this work.

     Duvivier, moreover, is a classy, “A” list director, and with his cinematographer Victor Armenise is perfectly able to alternate his inside/outside maneuvers in a manner that reveals that the two are innately related. The most notable of these scenes is when the inmate Maria describes what “rain”  means to her as she recounts a sports event she attended with her lover Pierre in Paris which a downpour halted, while the two lovers, escaped to a shelter under a porch. There, a man nearby turns on his car radio playing a song to serenade their hidden love-making. Duvivier’s camera swings back and forth in the telling of this event from Maria, laying on her bed in the reformatory telling the tale to her fellow prisoners, to Pierre, relating the same story at the table of the Barattiers where he is boarding, each time between swings pausing at an image of a window with rain pelting upon it.

     It is that same rain that ultimately endangers everyone’s life but also permits the escape of Maria and Pierre, and helps, with the sacrifice of her life of the anarchist inmate, to foment the inside revolution that results a permanent change with the establishment of a new, kinder director, Miss Guérande (Monique Mélinand).

     The interconnecting between what happens in the larger world and within the prison walls is also played out in the character of Margot (Liliane Maigné), who in her regular escapes and returns from and to the institution plays the role of the Greek Hermes or the Roman Mercury, who links the inside and outside, those of high position and those of low. It is she who delivers Pierre’s letter to Maria, describing his plans to help her escape and relaying his expressions of his love for her.*

     As the girls indirectly introduce themselves to the “newbie” Maria, they also reveal their own  crimes and sexual preferences, some clearly heterosexual, others obviously lesbian, as when one girl, advertising her natural breasts asks Maria to touch them in order to prove that everything within her bra is real, while another greedily attempts to grab a feel for herself.

     Another resident, nicknamed Gaby “Invoice” apparently for her use of her body for monetary purposes, appears to be bisexual, raising her skirt to show her thighs: “The left thigh is for men.  The right one for lonely ladies.”

     These variations of sexuality are presented as the director as normal, even if for his audiences they may have appeared to represent the rough lives these young girls have had to endure in order to survive their broken home lives and the criminal actions of their own parents. Yet the girls wear their differences like badges of honor, even allowing one girl to cry in response to almost everything since it clearly makes her feel better. And there are few hard feelings about their personal desires or past actions.

    The major issues of conflict that arise between these young women relate to their present survival and future acts. They all dislike the anarchist among them who appears to constantly seek out dissension in order to foment revolution, which as I suggest she eventually accomplishes. Their fights with one another, however, are mostly about how to proceed, not about their core values or the acts that brought them all together. And their major topic of discussion is how to survive until they are released, particularly given the most recent developments regarding the directorship and regulations of Maison Haute Mère.

      It is perhaps not so strange that it is the arrival of the innocent Maria—her major crime being to attempt to escape from her assigned employment with a family whose father and son both attempt to force her into sexual relationships—that sets off the series of events that completely alters the order of these girls’ lives as well as those who themselves seek to be free of such malevolent control.

      Things begin rather benignly, as the current director of Maison Haute Mère, Madame Bardin (Paule Andral), meets the young woman just brought to her. Although she greets the new girl with a rather menacingly interrogation of her past record, she soon after assures her that she recognizes these as minor infractions and attempts to explain that she is not being locked away in a prison—the doors and gates remain open, although there are punishments for those, like Margot, who abuse their regulations—but rather will hopefully be given the skills to work upon release in professions that do not entail the kind of indentured situations in which Maria has been placed. Complaining of the cold and damp of the former fortress which serves as the girl’s home, she suddenly receives a call from authorities saying they’ve have finally found new quarters for the institution. But hardly has Madame Bardin had a moment to share the good news, before she falls to the floor, dead apparently of a heart attack.

      Given the speed with which she takes up the telephone conversation and her seeming disinterest in what has just happened to Bardin, Miss Chamblas (Suzy Prim), we cannot help but suspect, that she may have involved in her predecessor’s death. Suddenly having been given command of the reformatory, she orders the open doors immediately bolted, the girls’ playtime be taken away until she discovers who has broken a drinking glass, that the nearly rabid dog Goliath be untethered, and, after abruptly re-interrogating Maria, that she be locked away in basement cells that have never been previously used.

     Somewhat like the wicked stepmother in Snow White, Chamblas immediately recognizes that Maria, in her beauty and innocence, represents everything she is not. And whereas, she can quite easily intimidate and dominate the other girls, even possibly sexually satisfying her desires with some of them, Maria, in her moon-struck innocence is incorruptible.

      Even the tough girls into whose quarters Miss Guérande, in rebellion against her superior, releases Maria, know that the new beauty is living in a reality unavailable to them which they jocularly refer to as “living in a movie in which locomotives fly the skies.” Yet it is her specialness, the fact that, despite the hard times she too has suffered, that she has remained untouched by them that attracts these women to her. When they finally are convinced through her and Pierre’s relationship that love does “still exist,” the only way they can imagine helping her—at least a first—is to turn to the spiritual world in which none of them any longer believe. Having even forgotten how to pray, they make up their own prayers to a God in which they don’t believe, chanting the word “Amen” each time their designated priestess says the world “thumb.” It is such a lovely scene that one tends to forgive Duvivier for so sentimentally connecting it up with Christmas, a day in which miracles always happen in motion pictures.

      But first Maria must endure the torture and temptations that the newborn Christ won’t have to face for 33 more years. Having heard from a prison snitch that a man is headed to the prison to release his lover, Chamblas personally challenges the young girl in a scene so salacious that it almost wipes away any taste of Christmas cookies still lingering on your tongue.

      Determined to discover what the wisp of a female being possesses in order to bring a man to their doors, as well as attempting to witness her beauty for her own delectation, the furious matron strips off the girl’s blouse as her fingers appear to itch in midair to get her hands on “the skin” which makes a man follow her “like a dog.” In an utterly over-the-top performance Prim strokes that skin in self-gratification thrusting her face so close to the girl’s that their lips almost touch all the while knowing that if they actually had the whole scene might have been cut. Certainly, I can’t imagine that these frames would have made it through the US or British censor of the day.

      Maria’s outrage and declarations of hatred are so deserved that even Chamblas is speechless, as she sentences the girl to return to the dungeon, as if we needed further proof that in the perverted version of love represented by Chamblas, desire can only be expressed through power and pain; this character obviously has long been a student of de Sade.

     Using the excuse of the annual girls’ Christmas choral presentation at the local church, Guérande once more intercedes, freeing Maria so that she might meet up with Pierre at the Christmas mass.

      Oddly, God himself is presented in this film as an even more malevolent force than Chamblas—if you believe that nature is an expression of God’s will. The damn breaks and the flood waters come crashing into the church, rendering any actions of the priest almost meaningless as he calls for the roughly hewn rowing boats to be brought into to the sacred stone structure to save his parishioner’s lives.

      After hiding out in the church steeple Pierre and Marie finally escape, but only after a chillingly dangerous run through the local fog and bogs in a police chase that almost takes away the frail child’s life. We can only hope that this time the police, wherever the two end up, will not yet again intervene in their relationship.

      Meanwhile, the girls, finally realizing there are fifty of them compared with four elderly administrators, take over the reformatory, as Chamblas and her only true supporter lock themselves inside their office. The half-starved girls vandalize the institution’s kitchen, most of them getting drunk on the wines stocked for the pleasure of the staff. Once more her associate intervenes, allowing Chamblas safe passage out of the building where she is severely bitten by the brutal dog she has previously unleashed. Guérande is ordered to take over as director and the girls’ lives return to semi-order—although given that these young women have now come to realize their power, it seems doubtful that they will ever be fully ruled again.

     It appears that “the kingdom of heaven” that this film proposes is attained only through challenge and disobedience, laying as it does outside of any self-described normative attempt to define, control, or delimit behavior, including sex and love. This sounds suspiciously close to Milton’s description of the great angel Lucifer to me. Maybe The Sinners is not such a bad title after all.

 

*It is difficult to believe that Stephen Sondheim had not seen this film prior to writing the lyrics of his song “Maria” in West Side Story given that his message to Maria ends with the repetition of her name—“Maria, Maria, Maria”—with a final emphatic “Maria” at the end.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2021

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

 

 

Valentin Vaala | Ihmiset suviyössä (People of the Summer Night) / 1948

god’s child

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lea Joutseno, Usko Kemppi, Valentin Vaala (screenplay, based on the novel by Frans Eemil Sillanpää), Valentin Vaala (director) Ihmiset suviyössä (People of the Summer Night) / 1948

 

Finnish filmmaker Valentin Vaala’s classic film Ihmiset suviyössä (People of the Summer Night), based on Nobel Prize winning author Frans Eemil Sillanpää's 1934 novel, is one of the many “back to the soil” fictions of Scandinavian literature and filmmaking. Like Knut Hamsun’s The Growth of the Soil, Tarjei Vesaas’ The Great Cycle, and Halldór Laxness’ Independent People, among others, these fictions represented the difficulties of rural living, while celebrating the stubbornness and independence of the central figures whom it suggested lived fuller lives than their fellow city dwellers; and, in general, these works argued that the natural, “real” world was preferable to the modern urban one.

     Indeed, that is one of the central themes in this film, as it begins with an unusual sight in this rural paradise, a car speeding along the dusty road on its way to the Teliranta estate, a farm that has been in the Teliranta family for 300 years, remaining one of the wealthiest farm estates in the region.

     The driver of that car Arvid (Matti Oravisto) who has come, unannounced, to see one of the family’s daughters, Helka (Eila Pehkonen) whom he had evidently dated back in the city and who spoke often of the wonders of her home, including its noted sauna. The family, father, mother, grandmother and Helka’s sister all greet the newcomer with pleasure, seeing him as a likely partner for their beloved family member.

    Nearby live Hilja (Emma Väänänen) and her husband Jalmari. She appears to be more worried about her sickly cow than the fact that she is pregnant and near to labor. When she finally does go into labor she sends out Jalmari to get the midwife, who happens to be on another case which forces him to seek out the doctor, also missing, meaning that by the time he returns the baby has already been born, Martta, the mistress of Teliranta have helped Hilja bear her child.

     An even poorer woman, Santa (Kaisu Leppänen), whose husband, a lumberman, is missing, but with her several children survives by brewing mead and, to help pay down her debts, allows one of the brutes to engage in sex when he’s not too drunk to perform. As she tells her children as they about to visit a nearby farm, “You must never tell the neighbors what’s happening at home.”

      Over the period of one long midsummer night, when the sun refuses to disappear and the characters are kept mostly awake, little and larger things happen to these people and others in the countryside that are aligned almost perfectly in the rhythm of the natural world about them. Just as their crops, flowers, trees, animals, and other natural phenomenon stand in glorious testimony to birth, love, decay, and death, so too do the lives of these people. Indeed, the reason this work is so beautiful to watch is the way in which Vaala and his cinematographer Eino Heino capture the natural world in black-and-white. As the novelist had reminded Vaala as he was making the movie, there should be only one main character, and that is the summer night.

   

     By comparison the humans in this story seem almost undeveloped, hazy, and slightly out of focus. We observe them drinking, eating, staring out windows at the landscape, kissing, traveling, and dancing; but nothing except the death of a drunken lumberman and the birth of Hilja’s baby seems to be of great significance. In fact the regional doctor arrives too late for both events. 

     Although taken by the beauty and charm of the countryside, at the end of this extremely long day and night, Arvid returns to the city perhaps to be joined by his girlfriend Helka or maybe he will return after he settles up his affairs. The film does not definitively answer any questions that arise concerning the fate of these figures. And besides, given the patterns of the natural world around them, we know their fates, no matter the seemingly all-important incidentals.

      That is, in fact, what I perceive as the weakness of this film which never truly invites us into the lives of its characters enough to allow us to really know and care deeply about them. On the one day we witness them amidst their everyday lives, they basically seem lost in a kind of frozen stasis that we also recognize does contain outsiders. We are strangers who have no real place in this apparent paradise, despite the sorrows some of its citizens, particularly Santa, must bear. Yet even she seems to be not only a strong survivor but someone who, by saving aside the money she receives and by rewarding the sexual favors which lowers her debt, is someone who surely will still prevail.

      However, one figure stands apart from all of these, an outsider much like us, a young romantic boy from the region who has escaped farm life to join the lumberjacks; yet even then remains apart from his lumberjacks as one who reads and who has evidently traveled, describing early on in the film how he has seen a Chinese carney performer throw knives at a woman who apparently was his lover. This young boy, the beautiful doe-eyed Nokia (Martti Katajisto) also throws a knife at the wood planking of the boat on which he and other men live, the mean men leaving their world dedicated to the floating logs only long enough to get drunk for a night before moving on.

            Even though for most of the film we know little about Nokia as well, we sense something in him that is special, simply in the fact that his beauty stands out against the brutal ugliness of his co-workers and even among most of the people who farm the land. Perhaps Nokia can be matched only by the handsome Arvid, both outsiders of sorts, even if Arvid appears to desire to become one of the farmsteaders and the surrounding peasants. If nothing else, we recognize in Nokia’s literary interests, in his politeness to those he meets, and in his animated story-telling that he is somehow exceptional.

     Unfortunately—in this static world in which even the celebrating dancers seem to move in slow-motion, floating in patterns around the small dance stand instead of actually engaging in intense bodily movement—Nokia is nearly all action, his eyes themselves dancing in the light of others whom he meets and his body reacting to the threats he encounters, particularly when challenged yet again by his totally drunken cohort. Egged on by another logger, Nokia finally takes the bully, Jukka, in hand, rushing at him with his knife, the man falling dead so quickly that we can only wonder, since he has passed out previously several times in this film, if he suffers a drunken seizure or a heart attack. It doesn’t seem to matter, for the moment the man falls, all the others, farmers, and loggers both gather to call Nokia a murderer, quickly assuring his being manacled, arrested, and jailed. It is he who insists immediately upon sending for a doctor who, as I mention above, arrives too late to do anything but to repeat the obvious: the man is dead. There is no attempt to truly discover how he has died.   

     But it is when he is locked away, and let out briefly by the only other comely man in this picture, Iivari (the brother of the jail keeper) that we discover just how different Nokia is from all the others in this film.

    Nokia, we slowly come to perceive through his own telling of his life, is a gay man (the first gay character in Finnish film) who has joined up with the lumberjacks imagining he might find beautifully fit men who in their loneliness might seek him out for a sexual adventure: “It was an impulse. I wanted to try it out. They tell such beautiful stories about it.” But, as he tells Iivari, “everyone is so ugly. Haven’t seen a fair man since I left home.”

     What about the girls, asks Iivari?

     “Ha! Those cows are not for me.”

     It is only when he begins singing a popular Finnish folk-song:

 

           "The boy was naive and beautiful,

           he was naive and beautiful"

 

with Iivari correcting him: “Don’t you mean the girl?” that his questioner begins to comprehend. When Nokia repeats another chorus with “the boy,” the truth suddenly dawns upon the jailor's brother.

      Calling him “God’s child,” Iivari hands him the liquor bottle, while Nokia falls crying into a kind of mad fit trying to explain what he means for someone like him to be manacled. In the end he cries out what might almost be a restatement of Wilde’s famous quote:

 

          "The young soul has longing that he cannot even name."

 

      We hardly care if Arvid returns or not or whether Helka joins him in Helsinki. But we feel cheated for not knowing at film’s end what happens to Nokia, a soul seeking out an impossible love in the world in which he lives. Like so very many of the “return to the soil” works, we discover the land of farmers, peasants, and itinerant workers sharing a pastoral paradise ultimately to be empty; it was after all just such a world to which the Nazis aspired, why Hamsun so admired Hitler, and the Germans chose his The Growth of the Soil as their favorite novel.

      Thankfully Sillanpää's work makes no argument for returning to nature but simply presents that world in an objective manner that shows its beauties and limitations simultaneously. I grew up in such territory, and frankly I have no desire to return even for a long midsummer night. And I can only dream that Nokia may be let free to escape its lures.

 

Los Angeles, July 21, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review July 2021).