Nicholas Ray | Rebel without a Cause / 1955

the coat off his back

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stewart Stern (adapted from a book by Irving Shulman and a story by Nicholas Ray), Nicholas Ray (director) Rebel without a Cause / 1955

 

In retrospect it would be easy to dismiss Ray's beloved film, Rebel without a Cause, as a gaudy (like many of Ray's movies, shot in bright primary colors, particularly red) melodrama of teen angst. Many of its themes are little more than hack psychology. Most of the film's actors, with the exception of the 16-year-old Sal Mineo, are hard to believe as high school students (James Dean and Nick Adams were 24 at the time, Dean dying in a speeding car before the film was released; although Natalie Wood was just 17, she looks far older than a college freshman—she'd done a lot of films by that time; Dennis Hopper was 19; Corey Allen was 21). And much of the overwrought (and quite unbelievable) dialogue—including Dean's famous line "You're tearing me apart!"—seems to have been stolen from some daytime soap opera.

      Yet the more I see this film, the more I realize Ray's remarkable achievement. This is not a film of realist pretention, but rather a kind of unsung opera about the isolation of teenagers (as the character Judy's mother explains: she's at the time in her life when she doesn't "fit in."), the difficulties of being sexually alive without knowing quite how to deal with the emotions that come with it.

     Unlike the missing parents of West Side Story—a work which shares many tropes with Rebel without a Cause—most of the parents are very much at home in their Los Angeles homesteads, trying their hardest to cope with their children's’ problems. If they all seem a bit "dopey" and self-deluded in this film, they are, nonetheless, well-meaning.

    Judy's father (William Hooper), given her suddenly radiant sexuality, has backed away from showing his daughter the affection he once did; if only he could explain to her and himself why that sexuality is bothersome to him, he might help her to understand and still feel a part of the family (at one point, when Jim Stark asks her "Is that where you live?" she answers "Who lives?).

    Jim Stark's father (Jim Backus) might today be seen as a supportive husband instead of the 1950s presentation of him as a hen-pecked man who doesn't have "the guts to knock Mom cold." And even Jim might today be less fearful of failing to play the macho games which characterize anyone refraining from them as a "chicken." Given the bullying described today in schools, perhaps not.

    You don't even need have taken Psych 101 to perceive that Plato's (Sal Mineo's) problem has to do with a father who has left and mother who is never home—on top of his being gay. These are basically good kids who play out, in Ray's pageant-like play, all parents' worst fears, their children's lives leading to drunkenness, overt sexual behavior, robbery, and death.

     The problem here is not good parenting, accordingly, but the fact that despite their nice homes, these young people feel homeless, unable to express anything to the adults around, or, particularly in Jim's case, the fear that any truth he does express will be met with hypocrisy, particularly in his mother's case, who determines to move to a different city every time he gets into trouble.

     The dramatic encounters in the artificial world which young teenagers must live—a world defined by the walls of a classroom filled with people of their same age with similar problems—are dramatically portrayed in Ray's movie: a knife fight (right out of Romeo and Juliet), a "chickie-run" in which young men in automobiles literally put their lives at the edge, and, finally, a shoot-out with dangerous fellow students and police. That Ray chooses the iconic Griffith Planetarium (a place of stars and—as the students have learned from the Planetarium lecturer—the end of the universe) as a backdrop to the knife fight, a Malibu-like cliff for the car race, and an empty Bel-Air-like mansion for the final shoot-out creates even more dramatic tension. These are or were very public places of wealth and power, locales in which these kids without homes are forced to act out their angst.

     Central to Ray's "operatic"-like work, moreover, is an attempt of the three major figures, Jim, Judy, and Plato, to create an alternative family in which they can live out their desires for love, acceptance, and quiet. Throughout Rebel without a Cause Jim's major desire is to find a group who will accept him as himself: a "cute" man-boy who simply wants "no trouble." Judy wants not only to be loved, but, as she later discovers, to love someone. Plato not only needs someone to like him (a near impossible task for a budding homosexual in the 1950s—I was there, having moved the same year to a new city where I—although far younger—was greeted by sometimes violent hostility) but desires a father and mother who might offer him love. In the vacant and derelict mansion, the three play out their roles: husband and wife, father and mother, son and lover, washing over any apparent oppositions that might exist in those positions, as they propose to themselves their "brave new worlds."

     Fortunately, in James Dean Ray found the perfect embodiment of all their desires, a quiet pretty boy with a pouting mouth, the director brilliantly positioning Dean between the two as their faces light up with joy and desire as he turns to each. So beautiful is his face and body, Dean need hardly speak.

    Mineo has the most difficult role but plays it quite brilliantly. He not only desires Jim to be his father—"If only you coulda been my dad."—but what the second part of that line suggests—"We could have breakfast in the morning."—a lover, someone who has stayed near him through the night, a desire expressed also in his having a picture of Alan Ladd in his school locker. It is not only that Ladd—particularly in his role in Shane—is a strong fatherly type, but because of his strikingly handsome features was long rumored to have been involved in gay life, tensions played out, some gay historians have argued, in his many attempts at suicide. Mineo, who was in real life gay, absolutely lights up each time Dean—rumored also to have been bisexual—turns to him. Who wouldn't?

     Legend also has it that Wood was having a relationship with Dean during the shooting—as well as with director Ray.*

     Obviously, the character Jim cannot share his love equally with both Judy and Plato, and it is that underlying reality that determines, in part, the end of this larger-than-life work. The meekest of all the film's figures comes alive as a kind of Western shoot-'em-up hero in the last few scenes, protecting not only his life but attempting to warn and protect Jim and Judy, now elsewhere in the mansion.

     Yet in those acts, he has crossed the line. While Jim has been partly responsible for Buzz's death, he has not intentionally attempted to kill him, and it was Buzz who demanded the symbolic "show-down." In actually taking up a gun, Plato symbolically becomes a killer (he has previously killed puppies), whose acts, dramatically speaking, must be punished. Ray ameliorates this seemingly unfair inevitability, however, by having Jim attempt to save his life, removing the clip from Plato's gun and brokering their exit from the Planetarium where Plato has holed up, and, more importantly, by allowing Jim to finally share his "skin" in the form of his coat—a gesture Plato refused in the first scene of the film—that represents the protective grace and warmth of familial and sexual love, an act that redeems the society and, at least temporarily, allows the two remaining youths to return "home." When, after Plato's death, Jim zips up the coat embracing Plato—despite the perversity it implies—he is clearly consummating his sexual act.

     Finally, Ray's great film typifies what I am describing as the "Los Angeles film genre." In these films an outsider comes to the city (Jim Stark is new to Los Angeles and is a born "outsider," dressing differently from everyone else except for Plato) seeking acceptance and love, but finding the former hard to come by unless he or she behaves in often perverse behavior demanded by others in the community. Ultimately, the hero comes to comprehend that there is no one kind of behavior in the vast spaces of the California city, and, embracing his own "outsider" self, is transformed into an Angeleno who discovers love.

 

*Ray was also rumored to be bisexual, something he denied, but sagely commented, adding fuel to the speculation, that everyone occasionally has dreams or fantasies about same-sex relations. Whatever the truth, it is clear that Ray and his writer worked hard, despite censorship codes of the time, to make it clear that Plato was gay, perhaps awakening the 16-year-old Mineo's own sexual predilections.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (August 2012).

Nicholas Ray | Johnny Guitar / 1954

women who rule the west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Phillip Yordan, Ben Maddow, and Nicholas Ray (screenplay, based on a novel by Roy Chanslor), Nicholas Ray (director) Johnny Guitar / 1954

 

A few days after seeing Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, I happened upon a television broadcast of Johnny Guitar, a movie I'd seen once or twice previously, which I suddenly saw in a new way within the context of Sirk's movie. Like Sirk, Ray has often been praised (and criticized) for locating his films in the context of popular genres (in Ray's case most often in teenage melodramas such as his Rebel without a Cause) and for his oversaturated color prints. In this work of 1954 Ray attempts a Western—if you can call it that. For Ray's "western," as François Truffaut has described it, is "phony"; or, if it is a western, it's "the Beauty and the Beast of Westerns, a Western dream."

     As most commentators have noted, in Johnny Guitar the standard gender roles are reversed: the two major male figures, Johnny Guitar (played by a laid-back Sterling Hayden) and the Dancing Kid (Scott Brady), are in thrall to the powerful saloon-keeper Vienna (Joan Crawford). Guitar, her first love, does not even wear guns, having put them aside in an attempt to alter his life. Vienna's current lover, the Dancing Kid spends most of his time with his all-male gang, only occasionally returning to Vienna's isolated saloon for entertainment. Brooding over her male customers is the simmering, glowering, wise-cracking Crawford, wearing various colors of blouses and pants, generally topped with a bright red scarf tied round her neck. Her lips are the reddest lips in the world.

     A savvy business woman, Vienna has purchased her saloon on land that is destined to become part of the railroad, and she plans to sell it and her property as a railroad stop for a hefty price. The problem is that the bar lies in the territory of local ranchers who want no railroad junction in their open lands, no new development that might bring settlement fences with it. Led by an equally powerful woman, Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge), the ranchers are determined to rid their territory of the Dancing Kid and his followers, along with Vienna. As the movie opens, robbers have hit a stage coach, killing Emma's brother, and Emma and the ranchers arrive at Vienna's saloon to arrest her and the gang.

     The heart of this battle, however, is not really financial, but psycho-sexual, for the Dancing Kid has also caught Emma's eye, teasing her with his nightly dances and sexual energy. Emma, dressed almost throughout the film in black, is a closet Puritan, longing for his company while, out of her guilt, seeking his punishment through his death.

      In this very first scene, Ray lays out the entire story: Emma and her men will ultimately kill Vienna, unless Vienna kills her first.

   The power of the film lies in its dialogue, witty, fast-paced, rarely allowing for a sentimental moment. Hayden and Crawford, in part because of their absolutely opposing temperaments, are near perfect in their dueling tangle of words. In the following dialogue, it is useful to note how Hayden speaks the lines which in most movies a woman might speak, Crawford responding more like a stereotypical male:

 

Johnny: How many men have you forgotten?

Vienna: As many women as you've remembered.

Johnny: Don't go away.

Vienna: I haven't moved.

Johnny: Tell me something nice.

Vienna: Sure, what do you want to hear?

Johnny: Lie to me. Tell me all these years you've waited. Tell me.

Vienna: [without feeling] All those years I've waited.

Johnny: Tell me you'd a-died if I hadn't come back.

Vienna: [without feeling] I woulda died if you hadn't come back.

Johnny: Tell me you still love me like I love you.

Vienna: [without feeling] I still love you like you love me.

Johnny: [bitterly] Thanks. Thanks a lot.

     In truth, Vienna has sent for Johnny Guitar to help her in her fight against the ranchers. She seems so self-sufficient, however, so able to keep the ranchers and sheriff at bay, that both her male suitors are almost insignificant. As she puts it to those who would take her off to jail, standing, as she does for much of the early parts of the movie, at the top of a staircase: "Down there I sell whiskey and cards. Up here all you can get is a bullet in your head."

     Ray's male characters, like most of Sirk's figures, are ghostly like beings in the real world, living as dreamers determined to mold their realities around an imitation of art: music in Johnny Guitar's case and dance for the Dancing Kid. The script suggests, given the social views of the day, these men are more feminine than masculine, choosing art over what both Vienna and Emma are in search of: money. Consequently, their inner beings are as unidimensional as the names they have created for themselves.

     As the plot meanders toward its expected conclusion, contrarily we suddenly see a different side of Vienna, a woman still very much in love with Johnny and a figure terrified by the difficulties she must face. She is the only one with any depth.

      With their mine panned out, little money left, and accused of committing a robbery and murder of which they are innocent, the Dancing Kid and his gang determine to rob the small-town bank at the very moment that Vienna has decided to withdraw her money. The coincidence makes it seem as if she has been involved, particularly since the Dancing Kid kisses her as he rides off with Emma's and the ranchers' savings.

     Facing the inevitable, Vienna awaits the posse—quickly rounded up while still in funeral garb for the burial of Emma's brother—dressed in a full cut white dress, revealing an entirely different possibility in her life. The scenes which follow, the vengeful burning of her "estate" by the now near-mad Emma, Vienna's near death by hanging, and her nighttime run are made even more strange and absurd by her costume. Dressed as she is, there is no way to hide, let alone escape.

     Quickly changing back into blouse and pants, she leads Johnny into an underground passage that takes the two to their destiny: the hideout of the Dancing Kid's gang and the long-expected duel between the two women.

     Determined to settle the battle, Emma fires up the ranchers with hateful statements similar in style to those made by the right-wing during the House on un-American Activities trials, a parallel recognized by many critics and admitted by Ray.

     Yet even here, the film does not rest in its Freudian implications, as the posse, sickening of the violence, leaves Emma to herself. She kills the Dancing Kid, the only man she has apparently loved, before turning the gun on Vienna (the name, one might note, of Freud's home city). Vienna shoots Emma dead. Love and life win out over hate and Emma's cult of death. Yet McCambridge leaves on in the imagination as a woman who could almost cut Crawford down to size.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (August 2009).

George Stevens | Shane / 1953

don’t go

by Douglas Messerli

 

A.B. Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher (screenplay, based on the novel by Jack Schaefer), George Stevens (director) Shane / 1953

 

Quite by accident, I ordered two films from Netflix back-to-back that I would never have thought to pair, but which share the same narrative structures: George Stevens’ 1953 classic, Shane and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1968 movie, Teorema.

     On the surface these films are obviously quite different; there is no real sex, for example, in Shane, while Pasolini’s Visitor has sex with nearly all family members, including their maid. Shane, moreover, is clearly without the Marxist and Roman Catholic messages of Teorema. But for all that, the films are similar in their plots and significance.

      As in the Pasolini work, a visitor (Alan Ladd) appears out of nowhere and is quickly welcomed to live with the family, in this case working as a hired hand.

     Almost as in Teorema the young boy, Joey (Brandon deWilde) immediately takes a liking to the handsome stranger crossing his family’s land, as does Shane to the boy. Clearly, there is no sexual relationship between the two, but it is equally obvious that Shane is absolutely worshiped by Joey, and, at one point, he tells his mother even that he “loves” the stranger. Perhaps it is just their good acting and the easy comfort in one another’s company, but Ladd and deWilde do seem absolutely delighted being together, winking and smiling every time their eyes come to rest on each other. Joey’s mother (Jean Arthur), knowing that one day Shane will have to leave, warns her son not to love him too much.

    Even the fact that it is Shane’s ability to use a gun that most attracts the boy, the obvious Freudian implications of that make it clear that it is the Shane’s western masculinity that draws the boy to him. One of my friends recently suggested that the relationship is so close to sexuality (which in this instance, I might remind the reader, would be pedophilia)—the boy, dressed only in his night shirt, even visits Shane sleeping in the barn early one morning—that it is amazing that the director “got away with it.” It might have been even more interesting and controversial had Stevens been able to cast Ladd’s role with his first choice, Montgomery Clift, a gay actor.

     But Joey isn’t the only one who immediately seems to fall in love with Shane. Joey’s mother, Marian Starrett, lights up in his presence, immediately serving up a meal that her husband describes as “fancy.” It is at her urging that her husband asks Shane to stay with them. She dresses up in her “wedding” dress, primarily for Shane, it is made clear, when the hired hand joins the family for a trip into town. Although, once again, the two do not have sex, Shane’s very presence clearly provides her a sexual frisson. At the memorial celebration, she dances more with Shane than with her own, quite clumsy husband.

     If her husband, Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), demonstrates little jealousy of Shane, it may be because, he too, obviously is attracted to the man and enjoys his company. Hardly have the two met when Shane sheds his shirt and helps Starrett remove a front-yard stump that the farmer has been whittling away for years. Starrett, too, changes his whole demeanor whenever Shane appears.

     More importantly, as in Teorema, the appearance of the visitor redeems the entire family and their small farm neighbors. Along with the other homesteaders, who have been continually threatened by local ranchers headed by Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), they suddenly feel strong enough to make a trip into town to buy goods and to celebrate Independence Day nearby.

      By single-handedly fighting and beating the entire gang, Shane emboldens the Starretts and others to remain on their land. And by determining to take on the gunslinger, Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) Ryker has hired to kill Starrett, Shane saves his friend’s life. Even as Shane wrestles Starrett to prevent him from going alone to Ryker’s headquarters, it appears the two are more engaged in a sexual embrace than in a true battle, and it takes a gun (again with all its Freudian associations) to knock him out. Once Shane accomplishes the act, he immediately gets water to help the “loser” to be quickly returned to consciousness.

     Now that he has restored meaning to the Starrett’s lives, he, like Pasolini’s beautiful hero, must leave, despite young Joey’s moan of despair: “Shaaaane, don’t go.”

     Should we be surprised that Sal Mineo’s gay heartthrob in Rebel without a Cause (1955) is Alan Ladd—that is, of course, until he meets up with James Dean.

      

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2016).

Curtis Harrington | The Assignation / 1953

rendezvous with death

by Douglas Messerli

 

Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director) The Assignation / 1953

 

Long thought to be a lost film, Curtis Harrington’s 8-minute color, silent short The Assignation (1953), was rediscovered and is now available on the DVD The Curtis Harrington Short Film Collection.

     It’s an elegant one-liner that nonetheless sends a few shivers down one’s spine. One might almost describe this as Harrington’s final “coming out” film, a true saying goodbye to what I have come to describe as the “A” variant of coming out works (by Kenneth Anger, Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, John Schmitz and others) dominated by the central sexually conflicted character’s attempts to dissociate himself from the female figure.  

      The film begins with an awaiting gondola into which soon settles a presumably male figure dressed in the traditional Venice carnival attire (see Jean-Daniel Cadinot’s gay pornographic film Le voyage a Venise of 1986 for a fuller rendition of these costumes) of a Bauta, a white mask with a pointed nose, and a long black cape, as he holds in front of him a slightly wilted rose.

      The heart of this film is the quiet rowing of the long boat through the maze of canals of Venice as the masked carnival celebrant, sitting rather erect, glides through Venice in a gondola manned by two gondoliers, one of them particularly handsome, the camera focusing on him from time to time.

     The sounds we hear and the images we witness are almost all from the viewpoint the man sitting deep within the vessel, with the homes and businesses seemingly shuttered from the canal side. Every once in a while, however, the camera shifts to a head-on view of the traveler, as we gradually perceive that his rose, contrary to what one might expect, seems to be reviving, becoming more erect and sturdier as it moves through the breezy canals under the gentle plash of the rowing oar. Along the way we observe several famous Venice sites such as the Campanile di San Giorgio Maggiore.

       Finally, the gondola stops and the costumed figure steps out and moves into a small courtyard. We see a woman sitting high up in a window smoking a cigarette. Seeing the man waiting below, she leaves the window and soon after begins slowly to descend the staircase, walking almost like a sleepwalker toward him. When she stands directly in front of him, the camera focuses on the single rose he has carried throughout the long voyage, whose petals suddenly drop off into a small pile at her feet.

       The duo stand looking at each other for a moment before the man gathers his long black cape and envelops her within it, obviously signifying her imminent death.

       Both the fallen rose petals and the deathly embrace intimate the director’s farewell to the female sex.

 

Los Angeles, April 16, 2021

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

Lex Rentería | Agaves al alba (Agave Echoes) / 2024

the last goodbye

by Douglas Messerli

 

José Mendoza, Lex Rentería, and Tamara Sánchez (screenplay), Lex Rentería (director) Agaves al alba (Agave Echoes) / 2024 [12 minutes]

One might describe the short Mexican film directed by Lex Rentería—one of the five filming companies who competed in the Rally Expresso Tequila competition—as a kind of beautiful summary of Brokeback Mountain shot through the commercial lens of the Agave azul, the “blue agave” used in the production of honey and, far more importantly, in its use in the Jalisco production of the potent drink Tequila.

   These two gay cowboys, in fact, meet up in a bar, drinking shots of tequila where they engage in friendly love-hugs and in the case of Miguel (Diego Ramírez) even a dance into which he attempts to engage his lover Alejandro (Abraham Ríos). The bar patrons are delighted, but Alejandro is nervous, and with good reason.

    He is about to join his uncle in Mexico City, where he wants to study acting at the conservatory, and this is their last night together in the small Jalisco town in which they’ve grown up. Alejandro can’t even be seen giving Miguel a last-minute kiss given the gossip of the community.

     Together they escape to the agave fields, where in a small tent they make love and express their true love and last moments of passion. The commentator on the IMDb site basically summarizes the simple plot, which took evidently three writers to create: “A young man goes to big city for becoming actor. Behind travel, he meets his friend. A last drink (and dance) in a bar, a night in tent together, intimacy near agave field and, in night, looking to stars.” I didn’t notice the stars, but longing and love is certainly at the center of this last goodbye.

     More importantly, as in most commercials, it’s a pretty-to-look-at 12-minute ad.

 

Los Angeles, February 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).

L. T. Hewitt | Battersea Power Station / 2019

other attractions

by Douglas Messerli

 

L. T. Hewitt (screenwriter and director) Battersea Power Station / 2019 [25 minutes]

 

The mother from Hell in this short film (played brilliant by Carolyn Saint-Pé) is from Fichleke, probably better known as Fishlake, a South Yorkshire community (population in 2011 of 682) from which her son, Peter (L. T. Hewitt, the writer and director of this terrifying comic coming out film) who has escaped to London, a city which Ms. Seegar (his adoptive mother) finds terribly, gray, dirty, and utterly forbidding. One of her first questions directed to her batter-brained son is “What’s in a big city that you can’t get in Fichleke?” Peter can only begin to answer, since she constantly interrupts all logical thought, “Art. Employment. Places to go.”

     And why can’t he go the local university instead of one the 46 such institutions which exist in London? But the truly exciting moment of this early scene of a rather amateur work is when a postcard Peter has written escapes from his pocket, to be picked up by his attending brother, Paul (Adam Cavender). The picture on the postcard is of Battersea Power Station, in his mother’s perception simply another ugly building, that is now being converted to apartments. Why would anyone want to live in such an ugly structure, Peter and Paul’s monstrous mother wants to know? Perhaps because it’s iconic suggests Peter and his sister Mary (Antonia Tootill), also along for the voyage.

     The postcard’s reverse-side message, so we later discover, in a kind of apologia/love letter to Peter’s boyfriend, Lloyd—a graphic designer who probably also created the card—not only apologizing about Peter’s inability to share the information of his being gay with his ridiculously dismissive mother, but expressing his deep live for his Lithuanian-born boyfriend and even a desire to marry him. Obviously, Peter is privy to all this information, and over the years, the card becomes almost a game to them, as each return to the other, an open secret they share through the years.

     Five years later the dreadful Medusa returns, with Fichlekean brother and sister in tow, for a visit, this time Paul having at least gotten up the nerve to admit he has a flatmate, Lloyd (Vaslov Goom) a charmingly handsome young man who can’t act his way out a bag, but is forgiven by the mother even as she expresses her utter disgust at the condition of the apartment we have already observed Peter endlessly cleaning every possible spot, including under the bathroom sink, which she insists is so filthy that she can’t even imagine how her son might live in such a pigsty.

     On a tour of the scrubbed-down apartment, Peter shows her his “own” bedroom—a pigsty, she proclaims—and Lloyd’s room, which is as clean as possible since it has obviously been vacant.

     Paul, however, finally hints to his sister that he believes it strange that a man Peter has never before mentioned has suddenly become a roommate—but then, of course, he’s read the now ancient message, and Mary cannot comprehend what he might possibly be talking about.

     Peter, meanwhile, has decided to bow out yet again from revealing his relationship to his mother and siblings, while Lloyd finally gets to read to never-sent epistle and suddenly realized just how intense his lover had felt about him so very early in their friendship.

     Lloyd leaves his lover in the back room to sort things out, while he goes forward in another attempt to charm the gorgon. She again asks what he does, he explaining that he’s a graphic designer. And when Mary and Peter probe what kind of customers he has served in the past, he finally responds, perhaps intentionally or maybe even innocently, that he worked on the campaign for the transformation of the Battersea Power Station, all suddenly rattles into place, as the monstrous mother turns into a hurt bull, demanding to know, as she pushes her way into her son’s bedroom, why he has never before admitted that he was gay.

      Unbelievable as it is, she is not upset because of his sexuality as much as she is furious for his inability to talk to her about the matter. It takes a deep inhale of air and a blink or two of imagination to accept that fact that she is not upset very much about his attraction to the lovely Lloyd as she is angry for his lack of openness and honesty.

    She still believes that the Battersea Power Station if an ugly building (“It was ugly 40 years ago and if they keep the same design it will still be ugly now.”), while Mary attempts to relieve the situation by simply responding “Let’s just all agree that it’s an interesting building and now it has other functions.”

     “Other functions?” Ms. Seegar queries.

     Peter’s answer is perfect: “Hope so. It’s the venue for my wedding reception,” as he pulls off Lloyd, the two of them leaving the Fishlaker’s behind.

     This short UK movie is not very profound, but yet again reveals just how difficult it is for many men (and presumably women) to come out to their own families.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).