Michael Cacoyannis | Όταν τα ψάρια βγήκαν στη στεριά (Otan ta psaria vgikan sti steria) (The Day the Fish Came Out) / 1967

the metamorphoses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Cacoyannis (screenwriter and director) Όταν τα ψάρια βγήκαν στη στεριά (Otan ta psaria vgikan sti steria) (The Day the Fish Came Out) / 1967

 

Michael Cacoyannis’ 1967 film The Day the Fish Came Out has probably received the worst reviews of any film of a noted international director. It came out of a period in which campy, sometimes over-the-top comedies such as Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966) were quite popular. And it shares some of the political satire of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the even earlier Jack Arnold piece of nonsense The Mouse That Roared (1959)—both films for which I, myself, have little admiration, and neither of which I see as truly “funny.”

     Yet critics were particularly mean when it came to the Cacoyannis work, since he had previously made grander epic realist productions such as Zorba the Greek and Electra. The New York Times reviewer, Bosley Crowther, for example, described it as “flabby” and “foolish,” going on to evaluate it as “a witless farcical account of how an unnamed, far-ranging power tries to cover up the fact that one of its planes has accidentally dropped some fissionable material on a barren, sleepy Greek island.” That “unnamed country,” quite obviously was the USA.

     Tom Milne of the usually insightful Time Out summarized: “Cacoyannis turns it all into hideously lumbering farce, so unconvincing that one is heartily glad when the unprepossessing characters at least seem likely to be overwhelmed by radiation.”

      Even the bland TV Guide called it a “silly and pretentious nuclear disaster drama.”

      Based partly on the factual 1966 loss by the American Force of 4 hydrogen bombs while flying over Palomares, Spain, the “McGuffin” of the film is a similar loss of two atomic bombs and a nearly impregnable metal box containing something so noxious that we are not even told what it is. The pilot and navigator of the plane (Colin Blakely and Tom Courtenay) drop their load this time on the nearly uninhabited Greek island of Karos before themselves parachuting from the plane and swimming ashore now, somewhat inexplicably, dressed only in their skivvies. And a special American force, headed by a Greek-speaking Mr. Elias (Sam Wanamaker) is quickly transported to the island to seek out the deadly missiles and the mysterious metal box. As Milne’s review, quoted above, suggests, the film ends with the death of the fish in the surrounding waters and the likely destruction of all living in and visiting the island’s small village.

      This is the baseline story, but no one with any sense of humor might care about this silly series of scary events. Cacoyannis makes it clear from the very beginning, through an epilogue comically spoofing the Spanish event and with slickly clever credits by Maurice Binder, that signals the fact that his tale is not really about bombs and human destruction but is about an entirely different issue: in this case a kind of metamorphosis of everything and everyone in this dystopian world. If Karos begins as a sleepy village of mostly old men and a few women, it ends up as a kind of sheik tourist and gay paradise that, having achieved such a new identity, is simply required to be destroyed given the moral judgments of the film’s audiences. In presenting his theme, accordingly, Cacoyannis almost invites his viewer’s disdain in a way that might at least reveal their own hypocrisy. But that’s taking a big chance, which, in this case obviously, just didn’t pay off.

       Perhaps seeing it in hindsight is fortunate; today we can perceive the campy celebration of this film within a different sexual context, if nothing else. Yet, it’s hard to even get hold of a CD. I bought one of the very last copies off of Amazon to be able to view it. Although I heard it sometimes appears on TV film channels, I’ve never been able to catch it.

      To accomplish his ends, the director immediately determines to transform all the military straight men into gay simulacrums. The survivors of the plane crash, both of whom describe themselves as married, are immediately forced to run around the rocky island not only in underpants, but particularly in the young Courtenay’s case, in what is almost a cotton jockstrap. His camera comically strokes the two men’s bodies, revealing even the size and shape of Courtenay’s small un-cut cock and the more hirsute chest of Blakely, both of whom, without clothes, without money, and without even the ability to make a telephone call to explain that they are still living, have certainly become something “other” than they had been before. Indeed, Cacoyannis almost immediately shifts them from being stock-comic figures into representing voyeuristic images to his audience. By showing them almost as nude and commenting on the fact over and over again—at one point the two even show up on screen with their underpants upon their heads as a substitute sunblock—forces us to perceive them in a new context. They are no longer pilot and navigator but two grown men living nearly naked in the wild. No wonder so many viewers of the day squirmed at the sight! And the slightly stupid character that Courtenay plays is particularly an appetizing morsel, presenting him a kind of gay version of Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot.

      If that isn’t enough, an entire squadron of hunky military advisers is asked to pretend it is visiting the island to scout out new places for a large hotel. The director is also credited as the costume designer. In the name of “going casual,” he clothes them in the outlandish pants, shirts, and sunglasses—with large mesh cutouts in their pants and mesh-woven shirts, posing them even without their shirts for most of movie, Wanamaker’s hairy chest being a particular focus of the camera lens—that they look like the gayest of gayest travelers one might imagine.

      Upon witnessing their descent upon the island, the pilot and navigator can only suppose they are a gay contingent of visitors, and one of the outrageously dressed squadron members, spotting the boys in underwear, presumes they have having sex among the rocks. Throughout, Cacoyannis shows as many male ass shots as Hollywood films have always portrayed, if somewhat more subtly, of their female sexpot heroines.

      Like any good group of gay boys, these want to be alone (they need to search the island for the missiles and deadly box, if you recall)! And, eventually, to establish that separateness, they buy up an entire part of the island and fence it off, suggesting that they are testing soil samples, etc. for their new solar hotel. To please those in the island who do not own this valueless property, they put them to work on creating a meaningless highway to the site.

      Although the military men might see the local peasants as backward and uninformed, they quickly ring up the Greek national government with the news of the proposed transformation of their island, determining to spiff up their village for the deluge of possible new tourists. Their bare, whitewashed walls are suddenly painted with bright pinks, blues, greens, yellows and other colors, creating a virtual rainbow of colorful possibilities (get it?). Numerous homes overnight become hotels. The road workers suddenly uncover a beautiful ancient sculpture. The small island town, just like the military men, also experiences a metamorphosis. Things here are suddenly very “gay,” in the older meaning of that word.

      Boats and boats of tourists, dressed in equally outrageous Fellinesque-like costumes, suddenly descend upon the port of Karos. These are the real gay boys along with their sexy girlfriends and wealthy women “benefactors,” who further transform the island into a truly sexual paradise whose visitor-inhabitants dance ridiculous Mikis Theodorakis-composed songs far into the night. Suddenly the sleepy little island has become the mega hot-spot its elderly citizens had always imagined was out of their reach.

      Too bad there are still a few stubborn peasants, particularly one fisherman and his wife, who, having discovered the large metal box are determined to open it and find what they greedily believe is a cache of gold. When they finally succeed, they discover only a few reddish-brown egg-shaped containers, probably holding deadly viruses, most of which the fisherman throws into the sea and a few of which he wife unknowingly tosses into the village’s water source. The fish rise to the surface, dead (“fish,” one might remember, was once a derogatory name for women in gay circles), and what looks like an eclipse of the sun appears out of nowhere as a public broadcast microphoned message is drowned out by their music. Tomorrow the US will see just such a sight.

       There will always be, suggests Cacoyannis, a few hold-out cretins who cannot enter into the current of joy and pleasure. These are called critics, I suspect, who always rip into all the fun.

       Yesterday, when I shared the story of this film with my thirty-seven-year-old friend, Pablo Capra, he suggested it sounded much more interesting than Zorba the Greek, a movie I’d dragged him to a few weeks earlier. Enough said.

     

Los Angeles, August 20, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).

Nick Eliot (Nicholas Ursin) | Behind Every Good Woman.... / c.1967

turned to stone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nick Eliot (Nicholas Ursin) (director) Behind Every Good Woman.... / c.1967

 

The short film played out in the boundary between documentation and realist fiction,  Behind Every Man Is a Good Woman... is about the most normative film I have written about in the pages of My Queer Cinema. The young black woman walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles, shopping in what appears to be the Garment District before making her way to the Jewelry District a few blocks away begins the film my expressing her major desires: “I’d like to live a respectable life, that’s for sure. A happy life,” before she goes on to declare the man she would like to marry is someone who “who wants to go places, to make something of himself.” Almost as in a cliched ending of these sentiments, she concludes “Behind every good man...you know what they say.”

     The year is 1966, and the streets are filled with people, walking, shopping, and standing outside stores in conversation. She receives several male stares, and is particularly interested in a young man who appears to be Hispanic standing nearby in conversation with a friend.

     He catches her eye, and she looks back at him, he signaling her to join him as the walk away together, stopping by a coffee shop. They talk for a while, without us being able to hear what they say, as she glances out the front glass window to see her bus passing by.

      She leaves quickly, rushing to catch it, but as she almost reaches the vehicle she trips and falls to the concrete, with a quick glimpse of a handsome man in a suit perhaps ready to help her up, although we never see that actual gesture.

      So begins what is almost a short musical operetta, played out to three popular songs, the first being Dionne Warrick's “Reach Out for Me” from 1964, whose lyrics clearly express our character’s inward fears to which she has so far refused to admit, but which her fall at the bus stop hint at:

 

When you go through a day

And the things that people say

They make you feel so small

They make you feel that

Your heart will just never stop aching

And when you just can't accept

The abuse you are taking

Darlin', reach out for me.

 

     In case, like the male hero of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) you’re not terribly alert to the subtle differences between a black female and a black transgender man, director Nicholas Ursin makes all transparent in the very next frame, as we see our hero dressing and making up his thin male body as she changes himself into the woman we have just witnessed on the Los Angeles streets.

     She is preparing for her date, this time accompanied by similarly appropriate music by Dusty Springfield, also from 1964, “Wishin’ and Hopin’” (a song first sung incidentally, by Warwick):,

 

Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin'

Plannin' and dreamin' each night of his charms

That won't get you into his arms

So if you're lookin' to find love you can share

All you gotta do is hold him, and kiss him and love him

And show him that you care

      As she puts on her makeup, she tells a fascinating story of how in a West Los Angeles gas station “...I decided to go in the men’s room. Not because I am a man, but because I wanted to go in the men’s room, period.” There she encounters a handsome man who seeing her, begins to back out, excusing himself as he suggests they must have put the labels on the wrong doors. She calmly replies, “No, this is the men’s room,” as she continues about her business, almost immediately recognizing that under his coat he is wearing a badge.

      He takes her outside just to check whether she is wanted for any crimes, but when he discovers she is clear, politely releases her—but not before a younger cop pipes up: “It’s too bad you’re a boy because you’re a real knockout,” which she, almost sassily, tells the camera “I took as a compliment.”

       By the time her story is finished she has once more transformed herself, set her small table, and now lights two candles, turning off the other room lights while she awaits her date. She sits on the couch for a few moments pretending to read a magazine, while the third song of this remarkable transgender musical plays forbiddingly in the background. The lyrics express her obvious fears, as The Supremes sing “I’ll Turn to Stone” from the year 1967, the date of this film’s release (although several of the sources suggest the film was released in 1966):

 

Take your love from me

I'll turn to stone

Turn to stone

If your love I couldn't call my own

I'll turn to stone

Turn to stone

I need your love in every way

Your love I cling to

When things slip away

Without your love

I'll be lost and alone

................................

I’ll turn to stone

Turn to stone.

    She hears a car drive up, going over to the window and looking out, sadly turning back into the room after evidently not spotting the man she is waiting for. Quietly she goes over to her table and, like Tom Wingfield’s sister Laura in Tennessee William’ The Glass Menagerie, quietly blows out her candles.

     The director of this beautiful short film is credited, as I mention above, as Nicholas Ursin. But the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) reveals his working name is Nick Eliot, who was the lover of Howard and my friend, artist and film director Norman Yonemoto. Eliot was the leading photographer of some of the hottest porn films of the next two decades, including Kansas City Trucking Co. (1976), El Paso Wrecking Corp. (1978), Three Day Pass (1982), and A Night at Halsted’s (1982). In 1979 he also worked as one of the many noted cinematographers of the documentary Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, a dairy-like work by and about German gay rights activist Rosa von Praunheim, a film I also review in these pages.

     The UCLA Film and Television Archive with the help of The National Film Preservation restored Behind Every Good Woman..., giving it new life for the LGBTQ festival circuit.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2020

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

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos | Bliss / 1966 || Gammelion / 1968

castles of hallucinations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos (director) Bliss / 1966

Gregory J. Markopoulos (director) Gammelion / 1968

 

The six-minute-long Bliss by American-born filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos is what one might almost describe as a sped-up snapshot portrait of the interior of a Byzantine church on the island of Hydra in Greece. The film, the first made after Markopoulos, with his lover, filmmaker Robert Beavers, had left the US behind for Greece, represented the new kind of film-making the director had developed in early 1966, wherein he constructed short films entirely in-camera, without subsequent editing.

     Kirk Alan Winslow has described the process: “A single roll of stock was run back and forth inside the camera apparatus, while carefully selected passages of frames were laid down (exposed), sometimes alone, sometimes upper-imposed or faded-in and out, at precise positions pre-determined by the filmmaker.” This new type of filmmaking was described as a “portrait,” the sitters for which might be either individual persons or, as it is in Bliss, a place.  Indeed, the beautiful images of the church presented over the period of six minutes do truly result, to the attentive watcher, in a kind of “bliss” which remind one, in part, of the last scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s great film of 1966, Andrei Rublev—although without the ravishing embracement by the camera that defines the great Russian director’s relationship with the art he depicts.

 

    Gammelion of 1968 is ostensibly a “portrait” once more, this of the Italian castello Roccasinibalda near Rieti, owned by publisher and activist Caresse Crosby, whose husband, Harry, had previously died in a double-suicide pact with his lover. But what was presented in six minutes in Bliss is extended, through long passages of the black and white leaders of the film itself into almost an hour in length, the “images” or “snaps” of the castle appearing at irregular moments along with brief fragments of music and spoken poetry (Rilke, read by Markopoulos himself). This lengthened “sitting” shifts the image clusters to a seemingly more narrative sequence, as if the “empty” space and grainy texture that separates the images were marking time for the sequential pattern or even interrupting and dislocating the “story.”

   Given the twisted combination of love and death of Harry and Caresse’s own life, Markopoulos’ “narrative” might almost be suggestive of their relationships; but, in fact, the story the director implies in this work is based on French writer Julien Gracq’s beautiful, slightly surrealist fable of a homosexual/heterosexual love triangle, The Castle of Argol, a work about which I wrote in My Year 2005. I’ll briefly repeat the plot:

 

“Gracq’s work is, on level, a highly romantic homoerotic tale. A young man of great wealth and intelligence, Albert, purchases a castle and the surrounding landscape. He moves into Argol and immediately perceives its mystery and magic-like surroundings, particularly the nearby forest of Storrvan, which appears as a threatening overgrowth of towering trees. Suddenly he receives a message that his dear friend and soul-mate Herminien is planning a visit—along with a stranger named Heide.

     Herminien and Albert, who have roomed together as students, see themselves almost as twins, each able to intellectually stimulate one another beyond the range of all others, and each able to read one another’s deepest thoughts.

    As Albert prepares for their arrival, he visits the nearby desolate seashore, discovering there a graveyard. On the surface of one tombstone he inscribes the name of the strange visitor, Heide. Clearly, Heide is already an intruder, but upon her arrival he is mesmerized by her beauty and intelligence. Over the next months, a deep relationship develops between the two, galling and festering hatred in Herminien, who simultaneously recognizes that he has brought Heide to Albert for his friend’s tacit approval and for sharing his love for Heide.

    But Albert also seems strangely aloof and cold with regard to Heide’s sexuality. One afternoon Heide and Herminien sneak away into the forest, failing to return by sunset. Intrigued and almost hypnotized by their disappearance and forest itself, Albert follows them into the dark woods, only to discover the body of Heide, brutally raped by his friend. He takes her back to the castle and nurses her to health. A long time later, they both follow a cleared path through the forest and discover the body of Herminien, who has been thrown by his horse. He too is returned to the castle and restored, but a new hatred develops in Albert regarding him. Heide remains secluded in her room, obviously unable to face either of them, while Herminien and Albert return to their intense conversations.

     Heide commits suicide, and they bury her in the seaside graveyard. Herminien determines to leave, but Albert follows him into the woods, putting a dagger into his side.”

    This story, quite obviously, never appears in Markopoulos’ film. Earlier in the decade he had explored the site as a possible setting for what he hoped would be a feature-length adaptation of Gracq’s work.

    Gammelion, accordingly, is not truly a “narrative,” but an expanded treatment of the location. But since the deconstructed images are so briefly represented, while often blurred or presented as overlaying images, we cannot even quite get to see the clearly beautifully stark and haunting views of the castle and its environs. We are forced, rather, to edit our own version of what we imagine we are seeing (and at times hearing), and we are encouraged, accordingly, to take these seemingly unrelated and briefly glimpsed “snaps” into our own consciousness in order to create a possible meaning. As P. Adams Sitney, writing of Markopoulos, suggests: the new style that the director had developed, “creates the aura of fiction without elaborating any specific fiction.”

      Yet, anyone acquainted with the Gracq work cannot help but be reminded of the hallucinatory quality of the book itself, as each of the fiction’s figures attempt to make sense of and comprehend each other and their relationships within the confines of Albert’s castle. If Markopoulos’ work can at all be described as a narratively coherent work, it is in its procedures rather than in terms of characters or plot. Indeed, there are no characters and there is no story to Gammelion except of the viewer’s own making. And yet, I came away having the feeling that I had experienced a near mystical tale, my eyes still blinking for the intrusions the screening purposely had put upon any of my own determined intentions to connect. The logic of the conscious mind, quite obviously, is suspect.

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2015).

 

David Mora | Dos veintitrés (Two Twenty-Three) / 2018

for the record

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Mora (screenwriter and director) Dos veintitrés (Two Twenty-Three) / 2018 [4 minutes]

 

A handsome man sits at the end of a pool, seemingly alone. He tells of a dream he had the night before in which he was at a party where he saw a beautiful woman in a miniskirt. He was a little drunk and was shouting at the DJ to play a song from Estopa. And as he turned, he spied yet an even more beautiful girl, a goddess, “light eyes, blonde hair, and a couple of considerable reasons.” And without hesitation he began to kiss her.

    And suddenly of the four of “us,” appear here in his pool. And the “chicks” begin to kiss one another, apparently being friends. The two males, “we,” were stunned and joined in. “You take your brunette, and I take my blonde, and we started to hook up.”

     Everything is fine until he notices that the girl has pricked him when kissing. He opens his eyes, “and instead of her face, it was you….”

     The man continues his story as he sits at the end of the pool, while addressing apparently no one, as if in a dream.

     “You know what I did? I continued as if nothing.” Indeed he was so horny that he forced his imaginary friend to suck him under water, with him barely breathing.

     But then the story suddenly shifts, as if the narrator were coming through a fantasy and admitting to a reality. “I lie. I didn’t dream this.” It was a fantasy that he added to his Sunday afternoon “wank.” And he also thought of his male friend, he admits, while jerking off on Friday after training.

     And sometimes even when fucking his girlfriend Elisa, he gets the smell of his friend. It’s all very strange, he admits, because he’s not into guys at all. “Gross!” he proclaims. “But sometimes I think about getting…the courage to let it go. But I don’t dare and get scared.”

     Because what is even more frightening to him is the possibility that his friend will not understand, the he doesn’t feel the same, that it may be something that will change their current relationship. “Because sometimes I think what we have is just perfect.”

      Suddenly, out from beneath the surface of the water, a beautiful man (Miguel Ángel Bellido) pops up, demanding to know “How much?”

      Our narrator looks at his watch: “Two twenty-two,” he answers. He looks attentively at his delighted friend, who has just broken his own record, a quiet smile remaining on the narrator’s face as his friend swims off and the credits quietly role.

       This short film by Spanish/Castilian Mora might almost be seen as a rehearsal for a bisexual coming out, or, more likely, a kind of audio-visual diary entry, shared with the viewer that will never be heard by the cinema-bound friend.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

Gregory J. Markopoulos | Swain / 1950

escape from hell

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory J. Markopoulos (screenwriter, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, and director) Swain / 1950

 

Gregory Markopoulos’ 1950 short film Swain has a great many things in common, structurally and narratively, with the works of Curtis Harrington (in particular his 1946 film Fragment of Seeking), Kenneth Anger (Fireworks of 1947) and other early “coming out” works—what I describe as the “A” version—of the period, including his own Christmas, USA of 1949. The major difference, however, which also perhaps requires us to even reconsider the earlier works I mention, is that Markopoulos’ Swain, in its exaggerated tropes and its early-color vignettes, as if we were skipping through a scrapbook, is also very funny, seeming at moments, almost to make light of the genre his dear friends and he himself had already established. Perhaps, we suddenly perceive, Harrington, Anger, and others, despite their serious pleas for an escape from normative sex, were also having more fun with their expressions than we might have imagined, laughing at times at their own suffering.

     Like the previous works, Swain concerns a ritualized rejection of heterosexuality. Our hero, played by Markopoulos himself, has clearly had enough in the pits of his hetero-pretense represented in this case by a swamp full of alligators, a moccasin snake, and a dead bird from which a worm on his wing, as our hero climbs out of his own “slough of despondency,” struggling his way back into the Ohio landscape (Markopoulos was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio) wherein he is more at home. The scene of him clawing his way up to the highway can only remind one of a scene in Harrington’s 1948 movie, Picnic, where the queer figure, in search of escape, climbs up an endless staircase with crooked steps that seem to be growing as he struggles to make his way to the top.

    Markopoulos, our queer hero, does eventually scramble up the bank to reach the highway, doing what can only be described as a little dance of joy as he runs off in his escape from the matrimonial pits he has been facing.

    He next goes seeking his home, a kind “room of one’s own” to which he can escape to rest and create. On the way into the house, he stops briefly to caress a statue of a pan-like figure, the commentator named “Blogn” on letterboxd describing him traipsing around “a masculine statue in a way I can only describe as sultry.” He further communes with the demonic and satyr-like masks lining the rafters of the house like iconic male protectors.

     As in nearly all the early “coming out” films, the first thing he does once inside is to lie down on a bed, obviously the best place to rest after one’s struggle with the opposite gender and to further contemplate one’s decision to move away from the conventional. Yet Markopoulos’ bed is not the narrow hospital-like bed that shows up in many of these works, but a large double bed upon which he falls to sleep.

   Soon after, however, we see that he has been followed by the film’s symbol of the female sex and the expectation of matrimony, performed in this work by Mary Zelles, swathed in a silken white dress that clearly reminds us of a wedding gown.

     The hero, upon discovering that she has followed him, retreats to the greenhouse, the in-house version of a solarium which was often the scene to which young couples retreat. But the greenhouse, in this case, is a world of flowers, not potted palms, which the male accepts as he rightful domain, having become in his own mind, symbolically speaking, a feminized gardener of dahlias and lilies.

     But even here he is not safe, as the woman follows him, striding forcefully toward a world of beauty in which he feels safely hidden behind the fragile leaves and petals of nature. But she enters without hesitation, seeking him out. He backs away, turns tail, and hurries off into another hothouse chamber, she a bit like an Electra seeking revenge follows.

     He escapes, she still following, this time with a long black coat over her white dress, as she crosses a train bridge where she observes a man walking with a small child—reminding her surely of what she may lose without if she cannot change his mind.

     Yet, as she observes in an abstract work of art leaning against the walkway, perhaps by her former male friend himself, his life has been a hell; the work seem abstractly to reveal this history of our hero to date, including his attempt to escape the devilish world below, and in her realization walks off to a destination other than his, the smoke for the train engine billowing upward and reminding us, perhaps, of the final leave of the two would-be lovers in David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945).

       A change in the music and the images of several high ornate towers suggests perhaps that she travels elsewhere and hints at a kind of release to the heavens.

     Our hero, meanwhile, walks across a must smaller bridge over a rivulet and moves off into a mark, stopping at one point at a small memorial before meeting up, obviously much later, with his former girlfriend, now dressed in a handsome blue suit with red collars. She smiles broadly as he appears, the two having cast away their “armor,” now joining in a friendly conversation with each other, without their previous constraints.

     For a moment, many of the terrifying images of the past flip by before the camera returns to their pleasant repast on the memorial in which they’ve seated themselves. And this time, it is she who stands up and leaves him alone.

      For one last moment, our hero imagines yet again that she has locked him up in a room from which he cannot escape; but then he soon realizes he is free to move off alone.

    With the use of serious classical music, some of it sounding like Stravinsky, and the highly wrought narrative, there are moments in this “coming out” work that in its melodramatic tropes approaches camp, and almost appears to be satirizing the work of his peers and himself of a few years earlier. Yet the serious message of the queer renunciation of the conventional sexuality remains as a powerful statement in this 1950 film, at a time when commercial Hollywood had long been forced to abandon all such concerns.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).