Lonely are the queer

This is a paper I presented a couple of years ago in St Andrews. I thought I post it here, more or less unedited (so the language is not all that it could be). Also, I mention important plot points for several films, Girl With Hyacinths, These Three, Tea and Sympathy and The Browning Version, just so you know.

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Lonely Are the Brave is a beautiful film from 1961 about a man who was born in the wrong century. In the opening scene he is seen resting on the prairie with his horse, and then a jet plane flies over him, moving us quickly from what we thought was a scene from the century of the steam engine to a scene in the century of the jet engine. However, that is not what this talk is about, I just wanted to explain where the title came from. The talk is rather about the theme of loneliness and how it is connected to queerness.

The history of gay and lesbian characters in cinema has still to be written, or rather it is constantly being re-written. One thing though is that they are much more common than they are given credit for. They are there, more or less hiding. Much has been made about how These Three from 1936, the first film version of Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour removed the lesbian aspect from the play. Instead of love between one woman towards another, it became love between one woman and the boyfriend of another woman. But These Three smuggle these queer things into the film. The boyfriend is called Joe, so the woman who was lesbian in the original still get to say to the girlfriend to the boy she fancies “I love Joe/you”. When a truer version was made in 1963 now called The Children's Hour, by the same director William Wyler, it was more modernist and outspoken, but it had not the same emotional punch. Such hidden suggestions and innuendos are common within cinema, not least Westerns.

One thing that has always stood out for me when watching Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths is how lonely the main character is. This theme of loneliness runs through his films, in his last great film Stöten – The Heist there is towards the end a shot of a young woman standing alone in a pool of darkness, surrounded by policemen, asked to give up her boyfriend. But nobody is as lonely as Dagmar Brink in Girl With Hyacinths. This loneliness is a mystery, and it is what intrigues the men in the film, as well as the audience I would suggest. Why is she so lonely? Because she is a lesbian in a time when that was not allowed or, when it was not allowed, was not talked about, or acknowledged.

Recently I watched Vincente Minnelli's fantastic Tea and Sympathy from 1956 and there again was a lonely person, well two actually, but one that is the point here, and that is the main character. I will show you the opening sequence to exemplify.

[In this scene we see the main character, Tom, walk around at a college reunion, where everybody are talking to each other and discussing the past and the future. But not Tom, he speaks with nobody.)

One of the key elements of Minnelli's mise en scène is the multidimensional staging, that there are several things going on at once. Sometimes two simultaneous scenes will take place at the same time in the same long shot. We can see that here.

The film is about a boy who when he was in high school was bullied and ridiculed for being "girlie". The woman in whose house he's staying, the wife of one of the teachers, takes him under her wings and tries to protect him. It doesn't go very well. He was, is, and remains lonely.

So I had both these films fresh in my mind when I watched a British film, the highpoint of director Anthony Asquith and playwright Terrence Rattigan's cooperation, The Browning Version from 1951. This is also a film about a lonely person, in this case a Latin teacher, played by Michael Redgrave in an astonishing performance. I did not think of it at once but at the end of the film I thought “but of course!”.

I would argue that the hidden assumption is that Redgrave's teacher is gay. That this is why he is lonely, that this is why he does not mind that his wife has had an affair.

All these examples are from the 1950s, which was coincidental, although since it is such a golden age of cinema, at least in the US and Japan, it is perhaps not that coincidental. But the thing that connects these three films is the explicit loneliness of the main character and his or her queerness, in different levels of explicitness. There is a lot more of queer subtexts in cinema before the 1960s than is acknowledged. And even when it is fairly obvious, like in Tea and Sympathy it is not seen. Geoff Brown wrote that “the combined forces of censorship and CinemaScope the tendencies threatened to disappear completely”  But he misses the point. It has been criticised for the fact that in the end the boy is “saved” and he gets married. But that is just mentioned in passing. We never see the alleged wife, he is still alone. In the first shot as well as in the last. There is nothing to “reassure” as, there are no heteronormative shots (such as of him with his wife, kissing, or some such).

But actually, the most interesting character in Tea and Sympathy is the sports teacher, the husband. He is clearly a closet gay man, and the most tragic character in the film. The boy is not in denial, but the husband is. In the end his wife leaves him and he now, too, is alone. So even if the boy would get married, what hope is there for that marriage? Marriage is just a blindfold, it will not cure anything, only hide it.

The love that dare not speak its name it was called, and the argument I'm making, an argument that needs to be backed up with plenty of more examples, is that in a time when it could not be pronounced, looking for the lonely characters might help us detect the ever present gay, or queer, characters. I would be interested in investigating this further. One obvious contender is Rebel Without a Cause (1955), to look at the real rebel, Sal Mineo's character, the boy who loves James Dean's character, and with whom he enters a weird relationship, in hiding building up a nuclear family which must end, like all family affairs in Nicholas Ray's world, in catastrophe.

In 1961, in Victim, Dirk Bogarde's character is confronted by his wife about a young man who has committed suicide. The wife wants to know why; is it because her husband and the young man were getting too close? Were they having an affair? He says that the man killed himself because he was blackmailed. She then asks why he was blackmailed; because he was a homosexual? Yes, because he was a homosexual. But who was the other man. Was it you? she asks. He finally succumbs. “I stopped seeing him because I wanted him, do you understand, I wanted him!” Now it was suddenly being explicit. In The Apartment made in 1960, C C Baxter (Lemmon's character) when he asks Fran (Shirley MacLaine's) out on a date she says that she already has an appointment. “With a girl?” he shyly asks. “No, with a man.” she says to which he replies “Well, some of the guys at the office had been talking...” “Well, you tell them every now and then. Just because a girl doesn't..”

Unfortunately this “coming out” led to decades of camp and burlesque, and seldom respect and ordinariness. But what happened to the loneliness? When the cat was out of the bag, the elephant in the room a conversation piece, did the loneliness of the queer character go away? It remains to be investigated.

I'd like to end this talk with my favourite scene from The Browning Version, which shows a rare moment of kindness towards the Latin teacher and its heartbreaking effect.

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Such was the talk. In From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann 1953) Montgomery Clift's character says “Nobody ever lies about being lonely.” That is definitely a film to include in this investigation. I will write more on the subject soon.

Anthony Asquith

A critic once called Anthony Asquith the most underrated British filmmaker of all time (although considering how underrated British cinema in general is many filmmakers can plausibly claim that dubious honour). The one thing that Asquith's name brings to mind is of course theatre adaptations, from Oscar Wilde to Samuel Beckett, and in particularly plays by Terrence Rattigan and George Bernard Shaw. He did three adaptations on Shaw's plays, with the version of Pygmalion from 1938 the most famous. But it was with Rattigan he worked most closely. Together they made 10 films, and they are among Asquith's best, especially The Browning Version (1951) with its heartbreaking performance by Michael Redgrave. However, there is a lot more to Asquith than adaptations. When I began looking at his films one thing I felt was that they had a musical sensibility, that music was important to them, and it did not come as a surprise when I later read that he was passionate about music, and apparently had an encyclopedic knowledge about composers. He also played the piano and would perhaps have become a musician if a teacher had not told him he lacked the necessary skills to become great. So instead he discovered the cinema. He has said that during his time in Oxford, as a student, he went to the movies constantly, learning the technique and trying to come up with his own ways of telling stories. He also went to Hollywood to closely study how the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch worked (there is a similarity there between him and Hasse Ekman).

Asquith's career had its ups and downs. He began in the late 1920s very successfully with four silent films, including Underground (1928) and the expressionistic A Cottage at Dartmoor (1929), Then in the 1930s he was less successful, although some of the films are of interest, with Pygmalion being both a great success and a great film. This is a multi-authored film, with Asquith, Shaw, Leslie Howard and David Lean, who was editor, and others all contributing with their own ideas and talents to the finished film. This too is a remarkably expressionistic film, in editing, framing and lighting, and what is so impressive, besides Wendy Hiller’s performance, is that it does not fall apart but actually holds itself together as a sustained piece of bravura filmmaking. It is a testament to Asquith’s skills and boldness, as well as his patience and kindness,  that it all comes together in the end. A film made during the war, Cottage to Let (1941 aka Bombsight Stolen), is also something of a marvel. It is a film that is part comedy, part thriller, part romance, and yet it too works surprisingly well, including John Mills performance as a Nazi agent posing as a RAF pilot. It also has rather stylish visuals. This film, and others, shows Asquith’s love for the medium and his eagerness to try out new things, visually as well as narratively. However, for the next phase of his career, he changed style. Now his films becomes more restrained, even austere, and this phase holds most of his great films. One brilliant example is The Way to the Stars, (1945), one of the films he made with Rattigan. It is exquisitely shot, framed and edited, and tells the story of the life and frequent deaths of pilots, British and American, on an airbase somewhere in England. It is told in flashbacks, beginning with tracking shots across the now empty airfield, where only the ghosts and the memories of the pilots and the crew remains. Other films to mention from this phase are The Winslow Boy (1948), The Browning Version and Carrington V.C. (1954). Then in the late 1950s Asquith somewhat changed track again and the films become more glossy and “international”, where before they had been distinctly English, both in themes and in setting.

It is tempting to see Asquith as a British equivalent of George Cukor. Although Cukor shows more coherence, not least in terms of style, and is the better director, there are strong similarities. The focus on acting and adaptations is the most obvious link. But like Cukor Asquith, at least from the 1940s and onwards, does not try to “open up” the adaptations but instead use the source material as a strength, and with exquisite sensitivity in his handling of the movement of the actors and the camera on the set, or the lack of movement when called for, make the films cinematic without being flamboyant. (Our notions of what is cinematic and what is not are often still rather crude.) Take a film like The Importance of Being Earnest (1954). It begins with an audience settling down at a theatre to watch a stage performance of the very play the film is based on. Here Asquith has foregrounded the film's theatre roots, and the film is done as if it takes place on a stage. At the end it returns to the theatre in the beginning, with the curtain coming down. By deliberately staying so close to the theatre the film makes for an interesting case-study when discussing stage adaptations and notions of what and what is not cinematic. The use of editing and close-ups are techniques that the theatre has not got. Something else that differs between cinema and theatre is the use of framing. It is not that the theatre does not use framing devices, but the cinema can use framing in different ways, and this is something the skillful director can work wonders with, and in so doing distinguishing the filmed version of a play from a stage version of the same play. The Browning Version is an example of how a director’s precision in framing can add layers of meaning to the words and the performance, and make a film cinematic without having to include opaque camera movements or outdoor scenery.

Among the noticeable things in Asquith’s films are the uses of mirrors. Asquith puts them in his images to add frames to the larger frame, to give a sense of larger world, or for startling effects, visual or psychological. The ending of Cottage to Let even takes place in a hall of mirrors. The films are also full of wit and irony, which sometimes has a slight subversive effect. The effective and morale-boosting film We Dive at Dawn (1943), about the crew on the submarine Sea Tiger, has several hilarious scenes, but the most surprising thing is the last line of dialogue. Some officers are watching the submarine come and go in the bay, and an admiral says “It's like I'm running a bloody bus service.” This kind of wit effectively counterpoints the often heavy subjects Asquith deals with.

His passion for innovation, of taking every film as an opportunity to try out new ideas and approaches also means that they are almost all of them interesting in some ways. This is very much the case with The Woman in Question (1950 aka Five Angels on Murder). It is on the one hand a not very exciting detective story about the search for the murder of a woman called Astra, played by Jean Kent. But the way it is told is remarkable. The detective, played by Jon Linnane, interviews several people about the woman and what happened the night she was murdered. Each flashback is narrated by the witness that is being interviewed, and they all have a completely different take on Astra, and what kind of woman she was, and why she was killed. What she says, how she says it, what she wears, and how she behaves in the various flashbacks are all different and when the film is over we will have to guess ourselves which of the many versions of Astra’s personality was the closest to the truth. It is the same idea as Akira Kurosawa would explore later in Rashomon (1951), letting an event being told from each interested party’s own subjective view.

There is a lot more to discover about Asquith himself too, and his films. This has only been an introduction. He is ripe for retrospectives and critical discussions of his career. Suffice to say for now that he was much loved by his cast and crew, and that he left a body of work which is emotionally rich and filled with both great acting and creative boldness.
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2013-07-11 I've changed two words that were incorrect. I'd also like to add that it is interesting to look at Asquith's films (at least some of them, such as The Browning Version) from a queer perspective.