going haywire
by
Douglas Messerli
Joseph
Losey, Stanley Ellin, Hugo Butler and Ring Lardner, Jr. (based on the novel Dreadful Summit by Stanley Ellin),
Joseph Losey (director) The Big Night /
1951
The
burly owner of a local bar, Andy La Main (Preston Foster) is planning a special
night at a boxing match for his son’s birthday, George (John Drew Barrymore); he’s
even bought him a birthday cake with candles. But the youthful, book-loving
George, who has just been pummeled by a local gang, can’t even get up enough
wind to blow them all out, director Joseph Losey, hinting, as he does in so
many of his films, that there is something a bit “different” about the
likeable George, both in his
seeming tenderness (babies immediately love him) and in his demeanor (he’s far
too gentle, it seems, for the bar and boxing world his father inhabits).
Without saying it, the director hints that his protagonist, a boy without a
mother, is perhaps gay. As Losey, himself bisexual, has one of his characters
express it: “I mean, each of us has got secret things deep inside, and if we
don't have someone we can share them with, we usually go all haywire.”
When, a few minutes into this first scene,
and after witnessing a noted sportscaster, Al Judge (Howard St. John) enter the
bar with his henchman to demand that Andy bare his chest so that he might
severely beat him with his cane, the boy bursts into tears. Why didn’t his
strong father fight back, he demands to know from the bartender, Flanagan, who
has evidently lived with the father for 16 years since Andy’s mother left. Soon
after, when George pockets a gun kept for protection behind the bar and races
off into the night, we recognize the subject of this film will be the discovery
and vindication of the young’s boy’s manhood.
The journey he takes in his “big night,” is,
quite naturally, led by an alcoholic professor, Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip
Bourneuf), the standard pedant of anatomy fictions, who after buying George’s
second ticket to attend the fight (a fight, incidentally that Losey doesn’t
even bother to show us, and ends after only a few moments into the first
round), takes us into the late-night noir
underworld of jazz clubs and after hours bars that Cooper inhabits and where
George hopes to be able to confront his father’s attacker.
Under the professor’s corrupt tutelage,
the boy meets Cooper’s unhappy girlfriend, Julie (Dorothy Comingore), a corrupt
cop, and a beautiful black singer (Mauri Lynn, singing Lyn Murray’s and Sid
Kuller’s appropriate composition “Am I too Young”), and finally, Julie’s sweet
sister, Marion (Joan Lorring), while
embarrassing himself as he compliments the singer’s beauty with a racial
sidebar, beginning with “despite the fact….” Clearly George is too still too young and unknowing to
get along in this world; and besides, for the first time in his life he becomes
drunk, awakening to be told by Marion that he has spent a long while getting to
know the stairs.
Nonetheless, by the close of his big
night, he does meet up with Al Judge, only to discover that the woman whom his
father was seeing, Frances, who had suddenly disappeared from their lives, was
Al’s sister, who committed suicide when Georges’s father refused to marry her.
When Judge turns George’s shaking gun on the boy himself, it goes off,
presumably killing Judge; but rather than being an intentional act, this time
it is only accidental. George fails, it appears, even if he succeeds.
Inevitably, the police arrive, believing
Andy has tried to retaliate for his beating, but George, finally proving
himself as an adult, screams out the truth from his bedroom window, confessing
to the act. It appears that, in fact, the shot only grazed Judge, without
killing him. And Andy, it appears, insists that he be the one to go to jail for
a short time.
Indeed, as The New York Times critic of the day, Bosley Crowther argued, the
story, based on a novel by Stanley Ellin, is “presumptuous and contrived.” But
I think Crowther, in the rest of his rant against the film, simply
misunderstood the work.
Losey is not truly interested in the
standard noir themes of strong men
and their loose women, but uses the scene, rather to explore what it even means
to be a man—or woman, for that matter—in a world that demands penance for being
someone other. Losey’s film can easily been seen in a long line of Menippean
satires filled with stock figures of both high and low worlds. George is young
and gentle, a bookworm instead of a street tough; Andy, still pining for his
wife, has evidently taken up with his bartender; Cooper is a man unable to face
up to the cruelty of the world, and his girlfriend is a kind of sadist in her
love for him; even the pure-minded Marion realizes that, despite the gentle kiss
she receives from George, that she is too old for him.
In short, Losey’s film is not truly
about boxing, guns, and macho wise-cracks, the staples of the genre in which he
has set his character types, but about outsiders, those who truly do not fit
into that world. Ultimately, it is not they who have gone haywire—although on
the surface it appears they all are quite crazy—but the world around them that
miscomprehends, perverts, and destroys their decency and love.
If later Losey found far more complex
representatives of his vision in actors such as Dirk Bogarde, James Fox, and
Michael York than in his early films of green- and blond-haired boys, it is
still utterly fascinating to see how consistent his vision was. And, in the
end, I admire this 1951 film for what it attempts.
Los Angeles, June
7, 2017
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