justified paranoia
by
Douglas Messerli
Lloyd
Reckord (writer and director) Dream A40 / 1965
Jamaican-born
British director Lloyd Reckord’s short 16-minute film Dream A40 reminds
me a little of a truly intelligent version of the American TV series The Twilight
Zone with a plot which Rod Serling and his colleagues never might
have imagined to write.
The time we are about to enter is back in
the terrible days before the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, a final
realization of the 1957 Wolfenden Report’s recommendation which had taken those
10 years to come into existence.
The twilight world that the two young gay
men (performed by Michael Billington and Nicholas Wright) are about to encounter
lies simply along route of a country road trip down a major highway, A40, that
takes the riders from London, through Oxford, and eventually into Wales—that
wild and wholly territory which took a couple of other British day trippers
into “The Old Dark House” of haunted horrors overseen by the Femm family,
including gay brothers Saul and Horace, cooked up in the imagination of
filmmaker James Whale.
But this time the travelers barely get
out of London when an obviously flirtatious woman in her Austin Healey cruises the handsome driver
of the Ventura Ford Station Wagon (Billington) encouraging him to speed up and away from her
heterosexual gaze.
His partner, in the back seat, (the much
more laid-back Wright) teases him about the unwanted solicitation by playing
Eve to his buddy with an apple he’s brought along for sustenance, reaching
round to put it into his lover’s mouth before quickly withdrawing it as he continues
chomping away on it in his friend’s ear. The driver finally pulls it away from
his companion and finishes it off, his mate now casually stroking his arm since
they now, symbolically at least, are both sinners about to banned from their paradise.
Almost at that very moment a car pulls up
where a little girl (Beverly Green) stares them down through her the open
window of her family’s Ford station wagon. The act is rather innocuous, although
the driver quickly pulls his arm away from where he was stroking his friend. Wright’s
character laughs it off, while Billington’s troubled and seemingly paranoid figure
fusses “You find that sort of thing funny, don’t you?”
In
the terrible apocalyptic year of 2020 we might all find that trivial incident to
be even more of a laughable matter, After all, what is his consternation all
about? As his younger riding companion puts it, even if the girl witnessed
their minor expression of affection she certainly wouldn’t know what to make of
it. Yet the incident has so troubled the driver that even when they pull into a
roadside restaurant to get a bite to eat, he finds it impossible to even
imagine stomaching a sandwich, and almost as quickly as they have entered the
establishment they are back on the road, with the easily flustered driver
speeding up clearly over the limit.
Perhaps to today’s younger audiences the
meaning of these insignificant events would be hard interpret. But let us
remember, as British Film Institute curator Simon McCallum has written, 1967
was
…crucial period in the fight
for LGBT rights in
post-war Britain, where a rash
of prosecutions of
high-profile gay men evoked
earlier scandals, not
the least the persecution meted
out to Oscar Wilde
and others by the Victorian
establishment.
Careers
were ruined and cover-up marriages destroyed. Imprisonment was common, and when
locked away in a goal individuals suffered journalistic, peer, and family shaming.
As in the case of the significant mathematician and war-time hero Alan Turing,
suicide was a common way out.
The angered Billington character stands
in a kind of rebellion, answering his friend’s question as to his destination with
a bark of despair: “There must be someway out of this place,” almost as if the
dreamworld in which they have found themselves did not reveal its own entry, suggesting
they now live in a nightmare world having little to do with the logic they had
experienced in the friendly party the night before. A bit like a labyrinth of
mirrors, in and out appear to point in entirely opposing directions.
As he enters another room he sees a great
many men gathered around what is obviously urinals in a bathroom, suggesting
the cottage sexual activities of many urban gays. But these humorless beings
look to be more out of a vampire flick rather than enjoying themselves in group
masturbation. He quickly runs from the scene, the director portraying the M. C.
Escher-like landscape through wide-lensed views of backdrop porticos. Climbing
over a short wall he finally reaches a space where in the distance he sees a
human being, rushing toward him.
The man is a cashier who cautiously lifts
a glass barrier to accept a bribe which might free the driver and his friend.
Yet as our would-be hero returns to
retrieve his companion, he finds him half-trapped within the noose, blinking
his eyes once before he, apparently, slips away into death. The survivor bends
down to pick up and carry away his lover in a manner that can only remind
anyone who has seen Whale’s 1932 picture of the Boris Karloff figure, Morgan, spiriting
away his master/lover Saul Femm up the stairs of the “old dark house.”
If the handsome but fretsome adventurer
had previously appeared to us as inexplicably paranoid, we now recognize it as
having been more than a little justified.
Los
Angeles, September 15, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review and Queer Cinema Blog (September 2020).
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