plato’s locker
by
Douglas Messerli
Sal Mineo (director) Two Scenes from Fortune and Men’s Eyes, promotional film for Mineo’s production of the play at the Coronet Theatre, Los Angeles / 1969
Stacey Miller (screenplay, based on the book by Michael Gregg Michaud and a story by James Franco, Vince Jolivette, Val Lauren and Stacey Miller), James Franco (director) Sal / 2011
In Sal Mineo’s Rebel Without a Cause high school locker the director announces that his character, John “Plato” Crawford is gay by featuring only a mirror—symbol of a narcissistic personality, which gays were generally perceived as exhibiting—and a fan head-shot of the lead of Shane (1953), Alan Ladd, with whom, as I have argued in my essay on that film, the entire family (played by actors Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, and Brandon deWilde) fall in love. The deWilde character, Joey in particular falls hard for the gentle stranger, pleading as the farm hand prepares to leave their homestead, in what has become the film’s most remembered line: “Shane, come back.” In a real sense, Shane became a kind of surrogate father, not replacing his own, but allowing his own father to transform himself into a local hero, a man who enabled his own father to come back to life.
Plato, who has been forced to completely
give up on his own father, is seeking another kid of “daddy” to replace him,
and Jim Stark is the perfect candidate. But as Mineo has himself argued, Plato
does wish to play son in this film in an odd version of a nuclear family with
Jim and Judy playing the mother and father. Plato has suddenly arrived at that
age where James Dean’s character is not simply someone who can replace his
father but might actually become another kind of figure to be loved: a sexual
partner, a gay lover. It doesn’t matter that the character may not even quite
recognize this, but when, after the rumble, he asks Jim if he might want to come home
with him anyone with any savvy knows that it is not the kind question you ask
of a potential father, but rather something you might ask of someone you’ve
just met to join you for sex.
Indeed, the fact that Jim Stark is
suddenly caught up in a potential love triangle between a heterosexual
(Nathalie Wood’s Judy) and a gay boy (Mineo’s Plato) determines—given the requirements
of the Postmaster General from Indiana Will H. Hays’ Motion Picture Production
Code—that if he so far had escaped the censors’ claws, before the film’s
credits he had to killed off. In Ray’s masterpiece, society, in the form of the
police, kill Plato in order to save it from homosexual pollution. Hoodlum or
not, Jim Stark must marry Judy if he is to be redeemed.
Mineo, an actor who later admitted to
being gay or bisexual, himself dismissed the possibility that Ray was
suggesting a family unit in the trio of the film’s major figures. In an
illuminating interview from 1972 with the then 18-year old Boze Hadleigh,
Mineo basically restated one of the major conclusions of film historian Vito
Russo in his The Celluloid Closet: “...He was, in a way, the first gay
teenager in films. You watch it now, you know he had the hots for James Dean.
You watch it now, and everyone knows about Jimmy, so it's like he [Dean] had
the hots for Natalie [Wood] and me. Ergo, I had to be bumped off, out of the
way.”
Indeed, the studio had not only to “knock
off” Mineo in that film, but insisted that he continue to appear as an outsider
for much the rest of his career, as an Indian in the Disney film Tonka (1958),
as a young Mexican draftee in Giant (1956), and again as a juvenile delinquent
in need of reform in Crime in the Streets (1956) and the television drama
Dino (1957)—this despite the fact that as a child actor Mineo had briefly
performed on stage in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, played Yul
Brynner’s son, Prince Chulalongkorn, in the stage version of The King and I,
had the year before Rebel acted as a Page in the NBC Opera
Theatre's production of Richard Strauss' Salome, and only two years
after Rebel had a hit Billboard record in “"Start Movin' (In My
Direction).” Besides his theater, film, and singing career, he posed in 1962
for the American pop artist Harold Sevenson for the gloriously, 9-paneled (96 x
468 inches) nude, The New Adam, now in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection.
Yet in three of his films following, his
characters were once more deemed expendable or dangerous enough to end the film
dead. His Mexican character Angel Obregón in Giant was killed in World War
II as was the private he played in The Longest Day (1962), as well as
the fascinating character he played in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960).
Mineo observes about the latter film:
“It's a terrific story, and Otto Preminger made it more than just a movie, but you know what shocked a lot of people then? My part: where Dov Landau confesses that the Nazis used him "like a woman." The word homosexual had hardly been mentioned in anything then, and when I said that...the speech, you could hear the shock. He had to die, even though he was straight and in love with this blond girl, because he was, shall we say, tainted. In the censors' eyes, anyway.”
Finally, Mineo, never truly hiding his sexuality, found himself as being seen as such an outsider that, despite two Oscar nominations, he was no longer offered suitable new roles. But far from believing that his open sexuality was responsible for the winding down of his acting career, Mineo argued that nearly everyone, at heart, was bisexual at the very least. When Hadeleigh asks him “Do you think rumors about your being bi have hurt you in your career?” Mineo responds:
“Maybe. . . Nah, I doubt it. Everyone's got those rumors following him around, whether it's true or not. Everyone's supposed to be bi, starting way back with Gary Cooper and on through Brando and Clift and Dean and Newman and . . . you want me to stop?”
BH: Did you resent the rumors?
Well, no. Because what's wrong with being bi? Maybe most people are, deep down. .. But anyhow, the rumor about me, from what I hear, was usually that I'm gay. Where, like, with Monty Clift or Brando, the rumor was that they're bi. [Brando later publicly admitted to bisexuality.]”
Mineo was even relatively forthcoming about James Dean, although still circumspect.
“BH: Were you in love with James Dean?
SM: He was a shitheel, sometimes. He liked being that way. But everybody had moments when they loved him—one way or another. I did, too. Did we have an affair, you mean?
BH: Then, or perhaps later . . . ?
SM: I might tell you some people I had affairs with—maybe. But Jimmy was special, so I don't want to say.
Becoming
far more interested in directing than acting Mineo spent a couple of years in
England trying out his skills before returning to Los Angeles, where, in 1969
he, metaphorically speaking, publicly announced his gay sexuality by directing
the John Herbert prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes in which he cast
Don Johnson (as Smitty), Michael Greer (Queenie, a role Greer also played in
the 1971 movie version), Gary Tigerman (Mona), and himself playing the role of
the fag-hating, but sexually male-on-male active Rocky. As Smitty later describes
Rocky, “For a guy claiming he doesn’t go in that direction it looks to me you
walk the path hot and heavy.”
For
promotional purposes, two scenes of that play were filmed and released, but the
15-minute “Theatre Beat” broadcast was lost, rediscovered only in 2019,
available now on the internet’s YouTube, restoring for us an important document
of LGBTQ film history.
The first scene, the earliest of the work
features the arrival of Smitty to the jail cell he will share with the other
three actors for most of the rest of the play, revealing, in particular, the
characters of Queenie and the much abused Mona, who, not having a “daddy” to
look after her and having only Queenie’s protection, has been gang raped by a
group of 15 guys (in the movie that number is inexplicably reduced to 8,
suggesting that the filmmakers found the larger number a penises in one ass to
be inconceivable). The pecking order of the cellmates is well established, with
Smitty immediately recognizing that the most hostile element in the cell is
Rocky.
The
second scene, more subtle and intense, occurs after Smitty has finally
beaten Rocky in the shower after one of their nightly sexual encounters,
establishing that the newcomer is now what Queenie calls “the man of the
house.” It gives us a clue to the excellent acting that Johnson and Mineo
evinced in the Coronet Theatre production.
Hadleigh
asks the actor an important question regarding this Los Angeles directorial
debut:
“...You
were letting Hollywood know that you didn't care who knew. Wouldn't that rob
you of future movie roles?”
Mineo’s positive spin on being totally out
in Los Angeles as early as 1969—given that several actors, straight and gay,
who later performed as homosexual figures have insisted that it had hurt their
careers—is utterly refreshing.
“Sure. Once I did FaME [Fortune and Men’s Eyes], I probably lost half my future chances. But that'll change—it's already changing. I think it's only going to change in a big way—in the future, I mean—if gay actors and stars and directors come out. That'll show the guys in charge that we're here, and we're gonna stick around and not keep playing bury-the-queer-in-the-fairy-tale. You know what I'm saying?
Given the many roles that he played
demanding that the queer be buried, it is almost shocking that the actor
nicknamed “the Switchblade Kid” was killed at the age of 37 by a knife stab-wound
to his left ventricle outside his West Hollywood apartment on the night of February
12, 1976—coincidentally I swear, 45 years to the day upon which I am writing
this piece.
James Franco’s 2011 film Sal, based,
it proclaims, on
the Sal Mineo biography by Michael Gregg Michaud, is less an actual
movie about Mineo than it is a kind of faux-documentary tribute to the actor,
following him for the last day and a half of his life. Several critics have
compared it to Gus Van Sant’s Last Day, as critic Dan Callahan writes, “keeping
almost all exposition at bay [which] makes [the] film as morbid as Van Sant's...where
all we do is wait through uneventful hours with the protagonist until their
foreordained death comes as a kind of finale and release.”
Franco, one immediately realizes has not
yet learned how to direct a movie. He has, for example, a cinematic vocabulary
of only a hand full of camera shots: face-on close up, face-on closer up, and
in your face; side-face close up and side-face very close up. He prefers, however,
to shoot the back of his character’s heads either close-up or very close up. He
doesn’t like to show two characters interrelating and does so only when they
are not fully communicating and then he often shoves objects between them such
as phones and dogs. All of this, I presume, is intentional, i.e. it’s all about
affect.
One might argue that there are only 7
scenes to this film in which there is hardly any action except the act of
murder itself—unless you perceive exercising, talking to a producer over
dinner, greeting one’s neighbors, talking to friends over the phone, or
rehearsing for a play while tied up on a kitchen counter as portraying
“action.” Indeed hardly any incidents in Mineo’s previous life are mentioned,
and even those that are made through incidental consist of references to James Dean having
daily traveled the route where the Mineo character played by Val Lauren is
currently driving, and a phone call to Sal’s Jilly, evidently Jill Haworth, the
woman he once had asked to marry with whom he acted in Exodus.
Otherwise, if you were an outsider to film history as most people are, you
might not even know who Franco’s film is memorializing until the epilogue which
shows a small clip from Rebel without a Cause.
The first scene, particularly if you’re
not a gay admirer of Sal, is absolutely gratuitous since it shows nothing but
actor Lauren working out with barbells. I am sure Mineo did daily work out, and
in this scene Franco is also referencing the many such workout photos taken of
Sal throughout his career, making him a favorite among the beefcake crowd. But
a long scene of muscles and sweat do not advance a plot.
Scene two is actually a rather important
one since the far less well-spoken Sal than the one encountered in interviews
attempts to express his aesthetics for a new film he’s desperate to make. I don’t
know whatever became of the script he’s arguing for titled McCaffery,
but it is apparently a piece that resembles some of the same concerns of Fortune
and Men’s Eyes and the play which he’s currently rehearsing at Los Angeles’
Westwood Theatre P.S. Your Cat Is Dead since it features a young
character who is “pummeled” in homosexual sex. He wants the work to be “realistic,”
meaning, apparently, gritty and sexually explicit instead of a work that simply
“prettifies” violent gay sex. The studio, the producer hints, is unhappy with
its depictions of gays and will probably want some rewriting, which Sal
absolutely refuses to do, arguing—similar to some of his assertions in the
interview with Hadleigh I quote from above—that its time the public realized
that gays are real people, and "there are good gays and bad gays."
It is absolutely frustrating given his
apparent passion about the script and his hopes that it might reveal his
directorial talents not to know more about the work. Who wrote it? What was the
full plot? What happened to this film—if it wasn’t simply a fiction made up by
the several screen writers. But Franco clearly believes in dropping pearls
without ever bothering to pick them up (see my essay on “Dropping Beads.”)
Scene three begins with another
interesting tidbit that, if more fully explored, would have put some real meat
on the meagre dribs and drabs of dramatic information Franco provides. Sal gets
a call from C. B., whose first name, we later discover, is Court. In fact that mysterious
figure’s full name was Courtney Burr, an actor then performing in New York, who
was Mineo’s lover at the time of his death. The apartment was leased, indeed,
in Burr’s name, who paid for it since Mineo, as Franco’s film gives evidence, had
hardly any money and was in arrears on his bills. When Sal died, the police
closed off the place for several weeks and he was not allowed entry to retrieve
his own belongings. When Burr was finally able to return he discovered that
Mineo’s family had been there before him and had burned several of their son’s letters
(evidently ones that identified his sexual
Instead we get a visit from a neighbor
with a dog, Bella, who Sal clearly adores, and the arrival of his cleaning
woman Hazel, presumably also paid for by Burr, who not only cleans up the chaos
he leaves behind each night but makes sure he’s fed by daily bringing him fresh
homemade sandwiches, turkey on the day of his death.
Scene four consists of Mineo picking up a
friend, who if we listen carefully, he calls Billy (Vince Jolivette)—in fact,
Franco even cuts any image of him out of the first half of this scene—who
presumably represents Mineo’s friend Billy Belasco, the producer with whom he’d
met at the Palm restaurant in the second scene. Franco makes no attempt to help
us to connect the appearances of this character or to explain how important he was
to Sal’s life, since Belasco often invited him to dinner parties at his home as
well. The two stop off at a medical center where Sal gets a shot (for what
purpose we’re never told; did he have AIDS? Probably not, since I don’t believe
there were any available medicines for that disease in 1973). Then they head off
to the local spa where they swim together in a kind of hearty wrestling game
and Sal has a massage inexplicably filmed in slow motion.
That afternoon Sal calls several friends
to make sure they reserving tickets to his play opening the next week. He makes
a longer call to Jill, worried because she taking a medicine (evidently having
something to do with gynecological problems) which is making her nauseous. The
call also reveals that previous to his current financial straits Mineo was
sending large sums of money back home to his mother, but cannot any longer
afford to do so; he’s angry that his mother has called Jill to ask for money,
which he feels she doesn’t need. That scene alone would have put meat upon the
skinny bones of a story that Franco refuses to tell.
Scene six is also rather important in
that we actually get a chance to observe a few scenes from the James Kirkland
play based on his own novel. Twice in the film Sal gives us a teaser of the
plot, namely that it concerns an unemployed actor whose life is falling apart,
his girlfriend having left and his pet cat having suddenly died. One night as
he returns home he encounters a robber in his apartment attempting to burgle
the place, and in anger and frustration ties him up and straps him to the
kitchen counter.
Obviously, the coincidence of coming home to find a robber in your house has enormous significance to what will latter happen to Sal that very night. But in the silly shenanigans that Franco teases us with, the rather incoherent directions of the noted real-life acting teacher Milton Katselas (played with his back to the audience by Franco himself) and the horrendous incompetence of actor Keir Dullea (Jim Parrack) who hasn’t a clue as to what his character is about and cannot remember more than a half-line at a time, we don’t get a chance to let the plot of the play resonate on the events that immediately follow rehearsal. Was Dullea—who did after all perform in some plumb movie roles in David and Lisa, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and De Sade, and in Broadway works such as Butterflies Are Free and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—really that bad that Franco’s Sal has to say goodbye to him with Noel Coward’s quip “Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow?”
And since Mineo had also hoped to bring Your
Cat Is Dead to Broadway and even make a movie of it, why mightn’t the
entire plot be told, since it fits in so well with Mineo’s directorial
interests.
Just for the record, I’ll let you know
that after hog-tying the intruder, the now nearly mad out-of-work actor Jimmy
Zoole falls in love with the Italian bi-sexual burglar Vito, whose wife also
left him when she discovered he was gay. Gradually establishing a sexual bond,
the two plan revenge on their former lovers by selling a stash of stolen drugs
before running off together. If Mineo had previously let the Hollywood
community know about his sexual interests he was certainly now ready to tell
the world.
Franco’s film takes us on a long voyage
home through a myriad of colored lights and the song weaving through the entire
film “Where Flamingos Fly” sung by Helen Merrill, to the carport where Mineo
suddenly met destiny in the would-be robber, a black man, as frustrated and desperate
as Jimmy Zoole who—when Sal cried out (all the neighbors concur) "Oh, God.
Help me. Help me, God. Oh, God — please help me." (not precisely what
Franco’s Sal calls out)—put a knife into his left upper chest, later described by
the coroner as a stab through the heart.
The film turns to black, followed by an
epilogue of two news reports, one simply saying the police have still to find
the murderer, the other, two years later, reporting that they have found their
man, Lionel Williams. Franco follows this with a brief clip from Rebel of
the 16-year old Mineo describing to Nathalie Wood just what a good friend he
has in Jim, who if you knew him really well would let you call him Jimmy.
It’s touching, but once more he’s left
out the most important facts. As one might expect upon Mineo’s death everyone,
including the police, suspected that the murderer was some gay ex-lover, an
abused gay kid, or some young homophobe whom Sal had mistakenly picked up who
committed the terrible act. Surely Sal Mineo died, in most people’s thinking,
the way Joe Orton or Pier Paulo Pasolini had, the way they had to die having
so transgressed the boundaries of normal sexuality. In short, the entire
society was now willing to let Mineo die the same way the film studios had let
Plato go, and all those others he dared to represent. The best he could have
hoped for was salvation, redemption, but given that he was clearly stubborn in
his perversities what else might one expect? In short the community killed Plato
all over again.
The truth was that the villainous
Williams, who had a long rap sheet, didn’t know, at the time of the murder, who
his victim was. He didn’t even know the name until he realized from watching
the news he’d killed a movie star.
The real story is so sad, as the cliché
goes, it makes a grown man want to cry.
Los Angeles, February 12, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February
2021).
No comments:
Post a Comment