the sadist
by
Douglas Messerli
Calder
Willingham (screenplay, based on his novel and play End as a Man), Jack
Garfein (director) The Strange One / 1957
The
Strange One,
the 1957 film directed by Jack Garfein with a screenplay by Calder Willingham
based on his stage play End As a Man has possibly one of the most
inappropriate titles of the many inappropriately named works of cinema throughout
the years. Yes, there are plenty of “strange” beings who weave their way
through Willingham’s portrait of the goings on in a Southern Military Academy
for young men of high school age. The central figure of this work, however, Cadet
Sergeant Jocko De Paris (Ben Gazzara), to whom the title likely refers, is not
really “strange” except in the fact that he is a born and bred Iago who spends
his days and mostly nights plotting how to destroy people’s lives for utterly
no purpose but the joy of it. You might describe him, as most of those writing
about this work have, as a bully, except his bullying and hazing activities are
usually assigned to his followers, while he spends his energies on toying with
and infecting his victims’ minds. Jocko is very much a “hands off” bully being
far more skillful at manipulating people’s way of thinking. If he is strange it
is only that he is an uncontrite “politician” in the most general sense. Had he
not been stopped, as he is in this film, he might have gone on to be a terrifying
governor in the manner of Huey Long or even President in the manner of that still
hovering despot, Donald Trump. Is it strange to devote one’s energies to
bringing out the worst of evils that lay deep within each of us? I’d dare to
argue that in some professions such efforts are almost perceived as necessary
and normal.
Both of these “strange” beings are outsiders who might be of interest to sympathetic LGBTQ viewers if they weren’t presented so obviously as perverted losers. These figures are represented so unsympathetically that even Jocko sees them basically as untouchables, creatures to leave for others to torture, as the fellow bathers do in stealing the Cockroach’s soap—in a kind of reversal of the semi-humorous prison warning to be careful about bending over to pick up soap that has slipped from your hands. De Paris may demand that Simmons deny that the North won the Civil War, he may threaten to beat and lynch him, even take a broom to his ass, but basically he’s simply not interested in torturing men so already self-tortured as Simmons and McKee are.
Jocko even gets a greater rush, moreover,
when the handsome next-door neighbor, Cadet George Avery, Jr. (Geoffrey Horne),
son of the school’s elder Major Avery, files a complaint with his dad about their
goings-on. When that fails—the four poker players and Jocko all rushing back
into their own beds like the sexual players of some Feydeau farce—Avery, Jr.
comes calling like Williams’ “Gentleman caller” upon Jocko’s follies with Gatt
now so drunken that he is ready to award his violent blows on anyone who crosses
his path.
After pumping a pint of whiskey into his gut like the evil neo-Nazis will do two years later to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, Jocko plants the beaten Avery on the morning parade grounds along with the rumor that the drunken upper classman has fallen down the stairs before stumbling out into the yard.
Much of the aftermath of this event is
focused simply on Jocko’s further manipulations of the situation to get young
Avery expelled while keeping those involved from telling the truth—an easy goal
when the two upperclassmen realize that they will also be kicked out after all
their hard work for three long years, and the freshmen will be faced with the reality,
in Marquales’ case of returning home to parents who have worked hard for years
to send their son the Academy, and, in Simmons’ case to losing the opportunity of
becoming a saintly chaplain.
The ramifications of Jocko’s prank, however,
become far more serious than simply a violent prank when the Major, shaken by
his son’s expulsion, begins to mentally unravel in his attempts to prove De
Paris guilty. Yet nothing seems to stop Jocko from setting up further doomed
sexual encounters just for his private titillation. And despite the utter
meaninglessness of forcing the female-phobic Simmons to meet up with savvy
local sexpot, Peonie (Julie Wilson), who Jocko has renamed “Rosebud,”**** our
Iago is determined to carry it through, apparently just to observe how it might
turn out—likely with both parties running from the other in disgust.
Interestingly, The New York Times critic
Bosley Crowther dismisses the film because, “...so much has been left out of
the picture that was in the novel and the play that the social comment of Mr.
Willingham's story is sadly lacking on the screen. For instance, the fact that
the "strange one" was the son of a powerful man whose enmity was
feared by the school authorities has been completely overlooked. So has the scene
of the beating of the drunken and helpless football star. The plot for
corrupting one boy with a prostitute is sketched vaguely in a feeble scene
wherein Julie Wilson ably plays a slack-jointed dame, and the suggestion of a
homosexual angle, so strong in the play, is very cautiously hinted here. Most
obvious and weakening alteration, however, comes at the end. Instead of the
school authorities having anything to do with the resolution of the
embarrassing problem they have on their hands, the film has the mischief-maker
run out of school by a sort of vigilante group, secretly mustered by the
cadets.”
When,
for absolutely no logical reason, finally, Jocko asks Simmons and Marquales to
join him in the bar above the diner where he intends to introduce the religious
zealot to his “Rosebud— and that bar, The Hound and the Hare, turns out to be
an all-male room where half the men sit around in tables with shirts stripped
off—I think even my mother and father, had they seen this film, might have
suspected that something else was going on. If, considering it’s sudden
appearance in a 1957 movie, I wouldn’t exactly describe this an actual depiction
of a “gay bar,” it certainly looks and smells enough like one that Cadet Gat
surely might have quickly turned tail upon entering. Simmons even says
something to the effect, “Surely he (Jocko) wouldn’t bring a girl into this
place, with men half-naked?” Hounds and rabbits are perfectly at home in almost
any gay meeting place.
As film commentator Jamie S. Rich wrote in
2009 about The Strange One:
I am not sure exactly what was censored from The Strange One in 1957, I can find no specific information—though apparently the movie was sunk more by producer Sam Spiegel's bruised ego and his taking the final edit out of Garfein's hands more than it was its salacious content. In addition to the homoerotic elements, there was also some scandal about Jocko hiring a hooker (Julie Wilson) to try and bribe Simmons with her wares. There is no real question about the girl's profession in this cut, nor is there any ambiguity about what the hungry-eyed Perrin, nicknamed Cockroach, is really after. In his only screen performance, actor Paul E. Richards plays Cockroach as a greasy, nervous, and calculating predator, his Southern drawl dripping with lust every time he talks to Jocko. Even if you don't catch Jocko calling him a "three-dollar bill," the sexual tension in the scene they have alone in Jocko's room, or Cockroach's trying to convince him not to go out with the girl, should erase most of the mystery. It's a potent subplot, and well-handled for the time, especially under Production Code restrictions. Sure, it's not a positive portrayal, but the pathology makes sense given the setting and circumstances.
Perhaps Crowther saw an earlier more
censored version than the one currently available. Yet his objections that the
school authorities weren’t involved in settling the situation sounds absolutely
ridiculous in the context which has already been established: that going to the
Colonels and Majors produces no results, and, in fact, is the reason why Major Avery
is about to be asked to resign. Those boys involved by Jacko De Paris in this
terrible incident and all the others who have long suffered Jacko’s belligerence
are about to end up as men (the idea being that through hazing you end up as a
man) only by themselves taking the action the school authorities are unable to,
arresting the perpetrator, demanding that he sign a full confession, and
putting him on a train that might take him as far away from their school as
possible. If it seems mean and petty to bind Jacko’s eyes near the train tracks
as he screams, quivers, and shouts in fear that he is about to be set out on
the tracks to be killed—something which he might ordered others to do with anyone
who had endangered his own life—it nonetheless reveals his own cowardice. And,
once he realizes that they have simply purchased him a ticket out of town, his
race to the caboose to shout out "I'll be back! I'll get you guys! You
can't do this to Jocko De Paris!" is recognizable as the feeble cry for
the continuance of his sadistic experiments which rational beings will no
longer tolerate.
If this strangely titled film is not a great one, in the end it was a brave one in its day.
*In 1957 this promotional pitch, given the fact that director Elia Kazan and actor Marlon Brando had recently brought The Actors’ Studio to fame with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), clearly offered this rather odd Hollywood offering a great deal of clout. James Dean was another famed Studio product. This film was Ben Gazzara’s and George Peppard’s first film roles.
**While Simmons is most obviously a “momma’s boy,” in this highly homoerotic work, he is in no respects gay. Simmons is a “creep” or an “outsider” only because of his religiosity and his birth in the North, not because of his sexuality.
***Particularly of interest was McCullers’ play and later film adaptations of her novel The Member of the Wedding (the play 1951, the film in 1952), with its budding lesbian “outsider” hero who talks about observing young boys in the alley involved in homosexual acts. Almost most of her novels were published in the 1940s, she was still a popular writer throughout the 1950s. My mention of that work here will suffice, I hope, for not devoting a full essay on that work in My Queer Cinema.
****I
should note that “rosebudding,” in gay terms, is kissing, licking, or sucking
the anus in anal prolapse, when the anus from continued penetration has slipped
forward, poking out of the anal entry. Willingham is not here referring to Citizen
Kane. More recently, it has been applied to such heterosexual acts as well.
Los Angeles, April 2, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).
No comments:
Post a Comment