8. The Boys on the Bandwagon: Homosexuality in the Movies

GENE D. PHILLIPS

IN SPRING 1968 Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band opened on off-Broadway and became the first successful American play to give an honest treatment of homosexuality on the stage. Two years later the film version, written and produced by Crowley, accomplished the same breakthrough on the screen. Crowley has said that he had no intention of espousing a social cause or starting a trend when he wrote The Boys in the Band. “Homosexuality used to be a sensational gimmick,” he comments. “The big revelation in the third act was that the guy was homosexual, and then he had to go offstage and blow his brains out.” This does not often happen in real life, so it does not occur in Boys. “If you once get over the fact that eight of the nine characters are overt homosexuals, you know the most sensational thing about it,” Crowley says.

Nonetheless, theatrical producers had a great deal of trouble getting over precisely that fact when Crowley first submitted his play to them. Actors who read the script turned down the parts they were offered because they feared damaging their careers. Finally Crowley convinced both backers and performers that he had written a play of worth and it went into production. The rest is history. The play was a phenomenal success and Crowley received several offers for the film rights. Since the film medium has always been even more reticent than the theater in dealing with a topic like homosexuality, however, he ran into just as much difficulty getting assurance that the film would be faithful to the play as he had in getting the play produced in the first place.

Film producers have always feared offending the movie-going public with a story that dealt more than tangentially with homosexuality. They have been aware of the deeply rooted prejudice in America against homosexuals. In 1969, for example, a Louis Harris poll disclosed that 63 percent of the nation considers homosexuals “harmful to American life,” although in many cases the people interviewed were not clear as to just why they felt that this was true. The National Institute of Mental Health, in a report released the same year, commented that “homosexuality represents a major problem for our society largely because of the amount of injustice and suffering entailed in it,” and that “the extreme opprobrium that our society has attached to homosexual behavior has done more social harm than good, and goes beyond what is necessary for the maintenance of public order and human decency.”

In fear of the attitude of the public, therefore, movie versions of plays and novels that treated homosexuality in the past were either completely rewritten or partially revamped to obscure that aspect of the story. When William Wyler filmed Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour in 1936 as These Three, the gossip at the girls’ boarding school centered around suspicions that one of the women who ran the school was having an affair with a man, rather than with another woman as in Hellman’s original. (When Wyler remade the film in 1962, however, the film medium had matured to the point that the original plot could be used.)

When Billy Wilder made The Lost Weekend in 1945 the hero’s self-doubts about being homosexual were eliminated and the film concentrated on his alcoholism. For sheer originality, however, it was impossible to top the producers of 1947’s Crossfire. The outcast from society who is murdered in the story is transformed from a homosexual into a Jew, giving the whole story an anti-Semitic theme which author Richard Brooks had never envisioned. (In a kind of poetic irony Brooks himself, now a film director, deleted most of the references to the homosexual nature of Perry’s and Dick’s relationship when he filmed Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood, about the two killers who murdered a Kansas family.)

Tennessee Williams has often dealt with homosexuality in his plays and it is interesting to see how this theme was allowed gradually to creep into the film versions. When A Streetcar Named Desire was brought to the screen in 1952, references to the traumatic experience in the past of Blanche Dubois (Vivien Leigh)—her discovery that her husband was homosexual—was thoroughly veiled. The incident not only became much more enigmatic than Williams had ever intended but became almost incomprehensible. The screen version of Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) managed to obscure the relationship between the Paul Newman character and his old school chum in much the same way. But Williams fared much better when Gore Vidal adapted Suddenly, Last Summer for director Joseph Manckiewicz in 1960. This film treated homosexuality more frankly than ever before on the screen, although one suspects that the film was at pains to emphasize the hideous death of the homosexual Sebastian—who is killed and eaten by young cannibals whom he had originally goaded into sexual encounters—in order to “justify” treating such material in the first place.

Deborah Kerr, who starred in both the stage and screen versions of Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, has told me how disappointed she was with the revisions made when the play was filmed in 1957: “They should have waited a few years to make the film. They had to obscure the idea that Tom Lee was homosexual by making the basis of the gossip about him the fact that he was some-what effeminate. Now that homosexuality is a topic of conversation the film could be made honestly. It was not, after all, about homosexuality so much as it was about prejudice and gossip in a small college town.”

Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent (1962) was not much of a step forward in the treatment of homosexuality on the screen, either. Don Murray played a United States senator who has guarded his homosexual past even from his wife. Both the script and direction of the film were heavy-handed. Preminger milked one scene dry, in which Murray goes to a gay bar to meet a blackmailer, but offered little insight into the plight of the Murray character. Moreover, both Advise and Consent and the remade The Children’s Hour, filmed the same year, are classic examples of what Mart Crowley was talking about: in each homosexuality is used as a sensational “third-act" revelation, after which the character discovered to be homosexual must obligingly commit suicide.

In England, however, filmmakers were beginning to deal with homosexuality more understandingly and directly. Basil Dearden’s Victim! (1961) was a frank and serious look at the social and psychological pressures on the homosexual in that country. The plot focused on the vulnerability to blackmail of anyone suspected of being homosexual. A respected barrister (Dirk Bogarde) befriends a lonely young vagrant (Peter McEnery), who in turn kills himself in a futile attempt to save the barrister’s reputation.

Several other actors had turned down the role of the barrister before Bogarde accepted it—on condition that there would be no compromise in treating the story. “Otherwise, why make it?” he asked. Victim! became the first film ever to use the word homosexual. Moreover, it provided the sympathetic understanding for its hero lacking in films like Advise and Consent. Yet Bogarde recalls that while the film was being made, the cast and crew were sometimes treated as if “we were making a film which attacked the Bible. But it was an enormous and surprising hit.”

When I asked the late Basil Dearden if he thought that Victim! had influenced audiences in their attitude toward homosexuality, he replied: “People’s minds cannot be changed by a movie. Problems or points of view can be expressed but that is all. Though Victim! pleaded tolerance for homosexuals, I am sure it never converted a single person to the cause it espoused. While myself not being homosexual, I have many friends that are who are charming and intelligent people. Even if they weren’t, I would still plead tolerance for them.”

Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961) presented a delicately nuanced story of a young girl (Rita Tushingham) who is deserted by her irresponsible mother after she has become pregnant with an illegitimate child, and is cared for by a shy homosexual (Murray Melvin) during the time of the approaching birth with the kind of consideration she never received from her mother. The story was told with a reticence that explored but did not exploit the material. The same can be said for Sidney J. Furie’s The Leather Boys (1963) in which the hero begins to look for sympathy in an old pal when his marriage to a girl as immature as himself (played again by Rita Tushingham) begins to turn sour. What he is really doing is attempting to relive his adolescence, and the relationship begins to take on a dimension of which he is naively unaware.

A similar development overcomes Tony, a young aristocrat (James Fox), when he unwittingly allows himself to fall under the domination of the forceful personality of his servant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) in Joseph Losey’s British film The Servant (1963). Tony is an irresponsible and immature individual who lacks any moral convictions or realistic personal goals and Barrett resents being subservient to someone whom he considers in many ways his inferior. He therefore derives perverse pleasure from methodically reducing the weak-willed Tony through drugs and alcohol to a degraded wreck.

As the film progresses Tony gradually submits to Barrett’s stronger personality and develops an emotional attachment to Barrett that he does not clearly perceive for what it is. In the key scene on the staircase Barrett strengthens his hold on Tony by threatening to leave, and Tony stands above Barrett on the stairs to block Barrett’s passage up to his room to pack. Barrett pushes past him as they talk and the scene ends with Tony kneeling below Barrett on the stairs abjectly begging him to stay. Their exchange of positions on the staircase symbolically underscores the way that their respective roles of master and servant have been totally reversed.

As the film ends we see Tony once more on the staircase, groveling in a drunker stupor after Barrett has expelled Tony’s former fiancée from the house for the last time. Losey photographs Tony, imprisoned as he is by his addiction to drugs and alcohol as well as by his emotional dependence on Barrett, through the bars of the bannister railing.

In America at the time it still appeared that homosexuality would remain the exclusive province of underground filmmakers like Andy Warhol’s clan and Kenneth Anger. Anger had made Fireworks (1947) while still in high school; it was a fifteen-minute sadomasochistic fantasy climaxed by an exploding Roman candle serving as a phallic symbol. In 1966 Anger made his celebrated Scorpio Rising, an uncompromising look, twice as long and twice as searing as Fireworks, at the milieu of the homosexual motorcycle cult.

In 1967 Frank Simon filmed his brilliant documentary The Queen, concerning a beauty contest among homosexual transvestites at New York’s Town Hall. The master of ceremonies and contest organizer, Jack Doroshow, narrates the sixty-minute film, and his straight-forward commentary effectively reinforces the telling images of a group of young men who have retreated into a world of fantasy. “You ask a queen, ‘What’s your name?’” Doroshow says at one point, “And the queen says ‘Monique,’ and you say ‘That’s marvelous, darling, and what was your name before?’ And the queen will look you straight in the eye and say, ‘There was no name before!’”

So far, the best feature-length American underground films to deal with homosexuality are Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970), which Paul Morrissey directed under the Warhol banner.

When Flesh opened in one of the London cinema clubs (which are not under the jurisdiction of the British censor), it gained widespread free publicity because it was seized by the police then returned to the theater for exhibition because the censor, among other officials, refused to support a court action against it. The censor, John Trevelyan, refused to grant the film a certificate for commercial exhibition, but he later told me that he felt Flesh gave an insight into the life of a male hustler and his customers unmatched by any other film of its kind. The more recent Trash (1971) provides a similar kind of character study, and is the first such underground feature to be booked into commercial theaters in cities like New York and Chicago.

The other kind of independently produced films dealing with homosexuality is, of course, the hard-core pornography which has become increasingly more available, at least in major cities. Until the late sixties these films were mostly 8mm pictures made with all of the technical expertise of the average home movie, with no plot or dialogue, and accompanied by pop records played either on the sound track or in the projection booth.

These films consisted basically of a series of homoerotic fantasies acted out on the screen, as for example, in a film called Pool Party, a product of the early sixties. This movie consists of young men frolicking at poolside in their swim suits for a while until they shuck their trunks and pair off for mutual sex. This particular short film simulated orgasm by showing one of the teenagers pouring foaming champagne across the thighs of his partner, another working up a soapy lather around his midsection while taking a shower. Most gay porno movies do not employ such indirection, I found while serving as a consultant to the Attorney General’s committee on pornography for some years.

Thus The Sex Garage, a black-and-white short perhaps made about the same time as Pool Party, portrays sadomasochistic behavior and leather fetish graphically enough, I am told, to repel even some frequenters of gay porno houses. One of the performers makes love to his motorcycle, with his attention particularly given to its sleek rubber tires.

Since there is a limit to the sexual gymnastics that can be devised for a gay porno movie, some of their makers began in the late sixties to cast about for variety. The increasing prominence of Blacks on the screen in commercial motion pictures had its counterpart in the rise of the Black gay film, including Lancer Brooks’s Black Heat. The Closet, which details the fantasies of a man undergoing a massage, attempts by the use of elaborate cinematic techniques, such as superimpositions and other types of trick photography and editing, to vary the routine presentation of sexual experiences.

Another method of producing a pornographic film distinguishable from its predecessors was the introduction of a story to motivate the sexual encounters in the movie. A Deep Compassion (1972) is one of these. Written and directed by Brad Kingston, this feature-length Eastman color movie concerns Rocky (Duane Fergus), an escaped convict who hides out in the mountain home of Carl, a young blind man (David Arlin). While he is being driven to Carl’s remote house by two buddies, he asks the one who is not driving to join him in the back seat of the car for some sex because, he explains, he has been out of circulation for two years. Their sexual experience is intercut with occasional shots of the driver looking over his shoulder at the proceedings in order to facilitate audience identification.

Rocky is finally left alone with Carl in the mountain retreat. Before the inevitable seduction occurs, however, there is a fantasy sequence in which Carl imagines that he is loved by a handsome god of the forest. They frolic naked through a wooded glade in slow motion, photographed in gauzy soft focus, but the scene turns out simply to be an elaborate prelude to the same kind of sodomitic sequence shown earlier in the film in a more realistic context.

The only truly dramatic moment in the picture occurs when Carl hysterically smashes Rocky’s skull with his cane (accompanied by music lifted from the sound track of Hitchcock’s Psycho) after Rocky has brutally raped him, and throws him- self over the mountainside. Nonetheless it is clear that whatever plot the film aspires to serves merely as a skeleton on which to hang the various extended sex scenes which in fact account for the bulk of the picture’s ninety-minute running time. A Deep Compassion does illustrate, however, an attempt by a maker of gay erotica to introduce some variety into his material.

More accomplished and polished than any of the underground films mentioned so far is the British movie A Bigger Splash, directed by Jack Hazan and shown at the 1974 Cannes and New York Film Festivals. It is a feature-length documentary about how the personal life of painter David Hockney influences his professional work. Shot over a period of four years, the picture enacts, and at times re-enacts, incidents in Hockney’s private life, centering around the breakup of his five-year relationship with a younger man named Peter.

Hockney is shown from time to time brooding over sketches that he had done of Peter over the years, in an effort to finish a painting of Peter begun before their breakup. At one point we see Hockney discussing Peter with a friend and then we cut to Peter making love with a young man his own age in a fairly explicit scene. “I tried not to be melodramatic about the homosexual scenes,” Hazan has told me; “I didn’t mean to shock, but only to be real.” Finishing the painting of Peter at long last serves as a catharsis for Hockney, who has by now gotten over the whole affair. This is betokened by his decision to destroy all of the sketches of Peter that he has been holding on to up to this point.

Hazan’s film in no way touts the gay life, but does provide one of the most revealing pictures of the homosexual world yet shown on film. And the fact that its subject is a real person makes A Bigger Splash all the more significant.

Hollywood finally began coming to grips with homosexuality in the late sixties, but still trailed behind the British and the American underground. John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), for example, transferred Carson McCullers’ tortured novel to film with all of the compassion for human frailty of a police report. McCullers’ view of the human condition, as personified in the twisted lives of a middle-aged homosexual army officer and his neurotic wife (Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor), was somehow mislaid between page and screen. As a result, Brando’s grappling with his infatuation for a young recruit failed to evoke pity from the audience and seemed only curious and grotesque.

A more significant step in the right direction was John Flynn’s The Sergeant(1968), which starred Rod Steiger as another older soldier infatuated with an enlisted man (John Philip Law). This time the story was told in a way that enlisted the audience’s sympathy with the desperate struggles of a flawed fellow human being. Asked if he considered The Sergeant something of a breakthrough, the film’s producer, Richard Goldstone, replied, “I felt it would open up the subject of homosexuality for more serious consideration on the screen. After all, the film is basically about loneliness. The Steiger character is a man who has been cast into a rigid mold. He reaches out for another human being, but in so doing shatters the mold which he has created for himself in terms of his personal behavior, and thus violates the whole pattern of his life. He cannot face this fact and it destroys him.” Yes, true to the Hollywood formula, Steiger was required to blow his brains out upon discovering his homosexual tendencies.

Referring to the films of the past which have somehow touched upon homosexuality, one critic has noted that they served a function larger than themselves: they prepared the way for more direct attempts to penetrate the homosexual mind and milieu. Had the screen version of Frank Marcus’s The Killing of Sister George(1968) been faithful to his seriocomic play, it might have been the milestone which The Boys in the Band was to become. For one thing, an explicit lesbian sex scene was included in the film which was not in the play, although Sister George was highly successful on the London stage without it. “Opening out” the play for the screen in other ways bloated its taut two-hour running time on the stage into two-and-a-half hours on the screen. Furthermore, the added location sequences tended to destroy the play’s claustrophobic atmosphere, which was so important to picturing the closed and insulated homosexual world.

Stanley Donen’s film of Charles Dyer’s play Staircase (1969) failed on the screen for different reasons. In it Rex Harrison and Richard Burton played two aging homosexual barbers. Asked why he took the role, Harrison said, “The story is really about loneliness and human failure. These two subjects are so much a part of everyone’s life that most people will not, or do not, recognize their presence. I would like to hope that in Staircase I can shed a little more light on these universal frailties.” But the previous screen image of both superstars militated against an audience’s accepting them as two miserable middle-aged queers—which is one reason Mart Crowley insisted that the film of The Boys in the Band use the original off-Broadway cast, none of whom would be familiar to movie audiences and who could thus submerge themselves in their roles.

The most successful American film—financially as well as artistically—to treat homosexuality before The Boys in the Band was made, significantly enough, by a British director: John Schlesinger. Midnight Cowboy (1969) tells the story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight) who comes from Texas to New York with the hope of becoming a stud for rich and lonely ladies, but winds up hustling men instead to get money to take his ailing friend Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) to Florida for his health. Although Joe and Ratso move in a milieu inhabited by homosexuals, Schlesinger says that his point was to show how two men can have a meaningful friendship without necessarily being homosexual. Asked why he thought homosexuality was being more commonly portrayed on the screen, he replied, “It comes from what’s happening all around us. Everybody does more or less what he wants to these days, and films are a reflection of that attitude; homosexuality is just one part of the whole scene. ... I hope that I have been able to get into the film that mixture of violence, desperation, and humor that I found all along 42nd Street when we were shooting there.” As far as I’m concerned, he did.

The Boys in the Band, however, is different from all its predecessors because it presents the homosexual in his own environment and not just as a misfit in the heterosexual world. In Boys there is a chance to explore the homosexual’s psychological and social problems as he tries to live at peace with himself in his own world. “I got the title from those movie musicals in the 1940s where Frances Langford or Peggy Lee or somebody was always saying, ‘Let’s have a great big hand for the boys in the band,” says Crowley. “It means ‘men in the minority,’ something like that.”

The plot concerns a birthday party given for a homosexual named Harold (Leonard Frey) by his friend Michael (Kenneth Nelson) and attended by a group of friends who represent a variety of homosexual types—not stereotypes. For instance, the fact that one homosexual is Catholic, one Jewish, and another Negro indicates that homosexuality touches all groups. Michael, the Catholic, can live neither with nor without his homosexuality: “I’m one of those truly rotten Catholies who gets drunk, sins all night and goes to Mass the next morning,” he says. As a matter of fact, the story ends with his going off to a midnight mass at St. Malachy’s in Manhattan.

Crowley treats Michael and the others with a perfect blend of compassion and wry wit. For example, the midnight cowboy (Robert La Tourneaux), who is Harold’s “birthday present” from one of the guests, is told to stand in the corner with the other gifts ; underlying the scene is the pathetic situation of a young man like Joe Buck who has looks and little else and knows it. Michael’s unhappiness at being homosexual drives him to make rather cruel jokes at the expense of himself and his friends, and even to try to make Alan, an old college chum from Georgetown University who happens in on the party, admit that he too is homosexual—as if adding one more member to the ranks will somehow make Michael feel less an outsider. Michael epitomizes his feelings about being homosexual in the now-famous line, “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”

Crowley has been criticized by some homosexuals for presenting them from an unflattering angle. He counters: “The story is about self-destruction. I am talking about the self-destructive tendency in homosexuals who flagellate and demean themselves out of self-hatred because they’ve been so shunted aside and considered such freaks by society. ... I hope there are happy homosexuals—they just don’t happen to be at this party. Besides, Michael is too often taken as the spokesman for all the others. He is really the only truly unhappy person among the nine; all of them have complex natures and have their own feelings about being homosexual.”

In transferring The Boys in the Band from stage to screen, director William Friedkin had the good sense to realize that the play’s success stemmed not so much from merely dealing with homosexuality but from being, in his words, “well constructed, with brilliantly drawn characters, witty dialogue, and a gripping denouement. To hoke it up with unnecessary location shots, flashy photography or background music would have been wrong.” Adds Crowley, “A film does not add variety to a scene by simply breaking up dialogue from the play with shots of the Seagram building and three or four other location backgrounds. The variety must come within the scene by photographing the action from different points of view.”

Hence Friedkin has not attempted to “open out” the play for the screen in the manner of Sister George, beyond introducing each guest in his own milieu before he goes to the party. “\ want the audience to be another guest at the party,” he explains, “to be involved in the action, not simply observers.” During the course of the party, Michael has each of the guests attempt to call someone whom they have truly loved in the past. It is noteworthy that none of the guests can complete a call outside the apartment except Alan, the sole “straight” guest, who phones his wife. (One of the other guests, Hank, talks to his companion, Larry, by calling him from the next room in the apartment.) The homosexual is locked in his own world and cannot reach the world outside which disdains and ignores him, Crowley seems to be saying. For this reason, it was very important that the film be shot almost entirely in Michael’s apartment, which thus becomes a microcosm of the homosexual world.

Other indications of how far the screen has come in its treatment of homosexuality can be found in a variety of films of the seventies ranging from The Music Lovers and Entertaining Mr. Sloane to Death in Venice and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. In the British screen adaptation of Joe Orton’s play Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970) Peter McEnery, who played the shy homosexual in Victim!, enacts the title role of a young man who trades on his attractiveness to a middle-aged brother and sister named Kath and Ed (Beryl Reid and Harry Andrews) to secure free room and board. Like all of the work of Orton’s short career, this is black comedy and has been played as such in the film. The acting is broad, the costumes and decor suitably outlandish, because the characters are more grotesques than human beings, and as a result the movie is at times irresistibly funny.

It looks for a while as if Sloane will rule the household as Kath and Ed both vie for his affections until, in a fit of rage, Sloane murders their meddling father. That puts them in a position to blackmail him into staying on under their mutual domination indefinitely: they make an arrangement whereby they shall take turns “entertaining Mr. Sloane.” Sloane was the first feature film of British TV director Douglas Hickox and, like Friedkin, he has concentrated more on rendering the play on the screen in the spirit in which it was written than in enlarging the canvas against which the action is played. He and his cast achieved ensemble acting of a high order, as did Friedkin and his actors in Boys in the Band, and one shudders to think what could have happened to this material in the hands of an unsubtle and heavy-handed director.

A serious attempt to explore the homosexual mentality was made by Ken Russell in The Music Lovers (1971), a film about the composer Peter Tschaikovsky’s conflict with his homosexuality. As in Russell’s biographies of composers for ВВС-TV, he has drawn a definite connection between the man’s life and his music. “The Russians have never admitted that Tschaikovsky was homosexual,” says Russell. “Yet he said himself that his inner conflicts were there in his music and this was one of his conflicts. His Sixth Symphony is tortured and tragic. In one scene in the film Tschaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) is shown in bed with the rich Vladimir Shilovsky (Christopher Gable) whose possessiveness helped push Tschaikovsky into thoughts of marriage. The composer, Russell points out, had always longed to have a family, and so he married Nina (Glenda Jackson), a neurotic nymphomaniac who was infatuated with him; the marriage, of course, was a disaster. Russell’s is the first film of Tschaikovsky’s life and work that deals with this aspect of his personality.

In Death in Venice (1971), based on Thomas Mann’s novella, the Italian film maker Luchino Visconti explored a somewhat similar terrain. Visconti’s earlier pictures had occasionally and tangentially dealt with homosexuality. For example in The Damned (1969) the director had used sexual perversion as a metaphor for the overall breakdown of morality in Nazi Germany in the thirties, climaxed in the film by the Night of the Long Knives in which one faction of Nazi troopers systematically annihilates another while the latter is engaged in a drunken homosexual orgy. With Death in Venice, however, Visconti made a much more subtle symbolic use of a homosexual theme.

The movie deals with Gustav Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde), an aging musician in turn-of־the-century Venice who becomes obsessed with a golden-haired young man with whom he never exchanges a single word. Ultimately the dying Aschenbach sees the lad as a projection of his own desolate longings for ideal beauty and friendship. As one critic noted, that this is also an indication of latent homosexuality is not really the point. What Visconti is getting at through the artist’s figure is the universal problem of relating the life of the mind to that of the body; or, in other words, it is the tension between spirit and flesh which torments Aschenbach. And Visconti wisely does not try to resolve this tension in the film. He rather chooses to present it for our consideration—and our sympathy, espedally in the scene in which the hapless old man garishly paints his face and dyes his hair in a pathetic attempt to close the age gap between himself and the boy whom he idolizes.

John Schlesinger’s Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971) also turns on the love of an older man for a younger man. Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch), a Jewish doctor, is involved with Bob Elkin (Murray Head); but so, he soon discovers, is Alex Greville (Glenda Jackson), a divorcee. “Bob represents those young people today whose lives consist in having an experience and then taking the nearest exit to some other experience,” Schlesinger comments. “Their whole lives are filled with exits. I wanted a young actor to play Bob, to make it clear that it is not so much a question of Bob’s being bisexual but of his being somehow unformed. He can switch experiences on and off, just as he switches on and off between Alex and Daniel.” Indeed, whenever a conflict arises with one of them, he takes refuge in the other.

Schlesinger treats Daniel’s homosexuality in a very matter-of-fact way. “Sunday, Bloody Sunday is not about the sexuality of these people,” he explains. “It asks the audience to accept them as they are. I am tired of homosexuals being portrayed in films as either hysterical or funny. This is the first film I know of that asks you to accept the homosexual characters as people. There is no special pleading. I didn’t want to preach in the film that we must be tolerant of others, but rather to imply the kind of acceptance I mean.”

“I suppose the film shocked some people,” Schlesinger adds, “but I didn’t set out to shock anybody. The scene in which Murray and Peter were shown greeting each other with a kiss is a case in point. Both of them were totally involved in their parts and they were certainly less shocked by the kiss than the technicians on the set were.”

Inevitably the irresponsible and uncommitted Bob gets bored with his life in London and takes a plane for America, leading to the final scene in the picture in which Daniel is spending a lonely Sunday afternoon trying to learn Italian from a record, as he prepares for a trip to Italy that he was originally supposed to take with Bob. Daniel is sitting in the patient’s chair in his office; suddenly he looks across the desk into the camera as if he were asking a doctor for advice. He confesses that he lives a lonely life and wonders what to do about it:

“I want his company and people say, what’s half a loaf—you are well shot of him; and I say, I know that, but I miss him, that’s all. . . . All my life I’ve been looking for someone courageous and resourceful, not like myself. He wasn’t it; but we were something.” Originally, Schlesinger notes, Daniel finished the speech by saying that no one has any right to call him to account; “but that line was dropped because, as I said, I wanted to avoid special pleading.”

Serious films like Sunday, Bloody Sunday, The Boys in the Band, and some of the other movies which have been discussed present homosexuality not as a curiosity but as part of the human condition; perhaps there will be more like them in the future now that the motion picture industry has treated such problems with frankness and integrity. Hopefully, a lot of boys will not jump on the bandwagon merely to exploit the subject. For worthwhile treatments have a universal value: as a character in a recent Broadway play said about homosexuals: “They are sad and mixed up—like the rest of us.”