SCREENED OUT – The Dark Side: Film Noir & Crime
FLICK Turner Classic Movies is continuing with night four of its Screened Out programming celebrating gay pride month. Tonight’s spotlight is on film noir and crime drama. The five films come from the period between 1941 and 1967, a time when gays and lesbians were pretty much pushed into the closet. The Hays Code set industry guidelines on what was morally acceptable between the years 1934 and 1967, so the gay characters presented tonight are mostly seen as sexual perverts. They will not have positive representations and their outcomes in the plot will usually serve to punish or kill them. But the stars in the films shine bright and are worth catching, particularly Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth, and Peter Lorre.
Tonight’s films include The Big Combo (1955), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Gilda (1946) and The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Reflections in a Golden Eye gives us Brando playing Major Penderton, a closeted army officer married to Taylor but is more interested in a young private played by Robert Forster. Penderton is a tortured character with confused perceptions of masculinity and femininity. There is also a flaming houseboy running around, which serves as the visible embodiment Penderton thinks is hidden within himself. Scenes showing him applying make-up and committing murder are meant to show his evil side. To say he’s sexually frustrated would be an understatement. 
Peter Lorre tangles with Humphrey Bogart, playing a devious criminal in The Maltese Falcon. And there is a troublesome threesome in Gilda, with Hayworth marrying gambler Glenn Ford, who keeps his sinister “buddy” George Macready nearby. Though their relationship is only hinted at, their sexual feelings for each other are unmistakable.
In Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer, adapted by Gore Vidal, Clift, who was actually gay, plays the neurosurgeon who tries to sort out the hidden secrets that caused the death of invisible central character, Sebastian Venable. It turns out Sebastian has replaced his aging mother (Hepburn) with his sexy cousin (Taylor) to procure young men for him. He is seen as such a fiend that he’s not even presented on screen. Vito Russo, in his groundbreaking book “The Celluloid Closet” compares Sebastian to the monster in “Frankenstein, in which the peasants pursue the monster to the top of a hill, where fire engulfs him.”
More info is available at the TCM website:
http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=159628&mainArticleId=159623
Original trailer for Reflections in a Golden Eye: http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index/?cid=102301
