The Ninth Circle (Deveti Krug) (1960)

Wow. Wow. Wow.

So, The Ninth Circle was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar the same year (1961) as Pontecorvo's Kapò, Roberto Gavaldón's brilliant Macario, and Clouzot's La Vérité (also brilliant), and they gave the damn Oscar to Bergman's boring The Virgin Spring. In any case, The Ninth Circle is very, very well made, and it is surely – with Kapò – one of the first films made about the camps. So much of the film is a love story (under Nazi duress) that I was expecting something else entirely from this film by the end – I, incorrectly, as it turns out – assumed the ninth circle was a reference to Dante's final circle of the inferno and signified the betrayals of Judas, Lucifer, and Cain.

But Deveti Krug shifts boldly in subject matter in the middle of the third act, and the ninth circle of the title turns out to be a literal section of the camp and not a literary reference to treachery. (Incidentally, Peter Weiss's The Investigation uses the circles of the Inferno as a formal way of tracking through the camps and the Nuremberg trials, and in the play we move further and further inside the camps.)

Because the movie shifted so drastically, I really wasn't prepared for the punch France Štiglic's movie delivered, and I ended up truly stunned by The Ninth Circle. Boris Dvornik, who plays the male lead, is outstanding in this.

Harakiri (1962)

Harakiri is an excellent film, superb in every way. The writing is stellar, the acting is uniformly great. It's also deeply affecting while also being very cool. The cinematography here is the real star, though: Miyajima Yoshio's work is incredible. There are sections of the film that are breathtakingly shot. It's brilliant. Satō Kei also gives a genius performance in the role of the leader of the Iyi clan. This whole thing is just impeccable. If you haven't seen it, or if samurai films seem all to run together in your brain, you should revisit this one.

I Wish (2011)

Kore-eda is just so good. I loved I Wish (奇跡). It's touching and sweet, but as with all of Kore-eda's movies, I Wish undercuts its sentimentality with farce and doesn't allow us to get mired in its sweetness

Ivan Pyryev's Brothers Karamazov (1969)

Brothers Karamazov (Братья Карамазовы) is a magnificent film. Ivan Pyryev died before he could finish it, and the two lead actors - Mikhail Ulyanov and Kirill Lavrov finished it for him. This film is epic and grand, with big emotions, gorgeous camerawork, beautiful costumes, and a truly brilliant performance by Ulyanov. I loved this, and it deserves every accolade it's been awarded.

The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

Well this is weird. My friends with whom I do an unseen movie night (where we watch a movie that none of us has seen before) chose this insane children's film as our movie this week. So many strange things happen in it that make no sense and fail to connect up. The movie follows the logic of, say, a father who is telling a bedtime story to a child who keeps interrupting to ask weird questions so that he has to keep inventing nonsensical explanations for things. In short, The Peanut Butter Solution makes no sense. It was fun to watch, though.

Gaily, Gaily (1969)

Gaily, Gaily is an innocuous period comedy set in the early 20th century. It's a bit of a shame, because this could have had something to say about government corruption and 1969 and young people rebelling and finding solace in art, but Norman Jewison's film settles for easy laughs and broad comedy. One can't complain too much, though. It's rather a pleasurable romp. The costumes are great, Melina Mercouri is quite fun, and the whole thing is filmed with a kind of madcap glee.

Marooned (1969)

Marooned is great. It's terrifying and wise and honestly it's sort of stunning that this movie came out 4 months after the moon landing and 4 months after Hurricane Camille leveled the coast of Mississippi. This is a movie with a botched re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and a hurricane. It's powerfully directed and beautifully acted. Gene Hackman is excellent and sad as one of the astronauts, and Lee Grant is really wonderful as one of the astronauts wives. Richard Crenna and Gregory Peck give sturdy performances. And David Janssen, who I don't think I've ever seen in anything, is bright and charming. I was really into this. I do love a scary space movie.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

Meh. This film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is fun, but it isn't really funny. Although the film's style is fairly clever, they've cut a lot of the songs. I liked the music-video quality of many of the numbers – "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid", especially. But the actors playing Hero, Philia, and Dominia are all underused.

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Farewell, My Lovely is a kind of copycat Chinatown without – it seems to me, at least, any stakes. In the first place, Robert Mitchum is doing a voice-over, and he tells us way more than we need instead of the filmmaker just showing us. Sylvia Miles is excellent in a small role, but this mostly never picks up any momentum, even when Sylvester Stallone is murdering a lesbian madam in a Hollywood cathouse.

Escape Me Never (1935)

Escape Me Never is not at all what I expected, although I suppose the title ought to have tipped me off that I was watching a melodrama and not a comedy. But Paul Czinner directed the first act of this like a comedy, and so I was lulled into believing this would be a light, fun film. It turns out to be one about co-dependence and, incidentally, much more interesting than I thought. Elisabeth Bergner, who made a sensation with this film, deserved every accolade she got.

The Farewell (2019)

The Farewell (别告诉她) was really funny and quite charming. I really liked its Chinese critique of USAmerican liberalism, too. Mostly, though, this was funny, and that is what I wanted from it. Also the music in this movie was superb, and it had several really excellent performances.

A Few Questions about Etiology and Sexuality

Two weeks ago, my uncle emailed me to ask me if I would tell him more about my sexuality. He said he was curious about some aspects of it and had some questions for me to answer if I was willing. I said yes. His questions surprised me (mostly because of some of the assumptions they made about queerness), but I thought the answers I gave him might make interesting reading, so I'm sharing them here.

I've told some of these stories before on this blog, but because memories shift and pictures of the past change, it makes sense to tell these stories again with the different emphases and valences they have taken on in the ever-shifting present. I found these questions both easy and difficult to answer – difficult mostly because I rarely think about these kinds of things – but I tried to answer them as best I could. These were his questions.

1. How old were you when you were exposed to a sexual situation either in the form of pornography or in person. Was the event accidental or what would be considered a violation, or an abusive event. Were you the victim of any protracted abuse either emotionally, physically, or sexually?
2. How many experiences did you have before you realized you may be homosexual?
3. What steps did you take to open up about it? How old were you when you did?
4. You’ve mentioned that you are an atheist, what impact, if any, did your sexuality have on your theological beliefs?

This is how I responded:

First off, I think it fair to say that I begin from the basic assumption of benign sexual variation: people are different; they have all sorts of different desires; and we know that all sorts of various things form those desires and attractions. That said, I assume that what we call homosexuality or a homosexual orientation is no better or worse than any other basic orientation, and that if it is abnormal (and it is statistically less normal, at this moment in history, than what we call heterosexuality), then that doesn't make it bad or wrong or dirty; a norm is a norm because of societal pressures and assumptions, not because it has some kind of moral authority. This is as true of norms in weight, height, skin color, and right-handedness as it is for normative sexual desires. I want to say, too, that my experiences as a queer person can't really stand in for queer people as a whole, and I have found that people have all sorts of different stories and paths for the understanding of their desires.

The answer to your first question is that I was not ever exposed to sexual situations or pornography at a young age, and I was not sexually abused or violated either emotionally or physically. I first heard of homosexuality at church. I remember feeling different from other kids as a young kid – I was picked on and bookish – but I seem to remember more than anything other people's assumptions about my effeminacy or my lack of masculinity: things like my father telling me not to cross my legs like women do when I sat down but to cross my legs like men do, or other adults telling me to hold books by my side at arm's length rather than close to my chest (one of these is the way women hold books and one of these the way men hold books, apparently). I remember this one time I was at some talk about masculinity and sex held at a park by our pastor and him asking a few of us boys (I can't remember who else was there or how old I was, but this would have been in 6th or 7th grade) what we ought to do if we felt desire toward someone of the same sex. I remember knowing so little about sex and desire that I volunteered an answer and said aloud "you should ask that person". The pastor looked at me like I was an idiot and said "That person wouldn't know anything". I had no idea. I never saw pornography until I was in high school (and of course that pornography was heterosexual), and I don't remember ever walking in on anyone having sex.

Cute Boys                             Me                  

The answer to the second question relates to the church, too. As I said, I felt different as a kid, and of course I also felt sinful as a kid. We were all told how sinful we were all the time. So because I felt sinful, because I felt this different, evil thing inside of me for which I didn't have words, when the pastor brought up "homosexuals" as a kind of bogeyman (he did this frequently), I thought "maybe I am one of those". I always identified with the evil characters in fairy tales and children's stories, even stories from the Bible. I was a sinner, and I knew that, and so I knew I was one of the bad people. What I am saying is that I am not sure that I would have named myself a homosexual unless I wasn't told so frequently that I was bad and that homosexuals were bad. But who knows. I started finding myself attracted to other boys when I was in 9th grade, I think. That would put me at 12 or 13. And I had a name for that from my church. I had never heard of bisexuality or any other option. So I knew I was attracted to other boys, and I knew that made me a "homosexual", and I knew that was very, very bad. I prayed for a long time to ask my parents' god to make it go away, but my desires persisted. Their god didn't do anything to help me.

I know that some people learn about their sexual desires through sexual experiences – a person may try sex with various people and then figure out his or her sexuality from there, but that isn't what I did. I had my first sexual experience with a guy when I was 20 or 21 (quite old by today's standards). I had been attempting to stifle my desires and make them go away for about seven years before I ever was willing to try anything. I would say that I definitely missed out on this period of time that your question assumes. I wasn't really free to experiment sexually, or didn't feel myself free to do so, and so I didn't learn about anything that way.

In answer to your third question about when I began to open up about it – I was 20 or 21. Most everyone by this time had sort of figured things out, I think. If a young man is not talking about heterosexuality all the time, and if he hasn't had sex with a woman, he is probably queer. It's a sort of unspoken rule, isn't it? I think my parents probably knew I was queer (I'm not sure how long they had known), and definitely a good many of my friends already knew. Still, I came out to all of them one by one: first to my best friends, then to my parents. I was in college by this time, and this was very difficult because I had been actively lying for a long time, and this means I was a liar. It's hard to convince people that one is being honest when one has been lying to one's friends for a very long time. Even though it was 20 years ago, and I know that my lies were lies that my society wanted me to tell about myself, I still have a lot of guilt about this.

I remember my conversation with my friends Derek and Jaime very well. Derek said to me, "You'll always have a home with us." This was a question of an actual place to live – there was always the fear that my parents would kick me out of the house – as well as a question of an emotional place I could call home. It was the perfect answer. My friend Jill said "I already knew". My friend John hugged me and said he was afraid I was going to tell him that but that he was going to try very hard not to judge me. I don't know how well I remember the conversation with my parents. I most vividly remember my father beginning to talk about sin. I remember that I stopped him. I said to him that the word sin could not mean anything to me anymore because if I believed that I was destined for hell and that I was never going to be happy, then that led to me killing myself. If god simply hated me, then I should die. I had gone down that road in my mind already. But I had decided that instead of dying I was going to try to be happy and live a life in the world.

I don't think my atheism is related to my sexual desires. But I will say that I do think Christianity is incompatible with being a happy, well-adjusted gay person. Christianity has been hostile to homosexual activity for much of its history, and to my mind there isn't much sense in trying to reconcile all of that hatred. But that isn't why I became an atheist. I became an atheist when I realized that I really really wanted there to be a god, but that that desire for someone to take care of me was very similar to my desire for The Lord of the Rings to be real. (Seriously. It is quite a funny comparison, but this is what happened.) Just because I want something to be real doesn't make it real. Believing in a god would make the world so much easier to live in; believing that someone is watching over me and cares about me would make the world feel safer. But that doesn't mean there is a god. It just means it would be really nice if there were one. In other words, I came to atheism rationally through making logical sense of my feelings about the Christian god.

Obviously, a good many ideas have shaped my current views on sex and sexuality – many of which have changed in the last 20 years – but this is my recollection of the period up until age 21 or so. As I say, that was a long time ago, so my memory may be faulty, but this is what I remember.

It is only very recently that I have started to interrogate the interlinked history of homosexual practices and Christianity – I've only just in the last year read John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization – and I think that's mostly just because I haven't really even been interested in the Church's ideas about sexuality. They seem to me merely a method of social control. What is clear from history is that homosexual practices (and even more frequently bisexual practices) have existed in almost all societies everywhere around the globe. What changes around the globe is the different ways those practices have been treated by their societies. I simply haven't had much interest in what made me gay or what makes other people gay. To my mind, once we can say that there is nothing wrong with it, the reasons why people like the things they like sexually seem to matter just as little as why people are left-handed or like cilantro or don't like the color green.

Seconds (1966)

Frankenheimer's Seconds was shot by James Wong Howe, and it's innovative and fascinating and completely unnerving. The film itself didn't really make sense to me – I just didn't get why the main character was so tortured and upset by what he'd done. I didn't understand why he couldn't make a go of his new life, or, indeed, why he thought he needed a second new face in order to try a third time. But Rock Hudson is a revelation in this, and the film's ending is totally great. Incidentally, Teshigahara's The Face of Another (released in the U.S. in 1967), which works with similar themes, came out in Japan around the exact same time as Frankenheimer's film.

Victim: the Most Surprising Film from 1961

What a stunning movie this is! I've just watched Basil Dearden's Victim for the first time and I'm just bowled over.

Incidentally, I have had Victim in my queue for years as something I needed to see – important gay cinema and all that – but I only just watched it because I recently watched another Dearden movie (Khartoum) and thought it was well directed, so I looked up other movies I'd seen of his and remembered that I'd thought his direction of Saraband for Dead Lovers in 1948 was also quite good, and then I saw on his filmography that he directed Victim. In any case, I moved it up in the queue, and I'm certainly glad I did.

In the first place, Victim is a superbly made film noir: it's a crime film that follows several different people, creating a web of intrigue. In fact, it begins with a man fleeing the police for a crime we the audience knows nothing about and which the filmmaker keeps hidden from us. We know next to nothing about what is going on for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's intensely interesting. We meet many of the film's major characters in this first fifteen minutes, but we are unable to make sense of almost any of it.

The plot of Victim, once this first act is over, is a kind of detective story, in which a man who has been wronged attempts to solve a mystery. This part of the film is intriguing and exciting, and trying to beat the con-artists and murderers is a satisfying narrative.

Sylvia Sims & Dirk Bogarde

But Victim is also a film that is invested in a pro-homosexual point of view: in 1961 when sodomy was still illegal in Britain. At least five times – and maybe more – the film makes the case that the anti-sodomy laws in Britain need to be changed, that they are simply a reward for blackmailers and thieves. There is a great sequence when a police detective tells his subordinate that he should be less prejudiced – Protestantism used to be illegal in Britain too, he informs the lieutenant drily. We also see people's ugly prejudices, and the film exposes them as relying only on disgust and not on any real basis of morality.

The central role is played by Dirk Bogarde (who may have been a closeted gay man himself), and Bogarde is insanely good in the role. It's a performance of powerful nuances. But, of course, he has an excellent script to work with, and Dearden's direction is honestly perfect. I really loved this film.

* * *

There is one thing I need to ponder for a little longer. Twice in the movie a character uses the phrase flourish like the green bay tree to refer to the idea that a homosexual might live a life of freedom. Both times the phrase is uttered contemptuously – first by the prejudiced cop and later by one of the blackmailers. The phrase is originally from the book of Psalms, chapter 37 verse 35. The King James Version reads:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

I am intrigued by this usage of the phrase. I was not aware of this, but clearly the phrase had, by 1961, become a kind of code for homosexual. A little Googling has turned up a use in Agatha Christie's 1952 novel Mrs. McGinty's Dead in which a character says that a character in a play she's co-writing can't be gay: "But you can't have him a pansy, darling", she says. "Not for this sort of play. I mean it's not green bay trees or anything like that. It's thrills and murders and clean open-air fun." This passage in Mrs. McGinty's Dead heavily implies that Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot is a "pansy", but I'll leave that be for the moment, because I'm trying to follow up on this green bay tree business.

The "play" of which the character is thinking is, of course The Green Bay Tree by Mourdant Shairp from 1933 – a gloomy piece about a homosexual and his young protégé that ends in murder. The play avoided censorship by never making this completely explicit, and the author denied it, but everyone knew what the play was about, and if one didn't understand the play's subject matter to be homosexuality, The Green Bay Tree wouldn't make a bit of sense.

There is a Louis Bromfield novel called The Green Bay Tree, as well – this novel is not about homosexuality, and so this is likely not the source of this meaning being laid on the phrase.

Intriguingly, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the phrase this way: to develop vigorously in a congenial environment, whether or not this is deserved. There is no hint in this definition that the phrase should be linked with homosexuality.

Similarly, the early 20th century theosophist Gottfried de Purucker uses the phrase without any inference of homosexual meaning in his essay "The Great Heresy of Separateness". In 2002, M.C. Beaton also used the phrase (apparently) without this homosexual inference in one of her Hamish Macbeth mystery novels, Death of a Celebrity.

But Christie's use in 1952 and Victim's double-use in 1961 seem to demonstrate that the phrase was widely understood in mid-century Britain as the vigorous development (to quote the Oxford Dictionary) of a certain kind of person.

Paw (1959)

Paw is an anti-racist Danish family film from 1959. It's a kind of Huckleberry Finn tale, where a young boy from the Danish West Indies (i.e. St. Thomas or St. Croix) comes to live in Denmark where his father was born. He is beat up and taunted by his schoolmates, and then his aunt dies. But he is taken in by a kindly old gamekeeper, and the two make a life. It's quite sweet, and there is loads and loads of footage of Danish wildlife, particularly birds. Although released in Denmark in 1959, it wasn't released in the United States until 1970 (!).