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A specific Fifties vision yet ancient as Catullus, who knew to defend "unmanly verses." Prep school days, the alumni reunion triggers the remembrance, the screen lush once again to "Plaisir d'Amour." The delicate aesthete (John Kerr), "Sister Boy" to colleagues and a source of consternation to the father (Edward Andrews) who wants "a regular fellow" and not a folk singer. His hair is too long and his room too tidy, poetry and theater interest him more than sports and dates, his sole ally is the neglected wife (Deborah Kerr) of the rugged housemaster (Leif Erickson). "You'll make some girl a good wife," he's told while sewing at the beach, nearby the faculty beefcake pours over a quiz entitled "Are You Masculine?" Vincente Minnelli's immaculately decorated closet, a remarkable study of "the calculated risks of being a man" subsequently completed in Home from the Hill. Commiserating outsiders, he's the lady's first husband who died in the war uselessly proving his courage and she's the boy's seventh-grade teacher lost but not forgotten. (His own mother is recalled only as an order "to go outside and bounce a ball.") The comic absurdity of the macho gait in a blue-toned music chamber, the stark horror of a bonfire-lit hazing ritual churning with "good-natured roughhousing." Lurid neon glimpsed through rain-speckled glass, the nauseous wince following a kiss with the soda-fountain waitress (Norma Crane), an intensity heightened rather than subdued by censorship and an illustration of John Alton's Metrocolor noir. The uncanny dappled light of a studio forest for the consummation, the Miltonic coda of a disused garden. "I'm always falling in love with the wrong people." "Who isn't?" A key work, superficially emulated by Weir (Dead Poets Society) but properly understood by Haynes (Far from Heaven). With Darryl Hickman, Dean Jones, Jacqueline deWit, Tom Laughlin, Don Burnett, Ralph Votrian, and Kip King.
--- Fernando F. Croce |