"British Film Forever" includes gay themes

In the UK, BBC2 has begun running a seven-part retrospective of British cinema, titled British Film Forever. The second episode, which aired on Saturday night, was subtitled ‘Longing, Loving, and Leg-overs’, and it aimed to take a look at the way love and desire have been represented in British films.

Both surprisingly and pleasingly, gay themes were given a substantial amount of screen-time in the 90-minute program. A section called ‘Secret Love’ explored the careers of British matinee idols Ivor Novello and Dirk Bogarde, who were adored by women but were secretly gay.

Particular emphasis was given to the career of Bogarde. Although he never came out publicly during his lifetime, he made several groundbreaking films with overt gay themes or hidden gay subtext. The first, in 1961, was The Singer Not the Song - described by the program as a ‘bizarre gay Western’ - where Bogarde’s leather-clad Mexican bandit takes a suspiciously strong interest in a Catholic priest, played by John Mills. Although the film did not explicitly refer to homosexuality, the sheer camp with which Bogarde played the role makes the subtext difficult to ignore these days.

The second film, also released in 1961, was Victim - a movie which has been credited with helping to propel a change in the law regarding gay men. (Gay sex was still a crime at the time the movie was released, and would not be decriminalized until 1967). In the film, Bogarde plays a closeted barrister, Melville Farr, who risks his career and his marriage by fighting back against a ring of blackmailers who have been extorting money from various gay men. Although it might appear old-fashioned now, the film was radical for its time in suggesting that gay men might be the victims of the law, and not criminals.

Actress Sylvia Sims, who played Bogarde’s sympathetic wife in the film, recalled that Bogarde came up with a lot of his speeches himself. She remembers him as being particularly determined to put in a line where his character, Farr, talks about having “wanted” another man, Barrett, with whom Farr had been emotionally although not sexually involved before Barrett committed suicide.

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Other commentators praised Bogarde’s willingness to bare his soul on screen, to take a role that cut so close to the bone at a time when he found it impossible to speak the truth publicly about his own life.

Although it was not contained in the ‘Secret Love’ section, another striking moment in the program came when British actress Sarah Miles was discussing Ken Russell’s 1969 adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love. Dismissing the heterosexual sex scenes between Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed, Miles said that the scene that had really turned her on was the sexually charged, naked wrestling match between Reed and Alan Bates’s characters.

Although it is common to the point of tedium to hear straight men talking about how turned on they are by lesbian sex, it is incredibly rare in a mainstream program to hear a straight woman talk about being turned on by gay male eroticism. The matter-of-fact way in which this was discussed was combined with further references to gay male characters in films like The Red Shoes and Sunday Bloody Sunday. It meant that overall, the program did a great job of presenting gay themes as an integrated part of the history of cinema, and not at all as something that needed to be ghettoized.