You\u2019re a kid. You catch a few seconds of something strange on TV. Those few seconds have a way, sometimes, of paying a call decades later.<\/p>\n
It happened to author, critic and film curator Michael Koresky. His absorbing new book is \u201cSick and Dirty: Hollywood\u2019s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness,\u201d and just as he was writing its final chapter, he dredged up a fuzzy memory of seeing something on his grandmother Bertha\u2019s TV set when he was around 10.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were over at my grandmother\u2019s place in Newton, Massachusetts, where we always went on Jewish holidays,\u201d he says. \u201cShe always had the TV on. This time it was set to PBS, which played movies in the afternoons, I remember. I walked by the TV and saw this little snot-nosed girl, sitting in the back of a car, looking very angry, whispering something in this older woman\u2019s ear, and the woman\u2019s face just falls, horrified. It looked like a horror movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then: \u201cMy grandmother\u2019s walking in and out of the room, carrying loaves of challah, and she stops and looks at the TV, and she sees me looking, and she says to me: \u2018That one,\u2019 pointing at the girl. \u2018That one\u2019s a troublemaker.\u2019 And she didn\u2019t tell me why.\u201d Years later, Koresky found out why.<\/p>\n
The film was the 1961 version of \u201cThe Children\u2019s Hour,\u201d Lillian Hellman\u2019s pathbreaking 1934 drama about \u201ca lie perpetrated by this malicious little girl, about her schoolteachers being lesbians, carrying on an affair,\u201d Koresky says. His book takes its title from a self-lacerating line spoken by the tragic closeted lesbian played by Shirley MacLaine.<\/p>\n
What Koresky achieves here is a sharp, sometimes personal investigation of some choice Hollywood projects, beginning with the massively altered 1936 \u201cChildren\u2019s Hour\u201d adaptation, \u201cThese Three.\u201d Many of the films under review were derived from sensational source material optioned by a studio only to be de-sexualized (at least on the page) and rendered the most distant of cousins to their sources.<\/p>\n
Rules were rules then. The Production Code Administration enforcement went into full practice in 1934, bringing the raucous pre-Code enforcement era to a halt. \u201cSick and Dirty\u201d isn\u2019t a pre-Code book. It\u2019s a Code book, about what happened next, what then-transgressive sexual images \u2014 furtive, oblique, often partially or fully erased \u2014 sneaked into the slyly suggestive \u201cRope,\u201d for example, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Its homicidal lovers plainly are as gay as a day in May, yet just closeted enough to pass muster with the Code.<\/p>\n
Koresky, senior curator of film at New York City\u2019s Museum of the Moving Image, delves into the screen versions of \u201cTea and Sympathy,\u201d as well as what he calls \u201cthe unparalleled derangement\u201d of Tennessee Williams\u2019 \u201cSuddenly, Last Summer,\u201d with its climax of the Elizabeth Taylor character\u2019s sexually voracious, manipulative cousin literally eaten alive by young boys he has \u201cprocured\u201d for himself.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know these movies come from an era of censorship,\u201d says Koresky. \u201cWe know the Production Code only allowed films to say and show certain things. Yet this time of great restriction, the mid-\u201930s to the early \u201960s, was also arguably the greatest period ever for American cinema.\u201d Our conversation is edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n
Q: How did you land on the handful of films you focus on in \u201cSick and Dirty\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: I wanted films from the key decades to reflect some idea of forward motion, in each era. It\u2019s a history of Hollywood, roughly 25 years of it, and it\u2019s not really an alternative history. It\u2019s the history of the Code, and how these films are connected, as well as connected to the culture at large.<\/p>\n I write about \u201cRebecca\u201d (Hitchcock\u2019s 1940 Oscar winner, with the plainly lovelorn Mrs. Danvers as relished by Judith Anderson), which could\u2019ve had its own entire chapter. \u201cRed River\u201d (the Howard Hawks\/John Wayne\/Montgomery Clift Western from 1948) could\u2019ve had its own chapter. And there were smaller films like \u201cDesert Fury\u201d (1947, Western noir), which is one of the great gay Hollywood films of all time.<\/p>\n Q: Can you talk a bit about how Hollywood\u2019s reliance on Broadway influenced the occasional, forbidden images of gay and lesbian life, usually tragic, of course, and always cleaned up for the Code\u2019s purposes?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: Sure. The entire book is anchored by \u201cThe Children\u2019s Hour,\u201d and (playwright) Lillian Hellman is the stealth protagonist, in a way. \u201cThese Three\u201d was the first adaptation made in Hollywood from that play, a prime example of how you\u2019d get these hit plays on Broadway, and Hollywood would be so envious of the scandal and sensation and success of them, and they\u2019d buy the film rights immediately \u2014 knowing they\u2019d be ordered by the Production Code essentially not to make movies out of them unless they changed every single thing. They\u2019d have to rework entire plotlines. With \u201cTea and Sympathy\u201d (director Vincente Minnelli\u2019s 1956 version of the Robert Anderson play about an \u201cunmanly\u201d teenage boy\u2019s torturous coming of age), MGM paid $400,000 for it, knowing they wouldn\u2019t be able to make it the way they wanted to.<\/p>\n Tennessee Williams\u2019 plays, and Hollywood\u2019s versions, made him one of the most important figures in cinema history, I think, in terms of how the Production Code was tested, challenged, how things progressed, and led to the amendment of the Code language. People were craving this prestige shock material. And then, in 1959, to have something like \u201cSuddenly, Last Summer,\u201d which is about as out-there as a movie could get in 1959, to have that somehow get through largely intact \u2026<\/p>\n Q: I still can\u2019t quite believe it happened.<\/strong><\/p>\n A: Once that film got released, and became a hit, and an Oscar-nominated hit, all bets were off.<\/p>\n Q: Until reading \u201cSick and Dirty,\u201d I didn\u2019t know about how a Loyola University meeting here in Chicago led to the creation of the Production Code in 1934.<\/strong><\/p>\n A: The Chicago Catholics were central to what Hollywood became. When the Catholic Church during the Depression threatened to boycott Hollywood, that meant 20 million potential lost customers. Depression-era Hollywood was terrified of losing everything. It couldn\u2019t ignore them. And under Joseph Breen, with the strong influence of the Roman Catholic National Legion of Decency, the Code was truly enforced.<\/p>\n Q: Where are we now as a film culture?<\/strong><\/p>\n A: It\u2019s a hard question. I have such conflicting feelings about the culture in general. This year, I mean look at how corporate sponsorship of Pride Month has dried up because of political pressure, and the pullback on DEI. Political reality dictates a lot. And it\u2019s affecting everything right now.<\/p>\n But things haven\u2019t changed all that much in Hollywood. You look at a movie like \u201cLove, Simon\u201d (2018), the first Hollywood film with a gay teen protagonist. Coming out story, very bland. I had conflicted feelings about; I\u2019m not sure who it\u2019s geared toward. On the other hand, if I\u2019d seen that movie as a teenager growing up, it would\u2019ve been a seismic event in my life.<\/p>\n Q: Your book pushed me to see a movie I\u2019d somehow never made time for: The first William Wyler version of \u201cThe Children\u2019s Hour\u201d from 1936. Such a wholesale whitewashing! But so good! And with Wyler\u2019s direction of Merle Oberon and especially Miriam Hopkins, it\u2019s sublimely clear these two college friends meant so very much to each other.<\/strong><\/p>\n A: It\u2019s the great example of a completely censored film that\u2019s also a really interesting one, and beautifully made. When I teach film, I preface a screening of something like \u201cTea and Sympathy\u201d by saying: \u2018These movies have some very progressive elements. They also have some very conservative elements. Now, let\u2019s talk about how those elements interact.\u2019 With \u201cTea and Sympathy,\u201d the students responded to it, not as a relic of a former time. Many wrote about how it related to their own lives, and how it feels to be young and not know who you are.<\/p>\n I\u2019m never going to admit actual nostalgia for a time of movie censorship. But you have to admit that this time of restriction holds sway over our imaginations, to this day.<\/p>\n ____<\/p>\n Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You\u2019re a kid. You catch a few seconds of something strange on TV. 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