• Tea & Sympathy

11/23/21 (Tues)

Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film is widely characterized as a gay flick, but the truth is as usual a bit more complicated. Tom, one day short of his 18th birthday, is a student at an all-male boarding school. He is soft-spoken with a penchant for the arts and the company of older women rather than sports or guys/girls his age. He is shunned by all guys other than his protective roommate, and he keeps apart from them as well. The situation worsens when the guys catch him sewing on the beach with a group of women, a skill he learned from a maid (who was promptly fired) after his mother abandoned him in childhood. Rumors begin to spread, and he comes to be taunted with the nickname “Sister Boy”. Meanwhile, his headmistress Laura is having problems of her own with a husband who spends more time playing sports and hanging out with his male charges than with her. She comments to him on their lack of intimacy and how much she wants to love him, but he refuses to discuss it. She takes pity on the beleaguered Tom, not least because he reminds her of her first husband, who died at the same age in WWI (which would make her in her 40s). She is disturbed when she learns that Tom is planning to visit a woman of ill repute, recognizing this as his attempt to lift himself up in the eyes of the other boys and, more importantly, himself. His failure to make that work leads to an attempted suicide. Laura visits him and, with a powerhouse line (“Years from now, when you speak of this, and you will, be kind”), kisses him and, it is strongly implied, de-virginizes him.

That may have something to do with censorship; the hit play three years earlier by Robert Anderson, who also wrote the screenplay, was apparently more forthright about the boy Tom’s possible leanings in both situation (Tom was caught swimming nude with a professor) and language (“pansy” and such). The play’s director Elia Kazan had dealt with gay themes before in the previous year’s Streetcar and would do so later in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which also features a man holding back from his wife; those themes were completely cut from the film versions in those cases as well. Also, the movie puts the story within a dumb added framework in which Tom is reminiscing about events some years later at a school reunion, where he’s explicitly depicted as married – see, not gay! The gay angle is not the only sin brushed out; Tom reads a letter from Laura revealing that she soon left her unfeeling husband and leads and regrets her adultery, while the husband is shown sitting morosely in his old room. In the final scene from the past, the play’s Laura is shown unbuttoning her blouse in a clear indication of what’s about to happen, but she stays safely buttoned up, in every way, in the film.

Still, the movie may have improved on the play in making the gay theme more ambiguous. The theme is not the character’s struggle with his sexuality but the nature of rumors and how speculation can become a destructive force. Nothing in Tom’s behavior necessarily means that he’s gay as opposed to just a sensitive guy, and the story wouldn’t change one bit if he were in fact completely straight, though the fact that (in the film) he’s married with kids doesn’t in itself mean he’s straight either given how things were done back then.

Some observers question whether Laura would really sleep with Tom out of pure sympathy, but there’s a strong suggestion that the gesture stems as well from her own loneliness, especially given the resemblance she’s noted with her late husband. It reminded me of Summer of 42. She may have been longing for a human touch given her husband’s aloofness, and the film hints ever so subtly that he may in fact have been a closeted gay; in a nice touch at the end, he is shown listening to classical music, one of the quirks that had raised questions over Tom’s leanings.

The movie is unquestionably old-fashioned in structure and dialogue, and women will likely be upset at their portrayal as little more than housewives, regardless of how true to the times. The acting is par for the course for a 50s melodrama. The three leads are recreating their roles from the play, but neither Deborah Kerr nor John Kerr (no relation – their names don’t even rhyme) seems overly committed to the role. Only Leif Erickson as the macho husband makes an impression. Norma Crane also does good work as the bad woman. The desire to keep the gay theme muted, though a good idea in general, may have led to an overly tentative approach in some cases; for example, the scene where Tom’s roommate teaches him to walk in a more masculine way was clumsy, nowhere near as funny as the similar scene in La Cage Aux Folles a few decades later. The film overall was quite stagy, even in the beach and pajama party scenes. The use of color was interesting, with Laura represented by yellow (clothes, furniture, flowers) and Tom by blue (clothes, flowers), but even that seemed overly schematic.

Still, the film is worthwhile as an exploration of how gossip and speculation can overrun the truth. Even those in the audience assuming that the sensitive youth is gay, as suggested in some snide reviews, are falling into the same trap. The kids in the film are just lucky that Twitter wasn’t invented yet.