I could just barely remember snippets of "The Devil at Four O'Clock" from having seen it on television as a child. It took a little work with the search engines last year to discover the title, and then ordered it from Amazon. We watched it while home on repat last December - it was quite a film.
Ohhh, "Johnny Guitar," the quintessencial kinky Western. Well, if there are any other kinky Westerns. John Waters, perhaps, but there it's too obviously trying to be kinky. The relationship between Hayden and Mercedes McCambridge, and Joan Crawford is totally upstated by the relationship between Mercedes and Joan. Joan's and Mercedes' outfits are 1950's Western version of dyke outfits. Did you know that in 1959 there was a TV pilot for a series that never made it?
(Well, the funniest part of the film is when Joan transforms herself by sashaying out in that billowly, virginal white dress which also looks like a butch dyke in lipstick lesbian drag).
(And Mercedes was, in real life, a lesbian -- check her out in "Touch of Evil" where she appears looking fully male).
I was too young when I saw Johnny Guitar to catch much of that.
I don't think anybody doubts Kirk Douglas's masculinity, but, the outfit he wore in one movie made me squirm when I saw it several years ago. It was a western, perhaps 50s vintage. Wish I could remember the name.
I have watched "Johnny Guitar" and searched high and low for the so-called lesbian thread but I just don't see it. The outfits are somewhat butch/fem, that's true, and Joan in that white dress is a hoot but it's just a catfight between the two women. I don't pick up on anything sexual between them at all.
Now, in "Giant", you don't really know who Luz (Mercedes) is jealous of. Is she jealous of Leslie (Liz Taylor) for marrying Luz's brother Jordan or Jordan (Rock Hudson) being married to the beautiful Leslie??
The undercurrent is there if you look carefully for it and many reviewers have found it. The inferances are subtle for the time and some of it is a Hollywood inside joke (with Mercedes never hiding her lebianism within the industry). The tension between McCambridge and Crawford isn't simply over what the surface indicates, especially that Mercedes was suppose to have had a fling with Johnny. The notion is, however, that Crawford rebuked Mercedes' advances some time in the past and that just added to the bad relationship between the characters, not just rivalry nor the suspicion that Crawford was somehow responsible for Mercedes' brother's death. Crawford certainly could be ruled out, well almost entirely, as a real life lesbian because she slept with nearly every male Hollywood star. She was in competition with Ester Williams!
Yes Edgar,
I love it. He had an attitude, and style, that was his own.
I was just reading about Richard Widmark. Still active at 90, he remarried in 1997 after losing his wife to alzheimer's.
