NP: So, Hellman was obviously always going to be a part of your story, Williams almost had to be a part of it… Were there any figures who maybe you had not been as familiar with who, through your research, surprised you with their central role?

MK: Yes, and one of the things that was surprising to me while writing it is how many connections there are between things. You have one person, one movie, then the same person shows up again. Like Richard Brooks; he was stuck in his own brick foxhole during World War II, stuck stateside at Quantico, and he was horrified by the bigotry that he saw in his fellow soldiers. So he wrote this novel, The Brick Foxhole, about a fatal gay bashing—in early 1943! The book is an amazing psychological portrait. The description of the killing of this gay man is really shocking, and beautifully done. And the book caused a stir. The military was really angry with him for having published it on their watch without permission. He was almost court-martialed. And then... a studio buys the rights to the novel, but of course the Code says, “Can’t adapt that.” So they changed it into a film about anti-semitism: Crossfire (1947). And it became something else: a historically important film. But then the fact that Richard Brooks wrote that and went on to become a filmmaker who ended up directing the film version of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958), which was one of the eradicated gay texts of the 1950s based on the Tennessee Williams play… that was really interesting! And that Dore Schary, who was working at RKO, and who really wanted to make Crossfire as an anti-antisemitism film because he wanted to do socially righteous films…. the fact that all these liberal-minded, ostensibly heterosexual men were driven to work with these queer texts… It’s all so interesting. I don’t psychoanalyze it but something’s going on there. It’s fascinating to see how these projects professing progressive values tend to wind up just doing what’s socially acceptable at the time. Schary always said he wanted to make movies for altruistic reasons, but after something goes through the mangler of the Production Code…

NP: I’m sure you’ve read Lillian Ross’s book Picture, in which Schary is a major character, and which very much details the way film projects that start out with certain intentions get gradually watered down and mutilated and cannibalized….

MK: Yep, yep. Yep. So I would say Dore Schary and Richard Brooks I discovered in the writing of the book. And just getting to wrestle with Hitchcock, in this particular mode, was really interesting. Specifically, Hitchcock and Rope, and some of the received ideas about him and the film; Hitchcock and perversity and queerness and sensuality. But I love Rope. I think Rope is one of the best and funniest movies he ever made. I was really interested in the fact that Rope and Crossfire came out within a year of each other, and one of them is based on a gay text where they did everything they could to get rid of any reference to homosexuality, and the other one is a film where Hitchcock was dead set on getting the queerness back into the material as best as he could. And that helped me write it, because I wanted to do something different with this. I don’t want this to be rote. Everyone’s read about Rope at this point, right? Well, not everybody, but a lot of cinema studies people, perhaps. I wanted to get a new angle on Rope and I’m happy with how it came off; I crosshatch those narratives to make it more of a portrait of men and masculinity in the post-war period. The way the book is structured, I’ve been talking up to that point about women, about lesbians, going from These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour, discussions of lesbian audiences, Marlene Dietrich as a lesbian icon, and Arzner... I was excited to start focusing on men particularly in terms of World War II. 

NP: Though your book is very much focused on the American scene, you also suggest the role played by imported films in the heady heyday of the “arthouse” cinema, in which you see a greater level of candor with regards to all sorts of human sexual behavior, which had begun to attract not only American audiences but American stars, like Rope’s Farley Granger, who trots off to Itay to make Senso (1954) for a very not-closeted Luchino Visconti…  with English dialogues by Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams!

MK: Yeah, La Dolce Vita (1960) was huge. And Victim (1961), the Basil Dearden film, released in the US the same year that they finally amended the Code, which allowed The Children’s Hour to be produced as originally written. The case of Victim is really interesting; anyone who’s seen Victim knows that it’s the talkiest, least sexual film about gayness you could possibly have, and it still got slapped with an X rating by the PCA. It shows how clearly non-progressive things still were. 

NP: Sizzling hot stuff, Victim. 

MK: I can just imagine all the young gay boys who rent this illicit film and watch it and are so disappointed. There’s not a single bit of bared flesh in the whole film. But yes, the influx of foreign films was another thing that helped, before television, before Preminger, to chip away at people’s ideas of what was acceptable. I talk about Bicycle Thieves (1948) a little in the book. Breen was horrified by the fact that the kid is seen urinating in the street, shot from behind, because you’re not supposed to think about genitals or bodily functions. I knew some stuff about what was in the Code before starting this book, and what was acceptable to Breen and what wasn’t, the separate beds and all that stuff. But the fact that you never see toilets…  

NP: That was famously Psycho (1960), right? That was the film that introduced the toilet to American moviegoers.

MK: I mean, it’s just hard to believe that in the whole of 1950s cinema there wasn’t a single toilet!

NP: Somebody must have caught one in the background. Maybe it’s in a mirror reflection?

MK: Breen retired in ’54… After that, you’d think Sherluck would let a toilet get through, right? It’s like you’re watching Suddenly Last Summer (1959), and a man gets eaten—a gay man can get killed and eaten on camera, you can hear him screaming while he’s devoured alive—but you can’t show a shitter?! Oh no, there might be a turd floating in the bowl! What the hell is that?

Nick Pinkerton is a Cincinnati-born, Brooklyn-based writer focused on moving image-based art; his writing has appeared in Film Comment, Sight & Sound, Artforum, Frieze, Reverse Shot, The Guardian, 4Columns, The Baffler, Rhizome, Harper’s, and the Village Voice. He is the editor of Bombast magazine, editor-at-large of Metrograph Journal, and maintains a Substack, Employee Picks. Publications include monographs on Mondo movies (True/False) and the films of Ruth Beckermann (Austrian Film Museum), a book on Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Fireflies Press), and a forthcoming critical biography of Jean Eustache (The Film Desk). The Sweet East, a film from his original screenplay premiered in the Quinzaine des Cinéastes section of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.