After the “For turning the crummiest boat in the fleet” tagline shot, this trailer cuts to a dance routine. There are two men on the center-left, shirtless, one holding another, when a third man comes from the right, grabs the one man being held, and (it seems to me) plants a rather obvious open-mouth kiss on the guy.
I say “Yay”, my wife says “Nay.” Help us break this impasse, Dopers!
Poll to follow. It’s public, btw, so consider yourself told.
My wife and I definitely agree on the first part - we’re wondering if it was possible that a 1964 audience would look at this scene (we caught it on TCM this weekend) and not understand how, er, flamboyant it is.
It’s debatable. The one man was sorta-kinda unstable, so he could have tripped, falling into the other guy; the camera was positioned so his face went behind the other guy’s head. I voted not enough evidence - you could argue both ways.
Yes, it’s ambiguous, which was the only way it could have been presented back then.
He runs up to the guy, grabs him with both hands around the jaw/cheeks, and shoves his face at his face. What else could he have been doing? He was either kissing him or pretending to kiss him — as a gag, I guess.
Those of us whose childhoods and adulthoods were entirely lived in the transitionary period between homosexuality being explicitly criminal and the modern world where it’s becoming just another variation on love and sex can find it hard to understand how…non-insinuatory, I guess…things like this were during the early part of the 20th Century. No one assumed that two guys “making gay” were doing anything other than joking because “gay” was thought of as something so horrible and vile and dirty that no sane person would “act that way” in anything other than a joking manner.
There are lots of examples of that kind of thing in old movies. Sailors having drag shows. Joking talk that you’d swear today was openly flirtatious. And none of it actually seen as MEANING anything because it was unthinkable that they were serious about it.
A truly excellent documentary on the subject is The Celluloid Closet. (Link goes to full film up on YouTube.) It goes through gay subtext in old timey movies, from literally the first films made by Edison up through Ben Hur (Gore Vidal’s interview is particularly funny).
The two heads just don’t seem to get close enough for a kiss, and I see no sign of the exaggerated movements that would be done for a stage kiss, which is what I would expect when doing stage-style dancing.
It’s a camera angle illusion, I think. The guy with his back to the camera’s head moves too much. I switched to full screen on a 37-inch monitor and it really doesn’t look like a kiss. If it is, it’s the weirdest most awkward non-touching kiss ever done on film.
