Seven Days in May (1964)
If you want to know what good directing is, you need to watch Seven Days in May; not because it’s a particularly good movie, but because it’s very well directed. It’s Rod Serling’s script again -- which means earnest, masculine and boring. Nary a woman in sight — just Ava Gardner who is hard to miss, but she’s forty-five, and I kept worrying about her makeup and the lines under her eyes. She can’t really act, but she does do anger and sexy very well, and after all, SHE'S A STAR. And Kirk Douglas gets to remind her that she ‘let an air force general use her like his personal airplane” which is the kind of inept metaphor that only Rod Serling could come up with. But Seven Days in May is all about white men in suits or uniforms, smoking, talking earnestly. So leave it to John Frankenheimer to make some moments incredibly unsettling, with music and lighting and vast doomed empty spaces — like the one where the senator is trying to escape from being murdered and he’s suddenly left alone in the airport, and there’s an eerie silence, and there's a black woman and her son, and the son is playing with some weird military toy. It’s very empty and it seems as if the senator might be shot dead — he isn’t, but all that is pure Frankenheimer. Frederic March (stars galore!) gets to deliver the penultimate speech that says it all — then and now — about fascism: “ Our enemy is an age, the nuclear age, it happens to have killed man’s faith and his ability to influence what happens to him… a sickness of frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness, and from this desperation — we look for a champion in red white and blue.” But frankly you don’t want lines to ‘say it all’; that’s just bad writing. You want lines that say next to nothing but somehow seem real and significant and you’re not sure why. This movie brought back a night from my childhood; the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). I was 10 years old. For awhile after I was very afraid of the sound of planes overhead — and this just occurred to me — perhaps this is the reason I’m afraid of flying now, because planes for me have always meant destruction. In case you don’t know, The Cuban Missile Crisis was the moment when President Kennedy stood up to Castro. But Castro had missiles, and it seemed quite possible that he might launch them. I was practicing the ‘cello in my room, and I came out, worried and asked my mother “Can you tell me what’s going to happen?”, and she said “I wish I knew dear. I really wish I knew.” This was the first time I had ever seen her betray the slightest uncertainty. Of course two years later she would divorce my father and start her affair with a married man, and I would spend years watching her cry because of his neglect, and I would start having anxiety attacks. Now I know it was probably because I was taking care of my mother when she of course was meant to take care of me. It was her only responsibility as a mother really, but it was something she was constitutionally incapable of doing. Yes she got us a house in Don Mills, which was way out of our price range, so that we could grow amidst upper middle class children — but now I realise this was more because she was a snob than anything. And still she couldn’t save us from brutal reality. The most traumatic thing I remember from our new little townhouse on Cassandra Boulevard was the plastic toilet seat. I had been used to a wooden one, and this seemed the epitome of cheap classlessness. What, were we peasants? I mentioned it to my mother and she said “Oh we’ll get a proper one.” But we didn’t, and that was the next step towards my disillusion. But I’m not going to go on out my mother, or rather I am, I always do, but I’m not going to blame her for anything. Because she was a brave woman, a trailblazer in many ways. It took such courage for her to divorce my father simply because he was unfeeling (he told us: I didn’t beat her! I didn’t see other women! What was the problem?). But then to embark on a life of perpetual unrequited love, and start her own business, and then drink herself to death, yes I think these are brave things. And if that shocks you, I will tell you something that I am proud to say that I owe to her. The love of bars. She used to tell me that she and Jerry Kelly frequented the Colonial Tavern and Three Small Rooms. They were dedicated jazz fans, and they loved Blossom Dearie (who came to Toronto and sang her own songs in that sweet tiny voice -- I have an autographed napkin from her) and Woody Herman, and Dave Brubeck. And then when I was old enough my mother would take me to jazz clubs, and she was in her element. These were dark old bars and she was noticed, always, and that’s all she wanted, really was to be desired. And that’s all I really want too. In the gay bars it’s called s/m — ‘stand and model’ — but sometimes it’s all we do. In another blog I mentioned A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Hemingway’s short story about a man who is sitting alone in a bar late at night and won’t go home. And the bartender asks him why, and he says because he fears ‘nothing’ — meaning the lack of everything. And all anyone needs, he says, is clean well-lighted place. I know what Hemingway meant (here I am explaining Hemingway — but he had a problem — too few words, among other things). He meant we need a clean well-lighted place that is not our house, that has something and someone in it, even if it’s just a waiter and a barstool. Yes, it’s about flirting, and being alone, and chatting with the bartender, and looking out the window at the people going by, and perhaps stumbling in an embarrassing way, and perhaps having fumbling contact with someone in a corner, and perhaps a beautiful young man comes up and kisses you madly for no reason — perhaps only because he is unhinged (this has happened to me a couple of times in the last couple of years) but really, it’s worth going to a bar for that. If you don’t get it — and you don’t have to, then at least respect it. You can see the world of dimly lit and seedy bars in Ava Gardners eyes (after all she was married to Frank Sinatra and spent all her time with him either fighting or screwing — what could be better?) I love being alone in a crowded place and nursing my own dreams over a vodka tonic (but only the kind of dreams you won’t find on Netflix or the Disney Channel). This is all, of course, unnecessary and selfish, and if you didn’t think I was a frivolous and pampered, superficial old fag before, then you certainly think so now. Or else, you understand.
