Love is A Many-Splendored Thing (1955)
This film is deemed offensive because Jennifer Jones, a white woman, was cast as ‘Eurasian.” But at the time Love is Many-Splendored Thing was a small step for mankind and a defense of miscegenation. (Much more offensive were the Canadian censors who cut all references to the fact that William Holden’s character was married .) The filming was apparently a nightmare: Holden and Jones hated each other, and Jones — married to movie mogul David O. Selznick — kept yelling “I’m going to tell David!” Holden shaved his chest hair so it wouldn’t offend the ladies (probably a good idea, he spends at least 10 minutes of the film in a bewitching bathing suit.) Nothing can save this film. Sure, the theme song is so beautiful you find yourself crying whenever you hear it (extraordinary how potent cheap music is!). I wanted to like Love is a Many-Splendored Thing, because I spent six months of my adolescence having anxiety attacks over A Summer Place—also a thin romantic melodrama with a gorgeous theme song. (Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee are yearning so hard for each other it strains the fabric of their swimsuits.) The longing in A Summer Place got under my skin, I couldn’t stop listening to the that song and wishing I lived in the movie. It all started in grade 6, with Kathy Marletty and Jeff Rubach —the popular kids at Harlem Road School in Buffalo. Cathy had a pool with a red brick wall around it (did I ever actually see it, or did I just dream it?). When I discovered one summer she had pool parties and I wasn’t invited, the vastness of my loneliness nearly killed me. This has always been my problem — and why I find it necessary to go out at night and drink and have sex. After all, that’s where the fun is, isn’t it? I can’t stand the idea of other people having fun and not me. (Thank God for COVID-19 — invented only to teach people like me how to meditate.) My need to be at the centre of the action caused me to miss the 80s (it was just palliatives, pot, poppers and penises — nothing out of the ordinary) which I should feel sad about, but I had so many men that it would be self-indulgent for me to regret. Jennifer Jones and her character are certainly self-indulgent in this movie; Jennifer is a Joan Crawford-esque actress (she doesn’t perform anything but her own beauty — and she won an Oscar for something why?) Like Crawford she loved playing these holier than thou (Song of Bernadette) roles. There is a kind of religiosity hanging over this movie; the title is from a poem by Francis Thompson 'Tis ye, tis your estranged faces that miss the many splendored thing.’ The poem is not bad. but it’s pious — pointing to the moments of holiness in daily life. This is the kind of movie that will be sanctioned for viewing by Disney in the ‘new normal.’ In 1955 I was three years old but I soon learned from movies like this that sex was awful and I would probably be burned at the stake for being gay. Jennifer Jones doth protest so much that you want to say ‘You are responsible for #Metoo!” She knows that William Holden is married (except in Canada where they wouldn’t tell us) so she constantly plays hard to get -- enshrining her virtue -- as when he says: "I think destiny intended us to be together," and she says: “I don’t think destiny intends anything for us,” and later: “I believe in the human heart right now, but only as a doctor.” Yes we know you are as pure as the driven snow Jennifer, just as we believe you are ‘Eurasian’ though your skin colour and eye shape changes from scene to scene. The script is filled with embarrassing pseudo-profundities. Jones rhapsodizes about their love, comparing it to the insignificant entanglements of lesser plebes: “Even the fat ugly people in this world believe that love justifies everything and makes them beautiful.” (So sorry that you had to say that line Jennifer). And less offensive (unless you think about it too much) is —“pity the poor people with their sad faces who have missed what we have.” I would not want to never-have-been-in-love and be forced to watch this film. Or maybe it’s actually designed for people with sad ugly, fat, faces who will see it, have anxiety attacks, and slash there chubby wrists. I am, however, in love (have I mentioned that?) and I think what drives me crazier than anything is that people think I’m lucky. Jesus Christ, I don’t know what drove me to yoke my fate to this crazy person, to hang my hat on this particular high chaparall (which google defines as “a dense impenetrable thicket of shrubs or dwarf trees.)” The fiction is this: love is about meeting every Thursday at noon on windy hillsides in crisp technicolour. No: it’s about cat litter and broken air conditioners in black and white. I’m not against love, I just hate it when people make out like it’s easy, or think that because you are in love you’ve got it better than them— or, to be more precise, those who think that somehow life is less of a struggle if you’re in love. On the contrary I am in love because I worked damn hard for it and still do and ignored a lot of bullshit and compromised a lot and gave up a lot and settled. In other words you love him so much that you gave up some of your dreams for him, except of course, your dream of him. Because that dream still exists in some nethernetherland at the end of your tether, where anxiety and longing supposedly cease (however that hasn’t happened to me yet). I am of two minds about movies like this. On the one hand I can’t keep a straight face when Jennifer Jones (speaking to Holden of her dead ex-husband) says, again and again “I have never known another man but my husband.” (You mean you’ve never met or talked to another man, Jennifer? What exactly are you getting at?) But then there is also Jennifer and Bill Holden in their twin swimsuits (Holden’s flat little tummy is tucked in ever so slightly so you can see his yummy man muscles); they are veritably bursting with passion. But Holden doesn’t, God forbid, screw Jones or even just press her gently into the sand (the 50s are so repressed) he lights her cigarette — but no, not with a lighter, by pressing the lit end of his cigarette to the unlit end of hers. This movie is straining for something we are all straining for; but I won’t say so few of us have. It’s something none of us ever have, these days, anyway. It’s called actual spontaneous human contact of some kind, it’s called a good old fashioned flash of sudden unexpected intimacy, it’s called a spontaneous unrehearsed hug or a spontaneous, unrehearsed orgasm. And you can quit talking about God, and just friggin’ realise that shit is holy.
