PLAGUE DIARY 19: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Set Up (1949)
Robert Ryan plays Stoker, a small time prizefighter past his prime. He’s still got hope though. His girlfriend Julie played by Audrey Totter (a poor man’s Lana Turner) begs him to quit. "Don’t you see that you’ll always be — just ‘one punch’ away?” But Ryan says quietly (cuz he’s a simple, straightforward, lean and handsome guy) “If you’re a fighter, you gotta fight.” But he knows “in this business you’re an old man when you’re 35.”(It’s all very gay, as 35 is when most gay men realise they are really old). One time when Robert Ryan gets knocked down — the fight in this film lasts for a third of it — that’s 25 minutes  — and it’s a friggin’ amazing fight) as he’s struggling to his feet under a countdown he sees a sign that says “Are you 35? Try Vim.” And when Ryan is introduced in the ring — instead of applause — someone shouts “Hey pop! Where’s your wheelchair?” Done at 35, like so many of us. The audience is brutal, and it’s one of the two clumsy things in this film (the other being Audrey Totter’s performance). The director, Robert Wise (he also directed The Sound of Music) depicts the fight audience as ugly, bloodthirsty, louts, yelling “Kill him, Kill him!” And even worse: “Cut him to pieces!” And they smoke fat cigars, rocking back and forth, with crazed looks in their frenzied eyes, one fat man is eating everything in sight — and a woman in a pretty hat is yelling loudest for over-the-hill Robert Ryan to die. It’s a bit overdone, I mean I know we are all beasts but also we’re just human, give us a break. And Audrey Totter is so bad. But it doesn’t matter because Robert Wise has given her a gorgeous film noir landscape to act in front of; neon signs like The Cozy Hotel, Rooms-Beds-Hot-and-Cold-Weather, Penny Arcade, Tattoos, Chop Suey, King’s Ale,  Paradise City, Dreamland, a fire escape with swirling coloured lights and a girl laughing, and finally — another fat man virtually eating a cigar and reading a magazine called Thrilling Love — it’s all just so juicy you could eat it. This is my world, It is the world I was born into. I was staying at my grandmother’s — she was my favourite “Nana.’ (My father’s mother scared me. When I went to visit my father’s mother once she said, ‘oh you’re getting so fat we’ll have to buy you fat boy’s pants’ — it totally traumatised me for a year. Did she have no idea what such a statement could do to a young fag?) But my mother’s mother, Nana, read Dorothy Parker and rhapsodised about Barbra Streisand (‘Don’t you just love her’ — she used to say to me about all the gay icons— she said that about Carol Channing too). And looking back on it now perhaps she knew my secret, and perhaps that’s why she left that magazine in her living room for me to find. It was a copy of Life magazine — June 26, 1964 (I was 12). I opened it, thinking there would be pictures of movie stars, and there was the terrifying headline ‘Rejected by the Straight World, Homosexuals build a society of their own.” It went on to say “in big cities, homosexuals are discarding their furtive ways, and openly admitting, even flaunting their deviation.” I can’t remember whether I even read the article — but the pictures, oh the pictures. It was the sleazy, smokey, film noir world of The Setup — men in leather jackets in dark bars, men in suits smoking under street lamps, limp-wristed men laughing, talking, drinking and yes flirting with each other, openly brazenly, without any shame. These were ‘The Homosexuals.’ Well, I instinctively knew that I was one of them, and that their world was also mine. I was  sitting in my Nana’s living room in Norwich Connecticut — a yellow, clapboard, one-story, ranch house, that she owned with my step-grandfather (he was a Bell telephone repairman). Though New York City was only a 45 minute drive away, it might as well have been on another planet. But Life magazine transported me there. Was it comforting to meet ‘my people’ for the first time (and simultaneously discover my identity)? It was a nightmare. I had had ‘feelings; ever since I met Tad — Thaddeus Aloysius Popcorn Crohn (Tad’s grandfather discovered Crohn’s disease, we met when our bikes collided in Buffalo). Tad and I fooled around when we were 9 years old. And Tad started it — which was a betrayal, He convinced me to get naked with him one Saturday morning after a sleepover. My father opened the door on us once and I was terrified. But he just said ‘how are you two bathing beauties doing?’ Which was oddly, both confusing and calming at the same time. Our sleepovers were the centre of my life until Tad suddenly decided we couldn’t fool around anymore. “But why?” “I don’t know, I just don’t think we should.” “But why?”  No answer. I remember when Tad said this, he was lying in bed with me, with his pyjamas on, holding a tin of ‘Twinkle’ silver polish “Do you think this stuff really works?” All I could think of was — you started this thing Tad, you made me go crazy for you — and now you care more about some damn silver polish than me? But always those idyllic sun-drenched Saturday mornings after sleepovers with Tad would not leave my mind. And when I saw the magazine — how did I know there was a connection between nine year old boys getting naked and ‘this social disorder, which society tries to suppress’ so clearly catalogued in Life?  Since I ‘came out’ my life has centred around alcohol, bath houses, strip clubs, and of course gay bars. Cavafy — the greatest gay poet of them all (except for Frank O’Hara) — lived above a bath house in Egypt. So, well, I live above a bath house in my mind. I cannot imagine the attraction of being normal; all normalcy repels me, my identity is a film noir movie, and the dingy streets of The Set Up transported me there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a middle class gay man and I live in a nice house.  And oh, the dialogue! Robert Ryan, desperate, in an alley, beaten by the crooked fight-fixers who wanted him to throw the fight, but he wouldn’t because he just had to win: “They wanted me to lay down” he says ‘but I was takin’ that kid.’ Then he realizes — in literally the last minute of the movie — “I can’t fight no more.”  And he says: “I won tonite,” meaning that he won the fight — but the greater win is that he’s come to terms with the fact that he’s just too old, and has to quit. Audrey Totter kind of ruins it by acting too much when she coos, breathlessly ‘We both won tonight” her eyes filling with tears (glycerin?). But hey, you need bad acting in a movie like this. It’s corny theme is that you have to learn to retire when your time comes.  Duh. Well, I haven’t quite learned that lesson. I’m going down with this sinking ship; meaning the vision of myself as outsider in some demented alley, hell-bent on getting piss-drunk and struggling up that wall. I know you’re probably thinking — ‘Hey that’s you’re world and you’re  welcome to it!’ And it’s kinda not real. But it is real. That is, in my mind.