Till the End of Time (1946)
All the leads were Marines, but it was overshadowed by The Best Years of Our Lives. Guy Madison plays Cliff Harper. Okay, we must stop here. He’s a tall blonde, with twinkling eyes and a full, eminently kissable, pair of lips. He’s absolutely juicy. At times, it was impossible to watch the film because of Madison’s beauty. And also because he can’t act. I was unsurprised to learn he was discovered by talent agent Henry Willson (recently portrayed by Jim Parsons in the Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood) who also discovered Troy Donahue, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, John Saxon (and many more). Each one of those actors absolutely steals every scene with their skin, eyes, and hair, and none of them can act. In Hollywood, Willson is depicted as a tragic (but very human) old drag queen, but I think he must be praised for bringing a gay sensibility to film. These spine tingling dunderheads are alarmingly attractive — Guy Madison of course has a bathing suit scene, and is often depicted in bed, with his furry chest and downy limbs exposed, his tender young face pressed adorably into a pillow. His stunned stunningness demanded a queer aesthetic from heterosexual director Edward Dmytryk (I know he was heterosexual because he met his future wife — the diminutive Jean Porter — making this film). The camera can do nothing but adore Madison in precisely the way it adores empty-headed female actresses Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, and Lana Turner (to name a few). It doesn’t help that the dialogue is, at times, ridiculous. Just before Madison kisses Dorothy Maguire (who is nothing but touching and coherent) for the first time, he says: “I saw you and funny things happened.” I kid you not. My super-active erotic imagination was already working hard on imagining the poor young buck fending off an emerging erection. Still confused by such strange, new, bodily sensations, he searches his tiny brain: “It isn’t love. What is it?” Maguire, helpful and somewhat quicker of mind, offers some alternatives: “Growing up? Eighteen months in the Pacific? Juke box joint? And a room that’s not too crowded?” At all these moments Guy Madison is simply there — not even a deer in the headlights — just there; he reads as registering nothing, literally as having no emotion or thoughts, as an utter zero. On the other hand, this makes him incredibly appealing to me. Now, I also find John Garfield attractive, but I am honestly distracted by his prodigious acting talent — and I even forget Marlon Brando’s lips occasionally (in Streetcar) when he’s going crazy with anger or working class pomposity. It’s kind of like when you’re in love with a new acquaintance, and you figure out the only way to become un-in-love is to get to know him. Perfectly formed bad actors catch us at precisely the point when we can steal a glimpse behind the mask that is their visage, and understand they are vulnerable people struggling, quite helplessly, to express a depth of emotion they simply do not possess. It is somewhat like having sex with them. We can peer inside and watch them searching for a missing profundity — and we not only sympathise, but we intimately know them, in the biblical sense. There’s nothing else really to go on about here, because if you have seen The Best Years of Our Lives you know it -- it’s basically standard ‘back from war’ fare. The guys have trouble adjusting — one has no legs, another has the shakes, and Robert Mitchum has a plate in his head. (Mitchum is a case in point — because although as perfect as Guy Madison — he can act, so our interest in him is differently directed; we actually hear what he says.) I don’t mean to be cold and callous, but I am. I wasn’t touched by any of this, and as I have already said, I am a coward, but really it’s not that. I can’t imagine what men like this have gone through, but I am not of the opinion that they should have gone through it, or that we should congratulate ourselves for living in a world where such things happen to anybody. There is one other line that stuck in my head. Near the end Madison says “I’ve been scrounged. I’m robbed of three and a half years — somebody stole my time.” This is odd syntactically; I don’t think the word 'scrounged' is correctly utilized. Google says it means to “seek to obtain (something, typically food or money) at the expense, or through the generosity of, others, or by stealth.” Dare I say the screenwriter might have made an error? Have these proud, bold, young wounded warriors been robbed of time by ‘stealth?’ For that would mean they have been robbed unjustly (they certainly have not been robbed by anyone’s generosity or at anyone's expense). Well we all have been scrounged for the last three months — as it is going on three months that we have been under lock down. Agreed, it’s not eighteen months, and it’s most decidedly not a war, because I have learned something on this American Memorial Day (I’m not mentioning Canadian Victoria Day because we were robbed of that by stealth, we were scrounged.) All old war movies offer the same message, that whatever the horrors of war, wars are also teeming with life. Yes hurried, frenzied, anguished, final days for some - but they are also times when people really live. That is something we cannot do during this ‘pandemic.’ And I would be proud to give up three months of my life — or longer — if I actually thought it was doing anybody any good. Jesus Christ during my life I could actually have had a successful career and made some friggin’ money if I hadn’t come out of the closet. (There I said it.) So don’t tell me I’ve never made a sacrifice. But what I’m not pleased to do is to give up even five minutes of my life for the pious lie that is COVID-19. More trope than disease, it demands we forever dive into the digital world, disappear into our families, and most of all, embrace victimhood. A fully orchestrated, lush Chopin’s Polonaise sweeps in every time Guy Madison sees -- or even thinks -- of Dorothy Maguire in Till the End of Time. It’s a tacky rewrite of a timeless classic transformed into a pop song. But I was immune to it here. I couldn’t care less about whether I’ve got COVID-19 antibodies, but after watching so many movies out of loneliness, fear of impending madness, and sheer desperation -- yes, I do fear one thing that is much, much more frightening — and that is -- because of this damn COVID-19 -- I will become immune to bad old movies.
