SCANDALOUS NOTIONS

On yesterday’s Michael Parkinson’s Sunday Supplement I was reviewing the new film release Notes on a Scandal with its much-lauded and Oscar-nominated performances by Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett.

Based on the best-selling, award-winning novel by Zoë Heller, the scandal in question is viewed through the eyes of Barbara Covett (Dench), an acid-tongued spinster who teaches history in a tough inner-city school.

Barbara is a loner with no friends, until the arrival of the new and seductively sexy art teacher, Sheba Hart (Blanchett) who, as Barbara puts it, causes “a few ripples on our stagnant pond”!

When Sheba embarks on a passionate affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil and is discovered by Barbara, the older women uses her knowledge of Sheba’s guilty secret to blackmail her into showing a level of affection for which she has her own, deep, illicit cravings…

What is interesting about the way in which the characters are portrayed is that Barbara’s lesbian desires for the younger woman are seen as menacingly predatory, while Sheba’s illegal affair with an under-age child emerge as being more tragically ill-advised as opposed to being simply wrong.

Although director Richard Eyre claims that he was attempting to make a non-judgemental film, cinematic conventions overtake that intent and the bitter lesbian (as in The Killing of Sister George) clearly emerges as the villain…

Whilst re-viewing The Maltese Falcon (see yesterday’s post) I was struck by the thinly masked portrayal of gays as villains. Of course, Peter Lorre's depiction of Joel Cairo is, of course, screamingly obvious...


The white gloves, the gold-handled umbrella, the gardenia-scented handkerchief and and an over-dandified manner - in fact Hammett, who unlike Warner Brothers, didn’t have to worry about the censors, simply called him “queer”.

But there is also the implication of a gay relationship between Sydney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman and his young body guard, Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jnr), whom he refers to as being like his own son. Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade, on the other hand, doesn't mince his words, calling Wilmer a "gunsel" - a bit of obscure yiddish street-slang for a young guy in a sexual relationship with an older man that was, in fact, so obscure, that it managed to slip past the usually vigilant censors.

In The Maltese Falcon, great film though it is, the premise is as obvious as it was permissable to be: Gay = Bent (by which I mean both crooked and not-straight) just as it does in such other films as Hitchcock’s films Rope and Strangers on a Train.

What is interesting - and sobering - is that 45 years on, being gay can still provide a useful cinematic shorthand for creating a character who is essentially a villain and, therefore, undeserving of understanding or sympathy…