Has Great Britain sent us a film of social and political significance? So it would seem from the reaction of a large portion of the American press to Another Country. The first clarion call came from the palms and the temples of the Cannes Film Festival, where New York Times correspondent E. J. Dionne, Jr. wrote that Another Country was an indictment of the “cruelty and hypocrisy of the old British class system.” He also thought it brought “a fresh eye” to the problems of adolescence. When the film opened in New York, Newsweek found it “seductive, graceful, and clever,” made with “intelligence and craft.” Rex Reed, writing for the New York Post, said the film had “fire and inspiration.” A reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, no less, felt it offered “powerful, poignant insights into the hypocrisy and foolishness of the British schoolboys who would become the country’s leaders.” On a more popular level, Harper’s Bazaar compared Another Country with Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire as a “romantic exercise in nostalgia.” According to Us magazine, it was a “luscious look at Oxford preppies in the 30’s that turns into serious, fascinating drama. Don’t miss.”
The innocent reader of all these encomiums might be surprised to learn that in terms of allotted screen time, Another Country is first and foremost a rhapsody to the beauties of homosexuality. It is, furthermore, narcissistic, elaborately self-pitying, and smug. The reader might likewise be surprised to learn that the movie was (in the words of the press handouts) “inspired by” the story of Guy Burgess, the upper-class Englishman and Old Etonian who, along with Donald Maclean, Kim Philby, and Anthony Blunt, betrayed his country and ours to the Soviet Union. Scholars of the Korean war feel that thousands of young American soldiers may have died along the Yalu because of the treachery of Burgess and his stylish friends. But all is apparently forgiven now, at least by most of America’s film critics. Besides, the film’s hero, Guy Bennett (Burgess), wears some absolutely delectable English upper-class apparel.
Aside from enjoying the film’s “lusciousness” and “nostalgia,” its “seductiveness” and “grace,” critics were in almost universal accord that the film is an attempt to explain why Guy Burgess betrayed his country. Its answer is that he was a mistreated homosexual. His film surrogate, Bennett, because of his blatant and indiscreet sexual conduct, is denied selection at Eton as one of the school “gods” (a kind of superprefect). If you deny a young man one of Eton’s top honors for such a hypocritical reason, the film seems to be saying, how can you expect him not to become a Soviet agent?
To be fair, several critics found the film’s explanation of Guy Bennett’s treason “reductive” or “inadequate.” On the other hand, none seemed exactly horrified by the act of treason itself. This is rather curious in view of the fact that the editorial pages of some of the periodicals in which the reviews appeared quite regularly work themselves into fits of trembling at the possibility that a single American life will be lost in the effort to prevent Central America, or perhaps even Mexico, from being incorporated into the Soviet empire. But maybe the loss of thousands of American lives in Korea through an act of shameless treason seems anodyne to the same papers’ film critics (if, indeed, they’ve even heard about it).
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Originally a play which ran for two years in London, Another Country was adapted for the screen by the play’s author, Julian Mitchell, and directed by Marek Kanievska (an Englishman with the strangest male Polish name I have ever encountered). The film begins with a five-minute scene in Moscow. A young American woman reporter is passed through a security check at the entrance to a residential compound, then mounts to a distinctly fusty apartment where a stiff old man is wheeled into her presence in a wheelchair. It is Guy Bennett (Rupert Everett). He had wanted fame, he says. He had wanted his name to live in history. “Even as a Russian spy?” she asks. “You have no idea what life in England in the 1930’s was like,” answers Bennett. “The whole despicable English background.”
To show the despicableness of the background we cut straight to Brasenose College, Oxford: golden gothic stones, acres of well-manicured greensward, a small river, a beautiful stone bridge. (The film is shot throughout in a style worthy of still reproductions in Town and Country or Vogue.) For the purposes of the movie, Brasenose College has become a school something on the order of Eton, and in the opening frames of the main story we see the whole student body assembled in semi-military formation in the grand court. But even as the young gentlemen are singing a hymn, two of the students—playing hooky perhaps—are caught by a master engaging in furious homosexual activity in the gymnasium changing room. Soon Martineau, one of the perpetrators, has hanged himself, and there is the devil to pay. The “gods” assemble (all, as a mark of rank, are allowed to wear their flowered waistcoats with their dark cutaway morning coats); there is a drive on to “clean up” the school’s various houses.
But Guy Bennett, now young and sulkily romantic, presses ahead with his ardent sexual vocation as if there were no tomorrow. Without a glimmer of reticence or discretion he propositions his best friend and roommate; when turned down he jibes glibly, “Everyone gives in in the end! It’s Bennett’s Law!” He ogles a “beautiful” younger boy in another house through binoculars, and proclaims his love for all to hear: “And I shall lay my heart at his feet!” He misses no chance to denigrate heterosexuality, the school, the military, the empire, and, in fact, patriotism.
Bennett is not consistent, however. He confesses to his mother when she visits one weekend that he aspires to be one of the school’s “gods.” “What’s that, darling?” Bennett (impatiently): “The school elite, mother! The crème de la crème! It’s the only thing that makes it all bearable, the thought that one day I’ll be on top of the whole stinking heap.” His life’s ambition is to be British ambassador to Paris, and he is afraid that if he fails to become a “god,” the ruling circles will say of him in years to come, “He isn’t quite one of us, you know. You see, he wasn’t a god, just an ordinary prefect.” Almost whimpering, Bennett imagines the dreadful fate of being sent as ambassador not to Paris but to Haiti.
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What with Bennett’s announced hatred for “the whole despicable English background,” one might think the film would show us something of the contrast between rich and poor in England during this period, or express revulsion at some of the more extreme perquisites of the pampered rich. (Bennett: “Champagne. I’ve been drinking champagne all day and it doesn’t pay to mix drinks, my goodness.”) Not a bit of it. The only despicableness we are shown is the denial of Bennett’s ambition to be a “god” because he is a flamboyant and obstreperous homosexual. Nor is the slightest suspicion raised about the bona fides of a person avid to hold high position in a system he feigns to despise. To become a “god” is Bennett’s overriding goal, the engine without which Another Country’s plot would not advance at all.
As it is, it advances only creakingly. Will A or B become a “god”? Will C or D become a prefect? There are lots of ins and outs. The film has four key characters. The first is Bennett, our romantic, hedonistic, but—until his great disappointment—apolitical homosexual. The second is Judd (Colin Firth): somewhat implausibly, Bennett’s heterosexual best friend, an earnest and “idealistic” Stalinist who cannot seem to open his mouth without spewing forth Communist agitprop (“Stalin’s working day and night to drag his country into the 20th century; I can’t abide it when they sneer at him”). The third is Fowler (Tristan Oliver), Bennett’s antagonist: stolid, manly, patriotic, concerned with the honor of the house and school, hostile to Bennett because of both his extravagant homosexuality and his all-around fecklessness. (Bennett turns out for military parade so negligently uniformed as to disqualify his whole house.) Straight as a die, Fowler is of course given no clever lines. The fourth is Menzies (Frederick Alexander), a “god” and shrewd manipulator.
At the end, Fowler catches Bennett pursuing a mad homosexual fling with a younger boy and nails him. Bennett is caned and humiliated before an assembly of the school “gods.” Through some fancy footwork, Menzies manages to put Bennett out of the running for the “gods” the following year. And, in the last scene at the school, Bennett, crushed, walking broodingly with his Stalinist friend Judd, says (as if it were a logical development from the events we have been shown), “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Communism were true?” “But it is true,” answers Judd. Straight cut to Moscow for a one-minute closing scene, with Bennett an old man in a wheelchair again. The woman reporter asks, “But don’t you miss anything at all?” Bennett, after some reflection, admits, “I miss cricket.”
The film ends with one of those printed “crawls” in which we learn what happened to the various main characters. Judd (idealistic) died fighting in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. Menzies (cynical) became Chancellor of the Exchequer before entering the House of Lords. Fowler (the author’s wish-fulfillment) resigned from the army in 1959 with the rank of major and is now retired obscurely after an unsuccessful career in business. And Bennett, we know (although we have not been shown), became a Soviet agent, betrayed his country, and finally defected to Moscow—all because they frowned on his brazen homosexuality and did not make him a “god.”
What the “crawl” does not tell us is what our principals would have done during the great war into which their country was about to be plunged. Leave aside Judd, already dead in Spain. Bennett, we must infer, would have been a Soviet mole somewhere in British intelligence. Perhaps he would have passed along to Moscow British codes and ciphers as well as U.S. nuclear secrets to which the British were privy—both things done in real life by Donald Maclean. Menzies and Fowler, with their military training, would presumably have served under the colors, and Fowler in particular might well have been decorated for valor at El Alamein. But Another Country is not concerned with praising brave men who saved their country in its hour of peril; it seems to prefer traitors, at least if they underwent an ordeal that deeply stirs our sympathies, such as not becoming a “god” at an imaginary Eton.
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The critics almost unanimously felt that this film is not “judgmental,” that it seeks only to “explore” and “investigate” why such privileged young men as Burgess, Maclean, and Kim Philby betrayed their country. I can only say: balderdash. The laws of the cinema are virtually immutable. The fact is that Bennett is good-looking. He is witty, clever, and engaging. The action is shown entirely from his vantage point. Guy Bennett is the film’s hero, for the same reason and in the same way that the Corleone family and mob are the heroes of The Godfather: the story is told from their point of view.
It would obviously be absurd to suggest that audiences of Another Country are being urged to go out and commit treason. But for the intended public of this film, it is also plain that treason is not what it used to be. When Burgess and Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in the early 50’s, there was a violent surge of outrage in Great Britain. For today’s intellectual, artistic, and academic elites and their hangers-on, however, it would appear that treason—at least on behalf of the Soviet Union—is now some sort of forgivable misdemeanor.
Other intriguing questions are raised by Bennett’s act. Although inordinately sorry for himself, he is after all sane. Are we to believe, does he believe, that the Soviet Union, which even at the time he was giving it his allegiance was murdering and starving tens of millions of its own people in the Great Terror, purges, and the forced collectivization of agriculture, was less tyrannical and hypocritical than his fictionalized Eton? Does one thwack of a cane on an upper-class English hide outweigh, let’s say, a million dead in Vorkuta, Dalstroi, or the Kolyma gold fields? Another question: since offended homosexuality is at the heart of this story, are we to believe that homosexuals are treated more benignly under Communist regimes than in the West?
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One of the difficulties in exposing the evils of Communist repression is that there still is relatively little evidence to offer of the seeing-is-believing sort. It is therefore extremely interesting that France’s Antenne 2, a television network entirely under the control of France’s Socialist government, should have recently co-produced Improper Conduct, a two-hour documentary on Cuba’s savage repression of its deviants, a repression that has fallen with particular ferocity on homosexuals. Improper Conduct is directed by Nestor Almendros, a Cuban exile widely considered to be the world’s greatest cinematographer (seven films for François Truffaut, six for Eric Rohmer, and in this country Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie’s Choice, and the spectacular Days of Heaven for which he won an Academy Award). Its co-director is another Cuban exile, Orlando Jiminez Leal, whose El Super won several international awards. When aired, Improper Conduct reached the largest audience of any documentary in French television history.
The term “improper conduct” is in some ways the Cuban equivalent of Russia’s “anti-Soviet behavior,” the supremely vague charge under whose guise totalitarian states imprison anyone they have a mind to—when, indeed, they post any charge at all. In this year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Castro’s advent to power, thousands of Cubans are still in prison or labor camps for “improper conduct.”
Improper Conduct begins with a startling event. In the fall of 1966, when the prestige of the Castro regime was still high among Western European intellectuals, prima ballerina Alicia Alonso and the Cuban National Ballet Company danced Giselle in Paris. After two performances, ten of the company’s dancers asked for political asylum in France. The event created a sensation, at least in Europe. Was it possible that Castro’s Cuba wasn’t the paradise Jean-Paul Sartre had been saying it was?
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At this point, the film offers a brief résumé of the Cuban revolution: a surge of euphoria after Batista’s downfall, quickly followed by disturbing signs. Under the growing influence of the old Cuban Communist party, Castro, that “Jeffersonian Democrat,” opted for an alliance with the Soviet Union and began a total collectivization of agriculture and all means of production. Furthermore, the revolution almost immediately adopted an extremely harsh, puritanical stance on morals and sex. With the militarization of the regime, things became even worse; as early as 1960 came the first round-up of “antisocial elements.” Homosexuality was lumped with prostitution, drugs, and corruption as a product of “decadent capitalist society,” and was dealt with far more severely than under Batista.
Around 1965, the situation hardened still further. A number of forced-labor camps were set up in the Camagüey district; anyone suspected of dissidence, members of certain religious sects (Jehovah’s Witnesses), and thousands of homosexuals were arrested on mere denunciation and deported to the camps. By 1969, people were being rounded up on the streets and in public places for wearing their hair too long, for dressing in “foreign” clothes, for looking too effeminate. The age of criminal liability was lowered to sixteen. Dissident intellectuals were completely expunged from public life. Writers were sentenced to eight years in prison for simply sending literary manuscripts abroad. People were arrested in the streets and imprisoned for “extravagant” behavior in public. It is one of the ironies of our age that U.S. hippies, who adopted their style of dress largely in protest against American “bourgeois” values, would have been arrested on sight in Cuba and sent to a labor camp enclosed in electrified barbed wire. It all sounds rather more harsh than being deprived of the rank of “god” at Eton.
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The heart of Improper Conduct is a series of 28 interviews with Cuban exiles, all of whom were victims of oppression in their homeland. They include the poet Heberto Padilla, whose imprisonment unleashed a worldwide wave of protest; the writer Armando Valladares, jailed for twenty-two years and freed thanks to the intercession of French President François Mitterrand; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the novelist and former editor of Cuba’s literary magazine Lunes; Carlos Franqui, former editor of the official party newspaper Revolution. Aside from these world-famous writers, we have painters, dancers, doctors, workmen, students, and even Caracol, a popular transvestite nightclub performer. Collectively, the picture they give of repression in Cuba is overwhelming.
Not overwhelmed, however, was B. Ruby Rich, Film Program Director for the New York Council for the Arts and the author of a three-page article calling Improper Conduct a “litany of evil” and giving Fidel Castro a clean bill of health—this, in American Film, the organ of the tax-supported American Film Institute. Miss Rich’s article contains four lines of what could properly be called film criticism: the rest is straight political apologetics. Another critic who has attacked Improper Conduct along the same lines as Miss Rich is J. Hoberman of the Village Voice; Mr. Hoberman is also a contributing editor of the same American Film. And to turn to another sector of our cultural establishment, it will be very interesting to see whether the tax-supported Public Broadcasting Service, whose New York affiliate has to date aired four pro-Sandinista documentaries, will run Improper Conduct after the movie finishes its theatrical release. Or will this film, produced under a Socialist administration in France, which attracted the largest audience of any documentary in French television history and won first prize at the Strasbourg Human Rights Film Festival, prove too “right-wing” for America’s cultural bureaucracy?
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Nestor Almendros, who survived several years under Fidel Castro, says that when he encounters people who do not prize the freedoms they possess in Western democracies, or who admire such countries as Cuba—which is all too frequent—he would like to sentence them to serve two years, not in a gulag but as ordinary citizens in the Marxist-Leninist country of their choice. Such a sentence would be richly deserved by many, and even the authors of Another Country would surely find the experience bracing.
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