More than Meets the (Heterosexual) Eye: Soldierly Queerness, Wartime Bisexuality, and Fred Zinnemann’s Films Starring Montgomery Clift
When it comes to director Fred Zinnemann’s two films starring Montgomery Clift – 1948’s The Search and 1953’s From Here to Eternity – there is certainly much more going on at the level of intriguing subtext than typically meets the (heterosexual) eye. In the years following the end of the Second...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Casa Cărții de Știință
2021-12-01
|
| Series: | Cultural Intertexts |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://b00e8ea91c.clvaw-cdnwnd.com/4fb470e8cbb34a32a0dc1701f8d7322d/200000407-d5ec8d5ecb/100-114%20Hart.pdf |
| Summary: | When it comes to director Fred Zinnemann’s two films starring Montgomery Clift –
1948’s The Search and 1953’s From Here to Eternity – there is certainly much more
going on at the level of intriguing subtext than typically meets the (heterosexual) eye.
In the years following the end of the Second World War, fears surfaced regularly in US
society about whether soldiers returning home would successfully be able to fit back
into the hegemonic expectation of being heterosexual family men, given that research
findings revealed many of them had participated in homosexual acts with some
regularity during their years of overseas military service. Such concerns are indeed
raised at the level of subtext quite efficiently in The Search, through the living
arrangements and emotionally charged interactions of Clift’s character and one of his
fellow military officers, and a bit more blatantly and elaborately in From Here to
Eternity, which to the careful viewer reveals itself to be a bisexual love story involving
two military men. Accordingly, this article provides in-depth subtextual analyses of the
bisexual undertones evident in both films, which were necessary in an era when
Production Code Administration restrictions prohibited explicit references to nonheterosexuality in all US cinematic offerings. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 2393-0624 2393-1078 |