Otto Preminger Invents the Gay Best Friend in ‘Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon’

Scripted by Marjorie Kellogg from her novel of the same name, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is a breezy collection of odd scenes whose tones vary from horror to humor to Gothic camp to surreal expressionism and subjectivity. All of this, perhaps more than in any other movie, evinces director Otto Preminger’s taste for tonal ambiguity — not to say clashes — in addition to our own ambiguous identification with many of the characters within a shot. To his standard carefully framed scenes of busy activity by actors and camera, Preminger adds competing stylistic devices that caused no less a critic than avant-gardist Jonas Mekas to praise the film, essentially for its queasiness.

Preminger had pushed at the boundaries of Hollywood censorship during the ‘50s and ’60s, so he was ready for the mature New Hollywood ushered in by the MPAA rating system, which assigned Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon — this now-tame period piece — a “GP” (a rating soon transposed into “PG”). There’s brief nudity, a casual acceptance of sex, a brutal scene of violence, and a constant tease about homosexuality.

The film centers on Junie Moon (Liza Minnelli), who is always referred to by her full name and who’s had half of her face scarred by battery acid in a horrific attack. This nightmarish event, recounted in an early flashback as she gazes at her new half-face in a mirror, is by far the most disturbing and unpleasant sequence. If this scene, as a part of the new permissiveness, implies that said permissiveness will be punished, it also makes clear that the punishers will be uptight squares whose seeming respectability hides psychopathic impulses.

Junie Moon has made friends in the hospital with two other misfits. Arthur (Ken Howard) suffers from the mysterious “Hollywood” disease, in this case resembling epilepsy and also linking the picture with the same year’s Love Story and such recent romances as Sweet November (1968). One might also mention the suicidal vogue of art-house hits like Elvira Madigan (1967) and Double Suicide (1969), but let’s not digress.

Warren (Robert Moore, out-diva-ing Minnelli) has been in a wheelchair since a mysterious “hunting accident”, apparently a teenage sexual pass that went badly. He’s pushy and bitchy and gets along famously with the other two, telling Arthur: “I’d rather be a queen than a ridiculous virgin.” Arthur tells him not to wink because “You’ll make me think you’re queer or something,” to which Junie Moon burbles “So what if he is queer? You don’t have to wink back.” This is a progressive stance for 1970 Hollywood, and it’s credible that Warren is willing to be showy without quite being blunt, and that his housemates learn to accept it quietly. By the way, Moore was an acclaimed theatre director whose hits included the 1968 gay drama The Boys in the Band.

The three of them instantly find a cheap fix-up for rent at $50 a month (this is 1970!) and set up housekeeping. Their landlady (Kay Thompson in her third and final film) is a rich eccentric who flounces through, spreading the aroma of Old Hollywood, especially with Preminger as her chauffeur (a detail unmentioned in online references). She leads the misfit trio through a bizarre sequence at her castle that seems designed to critique “positive thinking” and miracle cures.

Here’s more of the film’s ambiguity, for the story is full of eccentric characters without endorsing their behavior as uniformly good or bad. The crazy landlady is “good” for renting the house, but she’s also self-absorbed to the point of cruelty and dictatorship (thus making her a sly double for Preminger as director). Meanwhile, the equally self-absorbed Warren is often “bad” or at least of highly ambiguous morals as a scrounger and trickster who tries to run everyone’s lives from his chair and scam something for nothing. For their ambiguity, the characters are at once eccentric and realistic, even when couched or chaired in highly formal and artificial presentations.

At a beach hotel, Warren flirts with Beach Boy (pre-Blaxploitation Fred Williamson, very winning), a huge friendly shirtless black man who’s apparently a bisexual gigolo. He’s the bluntest character about Warren’s sexuality, along with a white hustler whose arm Warren twists for catty remarks, and something must be said about his presence as the movie’s sex object. Beach Boy radiates the kind of self-confidence that white racists called “uppity” at the time, and his openly ambiguous sexual demeanor feels all the more groundbreaking because he’s the “stud” type, rather than the “queen”. The “stud” may be a black stereotype, but it wasn’t quite established in films yet during an era when Sidney Poitier was all in three-piece suits, and certainly not in a non-hetero context.

Notice how he defuses the potential denigration of “Call me Beach Boy” by insisting that he’s saving his real name until he owns this place, as he glances around with determination. His final line to Warren is another potentially embarrassing one: “Us black people have to stick together.” I mentally rewrote it as “Us po’ folks” to make it sound better, but it’s still clumsy. It connects with an anecdote recounted by Chris Fujiwara in The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger, when Beah Richards on the set of Hurry Sundown (1967) questioned Preminger’s knowledge of the black experience. “How do you know I’ve never been black?” he asked, winning the argument.

Just to surprise us and Warren, a poetry-quoting African-American beauty named Solana (“People can’t help what their name is,” says Junie Moon) seduces Warren on the beach. While this is a believable one-off in the scheme of life and especially 1970, a heady collision of Black Power and post-Stonewall, it carries the air of reassuring a mainstream audience that might have been uncomfortable with Warren. We can presume that all these innuendos would have been enough to have some viewers shift in their seats, and not in a good way.

Vito Russo singles out this strategy for criticism in The Celluloid Closet, and the criticism is justified in a certain context. In the real world, people are flexible enough to cross lines and experiment from rigid boundaries when the opportunity presents itself, and Russo would have had no cause to complain if Hollywood movies indulged a trend of curious straight guys taking a walk on the wild side. In the absence of any such trend, all the line-crossing was in the direction of accommodating the audience’s normative impulses.

Thus, the newly-hatching permissive stereotype of “the gay best friend” rarely saw any action. Yet in Preminger’s early example of this new type of film character, the social reassurance is folded into what remained socially perverse, for if the “queer” is going to make it with a “chick”, at least it’s a black chick; outsider to outsider. They make it because they can both quote Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and the mad, bad, dangerous Byron, which renders them simpatico. Some may object that these poets represent “white culture”, but the giants of art are both universal and despised or ignored by the masses, so Warren and Solana happily identify as cultural elitists who make contact out of intellectual isolation.

On this point, it’s important to report that Kellogg, who was hired by Preminger to write the script even before her novel was published, told Fujiwara that she found Preminger “very supportive” and that what she wrote is basically what wound up on screen. She even won the ending she wanted. So rather than be quick to blame Hollywood or Preminger for any perceived compromise, sexual or otherwise, we must acknowledge the creativity of this lesbian writer.

On a tangent connected to the ambiguous landlady, the nosy neighbors are suspicious of the odd trio, so the nasty husband (James Beard — not the famous chef) gets Arthur fired from his job at a fish market by spreading rumors that he’s a “sodomist”, which Arthur’s boss Mario (James Coco) has to look up. He later apologizes to Junie Moon for caving in to the rumors about Arthur as a “sexual deviant”. This is before he knows anything else about the ad hoc household.

Mario, who clearly moons for Junie Moon from the first time he saw her half-face, is another odd satellite character of lonely pathos who belongs to the story’s bumpy weave, which seems prepared to admit everyone into its haphazard world from any random direction. Coco and Elaine Shore (who plays the neighbour’s wife) had acted together in Next, a two-character Terrence McNally play seen by Preminger. Coco became a well-known comic actor, appearing in Preminger’s Such Good Friends (1971), while Shore landed a role in the sitcom Arnie.

The intolerant squares are clearly thorns in the side of the movie’s outlook, none more so than the scary acid guy (Ben Piazza) who apparently gets away scot free in a creepy sequence that plays with subjective sound effects. It’s probably significant that ultimately the most endangered character is the one who carries society’s aces: the tall handsome white male. Perhaps on a symbolic level, the story implies that there’s little room in the modern world for the old hero types, or at least those who can’t live up to their expectations.

The film is crammed with characters and incidents only hinted at here, with Anne Revere and Nancy Marchand as hospital workers; Emily Yancy as Solana; Clarice Taylor as an elderly African-American woman on her deathbed, presented as a tragically sweet misfit who’s not long for this movie; Leonard Frey (of The Boys in the Band [1970]) as an unexplained fantasy figure from Warren’s past who figures in two very gay-whimsical flashback-digressions, which co-star Angelique Pettyjohn; Julie Bovasso as a woman in Arthur’s anamorphically squeezed hallucination/flashback that makes the characters around him look black and white; and Pete Seeger singing in the opening and closing credits as he strolls among sequoias in a sequence shot by Stanley Cortez.

The film is shot with a sense of freedom and beauty by Boris Kaufman, often with scenes presented in a single smoothly gliding take, whether outside (e.g., Beach Boy’s dune buggy speeding down the street) or indoors (e.g., Junie Moon and Arthur’s bedroom and dance scene). Preminger’s efficiently complex staging of scenes is one of his most consistent pleasures. Most scenes reward study without calling attention to themselves, and a few are self-conscious doozies. Get a load of the shot where Junie Moon leaves the frame in the foreground before we zoom into a background reveal of the person she’s seeking, Arthur, just before he’s surrounded by spooky dream-figures who swarm out of the darkness around him and vanish as quickly. That’s a master showman.

In line with their previous Preminger releases, Olive Films provides an HD transfer on this extras-free Blu-ray that looks very good and will undoubtedly win fans to a failure of its time. It remains an odd movie with some unconvincing material, but it’s very disjointedness is, paradoxically, part of its holistic nature. What should be unwieldy becomes an intimate examination of unconventional people’s refusal to remain isolated, as well as a snapshot of the moment when New Hollywood was being reborn from the ashes of the old.