Jocko de Paris was a gay anti-hero before his time. 1957, the year American films tackled so called subversive subjects, but homosexuality could only be presented as ' Strange ' or as one reviewer here cutely puts it ' The Evil One '. Yes, for most people it was evil and one of the characters is called Cockroach. He is the most visibly gay of all of the cast and what do the disgusted do to a cockroach; they cry out in horror and want to stamp it out. Jocko has to be ' bad ' to survive and he has to have power to survive among all these young guys who are there to end as men. ' End as a Man ' was the title of the book and play on which the film was based and at least in the UK they gave it its original title. Ben Gazzara is great at playing dirty seeing all too clearly around him that he does not want to end up as society's definition of a nice clean man. It could be no other way for him to succeed in the world he is in, but when the so called ' good ' seem to conquer him he cries out in a sort of manic triumph, ' I'll be back '. Perhaps I am being too prescient but these words seem to me to say that he and others will come forward and fight against the rigid rules of ' normality '. I might add that this film has been in the closet for years in the UK, only released again on DVD and BLU-RAY in 2019. At the time it was released it was a flop in a double bill with a comedy called ' Full of Life ' which seemed to me an act of camp normality against its unwelcome partner. I find the film extraordinary in its blatant eroticism. The shower scene alone tells all and the guys are playing away in their naked freedom, their military uniforms cast aside, and there is a sense in that scene that the freer decades were on their way. A must see film for its 1950's audacity.
Review of The Strange One
