The Strange One

Trying to go through the backlog of movies I've got on my DVR, and trying to watch some older movies, I recently decided to watch The Strange One.

The opening credits are superimposed over a jigsaw-like montage of pieces of darkness being removed to reveal what looks like it could have been a Tom of Finland drawing, which is actually not inappropriate considering what's to come in the movie. Anyhow, after the credits, we are transported to a southern military college which is imaginatively named "Southern Military College", where all the cadets are going to barracks for the night. They are, of course, expected to remain there until reveille in the morning.

And of course, some of them don't remain there. Jocko De Paris (Ben Gazzara at 26) is an upperclassman who rooms with Harold Koble (Pat Hingle at about 32). Jocko has decided that he's going to fleece football player Roget Gatt (James Olson) in a poker game. But, he's going to use a couple of freshmen to help him do it. So he and Harold barge in to the room of Robert Marquales (28-year-old freshman George Peppard) and the very mousy Simmons (Arthur Storch), Jocko acting as if he owns the place.

In some ways, he does, because he's a nasty little bully that nobody can ever bother to stand up to in part because he's also ridiculously manipulative, knowing how to get people to do what he wants. In part, they won't rat on him because they too would be punished for not having done anything right at the start.

One cadet who does try to do something is young Avery, who is the son of one of the higher-ups in the school, Major Avery. He breaks curfew to tell the commanding officers something is going on, although he has to know that there's going to be enough time for Jocko to get away with getting everybody back to their own rooms. Still he does it, and Jocko punishes him by liquoring him up and beating him before depositing him on the quadrangle.

Maj. Avery suspects something is wrong, but he's somehow unable to get anybody to speak, not even his own son, who you think would have told him that Jocko had a couple of freshmen beat him. Simmons is the one person who hates Jocko enough to think about doing something, but he's also the biggest coward of the bunch, and Jocko would basically out Simmons as a homosexual and a communist, regardless of whether or not Simmons is either.

In fact, there seems to be a lot of latent homosexuality going on here, including one fellow student, McKee, who's writing a novel that's a thinly veiled biography of Jocko in which McKee seems to be pouring his own repressed sexual desire for Jocko. This subplot is largely independent of the investigation into young Avery's beating.

The Strange One is one strange movie, and frankly, one that I found hard to like. That's in no small part because Jocko is such an unlikeable character right out of the gate, and the movie never really lets up on his nastiness. I was thnking of the previous movie I blogged about, About Last Night, and how Jocko is basically Bennie and Joan on steroids. The other characters around him are also all the way on the other side of the spectrum in their spinelessness. Further, it doesn't help at all that a lot of the dialogue felt incredibly unnatural to me.

Fortunately, the dialogue is the one thing that does let up as it starts to feel less stilted. The story, however, doesn't. So The Strange One may be a maddening watch for many of you.