film review:

THE THIRD SEX

Magazines running innocuous little articles often use the eye-catching gimmick of entitling such literary teacakes "Teenage Vice" (smoking in school), "Sin in a Nudist Paradise" (Sun Club's Annual Report). The Third Sex, a Swedish film dealing with homosexuality, uses this gimmick, but artistically, erotically and intellectually contributes strictly nothing to the problem and even less to the reputation of the Swedish film industry.

To encompass the entire homosexual question in a single film is impossible. To cope adequately with any single aspect of it with intelligence, sensitivity or authenticity requires artistic genius of outstanding caliber. This insipid film makes a brave attempt which is the nicest thing one can say about it.

A wealthy middle-class banker and his good wife come to the regrettable conclusion that their son is homosexual because he prefers art to banking and music to money. The film deals first with the father's ridiculous attempt to wean his son from a friendship with a genuine, but a trifle moronic, homophile youth. The story then covers the mother's attempt, after an ineffectual crusade for tolerance, to do likewise by bribing the maid-servant to seduce the lad. Brilliant dramatic material wasted.

Curiously enough the film springs to life only in the seduction scene, done with refreshing charm and deli-

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cacy, and the lyrical heterosexual love scenes which follow.

An abortive attempt at documentary is the father's search for his son which leads him through the gay bar haunts. Here a magnificient opportunity to capture pictorially the frenzied searching, the hysterical gaiety, the loneliness which is the core of the homophile's tragedy, is again wasted. An unconvincing scene of a drag floorshow, crudely treated in vaudeville fashion, emerges and the film's first step forward in sociology is achieved: father's discovery that beer and whiskey are a fatal combination, a fact that every male knows irrespective of his sexual inclinations.

The servant girl's performance, however, is excellent. Full credit, too, to the moronic homophile's mother who, in a one-minute scene with twenty lines to speak seated behind a sewing machine, subtly conveys the whole stunned horror and the agonized bitterness of the thing called acceptance.

The villain of the piece is an elderly roué, art dealer, philanthropist who gathers his handsome young charges at intimate affairs held behind locked doors and rejoices, by the name of Boris.

One such orgy, which the film insinuates forms the homosexual's regular social life, is the big scene, shot with both eyes firmly on box office returns. The setting is a hall luridly decorated with dragons, nude statuary featuring chiefly Apollo, masks and

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