Fireside sex grows cold

By Emerson Batdorff

In a movie when you see a couple sitting together by a fireplace and the glow therefrom is mild, you expect no hanky panky. But when the blaze is roaring, look out! The roaring fire is always a sex symbol in the movies.

I, for one, am getting tired of it. The most recent example was in "Forty Carats" in which Liv Ullmann and Edward Arnold were behaving themselves calmly on a beach in Spain until, unexplicably, the camp fire started roaring and they were off.

"Forty Carats" was not a very good movie, although it tried hard, and the cameraman somehow set up matters by the roaring fire so that it appeared for a while as though the happy couple was rolling right among the logs.

They never showed up scorched so I guess they kept away from being burned physically.

The blazing fire has become a movie cliche for physical love. It developed in the first instance not only because symbols often are more effective than actual depiction but because that way the moviemaker didn't have to show any of the actual events and thereby stayed out of jail. Censors were tough.

In "Phaedra." I remember, much of the love scene where the older woman seduced her stepson was photographed right through the blaze, as though the cameraman was standing in the fireplace.

The fire also works for homosexual encounters. In Women in Love" the celebrated naked wrestling match of two men took place before a raging fire. This left me somewhat cold because I could make no sense of the match; nothing further was said about the fellows being homosexual.

Usually, in a picture in which ardent love is shown by a raging fire. its fruition is similarly romantically displayed. namely by showing fields of ripening grain swaying in the wind, or peach trees ready for harvest.

I remember this sequence in "Ecstasy," although I had not gone to see the picture with that in mind; in fact I felt quite cheated after all the propaganda about the picture. I suspect there were several versions and Ohio imported the version rampant with symbolism while the straightforward one stayed in wicked New York.

Other symbols are not used as much in the movies as fire, but the ones that are used leave the feeling of being instant cliches. In "Wings," which came around again a couple of years ago, there was one. The young pilot, if you remember, is taken to a tent, where he is seen to be in very bad shape indeed. Then the camera focuses on an airplane with its motor idling idling idling. It stops: the propeller comes to rest. Obviously the pilot now is dead and in rather appropriate fashion too.

In "Lost Horizon” the symbolism got awfully close to camp, for some reason. The High Lama, an old man, lay dying after a full life and a productive one. The camera focused on a candle by a window. The curtain puffed as a breeze drifted in. The candle guttered and went out.

Why that was camp in the recent version I don't know. Most audiences could not know that the same thing happened years ago in the first version of "Lost Horizon,` in which the symbolism was beautiful. A different world. perhaps.

ism

Now, if someone would think up some new symbol-

•

*

•

:

3