Ciara Moloney
Two characters are getting drunk together. They could be consoling each other, forming a new alliance, or squaring up for a drinking contest. Before the audience sees how things develop, there’s a smash-cut to the next morning. One of them, still half-asleep, rolls over or cuddles closer, and realises they’re in bed with the other. They wake up in shock and horror, wondering what on earth they did last night.
You’ve seen this scene. It’s such a classic sitcom trope that subverting it is an equally classic sitcom trope. The characters may or may not have slept together; what matters is that the audience or the characters assume they did. Even if that assumption is wrong, it’s the pretext for a comic misunderstanding. The visual vernacular of the sequence is unambiguous.
This exact sequence plays out in The Westerner (1940) between Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan.
Cooper plays Cole Harden, a drifter who arrives in Vinegaroon, a Texas town run by “the only law west of the Pecos,” self-appointed Judge Roy Bean (Brennan). They have an acrimonious beginning when Harden is accused of stealing a horse from one of Bean’s cronies. In Bean’s court (his saloon), the accusation alone normally merits a hanging: the town undertaker eagerly awaits his next customer. But that changes when Harden claims to have met English actress Lily Langtry, and even have a lock of her hair. It’s a lie, and it works: Bean is a Langtry stan – papering the back of his bar with her pictures – and suspends Harden’s sentence. That night, they toast to the lock of Lily’s hair and drink whiskey out of beer mugs. Bean downs his with ease. Fade to black.
When we rise on the morning, Bean is snoring. His room is trashed: chairs knocked over, playing cards scattered on the floor. He and Harden are asleep on a single bed, Bean’s arm wrapped around Harden’s shoulder, Harden’s legs perched awkwardly on a wooden beam. Harden wakes first, and Gary Cooper plays the moment of realization in the same key as Kelsey Grammer would when Frasier gets in this kind of situation. His eyes bug, and when he tries to sit up, he notices the hand on his chest with alarm. His eyes follow the line from the hand to the body it’s attached to, and he screws up his brow in confusion. He gently lifts Bean’s hand up to climb out of his grasp. He tip-toes around the room trying not to wake him.
Bean does wake, and sits up very slowly.
“Good morning, Judge,” Harden says.
“Who are ya?” Bean asks, after a coughing fit, “What are ya doing here?”
He asks Harden to straighten out his neck, since he gets a crick in it when he “don’t live right.” He looks intensely at Harden, and asks him again who he is. As Harden, Cooper gives the kind of charming smile that makes movie stars: at once knowing and sheepish, private and warm, sweet and funny.
“Don’t you remember?” Harden asks. He tells him about the horse, and pats his arm.
I’ve seen this scene a thousand times, and every time, I was meant to assume the two characters had slept together, blackout drunk. The idea isn’t at odds with the rest of the film: it recasts Bean’s obsession with Lily Langtry into a classic sublimation of feelings into a parasocial relationship with a celebrity, for instance. But it would still be easy to write this instance off as a weird outlier: after all, it’s a trope that post-dates The Westerner by a few decades. You need to be able to show two unmarried characters in bed together, with the real implied possibility of extramarital sex, to carry it off, and The Westerner was made at the peak of the Hays Code. Even if that wasn’t the case, audiences in 1940 could hardly have been expected to imagine an off-screen gay tryst between two otherwise avowedly heterosexual characters. I’m sure paid-up John Birch Society member Walter Brennan would be pretty upset to think they would.
But the assumption that 1940s audiences didn’t know about homosexuality, let alone could have been gay themselves, reflects what David Byrne called in his book How Music Works “the high self-regard of those that live in the present.” Anyone who watches movies from the Code era knows that filmmakers often snuck forbidden ideas past the subtext-blind censors. William Wyler directed The Westerner—the same William Wyler who told Stephen Boyd (but not Charlton Heston) that their characters were in love in Ben-Hur (1959), and who remade The Children’s Hour in 1961 because his original adaptation in 1936 (These Three) swapped out the lesbianism in the play for adultery. If any classic Hollywood director would have Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan characters have sex off-screen, it’s Wyler.
“The Westerner” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Kanopy, Hoopla, and several ad-supported streamers.
