Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs (1974)
I had yesterday off, mostly because it was the only day I could see between now and Christmas that I could take off so as not to lose the leave entitlement.
And I did manage to get quite a bit done: dentist, as aforementioned, making The Famous Aubergine Dip, doing my UK Christmas cards, various items of life administration, some website updates and an academic blog post.
I also managed to watch this cult movie (based on a 1966 play of the same name), which I never managed to catch when it was (rather briefly) in the cinema decades ago, but has now been issued by the BFI on Blu-Ray/DVD.
I'm not sure how far it would hold up for anyone who is not interested in the non-Swinging parts of the Sixties and issues around masculinity, or how far it works as a movie rather than a filmed play. It has been opened up but I got the feeling that several scenes probably worked better as stylised/expressionist theatre rather than quasi-realism, and it's all very much about the words, with characters who become intoxicated by the exuberance of their own verbosity. A post on the IMDB page about the film suggests that the actors were perhaps a bit too old (possibly a factor of the lag between the play and the film) to be convincing art students, though one could argue that there is meant to be a mismatch between their apparent adulthood and their childishness.
It gets the chilly discomfort of the times (paraffin stoves...). And for art students, the characters are really, really drab.
But what I found particularly intriguing was its take on issues of manhood. Malcolm Scrawdyke and his coterie (Wick and Irwin) like to think of themselves as rebels, outsiders, wild men, etc (Malcolm has just been kicked out of the art school) but we soon come to realise that they are pathetic ineffectual losers. They do not just fail to be successful with women, they have all sorts of issues around sex.
They become absorbed in juvenile fantasies of power and violence, involving a plot against the director of the art school (does anyone, ever, watch this play/film and think this project was at all likely to come off, even before the denouement?), and the formation of the 'Dynamic Erection Party'.
There is one significant female character who has to bear a lot of plot and symbolic weight. Malcolm fancies her but cannot even bring himself to ask her out, even though he's (not very effectively) stalking her. And she calls his bluff in a climactic scene.
But what I gave immense props to this work for, was that it was the antithesis of the misogyny of the Angry Young Men in several ways. The AYM tended to position their characters as rebels, outsiders, wild men held back by WYMMYNZ embodying the forces of conventionality and social oppression and their female characters thus tend to be punching bags (mostly in the metaphorical sense) for rage which surely would be better directed against The Man.
LM&HSATE inverts this. There are still costs for the woman, and I'd issue a trigger warning here about a scene of violence at the end to anyone who might be moved to watch this film. But even then it needs the three main characters to egg each other on.
There is also a male character who is another loser fantasist but doesn't give himself over to the brutalist quasi-fascistic cult of Dynamic Erection. Denis Nipple is a bit of a Fotherington-Tomas who goes along with Malcolm and the others (more like Grabber ma than Molesworth) because they're his mates (even though he's in an almost constant state of disagreement and contradiction with them) and then suffers a crazy mock-trial and ostracism.
So, anyway, interesting. I wouldn't mind seeing the play, which I believe occasionally gets performed.
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