A Very Natural Thing (1974) Queer Film (D)

DIRECTOR: Christopher Larkin.

The film opens with David, a 26-year-old ex-monk, leaving the monastery to begin a new life in Manhattan as a schoolteacher.

BOTTOM LINE: Christopher Larkin directed and co-wrote this film about a gay man in his late twenties searching for love in mostly the wrong places (in Manhattan and the Hamptons), aiming to market it to a general audience. It didn’t work. Possibly because it was ahead of its time, but mostly because it’s pretty awful. The hackneyed script, the terrible acting, the wall-to-wall padding, and all those dreadful haircuts! The lead character in the film was once a monk, as was the director, and the opening scene, where he bids farewell to his monastery brothers, is the only moment with genuine pathos. There is massive footage of NYC pride parades that lends nothing to the proceedings except to tell us that the director did not have enough material or ideas to fill his movie.

Today, it’s nothing more than a failed curiosity that barely gets a D for effort. It would be over ten years before such infinitely superior Queer Films as “Buddies” and “An Early Frost” (both in 1985), “Parting Glances” (1986) and “Longtime Companion” (1990) were released. Unfortunately, all of those films showed gay culture in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Tragically, the lead actor in this movie, Robert Joel, died from an AIDS-related illness at the age of 48 in 1992, while the director took his own life after being told he was in the latter stages of AIDS in 1988. The writer of “The Celluloid Closet,” Vito Russo, who also died from an AIDS-related illness in 1990, has a blink-and-you-will-miss-it cameo appearance in the film.

STREAMING: FandoR (YouTube)

https://thebrownees.net/88-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1968/

https://thebrownees.net/110-queer-films-from-the-new-hollywood-1968-1980/