Play It As It Lays (1972) Queer Film C-

Frank Perry’s Play It As It Lays is a bleak, sun‑scorched portrait of psychic collapse—an adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel that exposes, perhaps unintentionally, the creative void left by the absence of Eleanor Perry, his longtime screenwriting partner and the emotional architect of his best work. This was Perry’s first film after their divorce, and her absence is felt in every hollow space the film cannot fill.

Perry collaborated with Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, on the screenplay, and the result is a film that captures Didion’s chill but not her interiority. Tuesday Weld plays Maria Wyeth, a drifting actress who wanders the grounds of a mental hospital, recalling the chain of betrayals, abortions, and emotional abandonments that led to her breakdown. Her husband (Adam Roarke), a self‑absorbed director, neglects her; her lovers blur into one another; her pregnancy ends in an illegal abortion; and her only true companion is B.Z., a gay producer played by Anthony Perkins with a weary, brittle elegance.

B.Z. is the film’s most overtly queer presence, though the role is underwritten—another iteration of the “doomed homosexual” trope that Perkins, through no fault of his own, was repeatedly asked to embody. His final scene, in which he invites Maria into a suicide pact, should devastate. Instead, it feels like a foregone conclusion, a gesture toward tragedy rather than an earned emotional crescendo.

The film’s most vivid sequences are the ones in which Maria drives endlessly along Los Angeles freeways. In the early 1970s, these concrete ribbons were still considered marvels of modern engineering, and Perry shoots them as existential corridors—vast, impersonal, and strangely beautiful. In these moments, the film briefly comes alive, finding a cinematic equivalent to Didion’s interior monologue: movement without direction, freedom without purpose.

Weld is good—cool, opaque, and quietly anguished. Perkins is compelling but constrained by the script’s thinness. The rest of the film drifts, elegant but inert, a mood piece in search of a pulse.

Play It As It Lays belongs in this survey not because it is a great film, but because it is a perfect artifact of its moment: Hollywood nihilism, queer despair, and the collapse of meaning in the wake of the studio system’s demise. It is Didion’s California rendered in images—sun‑bleached, airless, and quietly lethal.

STREAMING: YouTube.

https://thebrownees.net/85-queer-films-made-under-the-hays-code-1934-1968/

https://thebrownees.net/85-queer-films-from-the-new-hollywood-1968-1980/

Psycho (1960) Queer Film. Hitchcock. A+ – TheBrownees

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) Queer Film Focus – TheBrownees