I’m watching Don Siegel’s RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11 (1954) for the first time, thinking how great it is, how the issues regarding prisons have hardly changed since it was first released, how superb it looks….and then you come to the inevitable homophobic moment and the heart sinks. According to the film, gay men should be separated from ‘normal’ prisoners and placed with the ‘nuts’ and ‘looneys’ into a separate psycho ward, bringing to mind Trin T Min-ha’s phrase that there’s a ‘third world in every first world and vice versa’. I do think the scene reflects the times and some reference to homosexuality is probably inevitable in a prison film. But I think that it is also a mark against the film.
CONVOY (Sam Peckinpah, 1978) surprised me. I’d avoided it upon its first release thinking it a sub SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT rip-off but was encouraged to see it recently when Dîna Iordanova described it as being about civil disobedience and protest, which it is. And unlike the experience with RIOT IN CELL BLOCK 11, I was delighted by this bit, a joke I suppose, but one countering some of the dominant stereotypes of its time, at least outside gay porn.
