Go Ahead ‘N Ask: Bless the Beasts and Children - By King Daevid MacKenzie

The question was asked me the other day, what was the first movie I ever saw where I actually felt sympathetically towards a character identifiable as Gay? I didn’t have to think very long about it. I saw it in 1976, when the film was already five years old (I was 15).

Bless the Beasts and Children. Since moving to Arizona last year, I’m amazed at how few people I’ve met here have ever seen the film or read the 1971 Glendon Swarthout novel. (Perhaps the reference to Country Joe & The Fish dated the book too badly?) Many recognise the title because they’ve heard the Carpenters record of the movie’s theme song, the B-side of their million-selling 45 “Superstar.” In Wisconsin in the ‘70s, it seemed to be a mandatory part of the high school English curriculum, as it was taught at three (Neenah Armstrong, Oshkosh North and Kenosha Tremper) that I attended.

Swarthout is said to have been the quintessential Arizona author, having written in more genres about more events he set in this state than almost anyone else. A later novel, The Shootist, became John Wayne’s “valedictory” movie (so Leonard Maltin says). With Bless the Beasts and Children, Swarthout wanted to show that he “got” what was at the core of the youth counterculture of the time. He wound up giving a gift to the human spirit that still moves me today, 32 years after I first read it. In the novel, six misfit adolescents are shipped by their affluent parents “back east” to Box Canyon Boys’ Camp, just outside Prescott, for a summer. One of these is Gerald Goodenow, a Cleveland 13-year-old whose family, if you looked up “dysfunctional” in a dictionary, provided both definition and illustration. Gerald’s brutal stepfather had told the boy’s mother, with Gerald in earshot, that B.C. is the last chance she’ll have to avoid having to “buy him a dress and cosmetics.”

Goodenow is hardly the only Charlie Brown in this crowd, and they all wind up in the same cabin with a rockheaded counsellor called Wheaties and the contempt of the rest of the campers and staff. One day, Wheaties decides to “treat” his charges to a bloody slaughter of “worthless dings,” a herd of penned buffalo that are shot by meatmen who errantly fancy themselves to be “hunters.” Wheaties’ “treat” backfires on him when, after being told how worthless the rest of the Box Canyon population consider them to be, Goodenow and his cabinmates strongly identify with the buffalo and set out the next night to free them from the slaughter pen.

The film made of the story was produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, who had made a career out of “message pictures” like High Noon, On The Beach and Inherit The Wind. Kramer probably thought Bless the Beasts and Children would be his Easy Rider, documenting a pocket of the youth counterculture of the day that wasn’t being covered yet by Hollywood. As it happened, another picture was released almost the same week as Kramer’s that literally covered much of the same territory, Billy Jack. Tom Laughlin famously planted his foot on a standing redneck’s cheek in the very same Prescott business district where Goodenow and his friends hotwire an exterminator’s pickup truck to get to the buffalo.

As he was cutting the film, Kramer was also teaching a film course at Brigham Young University, and he had planned to screen the world premiere of Bless the Beasts and Children at BYU as part of that course. But when the BYU administration saw the film, they banned it from their campus because of Goodenow & Company’s “rebellion.” Actually, I fully believe the mission the boys undertake in this movie and novel is truly Christian; when Jesus commanded his followers to “love your neighbour as yourself,” I’m convinced he wasn’t just speaking of those neighbours of the same species as we are.

Past Swarthout’s wisely using a Gay teenager in his story of redemption (and Kramer just as wisely refusing to water down that character’s identification as Gay), the film has another Family connection that I hadn’t learned of until just this year. The actor playing the self-appointed leader of Goodenow’s band of misfits, Cotton, was Barry Robins. Bless the Beasts and Children was by far his most famous work. Only fifteen years later, on the 1st of April, 1986, Barry Robins died, one of Hollywood’s earliest AIDS fatalities. If nothing else that I’ve written here has justified your tracking down the video and watching this picture, do it to pay tribute to Robins. His memory deserves it.

And while on the subject of cinema, I’ve promised myself I’ll be spending the 12 Days of Christmas writing the first draft of a film script of my own. So, while I shut off the Ameche (I refuse to become a Victim of Telephone, a la Ginsberg’s poem, while working on this thing), you can visit kingdaevid.podbean.com for my latest podcast offerings, contact me at thevoiceoflabor@hotmail.com and join me in getting out of the year alive. Whatever your holiday is, have a great one and we’ll be back to work in a couple of weeks or so.