7 - Bums and Dark Alleys: Constructing Queerness in a Mid-1960s Greek Noir

Summary

Film noir is (in)famous for its representations of gender and sexuality: neurotic men, voracious women and, last but not least, flamboyant (male) queens, such as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (dir. Huston, 1941) and Waldo Lydecker in Laura (dir. Preminger, 1944). Important scholars see noirs as being about thinly veiled homoerotic relations between men (Krutnik 1991: 143; Dyer 1998a: 117–18; 2002: 110, 113, n. 20; Apostolidis 2009: 73, 93). Furthermore, in films such as Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951) and noir director Otto Preminger's 1962 adaptation of Allen Drury's 1959 novel Advise and Consent, homosexuality was constructed in a paranoid fashion as a threat to the US security state, while recent works have brought to the fore Raymond Chandler's unacknowledged homosexuality (Fuller 2020). In the 1964 Greek noir Amfivolies/Doubts (dir. Grigoriou), the character of the villainous Koronelos is basically played as a queen by Paris Alexander.

Kyriakos (2016) categorises the 1965 B-movie To remali tis Fokionos Negri/The Bum of Fokionos Negri (dir. Karagiannis) under ‘masculinity’. The film features stylistic and thematic elements today identified with noir: cynicism, nihilism, pessimism, fatalism, lust, greed, sexual perversion, corruption, obsession, betrayal, crime and murder. The ending is dark. The film employs the noir underworld milieu, including recognisable noir character types, one (at least) homme fatale and the male noir queer. The same year The Bum was released, one of the few texts on male homosexuality in Greece of the time was published in a mainstream Greek magazine. The film and the article discussed in this chapter taxonomise specific masculinities and sexual identities as ‘deviant’, while discursively constructing the Greek male queer.3

Karagiannis's film narrates the story of Alekos (Alkis Yannakas), a handsome young hustler and member of a group of no-goods. Alekos becomes involved in a scheme in which he has to seduce a 30-year-old virgin, Mary (Alexandra Ladikou), and swindle her out of her money. Mary becomes obsessed with Alekos. Her friend Dina (Efi Economou) and Mary's middle-aged suitor, the lawyer Nikolaidis (Andreas Filippides), unsuccessfully try to talk sense into her. Alekos's behaviour towards Mary quickly turns sadistic. To avoid losing him, she showers him with gifts and money. Yet no amount can satisfy his decadent lifestyle.