(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
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As Mister Scoutmaster (1953) reveals, the complications of man-boy love arise inevitably in an organization that depends for its very existence on the contradictory celebration of male-male bonds and the suppression of male-male desire.5 At an especially hysterical moment in American history, the 1950s, when sexual outlawry became overtly linked with political outlawry, one film tried to reassure audiences that the Boy Scouts could manage to contain the threat of queerness in its ranks, making the Scouts a prop for Mom, Apple Pie, and the American Way. But using a famously queeny actor to accomplish this task of reassurance makes the film interesting to us fifty years later. In Mister Scoutmaster, one of Twentieth Century-Box’s biggest stars, character actor Clifton Webb, was lured into a pup tent with a Cub Scout and Webb’s fundamentally queer persona took on new depths of meaning. Mister Scoutmaster is a comedy that portrays a tumultuous man-boy romance within the stricter terms of normalizing the Scouts as a paramilitary organization dedicated to the national goal of winning the Cold War.
In the film, Webb plays Robert Jordan, writer and producer of a TV show on NBC called "Spectrum," threatened with cancellation by a network displeased with the show’s inability to attract children.7 After futile attempts to learn about children from reading a slew of crass comic books, Jordan finds himself, by accident, taking over a local scout troop in order to rub up against (metaphorically speaking, at this stage of the film) youth culture. Of course, the film presents boys as unruly little heathen, and Webb delights in dubbing them "sadistic mass murders," "psychopathic little liar[s]," "uncouth, uncivilized little savages," and "juvenile delinquents." In effect, Webb throughout fulfils the traditional stereotype of gay men as contemptuous of breeders and their offspring. Even the eventual object of Webb’s devotion, Cub Scout Mike Marshall (played by Winslow), is treated to his withering putdowns of children. But the film aligns itself with Jordan’s loathing for children — except for Winslow, they are all brats or little thugs, mocking authority, shrieking, sticking their tongues out, and wreaking domestic havoc.8 Their parents fare just as badly when they fall under Webb’s sniffy disdain — the film is populated by neglectful fathers and grotesquely overbearing or scatterbrained mothers. They all need a strong hand, and Mr. Jordan is just the man to do it. He whips his troop and their parents into order in short order, objecting to the "sloppy scouting" of his predecessors, and, as he puts it, overhauling "their little keels." Perhaps the boys and their parents are just gobsmacked into stupefied order by the exotic nature of their new scoutmaster, one who has his uniforms tailor-made (he is such a dandy), who bests them in verbal abuse (he is such a wit), and who pompously adverts to his superiority in scouting skills (and he is a surprisingly energetic and rugged outdoorsman, to boot).
1. Hundreds of churches, schools, corporations, charities, and local government authorities have cut or reduced their ties to the BSA since the Supreme Court decision, "Boy Scouts of America and Monmouth Council, et al., Petitioners v. James Dale." Nine major urban scouting councils have demanded the BS Headquarters in Arlington, TX modify the organization’s exclusion policy. Nationwide membership in the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Venturers declined 1.2 percent since the decision.
2. The Christian Right has aggressively countered the backlash by recall and legislation, culminating in the Helms Amendment in June 2001 designed to withhold federal funds from school districts that refuse to give the BSA "equal access" to meeting space.
3. That is to say, gays who are not closeted. "Openly known" homosexuals, to use George W. Bush’s charmingly imprecise phrase, are the object of the BSA’s policy of exclusion and expulsion. Justices Rehnquist, Day O’Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas ruled that the New Jersey Supreme Court was wrong in forcing the BSA to accept James Dale, who had declared his homosexual orientation while in college and while he was also an Assistant Scoutmaster in Matawan, NJ.
4. In 1953, after nearly 3 years of hysteria over "perverts" in government, fostered by McCarthy’s henchman Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry, Eisenhower issued Executive Order IO405 explicitly excluding homosexuals from federal employment. Thousands were fired in witch hunts.
5. The Boy Scouts was a product of tub-thumping British imperialism. The organization was founded in 1908 by Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell (1857-1941), hero of the Boer War. Less than reverent biographers, like Tim Jeal, have speculated on the degree to which the married Lord Baden-Powell was homosexually-inclined. Jeal also notes how, by the 1920s, the British Scouting movement actively suppressed public knowledge of the large numbers of pederasts in the organization, while Baden-Powell, who had a thing for watching lads swimming au naturel, countenanced the hushing up of some potentially explosive scandals.
6. Webb (1891-1966) began his show biz career as a musical-comedy dancer before World War I and became an unlikely movie star, at last, in 1944 as Waldo Lydecker in Otto Preminger’s Laura (much to the initial displeasure of homophobic studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck). The Belvedere films, which essentially transplanted a saner, but even more bitchy version of Lydecker to the suburbs, were: Sitting Pretty (1948); Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949); and Mr. Belvedere Rings the Bell (1951). Winslow (born 1946) is by far the most mature presence in Howard Hawks’ comedies Monkey Business (1952) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), populated as they are with perversely infantile adults.
7. Mister Scoutmaster reveals, like many films of the time (All About Eve and It’s Always Fair Weather to name two), a peevish contempt for the threatening new medium of television. But, ironically, the film’s indifferent, flat black and white visuals and cramped sets are more akin to 1950s TV sitcom than 1950s cinema. The film was directed by the workmanlike Henry Levin (1909-1980), whose last film was, fatefully enough, a TV movie called Scout’s Honor, starring that famous Hollywood lost one, Gary Coleman.
8. But the kids are lovable rogues and brats of the kind painted by Norman Rockwell rather than real criminals. They’re freckle-faced and cowlicked rather than dangerous and sullen. Most interestingly, two of the lads are African-American, providing viewers with the fantasy of racial integration in the BSA, at least (these two boys do not have lines to speak, however, so the fantasy only goes so far).
