The Mark (1961)
About a heroic child molester.
The Mark starts with Jim Fuller (Stuart Whitman) moving to a new city to begin a new life. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this is a movie about starting over, perhaps in the life-affirming dramedy tradition of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) or Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). But no: Jim’s starting over because he’s just been released from prison, and he was in prison because he abducted a child.
“Attempted child rapists” aren’t typically guys you want to root for, and as the movie progressed, I found that, no, I was not rooting for Jim, even as he begins a romantic adult relationship with Ruth (Maria Schell1). To make Jim appear more sympathetic, the film shows us many scenes of him with his therapist, Dr. McNally (Rod Steiger), who argues that Jim has been “absolutely cured.”2 Perhaps this is intended to make the viewer less skeezed out when they discover that Ruth has an 11-year-old daughter, Janie. Here are Jim and Janie, unsupervised at the carnival.
The climax of the film is Ruth discovering Jim’s “mark” (that he committed a heinous crime) and having to decide whether or not to stay with him. And, with all the fanfare that accompanies great love stories, Ruth lets love conquer common sense. Look, I’m not going to write a whole thing about therapy and recidivism and whether child sexual predators can be rehabilitated. But this film is a well-made but fundamentally gross love story between a child sexual predator and a woman who has a child.
Rating: 4/10. Who thought this was a good topic for a movie?
Cast and Crew
In six months I know I’ll mix up this film, Room at the Top, and Sons and Lovers. They all take place in midsize English towns, are stodgily paced, have awkward love stories, and have mild-mannered protagonists with anger bubbling just beneath the surface. Stuart Whitman is the lead of this one, but for reference, I’ve put him side-by-side with Laurence Harvey and Dean Stockwell.
Anyway, Whitman worked a long time in both movies and TV, but he’s not well-remembered.
We’ve seen Rod Steiger once already in On the Waterfront, where he played Brando’s mobster brother who meets a bad end. Here are some of Steiger’s other roles in the ‘50s:
In 1953, Steiger starred as the titular character in the “Philco Television Playhouse” TV play “Marty.” You’ll recall that he was replaced by Ernest Borgnine in the film version.
Steiger played scene-stealer Jud Fry in 1955’s Oklahoma!, which means he’s the subject of the banger “Pore Jud is Daid.”3
Steiger won a Best Actor Oscar for a big-deal ‘60s movie that’s coming up, so we’ll talk more about him then.
The Trivia
When Jim moves into a rooming house, he finds a painting of “The Blue Boy” by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) on the wall. He reminisces that his mother loved “The Blue Boy” and his therapy group points to this as being a potential cause of his affliction, so today we’re going to discuss paintings that will make you a pedophile are from the Georgian period. Below, check out “The Blue Boy” and the another painting it’s typically exhibited with, “Pinkie.”4
Gainsborough was rivals with another famous English portrait painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). Now, you may look at Reynolds’ “The Age of Innocence”…
…and wonder what could possibly divide these two men. Well, Reynolds was the academic, aristocratic one who was the official court artist of the royal family and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts.5 Gainsborough, on the other hand, was less theoretical and more spontaneous—he was the “fun” one. Of note is that “The Blue Boy” was painted as a direct challenge to one of Reynolds’ “rules” about portraiture—that one should avoid greens and blues.
Another contemporary portrait artist of Gainsborough’s was Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842) of France. She fit into the Rococo artistic tradition, where works were more elaborate and ornate6, but her bread was buttered by painting portrait after portrait after portrait of Marie Antoinette.
But if portraiture ain’t your thing, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Le Brun overlapped with some major continental artists, including Francisco Goya (1746–1828) and Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), as well as American John Singleton Copley (1738–1815). And if some future movie blames, I don’t know, “Watson and the Shark” for inciting genocide or something, we’ll be here to cover it at Knowing Without Understanding.
Odds and Ends
Dr. McNally is referred to as a Harley Street specialist; Harley Street is a London street with many medical practices…Dr. McNally mentions that “small girls […] can be seductive,” which, goddammit, no they can’t…Ruth cooks Jim a dish of sole Veronique, which is an Auguste Escoffier recipe that garnishes sole (a fish) with grapes…when Jim starts crying in Dr. McNally’s office, McNally immediately offers him whiskey, which feels like a solution you don’t need an advanced degree to provide…when Jim hears the bells tolling, he asks if they toll for him, referencing John Donne’s Meditation XVII from “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions”…Brenda de Banzie played Gertrude, the woman who runs the rooming house Jim stays in; de Banzie also played Archie’s noisy wife in The Entertainer.
She’s the older sister of Maximilian Schell, who we’ll be seeing very soon in this column.
McNally argues that Jim’s desire for children stems from Oedipal trauma and relates to his concerns about the responsibilities of adult relationships.
Adult women weren’t acceptable. They made demands. They became a threat to you. And you were in terror [about] what could happen. Then, when you quit your job, you began to drift. You were too restless to work. You were looking for something. Do you understand Jim? Whether you know it or not you were looking for an answer to your physical problem. You began looking for younger and younger girls, girls still too young to have experience, who wouldn’t challenge you.
Look, I’m not here to do backseat psychotherapy, but didja consider that this dude might just be a pedophile?
The video’s top YouTube comment: “[A showtune] where the protagonist encourages the villain to commit suicide and everyone is just like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.”
Formally, “Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton: Pinkie.” It’s a Thomas Lawrence painting (though a previous version of this post erroneously stated it was also by Gainsborough—thanks to commenter Yogesh for the catch). Both “Pinkie” and “The Blue Boy” are on exhibition at the Huntington in San Marino, California.
There were two female founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts: Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. I first came across Kauffman, a Swiss Neoclassical painter, in this Trivia Factorial post.
Interestingly, the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts, after the death of Reynolds, was Benjamin West (1738-1820). He was a Neoclassicist known for his history paintings, including “The Death of General Wolfe” (a British officer who died during the French and Indian War) and “The Death of Nelson” (showing Horatio Nelson’s death after the Battle of Trafalgar).
"Pinkie" was painted by Thomas Lawrence, not Gainsborough