"A Sunday Afternoon Repast..."

"Violin Music"

Oil on canvas

Robert C Rore

What I Like About This: La Musica Notturna delle Strade di Madrid (The Night Music of the Streets of Madrid) by Italian composer Luigi Boccherini is without a doubt my favorite piece of classical music.  If when you listened to it, it sounded familiar to you it may be because of it's performance in the film, "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" starring Russell Crowe (watch his performance here).  

However, if you're a gay man, you likely first heard this piece used in an earlier film from 1980, director William Friedkin's "Cruising" where it was used in the soundtrack during scenes of deep introspection by Al Pacino's character: a straight police detective sent undercover into NYC's gay subculture to hunt a serial killer preying on gay men.  I can remember seeing "Cruising" as a teenager and thinking to myself, all my worst thoughts about being gay are probably true. This film truly scared me and left me quite traumatized after seeing it.  Perhaps more than anything else, during those teenage and early adult years of my life, my memories of this film helped to keep me in deep denial and in the closet. I also remember that the only thing I liked about the film was this tune.  I wouldn't learn the name of this musical gem until the miracle of the internet arrived and it was revealed to me after many searches.  Surprisingly, the music was not attributed in "Cruising's" credits.

On a happier note, this same trope was used in a much more light-hearted film from just two years later in 1982, called "Partners" starring John Hurt and Ryan O'Neal.  In this film, Sgt. Benson (O'Neal) is a police detective sent in after a series of murders in the Gay community. However this time, he is ordered to go undercover with a gay police clerk named Kerwin (Hurt) as his partner (both literally, and figuratively). 

Unlike "Cruising," "Partners," was intended as more of a dark comedy lampooning the gay community than a murder-thriller. Nevertheless, it ended up being one of the least offensive and frankly most wonderfully sympathetic films of its genre. "Partners" instantly became one of my favorite films of my young adulthood and thankfully had the opposite effect of creating in me a small bit of hope that love could really exist between two men and that maybe, just maybe I might be lucky enough, if I ever became brave enough, to find a life that was more of "Partners'" and less of "Cruising's" imitation of life.

And while it stays up, here it is some 40 years after I first saw it... It's dated, but it's also a wonderfully feel good and somewhat bittersweet look back on a time before HIV/AIDS when the gay liberation movement had come into its own and we had begun our steady march towards acceptance.

 

The Wikipedia article for this film reveals some fascinating background and is well worth a read here.

About the title of this post: I'm using the word, "repast" in its archaic sense, where figuratively speaking it means, something that is intellectually or spiritually nourishing.