David Secter (1965)
Lloyd-Eyre Morgan and Neil Ely’s Departures late morning, David Secter’s Winter Kept Us Warm mid-afternoon: it was fascinating to watch both these films – made sixty years apart, screened just a few hours apart – at BFI Flare. I was drawn to Secter’s first because of its Eliotian title then, once I’d read the brochure blurb, by its antiquity. The characters are students at the University of Toronto, where Winter Kept Us Warm was shot in black and white. The timeframe extends from late 1964 to early 1965 (the winter during which T S Eliot died, coincidentally). Same-sex sexual activity in Canada for consenting adults in private wasn’t decriminalised until 1969. This means – as Flare programmer Zorian Clayton, introducing the screening in NFT1, explained – that Secter’s film is extensively ‘coded’. That may be an understatement. Winter Kept Us Warm is thoroughly opaque – but that opacity adds to its historical interest. It also has an amusing aspect. David Secter was in his very early twenties, still a Toronto student himself, when he made the film, on a $750 grant obtained from the University’s students’ union. He advertised for cast members in the student newspaper: several of those who ended up in the film were unaware the story had gay overtones or undertones.
Even though Winter Kept Us Warm has recently been restored, it takes a while, watching it now, to adjust to the lack of technical sophistication, especially the sound quality. The writing – Secter shared the screenplay credit with Ian Porter and John Clute – is far from primitive, though. The main characters are two students, Peter Saarinen (Henry Tarvainen) and Doug Harris (John Labow), apparently chalk and cheese. Peter is a shy, unconfident freshman, reading philosophy and English; Doug is a popular, gregarious senior student, reading economics. An introductory sequence cuts between their road journeys to the halls of residence – Peter in the back of a taxi with plenty of luggage, Doug driving his own car and travelling light. Secter uses different pieces of music to accompany these journeys – a thin, almost plaintive little melody for Peter, a jazzier arrangement for Doug. Peter, whose ancestry is Finnish, lives somewhere in rural Canada and, in his first few weeks as a student, receives a regular supply of parcels from his mother – extra blankets, Finnish pastry. Doug’s background is metropolitan; in one scene, he meets up with his parents in Toronto. He also has a regular girlfriend, Bev (Joy Tepperman). One of Winter Keeps Us Warm’s strongest elements is how Secter defies expectations, encouraged by the initial impression given of his protagonists. The stage seems set for shy, somehow feminine Peter to fall in love – unrequited love – with handsome, self-assured Doug. Something like the reverse happens but another of the film’s strengths, thanks in part perhaps to its persistently muffled quality, is that it’s not quite as simple as that.
To earn some pocket money, Peter signs up, as other freshmen do, to wait on tables in the student refectory. Doing his first session there, he finds Doug the most volubly derisive of a group of senior students; soon afterwards, Doug realises that he’s upset Peter and that upsets Doug, too. It’s from this point that their friendship starts to develop but with Doug usually taking the conversational lead and Peter seeming to welcome Doug’s protection, not least in social settings. Doug’s other friends, including Bev, seem amused that he bothers spending time with awkward, diffident Peter. It’s after the turn of the calendar year that the ground starts to shift. Peter auditions for a part in a student production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and surprisingly (to the film’s audience, it must be said – as well as to Peter himself and to Doug) gets the part of Oswald. As he grows in confidence during rehearsals, Peter also gets friendlier with Sandra (Janet Amos), who plays Mrs Alving and is much more experienced than Peter, as a student stage performer and romantically. As Peter spends more time socially with Sandra, tensions grow between him and Doug, whom Bev finds increasingly distracted and remote. Puzzled by what’s happening, she says to him at one point, ‘Honestly, if I didn’t know you better, I’d think that you and Peter-‘ Doug instantly, angrily shuts her up but this is one of the film’s most potent lines. Regardless of his priorities in making Winter Kept Us Warm, David Secter treats Bev just as sympathetically as he treats Doug and Peter.
The film’s climax takes place on an evening that Peter spends with Sandra, and that Doug spends with Bev. As in the opening sequence, Secter cuts to and fro between his two principals, eventually in bedrooms. The sex there is filmed just as discreetly as any implicitly gay interactions in the story but it’s clear that Doug and Bev’s sleeping together is desultory and unsatisfying, and Peter’s night with Sandra quite the opposite. Peter’s still euphoric when he tells Doug the next day that he’s lost his virginity. One of Peter’s set texts is The Waste Land, in which, early in the film, Doug shows little interest. In the closing scene, he returns to the library, takes The Waste Land from the shelves and starts to read from ‘The Burial of the Dead’.
A middle-aged hall porter (Sol Mandlsohn), welcoming Peter to the student residence at the start, tells him he’s in ‘Lowrey house … there’s lots of mighty fine fellows in Lowrey’. A later sequence showing students in the showers ends abruptly as Doug is soaping Peter’s back. Both moments got a big laugh in NFT1 from the pre-alerted audience though I wasn’t sure that either qualified as coded. The audience reacted to the shower sequence as if Secter had cut just when something homoerotic was about to happen but there’s nothing in subsequent scenes to suggest that Peter and Doug have shared physical intimacy of a romantic kind, let alone had sex together. Winter Kept Us Warm is confounding because it’s governed by three aspects of contemporary taboo in relation to same-sex relationships which, as you watch the film, are virtually impossible to disentwine – what the film censor wouldn’t pass, what the law of the land proscribed, and what feelings young people were constrained from expressing or even admitting to themselves. (This last aspect is enriched by Secter’s successfully conveying how much the students generally – smart but still unsure of themselves – are putting on an act, regardless of their sexual preferences.)
The non-professional cast perhaps confuses the picture further. It wouldn’t be fair to describe these student actors as amateurish but of course they’re short on professional training and discipline. As Peter, Henry Tarvainen hits some effective notes but isn’t always emotionally precise – a few times, he seems to play a scene as he feels it rather than according to what would make better sense in relation to the story’s development. John Labow’s portrait of Doug is more coherent and focused, though also limited because the script ignores (or deliberately obfuscates) whether Doug struggled with homosexual feelings before Peter came along. It’s worth noting, even so, that all four main players in the film went on to substantial creative careers in Canada: Henry Tarvainen as a theatre director; John Labow as a television producer; Janet Amos as an actress in film, TV and theatre, and a theatre director; Joy Tepperman (now Fielding) as a novelist.
29 March 2025
