This commentary contains some spoilers and may be better read after the screenings.
At first glance, We Joined the Navy is a pleasant film about a series of cock-ups at a naval training school followed by some nicely colourful high jinks at sea and revolutionary adventures. At second glance, however, an altogether queerer picture starts to emerge.
The easiest place to pinpoint this is, perhaps, the extraordinary moment in which Petty Officer Gibbons (played by the merrily melancholic Brian Wilde) informs the new cadets that the navy is all about “rum, bum, and baccy”, that is, boozing, sex between male sailors, and smoking. This variant on Winston Churchill’s description of naval tradition as “rum, sodomy, and the lash” provokes laughter from the trainees, who seem to think that Gibbons is joking. But the film, under the mischievous guidance of director Wendy Toye, is full of suggestions of male-male intimacy. The dance class, presided over by a so-masculine-he-becomes-oddly-camp Sid James, in which the rather effete recruits partner up, follows almost immediately after Gibbons puts in our minds the image of decadent on-board carryings-on. Although the hapless trio of young sailors periodically go through the motions of eyeing up young women, they reserve most of their rolling around and general horseplay for each other.
There may be those reading this who want to argue that this is going too far, an example of seeing things in a film that aren’t really there. But the spectre of gay sex haunted post-war Britain and its comedies more generally. Life in Britain after six years of conflict did not simply return to how it had been. The intense camaraderie which men had experienced in the services left many of them unwilling to abandon homosocial intimacy to return to a more isolated domestic life; the taste that women had had of professional independence in factories and farms left many of them unhappy with lives of housework and child-rearing; and the greater freedom experienced by many children evacuated from cities left them querying parental authority. By the early 1950s, discussions of homosexuality, marriage, child-rearing, and the future of the family were becoming ubiquitous in parliamentary debates and newspaper columns. In 1954, the Conservative Government set up the Wolfenden Committee to report back on what reform was necessary to existing laws on prostitution and homosexuality. Already the wheels had been set in motion which would culminate in the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales in 1967.
And the film comedies of the time were getting in on the act. Not only We Joined the Navy, with its sly hints at sodomy, but also the tender, intimate homosocial play of The Lavender Hill Mob. Holland and Pendlebury are two men who live together, work together, holiday together, dream and plan a future together; they embrace, they laugh, and – at one glorious moment – smile down at the fruit of their criminal labour and refer to it as their “first born.” In the dusty ruins of post-war London, these self-proclaimed “non-entities” discover each other and find a new, adventurous, queerer kind of life. And the film’s jokes are not at their expense; instead, we are invited to laugh along with these loving men as they evade the police, curse schoolgirls, and outwit the Bank of England. Their eccentric, criminal lives are sympathetically drawn, and they model a kind of male-male affection which remains soul-stirringly funny and heart-liftingly queer even today.
We Joined the Navy | 1962 | directed by Wendy Toye | starring Kenneth More, Dinsdale Landen, Jeremy Lloyd, Derek Fowlds, Joan O’Brien
The Lavender Hill Mob | 1951 | directed by Charles Crichton | starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway