It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day when Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Bobbie Gentry never explained why the title character committed suicide in "Ode to Billie Joe" - unless an explanation was buried in one of the six or so verses she was said to have excised from the song for Top 40 radio consumption.Which gave author/screenwriter Herman Raucher free rein nine years later to come up with his own reasons why the kid might have jumped off the bridge and his gal pal lobbed inanimate things off it. In the slightly renamed film Ode to Billy Joe, Raucher and director Max Baer (yup, Jethro) presented Robbie Benson as a BJ upset about a BJ. Billie Joe's developing relationship with a too-young girl appropriately named Bobbie takes a weird turn when he comes of age in an unpleasant way: a jamboree with equal parts food, fighting and fucking gives way to a makeshift bordello where people have their way with holes for hire. It's too much for the unsure lad, who in his drunken state finds he prefers a man's company. This being set in 1953 - not to mention filmed in 1976, eons ago in terms of gay visibility - there was no way Billy Joe could be OK with that ... so he kills himself. A thoughtful YouTube poster has made the entire movie available in pieces for viewing; it's not terribly well acted, but it's interesting.
I'm glad the young generation is so, so better aware of their options where their budding sexualities are concerned. Gawd - if every essentially straight guy who had a dalliance with another guy offed himself, the human race would shrink noticeably.
2 comments:
"if every essentially straight guy who had a dalliance with another guy offed himself, the human race would shrink noticeably."
And the military would cease to exist!
Amazingly, since the song is 43 years old and I first heard it at age 12, it never occurred to me until someone else pointed it out this week, that maybe it wasn't suicide, maybe he jumped in to retrieve what he and the narrator had thrown into the river. And drowned or hit his head or something. (And no, I've never seen the movie all the way thru.)
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