Song of the Loon is a peculiar soft-core gay film, based on a popular pulp novel which was published in the mid-1960s. Gay soft-core from that era is a historical curiosity. Shortly after certain financially strapped cinemas began trading to the gay crowd, there was a testing of the legal limits of representation. Hardcore was not yet licensed, so a handful of soft-core gay features were produced; the most ambitious of these is probably Song of the Loon.
The film, like the book, tells the story of a naïve frontiersman who comes to terms with his sexual orientation through his encounters with an Indian tribe, the Loon, who practise free love and homosexuality. As such, this is what came to be known as a 'coming out drama'. The intriguing thing here is that the drama is played as an allegory, with the Loon standing in for the out gay man and the villains of the piece - a preacher and another, closet-case frontiersman – stand for those men who have not come to terms with themselves and so turn into homophobic hypocrites. The preacher's name is Calvin, so in part the film's allegory is a theological argument on the merits of a sex-denying Christian Puritanism versus a pagan liberation theology.
Song of the Loon intersperses narrative with montage sequences, the latter mostly involving soft-core episodes of lovemaking; there are some dodgy effects used to give these episodes an arty feel. The film was clearly made on a low budget; much of the editing and all of the acting is poor. The film is very earnest – there is hardly a moment of humour in the entire running time. There is also no sense of historicity, which emphasises the allegorical nature of the story; the idea of coming to terms which your sexual orientation is something that would have meant little-to-nothing to 19th century frontiersmen. Yet as a cultural and historical document of the time it was made, replete with coy eroticism, free-love preachiness and enlightenment through hallucinatory vision-quests, this has considerable value.
The film, like the book, tells the story of a naïve frontiersman who comes to terms with his sexual orientation through his encounters with an Indian tribe, the Loon, who practise free love and homosexuality. As such, this is what came to be known as a 'coming out drama'. The intriguing thing here is that the drama is played as an allegory, with the Loon standing in for the out gay man and the villains of the piece - a preacher and another, closet-case frontiersman – stand for those men who have not come to terms with themselves and so turn into homophobic hypocrites. The preacher's name is Calvin, so in part the film's allegory is a theological argument on the merits of a sex-denying Christian Puritanism versus a pagan liberation theology.
Song of the Loon intersperses narrative with montage sequences, the latter mostly involving soft-core episodes of lovemaking; there are some dodgy effects used to give these episodes an arty feel. The film was clearly made on a low budget; much of the editing and all of the acting is poor. The film is very earnest – there is hardly a moment of humour in the entire running time. There is also no sense of historicity, which emphasises the allegorical nature of the story; the idea of coming to terms which your sexual orientation is something that would have meant little-to-nothing to 19th century frontiersmen. Yet as a cultural and historical document of the time it was made, replete with coy eroticism, free-love preachiness and enlightenment through hallucinatory vision-quests, this has considerable value.
