Is there anyone out there that also has this opinion? I just don't see it, I mean I just saw them as good friends and Tom as a loyal aid who in the end decided his job was done and he was finished. Leo begging him not to leave is understandable, not homoerotic in any way to me, it was a "bromance" not a romance.
This is my signature. There are many others like it but this one is mine
The only thing Tom and Leo had "going on" was Verna...
Make tea, not war.
I agree with you.
I've seen this movie too many times to count (or if I had counted, I'd be too embarrassed to tell anybody how many times it's been), and I've never seen anything that leads me to believe Tom and Leo were lovers. I notice something new almost every time I see it, but I've never noticed anything like that.
(Eric Clapton on Jimi Hendrix) "He just plays blues things and he freaks out occasionally."
I agree. And like you, it is rather embarrassing to say how many times I have watched it since it came out. It didn't show locally in the theater here so I had to wait......I'd loved to have seen it on big screen as intended.
Ok. I will fess up. I think I have watched it start to finish maybe 20 times. It got to the point I didn't watch the movie. I inspected it.
There is an interesting thread on that topic, but I believe Leo and Tom had a brothers-in-arms relationship or bromance as it would be called today.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100150/board/thread/179759383
[deleted]
If anything, I saw more of a father-son kind of thing going on. Especially in that last scene where Leo asks him to stay.
shareIs your teacher on crack?
shareNah, it's a bromance. You get the feeling Tom is the only real friend Leo has in town. So when Tom cruelly denies that job offer at the end, the look on Leo's face at the end indicates a real sense of being hurt, of being betrayed by somebody he thought was his friend.
"What I don't understand is how we're going to stay alive this winter."
I've also thought about the possibility that Tom is actually planning to wipe Leo out too, after he did Caspar. And then start his own mob... dunno, just a feeling I get from that last scene where Tom is laying back against the tree, looking at Leo walking away, and then he stares at the ground, sort of giving me the idea that all he wanted was out of that life; but then he raises his head again and looks back at Leo with that ambiguous look on his face, almost one of challenge... Let's not forget that he made a hell of a lot of money with that last bet he placed, so he would probably have now the necessary wealth to have his own thugs on the payroll. Maybe I'm imagining things...
shareSometimes people see what they want to see.
shareHaving money and becoming a mobster have very little to do with each other, he was not a true violent man who would do what it took on a regular basis to stay on top. Money does not really buy loyalty, but mostly greed, one has to have charisma, ruthlessness and cunning to get respect. So he would have a long way to go, he would be better by waiting for his turn with Leo.
shareIn his essay 'The Simple Art of Murder', Raymond Chandler writes about author Dashiell Hammett, 'Hammett is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself is the record of a man's devotion to a friend.'
The story he refers to, is 'The Glass Key' which is the basis for this movie.
The point of the book and presumably the movie is that Tom is characterised by 2 factors: extreme loyalty to Leo and pride. He won't let Leo pay his debts to Lazar and he won't ask Verna to leave Leo and be with him... he expects her to do it of her will.
His pride is so hurt when Leo won't heed his advice to give up Bernie that he decides there is no going back to the way things were. He still goes through everything he does to destroy Leo's enemies and save him but he is too proud to forgive that 'insult' even after Leo asks him to return at the end.
No they're good friends. The sexual aspect is that they're both involved with the same woman. The one thing I regret about the increasing acceptance of homosexuality is that it leads some people to think that any close relationship between two men must be romantic/sexual in nature. Tom and Leo love each other but they're not in love with each other.
"Unless Alpert's covered in bacon grease, I don't think Hugo can track anything."
[deleted]
Your teacher must be a Yaoi fan. We need to put those types down while we can.
The knack to flying lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.