This Special Friendship

Jean Delannoy's This Special Friendship (Les Amities partculieres) is set in a boy's boarding school of the early 1930s. Two of the students, Francis Lacombrade and Francois Leccia, become close friends. Lacombrade has definite ideas concerning homosexuality: he's dead set against it, and is willing to blow the whistle on anyone whom he suspects to be different. When Lacombrade himself comes out of the closet, as it were, the loyal Leccia arranges for the private meetings between Lacombrade and his vis-a-vis Didier Haudepin. Michel Bouquet, a young priest assigned to teach at the school, begins to suspect that something unnatural is going on, whereupon Leccia defensively spreads the rumor that Bouquet is himself fooling around with some of the students. Dismissed from the school, Bouquet has a heart-to-heart with Lacombrade about being too judgmental. Torn about by indecision and conflicting emotions, Lacombrade chooses the most drastic means of solving his own sexual ambiguity. Based on a novel by Les Amities Particulaires, This Special Friendship was considered controversial enough in 1964 to be held from American release for nearly three years.~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide