It’s therefore both appropriate and timely that a landmark documentary, The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s engrossing chronicle of the depiction of gays and lesbians in Hollywood cinema, would be made in a year that celebrates the first centennial of movies.
Grade: A- (**** out of *****)
Fraught with illuminating insights about the “permissible” and “forbidden” in American culture–and at the same time vastly entertaining–it’s one of the best documentaries I have seen in a decade.
Chronicling hundreds of mainstream American movies, the docu offers a history of the screen perception of lesbians and gay men, from comic sissies to lesbian vampires, from pathetic queens to sadistic predators. As we move along the decades, the tone of the movies shifts from the light and humorous to the heinous and abominable to the heartening and a bit more liberating.
Admittedly, the filmmakers have worked with great footage–each of the clips is impeccably chosen and brilliantly illustrated. But the great assembly of images is only one element that contributes to the film’s richness.
The directors have shrewdly decided not to get overly polemic–the movie is not an angry political diatribe against Hollywood. Instead, witty, often campy commentary by seminal gay figures, such as Gore Vidal and Quentin Crisp, and interviews with directors and actors, such as William Wyler, Tony Curtis, Susan Sarandon, and Tom Hanks, shed light on the context in which these films were made and what they meant for both gay and straight viewers.
In her narration, Lily Tomlin points out that, for the most part, homosexuality has been treated by Hollywood as something to get easy laughs from the audience and/or inspire fear amongst gays by condemning their deviant lifestyle.
Hollywood’s first gay stock character to come under scrutiny is the sissy, described as one of “nature’s mistakes.” As Quentin Crisp notes, sissy characters often flirted with transvestism, which, unlike the present time, invariably was played for humor. Yet women in male drag were a totally different story.
High on the list of lesbian icons are Marlene Dietrich in a man’s suit, kissing a woman in the mouth, in Morocco, and Garbo as Swedish monarch in Queen Christina.
During the studio system, the Hays Code’s division of films into categories, such as acceptable, morally objectionable and condemned, meant that most gay characters were treated negatively.
As a result, gay male characters had to be depicted as miserable, pitiable or doomed, like Tom Lee’s role in Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy and Sal Mineo’s Plato in Rebel Without a Cause.
Our knowledge of Mineo’s real-life homosexuality and the tragic way he ended his life (he was stabbed in West Hollywood) inevitably make our watching of his “love” and “domestic” scenes with James Dean (and Natalie Wood) all the more painful.
Moving into the 1950s, the documentary heralds the arrival of tough lesbians behind bars (Hope Emerson as a tough ward in the prison drama Caged is a good example).
But there also is the sleek socialite model, played by Lauren Bacall opposite Kirk Douglas in Young Man with a Horn, interpreted by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen (Cabaret) as a warning for women to get back to the kitchen.
During the Golden Age, censors set about removing any obvious homosexual elements from the movies, but traces often remained. In one of the film’s best sequences, Gore Vidal hilariously recounts his introduction of a gay frisson between Ben-Hur and Massala into his Ben-Hur scenario. Knowing the conservative, humorless politics of his lead actor, Charlton Heston, director William Wyler consented, but asked Vidale not to tell him about it, though co-star Stephen Boyd was aware of it.
Watching the scene today, with Boyd campily looking Heston straight in the eyes, while holding his hand, renders the interaction an entirely new meaning.
Similarly, Tony Curtis wryly explains the deletion of his erotic hot-tub scene with Lawrence Olivier in Kubrick’s historical epic Spartacus (The scene was reinserted in later versions of the picture).
Gay Directors, Gay Films? By Emanuel Levy (Columbia University Press)
As the film moves through time, it shows a growing visibility of gay representation in Hollywood, in front and behind the cameras.
In the 1970s, new voices began challenging the prevailing stigmas attached to gays, actively fighting for a more realistic representation. Tom Hanks discusses his Oscar-winning role in Philadelphia.
Susan Sarandon throws new light into her sex scenes with Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger, and her Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-like relationship with Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise.
In addition to the more objective chronicle of Hollywood’s treatment of gays, the docu offers a more subjective account of “the gay look”–of how gay and lesbian viewers watch and read Hollywood movies. The tendency to read against the grain, i.e. between the lines, to see meanings not just in the text, but also in the subtext.
Independent filmmaker Jan Oxenberg (Thank You and Goodnight) discusses how lesbians were starved for grounded imagery of their real lives. A movie like The Children’s Hour, while depicting an illicit love between teachers Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine impeded the acceptance of lesbianism, when the MacLaine character decides to hang herself.
Playwright Paul Rudnick (Jeffrey) riotously deconstructs the campy scene in the lush musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where the sext Jane Russell is surrounded by a group of gorgeous men in a gym, but she is totally ignored by them.
Armistead Maupin offers personal observations of his coming out and his friendship with star Rock Hudson, who died of AIDS in 1985.
Interestingly edited, the film, which was written by Maupin (Tales of the City), benefits from Carter Burwell’s score and particularly from k.d. lang’s evocative rendition of the Doris Day evergreen “Secret Love” on the closing credits.
The Celluloid Closet takes a respectable place next to Epstein and Friedman’s two Oscar-winning gay films, The Times of Harvey Milk and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.
On a more personal level, the movie serves as an eloquent tribute to the pioneering Vito Russo, whose revolutionary 1981 book (of the same title) provided the essential material for the new movie.
I have no doubts that Russo, who succumbed to AIDS in 1991 (and was one of the central figures in the docu Common Threads), would have been pleased with this movie.
