Gay, Gay Hollywood

Just dreadful "documentary" about gay stars and some of the movies they made. The narrator (whoever he is) is more than a little ill at ease and some the narration comes off sounding real strange. The footage is in poor shape (most of the clips look like they were taped off of TV) and some truly questionable information. Do we really need to know about the size of Montgomery Clift's best parts when we're looking at his movies? Also there is endless footage of Robert Reed in "The Defenders" (a show he did before "The Brady Bunch") with him and the other actors flubbing lines and mugging for the camera. I suppose this does deserve credit for trying this way back in 1980 but it' a really lousy piece of work. Rent "The Celluloid Closet" instead--you'll be much better off. A 1 all the way.

Here's a brief compendium of four camp numbers from movies and television, with Jimmy Cagney, Gene Autry, Glen Campbell, and Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin.

It's more camp than gay, at least by the modern definitions of the terms. All of them were clearly intended to be funny. So what point where the people trying to make?

Having looked recently at THE CELLULOID CLOSET, I would opine that this fits squarely into the period when homosexuals were purely seen as figures of fun, and performers had no particular issues in portraying them as such. I doubt that was the point. I think the implication is that if Jimmy Cagney and Tyrone Power Jr. Did this, then the most masculine of men were homosexuals.