The Celluloid Closet

"The Celluloid Closet" is a necessity to understand film history in the USA. From the earliest days of cinema (a rare clip of an 1895 Thomas Edison experimental film shows two men dancing in an embrace!) up to the modern era, this film details how gays were depicted in the cinema (from the sissy fashion designer to the bull-dyke prison guard) and the problems film-makers had to deal with due to the restrictions of the Hayes Office and the self-proclaimed Legion of Decency.

An incredible piece of cinematic history shown in the film is the (now restored) "oysters and snails" scene in "Sparticus", where Marcus Licinius (Sir Laurence Olivier) tries to seduce his slave Antonius (Tony Curtis) in the bath.

This documentary changed the way I look at cinema, and now I often find myself seeking for the "hidden messages" in the characterization ("Calamity Jane", "The Maltese Falcon", "Johnny Guitar", "Rebel Without A Cause", "Ben Hur"...I can never see the scene where Judah and Mesalla drink that wine and glance into each other's eyes the same way again!). My only complaint is that the film does not mention the 1919 German silent film "Anders als die Anderen" ("Different From the Others"), one of the first to seriously deal with homosexuality.

Marvelous film! (To the film-makers: k.d. lang singing "(Once I Had A) Secret Love" at the end is a crowning touch!)

A documentary that follows the appearance of gays in the history of the movies, the film takes a talking heads approach with interviews, splicing in some terrific film pieces. We get to see Marlene Dietrich, in "Morocco," kiss another woman while dressed in tails -- and looking better than any man ever could. There's a brilliant in-joke clip from "Red River" where Montgomery Clift is told about the beauty of a Swiss watch and a woman -- and then asked if he's ever had a Swiss watch. The film looks at gay stereotypes such as the pansy or the sissy, the characters that Franklin Pangborn used to play. Some of the interviewees are exceptional, namely Harvey Fierstein, Gore Vidal, and the incredible Quentin Crisp. Vidal gives a hilarious recount of including a gay backstory in "Ben Hur" which Charlton Heston of course denies.

The film is also touching and kind of heartbreaking. You realize that in the century we've had movies how enormously they've shaped our culture and our perception of people, and how if the filmmakers and studio heads hadn't been pressured by the horrible Hayes code, society's collective view of gays might not be so troublesome. There's a great moment where Quentin Crisp talks about census takers in England, asking about homosexuality. They were asked whether they knew any homosexuals. If the answer was yes, they were asked what they were like, to which they replied, "just like everybody else." If they answered no, they were asked what they would expect to meet, to which they replied, someone with grand gestures and flamboyance and bright colors. So that there are two images we have in our minds -- one of what homosexuals are like, and one of what homosexuals should be like. And movies played a huge role in that. 8/10

I think this documentary is a total eye-opener. It gave me an insight into the American film history with respect to the particular topic of homosexuality. There are many original film clips as examples, and also have actors who performed the respective roles to comment on their views of this topic. This makes the documentary so convincing and credible.

Based on the book by Vito Russo, written by Armistead Maupin, and narrated by Lily Tomlin, THE CELLULOID CLOSET uses interviews and hundreds of film clips to examine the way in which Hollywood has presented gay and lesbian characters on film from the age of silent cinema to such recent films as PHILADELPHIA and DESERT HEARTS.

Throughout the documentary, the focus is on both stereotypes and the various ways that more creative directors and writers worked around the censorship of various decades to create implicitly homosexual characters, with considerable attention given to the way in which stereotypes shaped public concepts of the gay community in general. Overtly homosexual characters were not particularly unusual in silent and pre-code Hollywood films, and CLOSET offers an interesting sampling of both swishy stereotypes and unexpectedly sophisticated characters--both of which were doomed by the Hayes Code, a series of censorship rules adopted by Hollywood in the early 1930s.

The effect of the Code was to soften some of the more grotesque stereotypes--but more interesting was the impetus the Code gave to film makers to create homosexual characters and plot lines that would go over the heads of industry censors but which could still be interpreted by astute audiences, with films such as THE MALTESE FALCON, REBECCA, BEN-HUR, and REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE cases in point. Once the Code collapsed, however, Hollywood again returned to stereotypes in an effort to cash in on controversy--with the result that throughout most of the sixties and seventies homosexual characters were usually presented as unhappy, maladjusted creatures at best, suicidal and psychopathic entities at worst.

The film clips are fascinating stuff and are often highlighted by interviews of individuals who made the films: Tony Curtis re SOME LIKE IT HOT and SPARTACUS, Shirley MacLaine re THE CHILDREN'S HOUR, Stephen Boyd re BEN-HUR, Farley Granger re ROPE, and Whoopie Goldberg re THE COLOR PURPLE, to name but a few. All are interesting and intriguing, but two deserve special mention: Harvey Fierstein, who talks about the hunger he had as a youth to see accurate reflections of himself on the screen, and Susan Sarandon, who makes an eloquent statement on the power of film as "the keeper of the dreams."

Although the material will have special appeal to gays and lesbians, it should be of interest to any serious film buff with its mix of trivia and significant fact. The DVD also includes notable packages of out-takes from interviews that are often as interesting as the material that made the final cut. If the documentary has a fault, however, it is that it offers no "summing up," preferring instead to show only how far the portrayal of homosexuals has come and indicating how far it has yet to go. Recommended to any one interested in film history and interpretation.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Entertaining, thought-provoking and (at times) very funny documentary chronicling gay subject matter in motion pictures from the silents up to 1995. The narration (by Lily Tomlin) is insightful and the cameos and comments by various stars who have played gay (Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Harry Hamlin) or are gay (Harvey Feinstein, the late Quentin Crisp, Paul Rudnick) are very entertaining and in two cases (with Susan Sarandon and Gore Vidal) utterly uproarious. Special attention should be paid to the "Ben-Hur" segment when you realize Stephen Boyd was playing it gay and Charlton Heston was totally oblivious! This is a very important film and should be seen by everybody gay OR straight. A must for film buffs. Don't miss this one! My only complaint--it's too short! The DVD version has extra interviews that are just great.