The Celluloid Closet

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.

This is not a "film" in the traditional sense...perhaps

This is not a "documentary" in the traditional sense...probably

What is it??

The Celluloid Closet is a comprehensive history of film - gay film, straight film, "is she/isn't she?..." film. Everything. It is the result of 10 years hard work - no-one (especially big film/tv studios) is keen to fund a 2 hour film on gay movie visibility, they're all too busy closetted away (often literally) making sure viewers won't be offended by their output...

However the time, effort and sheer love that has gone into this is utterly evident and it may be a blessing in disguise that it took so very long. The film is based heavily on the late Vitto Russo's book of the same name. Russo was a film buff who catalogued in detail the visibility of gay and lesbian characters in cinema. He included film from across the globe and updated the book for the last time in the mid eighties (Parting Glances and My Beautiful Launderette having just been completed) before the explosion of new gay film of the last decade. The film takes the historical content of the book and uses the best editing *I* have ever seen to produce enlightening sequences on the treatment of gay people and issues. Although it only concentrates on Hollywood films, it has the advantage over the book in that it was right up to date at its time of completion.

Not only does The Celluloid Closet use self-appointed gay films, it also takes enormous pleasure in covering those films we love and know as gay classics even though the tension is a subtle sub-plot often totally lost on a straight audience! Absolute treats are the celebrity comments (they will set a thousand conspiracy theories going in your head too!), better still is the input of relatively unknown behind-the-camera people, writers etc, who are at liberty to be far more honest about their views.

There are also clips from classics like Rebecca, Calamity Jane (the dykiest show on earth if you ask me!), Ben Hur, My Beautiful Launderette, Parting Glances.......etc etc.. Any film you can think of is probably there - if not then maybe you should write a sequel!

Did you ever think that Laurel and Hardy were very cosy with each other? Did you think Mrs Danvers was a little forward going through Rebecca's undies? Did you explode at *that* kiss in Morroco? Have you always secretly thought The Hunger was a good movie? .............Well so did someone else. Quite a lot of someone elses - and some of them were the writers!

This is such a good film for too many reasons. I'd go as far as saying it's perfect film.

It has no characters/plot, etc but it shows the progress of gay visibility as one of the best stories there is. The people who made those movies are the cast. It is a film

It is informtive, funny, clever and revealing. It tells EVERYONE about their history and heritage. The general observations about film-watching apply to anyone. It's impressively detached and lets you draw your own interpretation. It's a documentary.

You will sit there thinking "wow" when it finishs. You will wonder how you view films - and how everyone else views them. It may even make you nostalgic for the days when closetted was the only option (and endless sex-scenes were impossible and forbidden so plot and dialogoue had to make do). You will think of omissions and ponder those included but it will get you thinking. That's the important part.

If this film doesn't make you want to go out and watch all your favourite movies plus all those featured in it then I'll be amazed!

It may sound like it, but it's no chore to watch. It's a pleasure.

It's inspiring. wonderful. Ultimately uplifting. And you'll need to see it again.....and again....and again! ....oh yes! And kd lang sings "Secret Love" at the end! Wow!...

"The Celluloid Closet" is a history of the treatment of homosexuals and gay themes in the cinema from the silent days to 1995, but it is a very partial account, focusing almost exclusively on Hollywood. The strength of the film is a huge number of clips from a vast range of films which show that, after a fairly liberal early period, homophobia reigned supreme until the late 1960s, and still can be seen in mainstream movies today. One of the great gay clichés is the homosexual movie buff in love with the likes of Judy Garland, so it is ironic that so many gay people should turn to the Hollywood product for distraction, given how anti-gay that product was. Some of the industry people interviewed for the film boast of how the censors were outsmarted on occasion, for example Gore Vidal's account of how Charlton Heston was fooled into acting gay in "Ben Hur", but it was not until "Boys in the Band", the film of a successful stage play in 1970, that homosexuality broke through as a topic for candid treatment.

With "Brokeback Mountain" in line for an Academy Award or two this year gay themes can clearly now be mainstream. This film reminds us that cinema reflects the society from which it springs, and the United States has not historically been tolerant to what we might call sexual minorities. Somehow things loosened up in the 1960s and film-makers followed the trend (though not the lawmakers in most states). The genie is now out of the box, gay rights are reasonably well established and there is no going back. It will be interesting to see how American gay cinema retains its edge, now that homosexuality has become domesticated.

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

This documentary is based on the book of the same name by Vito Russo. The format of the documentary is film clips, in pretty much chronological order, with Lily Tomlin narrating about each film's significance in the part of film history that is being discussed. That history is pretty much divided into the silent and sound precode era, the production code era during which realism was pretty much in a straight jacket, and the post code era in which prohibitions came crashing down. Industry insiders discuss films in which they were involved that had gay themes or characters, or films that have had an impact on them. Since this film was made in 1995, there were lots of writers, directors, and actors who were still alive who were working when the production code came to an end in the 1960s and even before that. They talk about how they would get around some of the strict prohibitions of the production code via a combination of subtlety and the fact that the censors often had no idea what was going on.

Gore Vidal is a particularly interesting and humorous interviewee since he was a writer on some of these projects. He talks about how he and Stephen Boyd talked and had his character Masala act as though he was in love with Ben Hur as that character's motivation, something that Charlton Heston would have never knowingly taken part in.

I would definitely recommend this to the film history buff.