Celulóide secreto

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

"The Celluloid Closet" is a documentary that dares to go where others haven't gone before. Hollywood, that dream factory, has always been a magnet for the artistic gays and lesbians that have had a lot to endure and have never been recognized to the valuable contributions they have made to the medium.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have compiled a comprehensible account of how homosexuals have been discriminated by the industry where they have been present since the early days of silent films. In fact, movies have always attracted homosexuals who, for the sake of being in the pictures, have gone to extremes in order to work in this form of entertainment.

We are given excellent background by a lot of people that explain the many intricacies these closeted individuals have endured while trying to have a career in the movies. Interviews with Arthur Laurents, Tony Curtis, Armistead Maupin, Susie Bright, Whoopie Goldberg, Jan Oxenburg, Jay Presson Allen, Gore Vidal and others, expand on the material we are watching. Lily Tomlin's narration is an asset.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman deserve credit for their frank attempt to illustrate Hollywood's hypocritical treatment to the people who, in a way, have added to the prestige and to the artistic quality of the movies.

I agree that this film is perfect and here's why. It details its subject in a thorough and sweeping manner. It explores films and details the homosexual portrayals in an intelligent and non-catty manner. It's clever, well presented, no it's not a typical documentary but it's a very moving piece nonetheless, and it tells a story throughout. I was really thrilled by this film and all the research and effort that went into it. In interviews the filmmakers said that the only section they wish they could have kept was one about gay historical figures whose biographical lives were depicted on film as heterosexual. Certainly this would have been wonderful, but as is, the Celluloid Closet is an incredible film.

"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