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 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.

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.

"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