Now out on DVD from Kino Lorber is director Mark Rappaport’s wonderfully meta take on closeted actor Rock Hudson.
Using Eric Farr as a stand-in for Hudson it begins seven years after the actor’s death from AIDs which shocked the world. For many this was the first time the public knew Hudson was gay but as Farr points out, using a flurry of clips from Rock’s films, he’s shocked that anyone didn’t know he was gay from all the hidden subtext.
Hudson, a truck driver who was groomed for Hollywood stardom didn’t hit his stride until director Douglas Sirk took him under his wing and starred him in a series of great melodramas. The juxtaposition of clips from those movies does reveal a kind of sexual ambiguity on his part. When Dorothy Malone says to Rock in Written on the Wind (frustrated that all her sexual passes go nowhere), “There’s only so much a woman can do, and no more. I speak from experience- with you,” you have to laugh at the implication.
It even suggests the older man played by Otto Kruger in Magnificent Obsession is the gay mentor to Rock in that film.
Rappaport’s use of films clips is clever, funny, snarky, and often frighteningly astute. And it does show the dizzying weirdness of Rock Hudson (a closeted actor) playing a womanizing heel in Pillow Talk who pretends to be gay to win Doris Day’s affections.
Or pairing Rock up with nelly, hysterical men like Tony Randall to negate any suggestion of gayness on Rock’s part. The film is a mere 63 minutes long but it’s playfully subversive on so many levels and a nice fractured take on queer identity as filtered through film.
What’s exciting on the DVD is other short films by Rappaport are included- like his lovely meditation on the career of actor John Garfield, and a fascinating portrait of Conrad Veidt (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) who fled fascist Germany before the beginning of World War II to end up forever stuck playing Nazis in American films. There’s also a strangely perverse short called Blue Streak which humorously sends up erotica.
