The Celluloid Closet (Documentary)

This documentary is the film version of author Vito Russo's landmark book by the same name. It explodes sexual myths and explores how our attitudes about homosexuality and sex roles have evolved through the century. With clips from over 100 Hollywood movies and interviews with many of the filmmakers and actors who created them (including Tom Hanks, Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg, Tony Curtis, and Gore Vidal), the film was likely quite relevant and path breaking when it came in 1995. Times have since changed and 30 years later, some of this rings are irrelevant and some not. But it still makes for a good historical piece to watch.

Gays were everywhere in the movies, right from the beginning–this documentary shows two men dancing together in a short named “The Gay Brothers,” from 1895–and often they were hidden in plain view. Hollywood knew who was gay and who was not, and there were in-jokes like John Ireland’s line to Montgomery Clift in “Red River”: Sometimes directors deleted scenes with gay themes because of studio or censorship pressure. 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 film clips are fascinating stuff and are often highlighted by interviews of individuals who made the films. 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."

The film 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. It is informative, funny, clever and revealing. It tells us about 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. Personally I am not familiar with most of these films, so for me, this was just apiece of history which sadly I wasn't able to connect much. (5/10)