Customer Reviews

The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender

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So I'm not the only one who obsessively watched these old movies as a kid and wondered why Walter Brennan kept showing up as the seemingly love-sick, woman-disparaging best friend of the handsome hero (usually Gary Cooper). Actually, this tape is a great companion piece to The Celluloid Closet. The Celluloid Closet maintains that the veiled gay characters of Hollywood's golden age were all comic sissies or tragically doomed or villainously deranged. This second look seems to say, "Well, usually. But if you take a second look at a few very familiar characters we all took for granted, alot of them were just regular guys." They spend alot of time analyzing Wendell Corey in Desert Fury as the overprotective, coffee fetching sidekick of gangster John Hodiak, but don't even mention the much more obvious relationship between gangster Robert Taylor and drunken sidekick Van Heflin in Johnny Eager. But it's a worthwhile rental and Dan Butler is too cute to only be seen on the world's most closeted sitcom Frasier, where he's forced to play a hetero.

reasons... First of all, judging by technique and material employed, this film must have cost very little to make. Secondly, the quality of the tape varies from very good to very bad (couple of shots are all blurry and kind of twitching). High cost and average picture quality notwithstanding, the film itself is very interesting. Mark Rappaport gives us his own perspective on politics of Hollywood. Although his perspective is very subjective, it does make you think. I think first of all this film was meant to be good fun. However, if you look closer, you will find that underneath all that humor and fun Mark Rappaport has produced a serious study of Hollywood. He has managed to connect fun material with film theory, "queer theory" in particular. Film clips, used to illustrate author's point, vary from well-known "westerns" to screwball comedy. All films mentioned are old and classic ones. I, personally, could think of numerous other film clips that would fit in perfectly, but perhaps those clips were not available to the authors. Keep in mind that this film is neither a feature film nor a documentary. It is simply a collection of clips, intercepted with humorous monologue, read by Dan Butler.

I wasted 100 minutes of my life watching this drivel. This would be a C plus film school project at best. Its scope is very narrow, and it harps on Walter Brennan (!) so much I wanted to scream. The point, that there were implicit gay relationships in otherwise hetero movies, was so well known by 1997 that this was a pointless exercise in snickering, smirking, and playing with libel. If this mess was edited down to 60 minutes, without the awful "host segments" and backing off the Brennan obsession, it might be tolerable.

If you REALLY want the Hollywood Gay Back Story, buy Vito Russo's superb Celluloid Closet.

"The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender" uses a series of film clips to remind current audiences of Hollywood depicted male gay characters with significant roles in the 1930's through the 1950's. There are breaks between the clips for a costumed narrator to give general exposition. The actors shown include Edward Everett Horton, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Clifton Webb, Walter Brennan, Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, and Gene Kelly. The movie does not get into Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, Tony Curtis, or other, later actors.

The general thesis is that Hollywood treated gay characters as comic relief before World War II but then chose to present straight characters who got into awkward, possibly homoerotic, situations - like soldiers dressing up as women or dancing with each other in the absence of women.

"The Silver Screen", as well as "The Celluloid Closet" and books like Jeffrey P. Dennis's "Queering Teen Culture" list or display situations that look gay to modern sensibilities and probably did back then too to those who were receptive. What I find lacking so far is an analysis of how these elements came to be in the film. Did the actor make a successful ad lib? Did the director sneak something into the shooting script? Was there a coterie of screenwriters who sneaked gay-related materials into the scripts? How aware were the producers, and why did they choose either to push these efforts or to look away at the efforts of others? The impression given in these analyses is that, since the film turned out a certain way, that is how the actor wanted it to be. Just as there were a lot of collaborators, there were a lot of well-placed studio homophobes who wanted to remove these references and had the WW2 military- and McCarthy-influenced culture behind it. There must have been some internal studio battles and battles with the censors. Were some studios, producers, directors, or screenwriters more prone to show gay characters than were others? What was the full story?

The Walter Brennan (et al.) section discusses the role of older sidekicks who latched onto the young hero. I found it curious there was no mention of the sidekick sacrificing himself so the hero could go off with the girlfriend.

"The Silver Screen" was entertaining, had good clips, and made its points efficiently. The extras were the film's trailer, a trailer for a biography of Jean Seberg, and a short film on actor John Garfield.

I thought this would be an interesting movie about the history of homosexual characters in cinema but it turned out to be a guy searching for any slight hint of a gay stereotype that most nobody else would see. Even gay people. If a character in a movie talks too sophisticated, is interested in the theater, or just likes hanging around his male best friend, he must be gay. To me, this kind of attitude is what makes many straight actors stay away from these kinds of roles and instead choose the roles that are mean spirited towards gays. Now a guy can't even get another guy a cup of coffee without some wacko out there thinking he's gay.