Customer Reviews

Straight-Jacket

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"Straight-Jacket" is a very funny satire showing what it must have been like for closeted homosexual actors living and working in Hollywood in the 1950`s (and who`s to say it`s really that much better now?). Matt Letscher stars as Guy Stone, a matinee idol along the lines of Rock Hudson, who leads a tricky double life. To the public at large he's a macho superstar heartthrob, the fantasy love object of women the world over, all of whom dream of being the one to finally strip him of his status as filmdom`s "most eligible young bachelor." In his private life, he spends most of his time prowling the bar scene for the next available hunk. In fact, Guy is so shallow that he doesn't even bother to learn the names of the star-struck men he sleeps with. Desperate to get the lead role in the upcoming epic "Ben-Hur," Guy agrees to enter into a sham marriage with a naïve young secretary working at the studio (she is unaware of Guy`s sexuality and believes he actually loves her). Soon we're deep into a laugh-filled version of "Far From Heaven," with Guy struggling to maintain interest in his new heterosexual lifestyle, a charade that becomes even more difficult after he meets the man of his dreams, an idealistic young writer named Rick Foster, who makes Guy think twice about the life of deceit he's leading.

Director Richard Day has written a script (based on his own stage play) filled with lacerating wit, hilarious puns (starting with the title of the movie and the name of the main character) and absurdist situations. He casts a scathing eye not only on anti-gay prejudice but on Tinsel Town phoniness, Red-baiting and superficial relationships as well. The movie shimmers with the bright, shiny look of `50's films, while the sets and costumes capture the period with rib-tickling fidelity (Guy`s peeling himself off a plastic, slip-covered sofa is priceless). The actors are all wonderful in their roles, particularly Letscher as Guy, Carrie Preston as his perfect little wife, Victor Raider-Wexler as the studio head and, above all, Veronica Cartwright (the young girl in "The Birds"), absolutely hilarious as Guy's understanding but pragmatic agent whose job it is to make sure Guy's career and hers don't suddenly come crashing down in flames around them.

"Straight-Jacket" is really a story about a man's coming to terms with reality, accepting himself for who he is, and changing society a little bit for the better in the process - with the Red Scare references serving mainly as allegorical allusions to the homophobia of today. This thematic layering is what makes "Straight-Jacket" one of the sharpest and most thoughtful movie comedies in a long time.

STRAIGHT JACKET began as a play by writer/director Richard Day and Day transforms this bit of fluff about Hollywood and its foibles and hidden secrets in the 1950s with the panache that true comedy must have: verisimilitude. The look of the film within a film has the constant appearance of being 'on camera' and that bit of execution makes the film really work.

Day deals with issues such as closeted gay actors and actresses, film moguls with an eye on the buck more than on art, the sub rosa gay scene of the time (pre Stonewall) among others. Though there is some parody on the life of Rock Hudson it is only a sidebar.

Guy Stone (Matt Letscher) is a handsome, successful movie star, with a devoted female audience, who gives the public appearance of being straight while carrying on a wild but anonymous gay sex life. His agent Jerry (Veronica Cartwright) struggles to keep him in tow, always aware that should his sexual preference become public that his acting career would be over. When Guy is photographed en flagrante Jerry decides that the story must not leak, a story which would prevent his obtaining the role of Ben Hur, and convinces Guy to quickly get married - the most available 'wife' would be the ditzy, star struck secretary Sally (Carrie Preston) whose boss Saul (Victor Raider-Wexler) agrees as a solution.

Once married Guy discovers Sally's obsession with being a 1950s wife complete with the tacky re-do of his pad, drowning him in affection, and ...preventing him from his nightly sojourns into the gay world. Guy meets procommunist writer Rick Foster (Adam Greer) who has written Guy's latest film, a script that must be doctored to pass McCarthyisms. They do the courtship dance and eventually actually fall in love, much to Guy's consternation! The political and conscientious differences between the two are forgotten until their pairing is discovered. Guy is asked to go before the TV cameras to confess his homosexuality (which the McCarthyites equate with Communism) and to give names of others who are of like nature.

At this point the film becomes poignant and the manner in which the films is resolved is best left to the surprise of the viewer. While some may feel this 'change of direction' in a comedy is melodramatic, others will see the conclusion as a meaningful resolution that maintains that 'comedy' is just the other side of the mask of 'tragedy'.

The sets and costumes and flow of the film are quite well done, successfully transporting us to the dazzle of the Fifties and the many mindless motion pictures that flooded the screens. The individual actors are good with especial kudos to Veronica Cartwright who can toss away one-liners with the aplomb of the best of comediennes. Carrie Preston is wholly convincing as the platinum blonde fluff head and delivers a song very well. While Letscher and Greer perform well there is no magic in their bond, even after their true feelings are revealed: they remain uninvolved with each other as actors so there is little to no sexual tension. The musical score is just this side of atrocious but it suits the era. In all, this is an entertaining if overlong film with an important re-enactment of a scary time in Hollywood that meanders a bit too much for the final punch it could have had. Grady Harp, June 05

I rented the movie originally and thought it was one of the funniest gay movies ever. (I ordered it from Amazon within minutes of completing my first viewing.) It is refreshing in that nobody ends up with a broken heart and nobody dies of a dread disease or at the hands of gay-bashers - a never-ending set of themes in gay movies. It was both funny and sensitive... sensitive in that a character chooses love over riches.

And the sharp wit is up there with The Birdcage and Jeffrey. If you love a sharp cut that is related to really absurd things (i.e. in The Birdcage when an old woman says "how dare you turn down sex when children in Europe can't get a date"), then you'll appreciate this movie.

This HAS to be my favorite gay comedy....ever!! The acting is superb and with the bonus features on the DVD, you can see the lengths at which the director went to, to produce a film that looks like the '50's, but, plays to a 21st Century crowd. The lead character, based on a Rock Hudson kind of actor in the 1950's is different in that this character never tries to hide his sexuality. Everyone else in the film is trying to hide his sexuality and he eventually is married off to a dim witted secretary who relishes in the role of being the wife of a film star. As the movie progresses, the love between the actor and the writer of the film takes over. These two guys look great together and without giving away any plot lines, there IS a happy ending. The comedy, especially when "Stone", the Rock Hudson type character is trying to find out whether the writer is gay or not is priceless. There was one scene that was shot for about 9 minutes straight. It took days, but the director wanted a seamless scene. Again....priceless. If you are a lover of gay cinema, this film is a MUST for your collection. If you don't laugh throughout, you have no pulse. Enjoy!

There are some considerable guilty pleasures in Straight-Jacket. The film is great to look at, with its high camp, digitally created Technicolor quality, which beautifully evokes period detail. Actual footage from Los Angeles in the 1950's is cleverly inserted into the film, so viewers get a real sense of what the city was like back then.

Straight Jacket also is snappy and fast-paced, featuring several funny characters and an often-frenzied verbal interaction between them. But the problem is that the film is terribly uneven and tries far to hard to make a political statement about homophobia when it doesn't really have to.

As a satire, the film is often delightfully acerbic and catty, the jokes flying fast and furious, with every role played with the right level of tasteless and humorous gusto. But when the film starts to take itself too seriously, drawing parallels between McCarthy's hunt for Communists and America's hunt for homosexuals; it shifts from social satire to social importance, and eventually looses steam and focus.

Straight Jacket is set in 1950s, at a time when America was afraid of Communists, and where gays were deeply closeted and frightened of Joe McCarthy. Guy Stone (Matt Letscher) is one of Hollywood's leading men and also one of their most eligible bachelors. He's a chiseled chunk of matinee-idol arrogance, beguiling everyone with a seductive smile and captivating his fans with a breezy non-threatening shallowness. He also has a dark secret - he's very gay.

Guy's fans have no idea that he has a liking for seamy gay bars, and one-night stands. So his manager Jerry (a riotous Veronica Cartwright) and SRO Studio boss Saul (Victor Raider-Wexler) find themselves in a bit of a bind. They're concerned that even a whiff of scandal will sabotage Guy's efforts to land the lead in SRO's upcoming sword-and-sandal epic Ben-Hur.

His chief competition is hokey B-actor Freddie Stevens (Jack Plotnick). The scheming Freddie is determined to get the lead, so he snaps a picture of Guy getting hauled off during a vice raid on a gay bar. Jerry knows it's time for serious damage control: Guy needs a wife, fast. And Saul's unsuspecting young secretary, Sally (firecracker Carrie Preston), is the perfect candidate.

Victor (Michael Emerson) a droll, entertaining valet looks after Guy at home. But when Sally moves in things begin to change. She's clinging, insatiable and domineering, with appalling taste in furniture; Sally is Guy's worst nightmare of a wife and he's absolutely horrified when the morning after the wedding he wakes up beside her. He complains, "She's terrible; she's a total bottom."

But the arranged marriage does the trick and Guy's career is back until he falls in love with Rick Foster (Adam Greer), the Communist-leaning screenwriter who has been employed to get all that "communist rubbish" out of Guy's latest star vehicle: a movie adaptation of Rick's play Blood Line.

Rick is left-wing, poor and literary, whereas Guy is vacuous, moneyed and capitalistic. Despite this they confess undying love for one another, and Guy gradually begins to come out. Their affair, however, puts Guy's total career and jeopardy and he has to make a choice between his love for Rick or his glamorous life as a movie star.

Straight-Jacket is loud and raucous and often plays out more like a late night sketch comedy than as a fully-fledged movie. The sit-com antics and the bawdy one liners are all lots of fun for the first hour, but the bad acting, combined with the fact that Greer and Letscher have next to no chemistry together, ultimately takes it's toll on the story. It has some fun moments though and there are definitely some laughs, but the tendency towards melodrama, especially in the last half, and a silly climax that seems tacked on will probably exhaust most viewers. Mike Leonard June 05.

I highly recommend this film. I especially loved the relationship between the lead and his agent. I watched it with my three best friends, who just happen to be gay, and...as their "hag", I can say we laughed all the way through it. It's funny, tender AND it makes you wonder...what would it be like to have to live an untrue life? To have to hurt someone to conform to other people's sense of normal? This movie will make you laugh and, hopefully,....think.

Have you ever watched a film that was either too much drama or too much comedy with not enough point? Worry not, Straight Jacket is not one of these films. In fact Straight Jacket is perhaps the perfect combination of satirical comedy and character driven drama. Out of the many gay films I have seen, this one pulls it off near perfect. Without being full of itself, the film manages to make you roll in laughter, shake in anger, and bring tears to your eyes. Not to mention the issues in the film are extremely salient to modern culture, which helps bring the characters and action home. The 50's McCartheyism setting provides a comical backdrop while also showing the striking similarities between then and now. The love story between the two main characters is not one of development, but rather of the conflict many gay men face between hiding in the shadows or confronting the world headfirst. And while this review makes the movie seem sober, which it is at times, that is not to say the movie is not also an incredible comedy. Writer/Director Richard Day delivers wit and sarcasm with amazing timing and clever dialogue. You never know what will happen next. The style of comedy is very similar to Day's first movie Girls Will Be Girls (which I also highly reccomend), but is more mature in many ways. Overall Straight Jacket is an amazing movie and has earned its place as one of my favorites and the best gay movie of present times.

With a double entendre movie title, "Straight Jacket" creates a farcical story about the problems & prejudices people of a different sexual orientation had to endure in the old days of Hollywood, circa the 1950's. The coyly illustrated "fifties" opening credits (with a jaunty, squeaky-clean theme song to match) set the tone for what's to follow. Mirroring the life & career of Rock Hudson, Matt Letscher is movie star Guy Stone, who is quite comfortable in his dual role of straight actor by day, and gay predator by night. Although closeted in the public eye, Guy is somewhat frivolous with his lifestyle, which gets him into deep trouble one night: The local gay bar he frequents is raided by police, and Guy's name is splashed across the front pages in a gay scandal. Panicked, the studio head & Guy's agent (Veronica Cartwright, terrific as a tense, tough-as-nails agent) dream up a "marriage of convenience" to squelch the gay rumors & throw the media off the trail. But can Guy survive the required twelve months of straight matrimony in order to get the film role of his dreams? That's the inital premise that soon branches into more thought-provoking questions the moment hot young writer Rick (newcomer Adam Greer) enters the picture. Plotting to seduce the young man (as he's done with so many others), Guy is startled to discover that Rick is someone entirely different, and he finds himself attracted to him intellectually as well as physically. Guy begins spending more & more time with this intriguing person and less & less with his "wife", to her never-ending frustration. Secret rendezvous can only sustain the relationship between Guy & Rick for so long, and Rick begins making Guy think twice about the double life he's leading. Eventually, one of their meetings is exposed, and Guy is really outed this time. In a McCarthy-ism twist, a studio investigator puts Guy on the hot seat during a televised investigation with an ultimatum: Either confess as a homosexual communist & name names or never work again. Of course, Guy's response is noble, honest & selfless (I won't spoil it for you).
The production design really captures the period, with some nifty CGI-created location shots. The direction is choreographed with such busy energy that you feel you are watching one of those silly old romantic farces that Hudson & Doris Day used to do together. And of course, there's the cast: Letscher is all suaveness as Stone; Greer is bare-bones pride & honesty as Rick; Carrie Preston (who was in the original stage play) is giddy fun as the "patsy wife" Sally (her organ playing scene is hysterical); Cartwright as the business-savvy Jerry; Freddie Stevens, an obnoxious, pot-smoking rival actor; and Guy's servant, who serves as sort of the actor's conscience.
Watching this, it's interesting to compare how conditions were in Hollywood back then--with its narrow-minded views on gays & corny, intelligence-insulting movies--and now. Considering the advancements gays have made to be more visible in the industry, there still exists stigmas (Gay actors can't be in leading man roles, etc.). Thank goodness there are movies like this to illustrate those problems and, with some understanding & open-mindedness, gradually resolve them.

I have purchased and viewed many movies based upon an Amazon recommendation, but I have never been so completely delighted as I have with "Straight Jacket." Quite honestly, I had never heard of it before I looked into Amazon's recommendations, but it sounded interesting enough to take a chance on. And it was!

Not truly a musical, "Straight Jacket" nonetheless features a couple of songs which are distinctly "hummable." And I do not mean that as a slight; far from it. The opening credits are backed up by the eponymous "Straight Jacket" to good effect. And the absolute showstopper - "Two Kinds Of Love" - is itself enough to make the purchase worthwhile. The number is both a good and memorable song, and at the same time, the occasion of one of the most hilarious pieces of physical comedy I have seen in a long while. I literally almost "fell off my seat laughing."

The plot line is somewhat predictable, but it remains engaging despite that. The love story is believable, the redemption of the protaganist credible. The send-up of Hollywood has been done repeatedly, though rarely so succinctly as here. But what makes the movie outstanding is the dialogue. Wit is abundant, and there are many memorable lines and quotable bits of dialogue which I feel certain will be found seasoning conversations around the country before long.

If one is looking for a sober examination of Hollywood in the repressed and repressive 1950s, this is not the film. "Good Nigh And Good Luck" is probably a better choice. But if one seeks an enjoyable and diverting comedy which also can make you think, then this fills the bill superbly.

Some good ideas in "straight-jacket" , some funny lines and visual gags, and an original angle for a gay themed movie.
Once or twice a scene falls flat or a joke does not work at all, but these are mercifully quick moments in the greater scheme of things.
Due to an obvious lack of money the film falters specifically in the special effects and set departments.
You will have to be able to give the movie the benifit of your doubt, otherwise you will not enjoy it. I thought it was a nice but flawed effort.
If I were you I would rather rent, and not buy. That's my honest opinion.