Amazon.com
Canadian filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald made his name on the gay film scene with his dramatic fantasia
The Hanging Garden, but with
Beefcake he captures a more lightheartedly dreamy tone: The film takes its lead from Valentine Hooven's lip-smackingly compulsive coffee table tome of the same name. We're offered a teasing, pseudo-history of mid-century pop male photography, featuring quaint muscle-mag shots and nude "studies" of, among others, a hungrily seductive young Joe Dallesandro (before he made his name in underground Andy Warhol flicks like
Flesh). Dallesandro's here to talk, along with other "models" who mostly supply commentary on Bob Mizer, the enterprising founder of the Athletic Model Guild. Fitzgerald blends the real-life documentary material into his fictional confection concerning a sexy bumpkin who falls into Mizer's AMG set-up (it produced America's first closeted gay erotica publication, passing itself off as an innocently obsessive guide to health and fitness). The campy original story--the hero's
Valley of the Dolls-inspired name is Neil O'Hara--is a bit dumb, actually, mostly because it's not even half as interesting as the real deal. Lots of innocently nude frolicking doesn't hurt, though, and the film engages when it manages to be as naively sweet and erotic as Mizer's bygone magazines.
--Steve Wiecking
This partially dramatized documentary illuminates the nineteen-fifties world of male-physique magazines, a charged combination of bodybuilding and homoeroticism. Director Thom Fitzgerald uses as his focal point the figure of Bob Mizer (Daniel MacIvor), a man in love with photography and with the well-built young men he recorded in classical poses. Mizer's dream of creating an agency to represent these aspiring models and actors began with a photo catalogue and soon evolved into the leading muscle magazine
Physique Pictorial and a production company that put out thousands of beefcake movies. Plenty of that footage appears here, wittily blended with staged scenes from Mizer's self-made world. Completing the unusual format are interviews with some of its principal figures, from Jack LaLanne to Joe Dallesandro. -Ken Marks
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
DVD ~ Joe Dallesandro
DVD ~ Ulrike S.
DVD ~ Jerry Douglas
DVD ~ Kevin Stea
DVD ~ Theo Montgomery
DVD ~ Joram Schurmans
DVD ~ Alex Dimitriades
DVD ~ Tony Ward
