A Vital History Lesson on How Film Has Treated Gays

Weak, effeminate, only vaguely sexual, the old-fashioned Sissy--”Hollywood’s first gay stock character”--was the kind of feeble cliche likely to dismay contemporary viewers. But Harvey Fierstein, author and star of “Torch Song Trilogy,” confesses to a fondness for the Sissy. “Visibility,” he explains quietly, “at any cost.”

That poignant sentiment is at the heart of “The Celluloid Closet,” a remarkable and involving documentary that is literally eye-opening. It starts with a notion that straight audiences may have forgotten, that film functions as a mirror in which viewers look eagerly to find themselves, hoping to discover what’s acceptable and what’s not in terms of social and sexual behavior.

Put together from judiciously selected clips from more than 100 movies plus interviews with contemporary Hollywood figures, “The Celluloid Closet” underlines, as screenwriter Jan Oxenberg puts it, “how incredibly starved for images of ourselves” homosexuals have always been. More than that, it illustrates what gays were forced to make do with in terms of screen portrayals, and to what lengths they went to satisfy what Fierstein calls “the hunger for gay images, not to be alone.”

Produced and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman and based on Vito Russo’s landmark book, “The Celluloid Closet” views familiar films through a different lens, focusing on trends that have gone unreported and highlighting aspects of accepted classics we may not have noticed before. But once elaborated, the truth of its talking points is hard to dispute.

Take for instance what is sure to be the film’s most discussed anecdote, Gore Vidal’s bemused description of how he convinced “Ben-Hur” director William Wyler to allow a gay subtext into the relationship between Stephen Boyd’s Massala and Charlton Heston’s Ben-Hur. Seeing an appropriate clip makes a strong case for the truth of Vidal’s assertion that Boyd was in on the scheme while Heston was not.

In some ways, the earlier days of film were enviably casual about homosexual behavior. One of Edison’s first efforts showed two men dancing, William Wellman’s landmark “Wings” featured an on-the-lips kiss between two male best friends, and gay bars made their first on-screen appearance in a 1932 item called “Call Her Savage.”

Then, in the mid-1930s, the studio-driven Production Code, backed by the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency, banned the depiction of “sex perversion” and homosexuality became almost invisible. Gay subtexts in Tennessee Williams works like “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and “Suddenly Last Summer” were toned down from stage to screen, and when a novel called “The Brick Foxhole” became “Crossfire,” the problem in question changed from discrimination against gays to anti-Semitism.

If gays somehow did appear in mainstream films, they were almost inevitably there as villains. Consider Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers, almost worshipful about her former employer’s underwear in “Rebecca,” or Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo, fondling a phallic cane in “The Maltese Falcon.”

These factors forced gays to search for signs and meaning that straight audiences often didn’t notice. Among the scenes singled out for special attention by gay viewers were Marlene Dietrich in pants in “Morocco” and Joan Crawford’s dazzling black shirt in “Johnny Guitar.” “It’s amazing,” says writer Susie Bright, “how you will watch an entire movie just to see somebody wear an outfit that you think means they’re homosexual.”

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“The Celluloid Closet” is at its best when dealing with this early, repressed part of film history. When its story gets closer to today, the otherwise excellent narration, written by Armistead Maupin and spoken by Lily Tomlin, tends to get more upbeat about the likes of “Making Love” and “Philadelphia” than the quality of the pictures deserves. Plus a few of the talking heads sound increasingly as if they’re on a podium at some politically correct fund-raiser.

Still, because of the questions it raises and the evidence it provides, “The Celluloid Closet” remains of compelling interest. It’s completely mainstream in terms of style, and when that’s added to the fact that between them Epstein and Friedman have won Oscars for “The Times of Harvey Milk” and “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt,” it’s both surprising and a shame that the academy didn’t even bother to nominate this film. Maybe some of the evidence still cuts a little too close to the bone.

* MPAA rating: R, for some graphic footage of sexuality and violence, and for language. Times guidelines: scenes from “Cruising” probably account for the rating.

‘The Celluloid Closet’

Home Box Office presents, in association with Channel 4, ZDF/arte, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment, Hugh M. Hefner, James C. Hormel & Steve Tisch, a Telling Pictures production, released by Sony Pictures Classics. Directors Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman. Producers Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman. Executive producers Howard Rosenman, Bernie Brillstein, Brad Grey. Story, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, Sharon Wood. Narration Armistead Maupin, based on the book by Vito Russo. Narrator Lily Tomlin. Cinematographer Nancy Schreiber. Editors Jeffrey Friedman, Arnold Glassman. Music Carter Burwell. Art director Scott Chambliss. Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

* At selected theaters.