Rock Hudson’s Home Movies

 

Picture: C-     Sound: D     Extras: C-     Film: B-

 

 

How can a filmmaker with limited means come up with a way to be innovate and challenge notions about sexuality and our lives?  Mark Rappaport found a way, beginning with short films and behind-the-scenes work, before he came up with a breakthrough idea.  He would tell the untold story of secretly Gay film icon Rock Hudson by having another actor (Eric Farr) appear on camera as Rock, speaking of his life (more or less in the afterlife) to a large number of clips from his films.

 

It was well known that Hudson was Gay among the Hollywood elite, and he would screen his films for friends who knew better than the ticket-buying public.  That is what makes the title of Rappaport’s film so ironic.  Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) creates an informative collage of clips from his career and imagines what he would say about them, addressing the content and gay context of everything shown.  This goes on for 63 minutes, but could have gone on longer if he had delved more deeply into this if he had wanted.

 

We see his genre films, the Melodramas, Westerns, and Romantic Comedies, as well as some of his great works.  I was surprised his TV work on the likes of McMillan, McMillan and Wife, and Dynasty was omitted, but the rest of it is just fine.  Rappaport slowly peels away at myths and standards kept in place to perpetuate Homophobia, while giving Hudson his due.  One or two moments may be pushing things a bit, but it is a fine piece of work.  I do not think it qualifies as a documentary like his later The Silver Screen – Color Me Lavender (see my review elsewhere on this site), but it is an innovative work that is easy to label “post-modern”.  I would suggest it is instead a “surrogate autobiography”, meaning it is not first person, but is respectfully trying to approximate the real thing.  This one does a decent job.

 

The full screen image is from the analog video it was made in, with various color and monochrome clips throughout.  Back in 1991, higher quality clips were not as available as they are today, nor was better videotape.  However, this is clever, despite how soft the picture quality is throughout, so be expecting this to show its age.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono is a problem, with its background hiss from the original source and low volume to begin with.  There is not any way of knowing what the condition of the original audio was or how it was made, but be VERY CAREFUL when turning the volume up, the REMEMBER to turn it down when you are done so you do not damage your speakers.

 

The extras include the faux T-Shirts made for the Silver Screen DVD, the trailers for that film and his Jean Seberg project, and a 15-minutes-long short called Blue Streak.  It is a sometimes abstract film in monochrome (the nudes with words at the bottom of the screen), and color footage (the outdoors as heterosexual fantasies are read by the “wrong” gender to subvert them.  The source looks like an old analog tape, but it is interesting just the same, and the audio is better than the feature.

 

My only complaint about the work is the way it takes on John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), Rock’s best film (give or take Giant from ten years before).  It uses the “desks room” sequence for an example of a Gay moment when the film has a darker and more subversive point.  Then it uses the finale of the film as a parallel with his tragic death from AIDS.  It does not note that he got it from a “sick young kid”, but one of the potentially greatest points is lost.

 

Rappaport suggest Hollywood may have been using Hudson all the way, starting with his own infatuation with a bare-chested male star of the past, then comes his end.  Frankenheimer’s masterwork is about a corporation who gives its lead (Hudson) a second chance with a new body and identity.  Without Hollywood doing the same for Hudson, no matter how high the price may have been, his life and all those films would have never happened.  The lingering question is how and if both “leads” ruined this chance.  That would have made this feature length and is something Rappaport ought to examine in the future.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo