“ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED” My rating: B (Max)
104 minutes | No MPAA rating
For more than a decade movie star Rock Hudson was the embodiment of American manhood.
That he was a gay man playing a deep, deep role in every aspect of his public life was well known to his colleagues and coworkers. Yet just about everyone joined ranks so as not to destroy the romantic illusion…after all, that illusion generated wealth and steady employment for hundreds of in the movie and TV industry.
But you’ve got to ask…What sort of psychological issues came of spending a good half of your life pretending to be something you aren’t?
The answer, according to Stephen Kijak’s fascinating new documentary “Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed,” is that Hudson seems to have suffered no lasting damage. He was a master at compartmentalizing the two sides of his life.
On the screen and in the public eye he was just a hetero guy from Illinois who managed to retain his modesty even after rising to the heights of movie stardom.
In his private life Hudson hosted parties packed with young, often nude, men. He often traveled with the gay couple who were his oldest friends in Hollywood (actor George Nader and his lifelong companion Mark Miller). Hudson didn’t try to hide his sexuality from his fellow actors, and he was considered to be such a nice person that no one who knew him would even consider divulging his “secret.”
At the same time Hudson was cautious, never allowing himself to be photographed with any of his sexual partners…not even snapshots while on vacation.
“All That Heaven Allowed” nicely limns Hudson’s career. There is particular emphasis on his early years under the tutelage of agent Henry Willson, who made a specialty of representing handsome young men, bedding them when it suited him, and guiding their careers through the studio system.
It was Willson who gave the young actor Roy Fitzgerald a new name — Rock Hudson..a melding of the Rock of Gibraltar and the Hudson River — and who drilled the “gayness” out of his physicality and vocal patterns. And when the scandal magazines began asking why the handsome hunk was still a bachelor it was Willson who arranged for Hudson to marry Willson’s secretary…a union that lasted only two years but for the time being stopped wagging tongues.
Like any movie star bio, this one features tons of clips from Hudson’s films. But what’s flabbergasting are the innumerable times when Hudson was given situations or dialogue that today read as screamingly gay…and yet the mainstream press and the ticket buyers never picked up on it. (Or maybe they they did and willfully ignored it.)
In any case, it pushes this doc into the deepest corners of the meta universe.
The illusion was broken for good in the early 1980s when Hudson became the first celebrity to admit contracting — and to die from — AIDS. The film points out how the actor’s fame and fate built public support for research into the disease (the Reagan administration preferred to look the other way, even though Nancy Reagan was one of Hudson’s dear friends).
One is left with the impression that despite a life in what one commentator here calls “the shared misery of the closet,” Rock Hudson led a largely contented existence. He did pretty much what he wanted, and if having to play straight in public was a painful burden, he didn’t let on.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 