Film Review: The Celluloid Closet
July 15, 2014
We tend to watch films without much thought about how politics effects film-making. The documentary The Celluloid Closet gives an insight into world of film-making, politics, censorship and equality.
Narrated by Lily Tomlin, in the opening scene of the movie, Tomlin tells the audience, “For 100 years, laugh at, pity or fear, Hollywood taught straight people what to think about gay people and what gay people should think about themselves.” Film critic, Susie Bright said, of the roles played by gays and lesbians if you were gay, “you felt invisible.” Hollywood relied on stock characters to portray gays and lesbians in film and those characters never showed realism.
After a few years in the making, and 5 years after Vito Russo passed away, The Celluloid Closet was released in 1995. It was directed and written by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Utilizing film clips and interviews, The Celluloid Closet walks through decades of Hollywood films giving viewers example after example of stereotyped stock characters and personal reflections from numerous actors, screenwriters, directors and producers, on how those characters shaped the views of gays and lesbians on and off the screen.
The “sissy” was the first gay stock character in film and it remained a primary role to portray gays for decades until the 1980’s when the film industry switched to show gays and lesbians as depraved, violent criminals and killers. At that time, gays and lesbians went from being the victims in film, to being fanatical victimizers. In the 1950’s as traditional family roles were stressed in films, movies that had lesbian roles carried the message that women needed to get back into the kitchen where they belonged and the rough, tough, cowboy masculinity view of men ruled in films at the box office. As Gore Vidal noted in The Celluloid Closet, as a writer, you “learned how to write between the lines in the ‘50’s.
As The Celluloid Closet tells us, if gay or lesbian sex was suggested in a scene, the scene was cut. There were many films with blatant gay references that always ended up on the cutting room floor, like the classic Ben Hur. Writer Gore Vidal describes in The Celluloid Closet how he wrote the Ben Hur script with blatant gay scenes and how the scenes were edited out to meet censorship approval. In 20’s and 30’s churches came down hard on the film industry as movies began to get raunchier with sexual innuendo and the industry began to police itself with the Hays Code, which was the first film industry production code of self-censorship. The Hays Code morphed into the MPAA film rating system in the late 1960’s.
Watching The Celluloid Closet I found myself surprised by the gay inferences in old movies that I had never actually noticed in the past. There is a clip in the film about Peter Lorre’s calling card in The Maltese Falcon that was scented with “gardenia” and I had never picked up on that in the film watching it in the past, as an indication that Lorre was gay. When I saw the clip I realized, it was subtle hint that I missed. To many straight people I could see where gay and lesbian inferences in older films might be subtle enough to not immediately call attention to a character being a “sissy,” gay or lesbian but, I could certainly understand that every gay and lesbian watching those scenes knew the implications.
Although the film industry has come a long way since The Celluloid Closet was first released in 1995, it is still an important film for anyone to watch in order to learn more about the film industry’s early depiction and censorship of gay and lesbians in the movies. We’ve learned many lessons through the decades since the film industry’s inception and one of the biggest is that films have transcended their stereotyped roles not just of gays and lesbians but other minorities as well. The Celluloid Closet is a must see documentary.
Works Cited: The Celluloid Closet, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman, Sony Pictures, 1995, Documentary Film
