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The silver screen color me lavender3/28/2023 In his most persuasive if overstated thesis, Rappaport dissects what he calls "the Walter Brennan syndrome," the phenomenon of the sidekick who assumes the housewife's burden for his adored buddy and chases off interfering women. In this manner we are able to see that there is more than male bonding afoot in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby's Road pictures as well as in the films of Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Cary Grant and his secret love, Randolph Scott. Rappaport revives the "shyster lawyer" techniques with which he exposed the homoeroticism lurking in Hudson's films, using stop action, slow motion, and crafty editing to insinuate new meaning into old movie clips. Hosted with puckish charm by Dan Butler, this latest deconstruction of film icons from Mark Rappaport (Rock Hudson's Home Movies) is destined to be far more controversial than HBO's genteel distillation of Russo's cranky tome, The Celluloid Closet. The formidable size of Hollywood's closet is but one concern of The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender, a post-Vito Russo probe into the codes and representations of homosexuality in cinema's past. Isn't it terrific that there are so out lesbian filmmakers that it is possible to devote a whole movie to profiling them and not out of steam? Isn't it depressing that there are so few out gay male actors in Hollywood that one of them could someday corner the market in narrating documentaries about how few out gay actors there are in Hollywood? APA style: The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender.The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender." Retrieved from MLA style: "The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender." The Free Library.Written, directed and edited by Mark Rappaport director of photography, Nancy Schreiber produced by Couch Potato Productions released by Planet Pictures. Moments like this prompt a wish that Rappaport were less of a superficial essayist and more of a determined reporter and historian. Rappaport makes a telling point when he notes in a fleeting comment that the highly praised 1947 film "Crossfire," about a bigoted Army sergeant who kills a Jew, was based on a novel in which the victim was a homosexual. It pores over the jealous resentment shown Lizabeth Scott by Wendell Corey in the triangle completed by John Hodiak in "Desert Fury" (1945) takes a brief excursion to Europe to display the lingering, loving images of beauteousĪctors like Jean Marais and Alain Delon in films by Jean Cocteau and Luchino Visconti and it returns to the United States to pore over the womanless world in the westerns of Randolph Scott, who was known to Hollywood to be gay. In the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby movies, and spends an inordinate amount of time on Walter Brennan's playing grizzled sidekicks to macho stars like John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart. Its hit-and-miss identification of its film clips and performers is vexing.Īdmittedly "an incomplete sampling," Rappaport's film surveys the prissy comic character actors of the '30s like Eric Blore, Franklin Pangborn and Edward Everett Horton finds and speculates on homosexual undercurrents Rappaport is entitled to his opinions, but devoid of interviews with studio executives, actors, directors, screenwriters and dispassionate experts, "The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender" forfeits any claim to seriousness. But at times, listening to the narration is like being in the company of adolescents who can find sexual innuendo anywhere. Yet as Rappaport observes through Butler, the old films are rich with relationships, dialogue, glances and other bits of action susceptible to interpretation as being freighted with homosexuality. Society at large preferred that homosexuality remain hidden, so did its films. With a narration by Dan Butler (described in the publicity materials as an outspokenly gay actor), who plays the womanizer on the hit sitcom "Frasier," Rappaport's film makes the unsurprising point that at a time when American Written, directed and edited by Mark Rappaport, "The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender" is another of the so-called cinematic essays by the filmmaker, whose previous works include "Rock Hudson's Home Movies" (1992)Īnd "From the Journals of Jean Seberg" (1995). Treatment of homosexuality during its golden age, from the 1930s to the '60s. Mages and opinions abound in "The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender," but genuine insight and reportorial curiosity are in short supply in this film about Hollywood's The New York Times on the Web: Current Film.'The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender': Little Insight on Hollywood and Homosexuality
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