Mark Rappaport’s 1992 faux-documentary essay film Rock Hudson’s Home Movies recasts the ’50s matinee idol’s on-screen life as a grand Sirkian tragedy. At once tender and anguished, Rappaport’s investigative travelogue crackles with sardonic humor and bristles with thick layers of irony as it maneuvers its way through Hudson’s career, examining the signs that pointed to his sexuality throughout his films.
Using a slew of choice film clips and cheeky, knowing voiceover—delivered by Eric Farr, who intermittently appears on screen playing the deceased actor as he reads from a fictionalized autobiography—Rappoport interrogates Hudson’s filmography with all the unflappable determination of a great explorer, driven by a singular sense of purpose.
From the start, Rappaport enters what he refers to as a “hall of mirrors” akin to the one in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. Though seeking to discover how coded behavior in Hudson’s films reflect reality, Rappaport also explores, to paraphrase Godard, what’s revealed by the reality of these cinematic reflections. In doing so, he unearths seemingly countless clips that tell the story of Hudson’s sexuality, which was an open secret in Hollywood.
In dissecting Hudson’s film persona, which was defined by an all-American masculinity that served to mask his homosexuality, Home Movies presents the allusions to Hudson’s secret as a double-edged sword. For every clever scene in one of Hudson’s films that allowed him to speak at least tangentially to the reality of his identity, there were moments of humiliation that he endured at the hands of screenwriters and directors who aimed to disparage the actor.
Some of the clips that Rappaport presents are deliberately taken out of context to suggest a much stronger homoerotic tension than was originally intended by filmmakers, most notably a conversation between Hudson and Earl Holliman’s characters in Giant and a showdown between Hudson and Kirk Douglas’s characters in The Last Sunset. On the other hand, Hudson’s work with Douglas Sirk is a treasure trove of glances and handshakes held a few moments too long, coy allusions to homosexual desire, an explicit distaste for or indifference to marriage, and a coddling of Hudson’s characters by the women in his life.
In Sirk’s Captain Lightfoot and Magnificent Obsession, Rappaport finds brazen portraits of older men who are overly possessive or protective of Hudson’s young, hunky characters, who remain eager to learn from their more knowledgeable elders. And in Robert Mulligan’s The Spiral Road, Rapport sees in Burl Ives’s eyes the hurt of both a friend and a lover, upon his Dr. Jansen learning that Hudson’s character will be moving out from the apartment that they share now that he’s gotten married. Jansen states that for their kind of work, he must be a “man alone,” a notion that recurs time and again in Hudson’s films.
In his films with Tony Randall and Doris Day, Hudson’s characters repeatedly profess that they’re not one for marriage. And in Melvin Frank’s Strange Bedfellows, Hudson’s Carter only attempts to stay in his dysfunctional marriage because, as a high-level businessman, he must give the appearance of being a strong, traditional family man. Never mind that, as Hudson’s George did with Tony Randall’s Arnold in Send Me No Flowers, Carter spends as much time in bed with a woman as he does with a man (his wife’s other love interest, no less).
But it’s Howard Hawks’s Man’s Favorite Sport? that, along with the eight Sirk/Hudson collaborations, Rappaport positions as the prime example of queerbaiting in Hudson’s career. Indeed, where many of the inferences in those other films are tucked away in throwaway lines or brief scenes, the entirety of Hawks’s film is about a man desperately clinging to his perceived identity and trying not to be found out by his clients or co-workers.
What is subtext in these other films becomes the text of Man’s Favorite Sport?, which even goes so far as to make the Hudson character’s inability to handle a fishing rod into an integral plot point. Rappaport’s scrutiny of both the subtle and not-so-subtle references to Hudson’s sexuality in the film is charged with wry humor and subversiveness. And the singular mix of levity and intellectual rigor that defines Rock Hudson’s Home Movies is why it remains an incisive look at how one man’s queer identity was filtered through film.
Man’s Favorite Sport?, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, Shakedown, and Strange Bedfellows are now available from Kino Lorber.
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