Search - The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender on DVD

So, I'm not the only one

09/12/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"So I'm not the only one who obsessively watched these old movies as a kid and wondered why Walter Brennan kept showing up as the seemingly love-sick, woman-disparaging best friend of the handsome hero (usually Gary Cooper). Actually, this tape is a great companion piece to The Celluloid Closet. The Celluloid Closet maintains that the veiled gay characters of Hollywood's golden age were all comic sissies or tragically doomed or villainously deranged. This second look seems to say, "Well, usually. But if you take a second look at a few very familiar characters we all took for granted, alot of them were just regular guys." They spend alot of time analyzing Wendell Corey in Desert Fury as the overprotective, coffee fetching sidekick of gangster John Hodiak, but don't even mention the much more obvious relationship between gangster Robert Taylor and drunken sidekick Van Heflin in Johnny Eager. But it's a worthwhile rental and Dan Butler is too cute to only be seen on the world's most closeted sitcom Frasier, where he's forced to play a hetero."

Very interesting film, but tape is overpriced for couple of

zara_azari | 05/27/2000

(3 out of 5 stars)

"reasons... First of all, judging by technique and material employed, this film must have cost very little to make. Secondly, the quality of the tape varies from very good to very bad (couple of shots are all blurry and kind of twitching). High cost and average picture quality notwithstanding, the film itself is very interesting. Mark Rappaport gives us his own perspective on politics of Hollywood. Although his perspective is very subjective, it does make you think. I think first of all this film was meant to be good fun. However, if you look closer, you will find that underneath all that humor and fun Mark Rappaport has produced a serious study of Hollywood. He has managed to connect fun material with film theory, "queer theory" in particular. Film clips, used to illustrate author's point, vary from well-known "westerns" to screwball comedy. All films mentioned are old and classic ones. I, personally, could think of numerous other film clips that would fit in perfectly, but perhaps those clips were not available to the authors. Keep in mind that this film is neither a feature film nor a documentary. It is simply a collection of clips, intercepted with humorous monologue, read by Dan Butler."

Tedious and Sophomoric

A reader | New Orleans | 11/29/2008

(1 out of 5 stars)

"I wasted 100 minutes of my life watching this drivel. This would be a C plus film school project at best. Its scope is very narrow, and it harps on Walter Brennan (!) so much I wanted to scream. The point, that there were implicit gay relationships in otherwise hetero movies, was so well known by 1997 that this was a pointless exercise in snickering, smirking, and playing with libel. If this mess was edited down to 60 minutes, without the awful "host segments" and backing off the Brennan obsession, it might be tolerable.

If you REALLY want the Hollywood Gay Back Story, buy Vito Russo's superb Celluloid Closet."